2002–2008
In which Indie’s three-decade-long, slow and steady rise toward commercial and cultural dominance is manifest, and Brooklyn emerges as its taste-making center, thanks in part to a film . . . about New Jersey.
Rock and roll at the start of the twenty-first century wasn’t very sexy, and then it became sexy again, and then it became resolutely unsexy and stayed that way. As the 1990s ended, rock was the province of either thudding mooks who ripped off the Pixies’ loud-quiet-loud motif, like Limp Bizkit, or sensitive singer-songwriters, new James Taylors and Dan Fogelbergs, like Chris Martin of Coldplay and John Mayer. Then, in the fall of 2001 and into the winter of 2002, bands like the Strokes, with their skinny jeans and Chuck Taylors, along with their “garage rock” contemporaries such as the White Stripes, Interpol, and Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, did what seemed impossible: they brought late-1970s Punk rock to yet another phase. This modern rock renovation was one informed by the digital “modern age,” pop savvy in that plugged-in, fully-informed-fan way, but with a firm footing in the past and its gloriously rudimentary primitivism. Black leather jackets were the uniform again, now cropped and tight.
N.M.E. and Melody Maker, the only two big print music weeklies around, went batty for everything about this sound, and soon a generation of British bands, the Libertines the most talented among them, were adopting the druggy downtown style themselves. Punk was back, and then, within eighteen months, it was over again, brought down just as it had been before by hype, drugs, power struggles, and burnout. Just as had happened with Punk heroes in the late ’70s, there were thousands of kids worldwide who liked the Strokes fine but could never dress like them and were intimidated by their seemingly effortless urban cool. The Strokes’ white belts would soon join the safety pin in the museum, and a gentler, more sensitive strain of Twee Tribe–friendly rock would become even more commercially valuable, and a major cultural force. Many of these bands—the Shins, the Decemberists, Death Cab for Cutie and its offshoot the Postal Service, Rilo Kiley, Sufjan Stevens, and Beirut—predated the Strokes or were their contemporaries. The problem was that these bands were hopelessly unhip. Then, when uncool became cool and white belt hipster fatigue set in, as it inevitably would, they seized their chance. They were post-hip superstars. There was a book released in the UK in 1986 called Like Punk Never Happened that described the shift from Punk—lean, mean, three-chord rock and roll—to cuddly, marketable stars like Boy George and George Michael. By 2004 it seemed that the same thing was happening. It was as if the Strokes never existed.
After two stellar albums (Room on Fire and Is This It), this fab five decided, like their ’90s heroes in Pearl Jam did, to retreat some, exhausted and over it. Some got married and had kids. Others went down drug holes and came out the other side, but they would never be the same band again. Meanwhile Jack White became more or less his own man, following his unshakable vision and the occasional band. Into the rock void came the Twee soundtrack and a series of bedroom-geek-approved, Pitchfork-endorsed bands that were, almost uniformly, more gentle, thoughtful, and cuddly. They wore no leather, but rather neat sweaters (Vampire Weekend). They played old-timey instruments like the French horn, the cornet, and the accordion (Beirut). Some were almost inevitably Canadian (Arcade Fire), but most came, or at least migrated to, Brooklyn, rehearsing in an old pencil factory by the river in Williamsburg and releasing music directly to the fans who prized them as their imaginary friends.
Almost none of these bands were inferior to the Strokes. Many of them, Vampire Weekend and Arcade Fire certainly, proved even more consistently great. It’s just that if you ran into them in a dark alley, you would not feel a chill up your spine and reach into your pocket to protect your wallet. It was, frankly, disorienting for those who covered the scene, as I did at the time. One minute I was up all night, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon with the Strokes, and the next I was in the basement of an old social club somewhere in Brooklyn, discussing stamp collecting and bird-watching with a clean-cut, dead-sober Sufjan Stevens. “I’ve got a Peterson Guide [for bird-watching] and all that stuff,” Stevens told me excitedly. When I ventured into Brooklyn to find Zach Condon, who traveled Old Europe collecting sounds and instruments and then recorded his first albums in his New Mexico bedroom under the moniker Beirut, I could barely find his walk-up, in the middle of what was then a Hasidic Jewish enclave far off the Bedford Avenue strip. It felt like being in Poland or Prague. “It’s a different city,” Condon said of Brooklyn in 2006. “You can only see the rooftops of Manhattan, and that’s about it. I actually get frustrated there. It’s too much like Disneyland. I’m really affected by the space I’m around. I’m super sensitive to aesthetics.” Brooklyn was proving a blank slate where musicians like Condon could build their own universe as they envisioned it, a kind of new “Old New York” that suited their romantic notions and didn’t have the peer pressure and the coked-up pace of Manhattan. Much of the music shared the tempo.
