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Owen Has Issues

So, okay, I’m a geek, right? I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer, video games, Woody Allen, and Internet porn. All the people at Columbia are these hippie artist types, who aren’t by any stretch of the imagination “cool,” but I certainly stand out in a crowd comparatively. I’ve been walking around for the last few years thinking I was pretty much the geekiest guy on the entire campus, based on the small sample of classmates, acquaintances, and random students I’ve met during that time. And, consequently, I always feel like nobody ever likes me and they all just sort of tolerate me because it’s not like I’m going away.

But now I feel better. I’ve met Owen.

Last week was our first week of classes, and my one and only evening class is on Wednesday nights. So, I trudged downtown, got some dinner, and went up to the third floor because the goddamn caf&eactue; was packed. There, I found two girls I had a class with last semester talking to a guy I didn’t know. They introduced me to the guy, who happened to be in my class (the girls, unfortunately, were not), so we all sat around chatting for a little while.

Then, I heard a screeching, semi-lispy voice rattle out, “Mr. Paul, wait!” This Mr. Paul, a professor who was entering his office, stopped dead, sighed visibly, and turned to the source of the voice, which was beyond our range of vision down the hall.

“Shit,” the guy sitting with me — Grey is his name — muttered.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s Owen,” he said, indicating the voice we heard.

And then Owen entered our field of vision. He’s an enormous, overweight, ungainly fellow, extremely hairy, with uncombed black hair, extremely thick glasses. If you haven’t yet seen American Splendor, it’s on DVD, and you should really check it out. It’s amazingly good. At any rate, there’s a character in that film (and in real life) named Toby Radloff, who is a self-proclaimed nerd. He’s large, odd-looking, talks strangely, and is borderline autistic. He looks and speaks almost exactly like Owen.

Owen rushed up to this Mr. Paul character, rambled on and on about some assignment from last semester, and Mr. Paul quietly tolerated his blathering before politely brushing him off. Anybody watching this exchange — anybody but Owen — would instantly know that Mr. Paul disliked this guy intensely.

“Who’s Owen?” I asked Grey and the girls.

“You don’t know him?” one of the girls said. “Jeez, you’re a screenwriting concentration and you don’t know Owen?”

“No…” I said, suddenly feeling very left out.

“Consider yourself lucky,” Grey muttered.

“What’s wrong with him?” I wondered, although based on his voice and overbearing personality, I already kinda knew.

“Just wait and see,” Grey said. “I’m sure he’s in our class.”

Now, I’m not one to necessarily make judgments based solely on what others say. Plus, I mean, the guy instantly reminded me of Toby Radloff, and Toby was a strange guy, but he was still pleasant enough. So, even though I people I knew were ragging on him, I wasn’t going to leap on the “Man, do I hate Owen” bandwagon like they were. At the same rate, I wasn’t going to leap into his arms like Balki Bartokomous and declare him my best friend/”dance of joy” partner.

No, I was gonna keep my distance, cautiously observe him, and make my judgment based on that. Like Grey suggested, I would wait and see.

This class is called “Chicago screenwriters,” and the subject is pretty self-explanatory — we’re studying Chicago screenwriters. One of the writers we’re studying is none other than John Hughes, who honestly wrote some terrific stuff in his day. I mean, they were all bubblegummy message movies, but they had a particular edge that sort of shoved them above the rest of the crap. That’s my opinion, anyway. Plus, I always get sort of a warm, nostalgiac feeling, because I grew up watching stuff like The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

When we discussed Hughes on the first day of class, Owen loudly announced that John Hughes’ screenplays are terrible.

“Why do you say that?” our professor wondered.

Owen responded that, while most people feel the same nostalgia that I do when watching John Hughes movies, his films are so far from any reality he’s aware of that it makes him sick. He went on to announce that Todd Solondz’s “coming-of-age” portrayals are much more realistic than anything John Hughes has ever done. I’m only aware of one coming-of-age film from Solondz, Welcome to the Dollhouse, which I really didn’t like particularly.

Why didn’t I like it? I didn’t relate to it. Why? Because I, personally, thought it was shallowly unrealistic. It really oversimplified pretty much everything and aligned you with a purposely unlikable character but didn’t give you any reason to understand why you didn’t like her. She just existed. In fact, nobody in the film was likable at all, which would be fine if there was any indication that gave us a reason to side with them anyway. Really, that was my biggest problem with it as a whole. I felt like it kept me at a distance the entire time.

