Three years ago this spring I gave myself one Sunday afternoon off from self-pity to indulge in some window-shopping. A movie rental place among the sporadic cush boutiques of a “turning” avenue in Greenpoint, Brooklyn first caught my guilt-trap. How novel: it had been so long since I had rented a film. Greenpoint should’ve been the novel angle, considering this was the first time I’d ever visited the neighborhood, but my life is in screens.
A clerk, apparently impressed by my selection, Albert Brooks’ Modern Romance, chatted me up.
“Oh, this is great! Have you ever seen this?”
“Well, no, but he’s amazing in everything. Even in Taxi Driver. Steals every scene he’s in.”
“Yeah,” he conceded. “Sometimes you just forget DeNiro’s even there.”
The exchange was a no-win situation: Like, I don’t know, America. Us? Whatever. A wash was what it was. Brooks’ “We are the people” phone call in Taxi Driver is the best Washington movie ever made, and it doesn’t even take place there, or last for more than two minutes.
Somehow, though, I forgot Albert Brooks is still around, kind of like how I kind of forget Morning Joe is on when I’m half-awake and it’s, like, an hour and a half before “Business Before The Bell.” One doesn’t have to point it out all the time when it’s always there in the background. It was really weird earlier this week when Brooks promoted his new book, 2030, on Morning Joe. Mika and Willie spent most of the segment telling him how much they loved him in Broadcast News. Morning Joe is, essentially, Broadcast News in real time. Kind of like Real Life, no? And I hate Broadcast News, because I once worked in broadcast news for two and a half months I.R.L., and my supervisor in the Washington bureau thought he was Albert Brooks in Broadcast News. At least I think he does, or did, or that he, or I, thought so at the time, at one time. Am I even remembering him correctly? (My former supervisor no longer works in broadcast news.) Does he think I’m weird for thinking that, after all this time? What was I thinking, letting him know I’m thinking about him? I can’t even spiral through that past shame without aping Albert Brooks, which I have been doing for years, even before Brad Goodman adjusted anybody’s Self-O-Stat on The Simpsons nearly twenty years ago.
See, Albert Brooks has been doing me my whole life, in the sense that I am just doing him all the time. My sister and I have been quoting the “It’s not quite breakfast, and it’s not quite lunch, but you get a slice of cantaloupe at the end” riff from Life on the Fast Lane since 1990, when I was six years old and didn’t yet know that somebody recently invented video rental stores. So maybe 2030 is a novel in the same way I am a medical student–sometimes people ask me if I am just doing it because it’s a good premise. I do know that I shirked one night of study for the medical boards to read 2030 all the way through. Bought on Kindle edition, even, because I’m a little afraid of clerks.
To have done the nobler thing–to leave 2030 aside for a few weeks and love my boards review book as hard as the notes I have scored into its 529 page margins–would have required self-sacrifice, which Brooks correctly insists in 2030 will save American healthcare from itself. But talking about the important thing here, the last book I loved, is really asking me to risk standing for something, like loving it a little too much. All I see right now is the quality of my longhand deteriorating the closer I get to the M.D. degree–me me me.
It may seem like the most arch move of all by the arch arch-person to come up with a product so deeply felt, but ignore that–2030 is probably the most grounded thing I’ve read during the slip ‘n slide that is two-kay-elev. Come in expecting something closer to Bill Murray’s cover of “In The Year 2525,” and you’ll come out committed to rebuilding your country. If man is still alive in 2030, I hope Brooks is still in the popular culture to remind us that we would be easier on ourselves were we better to each other–better collaborators, more straightforward, honest partners, even nice. Then again, whenever I hear the word “culture,” I don’t reach for my revolver, but for the nearest revolving door so I can reenact the opening to Perfect Strangers. Reading 2030 is like asking Larry Appleton–total Albert Brooks ripoff, no?–to believe like Balki. Dance, joy, etc. Yes, you can!