“So much of it does not rock. Not in any sense,” says Simon Reynolds. “One of its hallmarks is other instrumentation. The guitar does not function as the dominant instrument anymore. It’s what depresses me slightly about it, that it’s so tightly linked to class now. College-type people listen to it. The fact that it’s covered by NPR basically seems to indicate that it’s become a sort of class marker.”
Danger was being phased out in stand-up comedy as well, in favor of a Twee boyishness—or, in the case of Kristen Schaal and Sarah Silverman, acid-tongued girlishness. Andy Kaufman and Steve Martin—no longer Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, John Belushi, George Carlin, or Sam Kinison (all druggy, edgy, and doomed to rides either short or extremely bumpy)—seemed to be the new heroes. Kaufman, an oddball from an upper-middle-class Long Island family, debuted in the autumn of ’75 on the inaugural season of NBC’s late-night sketch comedy Saturday Night Live and became yet another eventual Twee hero.
His breakthrough act, the one that made him nationally famous, was honed in the comedy clubs of New York and Hollywood. It found him standing nervously alongside a mounted turntable as it played the theme to Mighty Mouse. He’d twitch and wait for the chorus—“Here I come to save the day!”—lip-synching with an almost camp fervor for a few brief moments before falling back into his timid stance. And thus was introduced an “Is this real or a put-on?” sense of enjoyable paranoia to popular culture. Kaufman only enhanced this with powder-keg appearances on The Tonight Show and, most famously, Late Night with David Letterman. Kaufman, like Richman, could push and push, singing “Old MacDonald” (“With a moo, moo, here and a moo, moo, there . . .”) until he broke the crowd and had them. “There are no punch lines to anything I do,” he once said. Anyone waiting for the wink would wait forever.
In Girls, Ray (actor Alex Karpovsky) owns almost nothing of value but a signed cutout of the late comedian. Kaufman and very early Steve Martin made stand-up comedy safe for the young at heart. In order to be a popular stand-up during this period, once Woody Allen vacated the art form for film, you had to be raunchy and manly: Richard Pryor, George Carlin. The only other alternatives were the buttoned-down, classy observers with their bow ties and dry, radio-announcer deliveries. Kaufman and early Martin (iconic prop arrow through his head) were deeply in touch with their childhoods. Martin’s “Happy Feet” routine was as much a whimsical notion as Kaufman’s Mighty Mouse bit. He’d stop a serious monologue with the warning, “Uh-oh, I’m getting . . . happy feet,” then break into a goofball soft-shoe, his hands flailing wildly, before returning to the staid banter. These were boys in men’s suits doing humor that was not too far from the schoolyard, whereas someone like Richard Pryor was a grown man, courting and wrestling with darkness.
“If you showed one hundred people a clip of Andy Kaufman doing a character or doing the bit with the phonograph, the last thing that any person you showed it to would say was, ‘That’s a man!’” says veteran stand-up comedy manager Barry Katz today. “If you saw Steve Martin doing ‘Happy Feet’ in an era he was in, or bunny ears, if you showed a hundred people that clip, they would not say, ‘That’s a man!’” Kaufman and Martin would both adapt their popular stand-up acts to television and became even more famous as the masses somehow accepted their inherent strangeness and precociousness, their lack of the conventional setup-and-punch-line structure. They were dangerous and unpredictable, of a piece with Punk and post-Punk but with a boyish sweetness and cleverness they wore very much on their sleeves.