Plus, it didn’t really strike me as particularly realistic, because everything was way too simple. Nobody had any legitimate complexity, not even the protagonist. Even John Hughes, master of the simple formula movie, does a little bit to make his characters mildly complicated. Plus, his movies are escapist fantasy, and intentionally so. Solondz makes an unrealistic movie that masquerades as reality when John Hughes is unabashedly sentimental and not really trying to portray anything real.

Basically, I prefer Hughes. I’m not saying Solondz is a bad filmmaker, even though he has made more than one bad film and he sort of has a habit of screaming that everyone but him is wrong through his directorial voice, but I prefer a sentimental romp to an unnecessarily depressing story.

But that’s just me. If Owen prefers Solondz for whatever reason, that’s his business. Except it’s not his business — it’s everyone’s business, because he shrieks out his opinion at all times and refuses to allow anyone to think any differently than he does. He literally screamed at a guy because he said he liked Ferris Bueller more than Welcome to the Dollhouse.

This is why I don’t like him, and this is why nobody else likes him (including professors). His opinion is god. He’s one of these arrogant writer types who firmly believes everything he says and does is genius but is still so insecure that if anybody disagrees with him, he flips out. He’s Bill O’Reilly, except somehow more annoying.

Another minor example: Owen is also in my genres class, and we got into groups last week and formulated ideas based on articles we found in the newspaper, and then this week we pitched them to the class. He was absolutely thrilled with his idea, but the rest of the class really wasn’t that much. It’s not that we disliked it — we just didn’t like it as much as he did. So, when the next idea was pitched, everybody sort of glommed onto it. Honestly, it was a story we all loved.

All except Owen, and I don’t think he didn’t love it because he really didn’t; I think he just wanted to criticize it because somebody else came up with a more interesting idea. He kept yelling that the main characters had to be “a bunch of rich snobs,” because that’s the only way they would have done what they did.* Which, okay, it’s not a bad point, but it really sort of dumbs the whole thing down. It’s such a cliché to have the rich parents spawn brats and then put so much pressure on them that they do horrible things at a young age. I’ve seen that movie a dozen times, and when somebody in class pointed that out, he totally ignored them and just kept throwing out the “rich” idea.

It’s fine to have ideas, it’s fine to participate, but he got shot down. It’s not like the exact same idea, told the same way, is going to make us jump out of our seats with excitement the third time when it was shot down the first time. If you like your idea and nobody else does, by all means go and write it to yourself. Maybe you’ll sell it for $5 million. Or maybe it was just a bad idea.

I don’t mean to complain, but everyone knows about Owen, and everyone dislikes him. He sucks the energy right the hell out of the room every single time he talks. It’s like stepping into a vacuum for a few seconds until he shuts up and normal life can resume. It’s an odd phenomenon, one that I haven’t witnessed at all since I started college (though I saw it to some degree with people in junior high and high school). Everybody lets him do his thing and tolerates him, because he’s not worth arguing with, even if you can win. I can accept that, and I can let him do his thing, too, because I don’t want to argue with him any more than anyone else.

But if the first two weeks are any indication, this semester is going to be long.

Still, Owen makes me feel good about myself. I’m sort of realizing that when people invite me to go places outside of school, it probably means they aren’t just tolerating me. They’re not avoiding me completely or giving me pity laughs when I make a joke, and they really think my ideas don’t suck. I never get the glazed-eye “man, is it really that rude to check my watch while somebody’s talking?” look; people engage me in conversation.

By gum, I’m liked by people who aren’t pets. And, unlike Owen, I didn’t have to post a sign-up sheet for an online Dungeons and Dragons discussion group in order to find non-pets who like me.

See, people, you don’t need years of therapy or antidepressants to stop feeling glum — you just have to find that one guy on the planet who makes you look like the love-child of Cary Grant and James Bond.

*It was about these three 12-year-old girls in California who were late to school one day, and rather than take a tardy, they for some reason told administrators that a homeless person molested them on the way to school, and he was imprisoned for eight months before the girls finally admitted they had lied. Being that our “genre” is conspiracy and paranoia, the general idea was to follow the girls after they enter into their conspiracy and as they grow more and more paranoid. To expand the conspiracy idea, we thought it might be interesting if one of the parents figured it out and helped them continue to cover up the truth. [Back]

Tags: American Splendor, annoyance, artist, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Chicago Screenwriters, Conspiracy and Paranoia, discussion, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, friends, Grey, ideas, interrupt, John Hughes, nerd, obnoxious, Owen, rude, shot down, Spring 2004 semester, Toby Radloff, Todd Solondz, weird, Welcome to the Dollhouse, Woody Allen

Posted by Stan on February 21, 2004 1:07 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | School Rants | Digg It