The keyword in the title is “infinite.” Eight years ago, Grant Morrison began the final issue of his sci-fi super-hero hypersigil saga The Invisibles with the words of a young woman in 2012, the year human consciousness will pass through some sort of singularity and emerge transformed. “I grew up with the Gnostic straight-edgers,” she wrote, “anti-sex, anti-death ,we imagined ourselves to be perfect simulations. [...] The universe [was] a program inside a Manichean murder machine.” Now, four years until 2012, a teen film comes along that begins to make good on Morrison’s prognostications.
Michael Sera plays Nick, the only straight boy in The Jerk-Offs, a queercore band without a drummer. He has recently broken up with his girlfriend Tris, a know-nothing, malicious bimbo. Still hung up on her, he compulsively makes her mix CDs, though she resents his pitiful attentions and tosses them in the trash can at her Catholic school. There, her acquaintance Norah, the daughter of big-deal record producer Ira Silverberg, fishes the mixes out of the trash and fantasizes about Nick. Serendipitously, she encounters Nick at a Jerk-Offs show while searching for a secret performance of his and her favorite band, Where’s Fluffy? Meanwhile, Caroline, her pathologically stupid alcoholic best friend, gets fall-down drunk, and Tris shows up with her new boyfriend. Norah, not realizing that Nick is Tris’s ex-boyfriend, pretends to be his girlfriend to deflect Tris’s mockery of her. This makes Tris jealous, which motivates her to get Nick back, but Nick’s bandmates loathe her and devote themselves to setting up Nick and Norah. They volunteer to take Caroline home so Nick and Norah can spend the night together, but complications ensue: a drunken Caroline gets lost and staggers and pukes her way through the city; Norah reunites with her ex-boyfriend Tal who seems only to be using her to get a record deal from her father for his anarcho-Zionist band; and Tris returns to reclaim Nick’s affections. It all works out in the end, though, as our straight-edge hero and heroine escape the fools who would weigh them down.
Perhaps the quickest way to come to the point about this film is to evaluate how it treats its New York setting. Not the seething, dangerous multicultural metropolis of seventies and eighties film, the city is a sedate archipelago for the cultural affairs of the privileged. But this, which perhaps only reflects aspects of current reality, does not tell us enough.
We must first notice the complete absence of African-American culture. Black people turn up in a few token roles, but they are dismissed most thoroughly in the film’s non-diegetic indie soundtrack and its diegetic willingness to live without drums. For when people call indie music “white,” they mean primarily that it lacks rhythm—and this film goes so far as to dismiss half of the rhythm section. Without beats, music is too slippery to dance upon; it becomes ethereal, purely melodic, disdaining the body and striving toward the realm of the spirit as in nineteenth-century Romantic composition, before the Afro-Latin revolution in western musical convention. Indie music generally, and this film specifically, attempts a flight away from that body, the color of which in acoustical culture is black.
There are Jews in Nick and Norah, beginning with Norah herself, but the treatment of Judaism falls right into line with the film’s themes. Norah’s father is the wealthy culture-industrialist of anti-Semitic caricature, while her Zionist ex is, predictably, a smarmy money-grubber. Thus all of the film’s Jews but Norah are attached not to the dancing body, like the African-Americans of stereotype, but rather to gross stuff like money and land. How does Norah escape this imputation? Well, as she later tells Nick, her own favorite part of Judaism is the concept of tikkun olam, or repairing the world. While this phrase and concept have a place in mainstream Judaism, they have special significant within the occult and neo-Platonic tradition of the Lurianic Kabbalah, in which tikkun olam refers to the rejoining of the divine sparks which have been lodged in the dross of this bungled world, created not by God, but through his withdrawal. We must resist this world to reach to him. Nick immediately understands, replying that “we are the broken pieces,” thus taking the entire story back to the Platonic myth of eros. The only worthwhile Judaism this film will countenance, then, is one which pictures the world as a Manichean murder-machine and which encourages its devotees to become gnostic straight-edgers.
The film’s queer characters are ministering angels to our cute spiritual couple. What else is a gay man in this kind of story but a quick signifier for pure Platonic love, love—even sexual love—without participation in nature and its reproductive cycles? “Mirrors and copulation are abominable,” say Borges’s gnostic hieresiarchs, “for they multiply the number of men.” It is through this aphorism that Nick and Norah’s gay guardian angels are best understood.
Perhaps no one gets the shortest end of this film’s stick than white women, represented by Tris and Caroline. Pornified sluts addicted to all manner of consumption, filthy bodies who are vomiting when they aren’t binge drinking, or orally fixating on gum and sandwiches, or making out with strange men, they would drive any poor pure soul too unfortunate to be gay to be “anti-sex” instead. When Tris wants to seduce Nick again, she caresses his soulful, spiritual head with her foot, the body’s lowest member, condemned to tread in the dirt. Little wonder that he abandons her for his Kabbalist co-gnostic.
Finally, we learn that Kabbalists and Platonists do it better, at least with each other. At one point, Tris taunts Norah with the knowledge that she (Norah) has never had an orgasm. Tal, her greedy Jewish boyfriend, did not satisfy. At the film’s literal climax, however, Nick brings her to orgasm in a heavy-petting session in her father’s recording studio. Like good gnostics, our hero and heroine never even remove their clothes. A microphone picks up Norah’s cries ofjouissance, thus converting their love into pure electronic sound, pure spirit, which it always was anyway. As you might well imagine, Nick and Norah go off into the sunrise after their wild night. In the film’s only miscalculation, they kiss on the escalator down into Penn Station. Actually, they should have been going up and into the light, like Tim Robbins at the end of the similarly-themed but differently-genred Jacob’s Ladder.
In some ways, this film is just what one might expect in a period of civilizational calamity. Gnosticism itself emerged as the Roman Empire declined, and Kabbalah became prominent during a period of medieval and early modern anti-Semitic pogroms. Threatened communities and collapsing empires often seem to desire nothing more than transcendence, and often too they recoil in disgust from the materialism which they had enjoyed during their eminence. There have been assertions that our own ruins will bring forth a renewed populist fascism; already a Marxist resurgence can be seen among intellectuals, with the Hegelians Zizek and Jameson achieving newfound fame. But this film suggests that indie dissident youth won’t have it. Grant Morrison, who foresaw this all, said that by 2012 they’d be hippies again, seeking cosmic consciousness and escape from the prison of the world. What can a Hegelian offer the gnostic straight-edgers? Hegel’s motto, after all, was, “Essence must appear!” And they don’t want to appear, but rather to disappear—“completely,” as Thom Yorke put it. Tired of time and motion, space and bodies, sex and death, they wish to become angels.