Kaufman seemed to pour all of his residual darkness into a character named Tony Clifton, a vulgar lounge singer in the Vegas-Sinatra mode. Clifton, who drank, smoked, whored, and burned bridges, seemed to exist so that the painfully awkward Andy Kaufman could remain and take his audience out for milk and cookies after a performance at New York’s revered Carnegie Hall. Martin became a movie star, and in underrated films like Pennies from Heaven and Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid backed away from his stand-up persona. Even his goofball comedies would have small grace moments, as in The Jerk, which briefly suspends the broad comedy to find Martin strolling seaside, plucking a ukulele, and harmonizing on “Tonight You Belong to Me” with paramour Bernadette Peters. It’s a serious and highly romantic moment, until Peters produces a cornet from nowhere and takes a solo.
Still, for all their shunning of reality, without both Twee comedy pioneers, there would be no Indie strain of the comedy sect today. Bill Hicks and Mitch Hedberg, perhaps the last of the progeny of Carlin and Pryor, ceded the stage to the likes of doughy, nonthreatening stars like Mike Birbiglia, who, in his oxford shirt, is more of a child of monologist Spalding Gray. Demetri Martin, Kristen Schaal, and even the relative veteran Sarah Silverman can be boyish or girlish and powerful in part because of the context we can now place them in. They will never fill arenas like Dane Cook or Kevin Hart, and may always play the best friend or the weird neighbor on TV shows (whereas Steve Martin and Andy Kaufman were leads), but they are free to be their occasionally and sometimes gleefully stunted selves and prosper.
TV too backed off the darkness of Twin Peaks in favor of a new gentleness that seemed to speak to the new generation directly, if not to the masses. MTV, after the alternative revolution, continued to phase out music videos in favor of event programming geared toward the new Internet-savvy audience. It picked up the soon-to-be-canceled My So-Called Life from ABC in 1995 and reran nineteen episodes, introducing the low-rated series to a wide audience. Angela Chase, played by a teenaged Clare Danes, is on the cusp of adulthood (as represented by her neurotic parents) and at a social crossroads at her high school. (Her goony-sweet next-door neighbor Brian Krakow is going nowhere socially but is dependable. The handsome-but-vacant Jordan Catalano is sexy but unaccountable.) She’s not a popular kid, but not a loser either. It’s a sophisticated portrayal of an identity crisis set to the new platinum Indie rock. She spends much of the groundbreaking show frowning furrows in her forehead, aghast at the enormity of it all. Will she ever get to college, or will the Buffalo Tom concert have to suffice? Here were the first teenagers ever portrayed in pop culture, to deliver the message: “We know this system is insane.”
“I think it was the first TV show to deal with adolescence in a realistic and respectful way,” says Devon Gummersall, who plays the hapless, kinky-haired Brian Krakow, a kind of teenage saint of unrequited love. “It’s really difficult for writers who are in their thirties or forties to do justice to the teenage years—we all have a natural selective memory.” MTV got it and played My So-Called Life constantly. “MTV established it in a lot of ways,” says Gummersall. “They played it for five years. They overplayed those nineteen episodes incessantly. It was great; that was where we became a cult show—that’s where it started to become a lasting thing in the public consciousness.”
The animated Daria, which premiered in 1997, featured a protagonist like Clare Dane’s Angela Chase, another questioning loser hero. Her sister, Quinn, is a golden girl. Her mother is a distracted businesswoman. Daria is mortified by them both: “I don’t have low self-esteem,” she says, “I have low esteem for everyone else.” In 1999, Freaks and Geeks offered a portrait of high school in the early 1980s that sated the desire for all things Reagan-era with even more satisfying detail, as it was staffed by people who were actually in high school in the early 1980s: creator Paul Feig, executive producer Judd Apatow, and writers like Mike White. The story of Lindsay Weir, her little brother Sam, and their high school experience mines some of the terrain covered in My So-Called Life. Lindsay is a mathlete and a geek, but she’s also a secret rebel, drawn to the freaks, who smoke pot and listen to Rush and Styx in the parking lot. Her parents are nuts (SCTV’s Joe Flaherty and Becky Ann Baker, who would go on to play Hannah Horvath’s mother on Girls). Her teachers are worse.
