The Lloyd Dobler Factor

While talking to a good guy friend recently I said something about standing outside his bedroom window with a boom box to get his attention (he doesn’t have a door buzzer), and he immediately shot back with a long rant against the movie I was referring to, Say Anything.

By Abigail

Very few women I know actually saw the Cameron Crowe directed film in theaters. It was released in 1989; I was four, and more interested in Mr. Rogers than Mr. Perfect. But now I can’t even count the number of times I’ve seen the film, and each time I watch it I fall in love with John Cusack’s character, Lloyd Dobler, again. This is why I couldn’t understand why my friend, we’ll call him S, loathed the film, and especially Lloyd, so completely. He said the film was cheesy, the plot unrealistic, and that the character I loved so much was moronic.

I’m going to call this disconnect between the way I feel about Say Anything, and the way S feels about Say Anything, “The Lloyd Dobler Factor.” What is it about the film that I love and that my friend just can’t wrap his straight male head around?

Lloyd loves Ione Skye’s character Diane so completely he braves her overprotective (and criminal) father to get her, and he does that adorable boom box thing (the only time a Peter Gabriel song will ever be okay) to win back her affection after they hit a rough spot. Lloyd says things like, “I gave her my heart and she gave me a pen,” and tells Dad: “What I really want to do with my life – what I want to do for a living – is I want to be with your daughter. I’m good at it.” What’s not to love?

In 2002, the film earned Entertainment Weekly’s number one spot as the greatest modern movie romance, it’s number eleven on the magazine’s list of the best high school movies of all time, and it is the forty-eighth best reviewed movie on rottentomatoes.com. So what doesn’t S get?

Maybe it’s because Lloyd is the perfect boyfriend? His only goal in his post-high school life is to get Diane. His life revolves around getting and keeping Diane. Lloyd was the pre-curser to The O.C.’s Seth and Gossip Girl’s Dan, who, despite existing in a culture where a man is expected to be more successful and richer than his girlfriend or else risk feeling emasculated (remember that Sex and the City episode where Steve and Miranda break up over a designer suit?), Lloyd, Seth, and Dan are all perfectly okay being lower on the totem pole than their significant others. Lloyd is an underachiever who loves Diane because she’s smart, not despite it.

Is S threatened by a guy like Lloyd Dobler? In my twenty-three years of dating experience (okay, I guess there was that Mr. Rogers period, so let’s say ten years of experience), I know that men like Lloyd don’t exist. But we women still dream, some of us even holding out. Maybe for a guy like S, the Lloyd archetype -– loving, adorable, self-sacrificing, self-deprecating but with a hint of an ego –– is too much to live up to? Well, I say deal with it.

Men need to get over the old-fashioned notion that they need to be more successful than their girlfriend. We deal with a glass ceiling at school and at work; we don’t need to deal with one in the bedroom. Women are expected to pluck, wax, and wear underwear that’s meant to go up our butts, the least men can do is hold up a boom box every once in a while.