Monday – Klosterman’s “This Is Emo”

READING SUMMARY

Klosterman explains the belief that all people, including him, will never be truly satisfied by love. All of us, as Americans, have the “inability to experience the kind of mind-blowing, transcendent romantic relationship” that we think is a normal part of life (Klosterman 2). There will never be a right-place-right-time type of romance, as it will always be compared to the fake love shown by the media. Movies and songs tell us how love is supposed to feel, and we constantly chase this feeling, wanting to feel that real love as well. Klosterman blames this fake love on mass media, as it has made it impossible to have normal love. We are all acting out this fake love, and even take on the characters of romance that the media has given us, and we’re all susceptible to falling for such characters and acting. We think we’re going to find our soulmate out of nowhere, but life isn’t like the movies that we grew up watching. This is especially noticeable in the common plot of romance movies where someone falls in love with their best friend, and this “dooms us to disappointment” (6). Mass media consistently leads us in the wrong direction romantically, making us “need something deeper than what we want” (6). Such famous romance movies have made it normal to think that your best friend is your soulmate. What we want is this fake love where everything works out and you find your soulmate and live happily ever after, not real love; therefore, we’ll never be satisfied.

OUTSIDE EXAMPLE

One of my favorite songs is Turning Out by AJR, and I’ve always really connected to it. It’s about being confused with love and not knowing what it should really feel like. It’s the feeling of not knowing if you’re simply not in love at all or if it’s just not like everything you thought it’d be, and not being able to tell the difference. You have to learn the hard way that love isn’t like it is on television, or like most songs, and I think that this is one of the few songs that accurately depicts this unknown feeling of what love should really feel like. Real love not what we expect, and then we question it, unsatisfied and confused, just like Klosterman discusses in the reading.

READING CONNECTION

Turning Out by AJR puts Klosterman’s reading into more relatable words. Turning Out is about love not being like the stories we grew up on, and feeling confused and lost due to that; Klosterman explains this feeling. The song lyrics “Maybe I’m stuck on what I see on TV / I grew up on Disney / But this don’t feel like Disney” really shows this feeling. Klosterman blames television and the media for leading us to desperately want fake love and telling us what it should feel like, and then we are stuck being confused about why our love life doesn’t feel right. Many of us grew up on Disney and rom-coms, thinking that they would be us someday, and being disappointed when Prince Charming didn’t show up out of nowhere, when we didn’t feel love like that. The song goes on to say “In my mind / I thought the birds would sing and sparks would fly / But it’s just quiet / Am I cruel? / Or am I ignorant or was I fooled / By the stories I knew?” When love doesn’t feel like we think it should, we’re left wondering what’s wrong with it. Klosterman gives us the answer: it’s mass media; it really is that you were “fooled / By the stories [you] knew.” We grow up thinking that we’ll always get asked to the dance when no one else is there for us, that we’ll marry our best friend, that we’ll live happily ever after with our soulmate, like in the movies. Both Turning Out and Klosterman’s reading reveal the sad truth, that real love will never be like the movies, and we’ll always be left unsatisfied and disappointed.