The show combines elements of My So-Called Life’s drama and sensitivity with a healthy sense of classic ’70s and ’80s stand-up humor. When both elements came together, as they did on the classic late-season episode “The Little Things”—when Seth Rogen’s Ken learns that his new girlfriend, Amy, was born with both male and female reproductive organs and was made female by her doctors—it set a template for the kind of gross-out comedies with hearts of gold that would be the new Apatow blockbusters of the twenty-first century: The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up, Bridesmaids.
Freaks and Geeks lasted only one season, and, like the earlier show, amassed a cult, quote-spewing following. It was an expensive show to produce, jam-packed with costly retro pop and New Wave (its theme is Joan Jett and the Blackhearts’ “Bad Reputation”), and the authenticity that did it in was part of its appeal.
Stars Hollow, the fictional town in Connecticut that is the setting for Gilmore Girls, is a kind of snowy Narnia where there’s no violent crime—another sweet universe, not unlike the burgeoning Kind Brooklyn. The only nuisances there are trolling troubadours like Grant Lee Phillips. Stars Hollow was a safe little corner of the world for Gen Twee.
Created by Amy Sherman-Palladino and first aired in 2000, Gilmore Girls is Twee fantasy. It asks, “What if my daughter really was my best friend?” The rift between parents and children, endemic to all youth-oriented popular entertainment, is finally erased. We know it’s fantasy because mother Lorelai (Lauren Graham) and daughter Rory (Alexis Bleidel) consume nothing but pizza, hamburgers, and black coffee but remain perfectly trim. And yet the fantasy is almost never questioned because reality, increasingly harsh on the outside, has no place in Stars Hollow. When it does intrude, everyone learns from it.
Lorelai was pregnant at sixteen, “the scandal girl.” Her life upended, to the chagrin of her wealthy and standing-conscious parents, she didn’t go off to college and instead left home and pledged her life to raising the child (also named Lorelai but known to all as Rory) the right way. Lorelai has character. She’s a flake, but her sacrifice gives her grace. Lorelai is also, crucially, raising her daughter idealistically. She is the parent all Brooklandians want to be. Gilmore Girls is all about references: Dawn Powell, Sid Vicious, Ruth Gordon, Judy Blume, Slint, Steely Dan, Artie Shaw, Black Sabbath—you have to be quick to process them all, and Sherman-Palladino doesn’t wait for you.
“There’s a preponderance of secret language,” says Chris Eigeman, who played Lorelai’s love interest, Digger Stiles. When the show was released on DVD, it came with a glossary. It’s the first great show of the search-engine age.
And then there was Charlie, the hero of Steven Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Released in ’99 on the MTV Books imprint, the novel would sell over a million copies. Charlie is a lonely kid whose best friend recently committed suicide. He’s haunted by the death of his aunt Helen, and upon transferring to a new school isn’t expecting more than the usual pain and tension. But he makes friends with a crew of like-minded misfits who are proud of their outsider status, even revel in it. It defines them, and suddenly he feels warm and “infinite.” Perks is a leap forward, part of the next step beyond Nirvana’s alterative revolution. “When you can buy flannel shirts at the Gap, they stop being the flannel shirts that we fell in love with in 1990,” says Chbosky. “Style, substance, music, art, movies, and television never stand still. Invariably what happens is those kids that need to be iconoclast and need to be a step away, they’re going to find the next thing because they’re the trendsetters and they’re the trailblazers and it’s never been different.”
Instead of moving forward into a new world of technology, many teens of this generation simply went backward, Jack White–like, and invested in things of permanence. The era of vinyl records being sold in Urban Outfitters begins here.
“An LP is not going to be updated,” Chbosky says. “It’s physically healthy. It feels grounded and trustworthy. You can’t put it on a phone. You can’t delete it. In a modern world where everything is portable, there’s something lovely about having something that’s grounded.”
The notion of books and records as friends is treated reverently in 2004’s Garden State, written and directed by Zach Braff. Braff was, at the time, the star of a fairly mainstream sitcom, Scrubs. The show had its own devoted following and a madcap sense of humor, but few could have predicted the notes Braff would hit with his debut film, or how it would alter the lives and careers of once comfortably small Indie rockers. Mainstream Hollywood came to them, as the East Coast advertising world and MTV had already done. It took a bit longer, but the conflicts were eternal.
Twee’s biggest overground moment, however, was not concocted in MTV’s Times Square conference rooms. It seemed to come out of nowhere, a long-circulated, potential vanity project from a TV actor. Braff had been slowly circulating a script set in his hometown of Orange, New Jersey, for years. The film was about a troubled young man who returns home for his mother’s funeral. It was a charming enough script to attract major movie stars, like Natalie Portman, then appearing in the Star Wars prequel trilogy, as well as respected, young independent film actors like Peter Sarsgaard. Produced by Danny DeVito, it was still an under-the-radar affair.
“We’d meet up at Thirty-third Street,” says Armando Riesco, who appears in the film as Jessie, an improbable overnight millionaire thanks to his invention of “silent Velcro.” “And a van would take us out to New Jersey. I got the sense that people believed in this film strongly. You don’t get Natalie Portman and Peter Sarsgaard on board because they’re your friends.”
Like The Graduate, its most obvious predecessor, the film opens on an airplane and is driven from start to finish by its evocative soundtrack (also featuring Simon and Garfunkel). The film’s most iconic scene takes place in a doctor’s office. Andrew Largeman, played by Braff, is back in his New Jersey hometown from Los Angeles, where he’s a struggling actor and waiter. His mother, who drowned in the bath, had been crippled in an accident that Largeman blames himself for. Complaining of headaches, he goes to a doctor recommended by his aloof shrink father, played by Ian Holm. Waiting in the office, he encounters Natalie Portman’s Sam, in jeans and a sweater with big retro-style headphones encircling her head. They chat and he casually asks what she’s listening to.
“You gotta hear this one song. It’ll change your life, I swear,” she promises.
It’s “New Slang” by the Shins, a three-year-old track from their Sub Pop album Oh, Inverted World. The band’s front man had been around for a decade, recording in Albuquerque under the name the Shins since the late 1990s. The song is gloomy and jangly, not unlike an old Kinks track, but there’s a soothing quality to it that is instant. We can see its healing effect on the grieving, tormented Largeman.
“The music was written in,” Riesco says. “He knew what song was going where before anything was shot. Zach basically handpicked these songs to be on the soundtrack to his movie.”
Garden State’s soundtrack album, released in the summer of 2004, sold almost a million and a half copies in North America, won a Grammy, and made major rock stars out of the Shins. It also established a cultural field upon which other Indie rock bands could follow suit, bands that had nothing to do with the film but shared a gentleness and a Brooklyn-ish quality, as well as a certain professionalism. Politics and revolt were not only unnecessary, they were a liability. “Music became Twee in that middle-class Brooklyn artisanal urbanite who went to college in the nineties. It’s not that I have something against that stuff. It fits into society, and what you get is niceness and contentment,” Riesco says. Somehow the rise of Nirvana and the Strokes felt like triumphs of the underdog, with a strong tether to eighties Indie, both British and American, while the rise of groups like the Shins, Modest Mouse, and the Decemberists to the top of the pop charts felt like a shrug, as if, unthreatening and uncontroversial, they always somehow belonged in a Starbucks. “It was music for people who didn’t buy into the ethos of cool that goes around rock, the danger element,” says Riesco.
The world of Garden State, like Stars Hollow, was a place these cool-shunners wanted to go back to again and again. To play “New Slang” was to return to that scene and feel something. “It was the beginning of the numbness everyone feels today,” says Riesco. “People texting and walking at the same time, unable to really connect with people.”
Braff’s shell-shocked hero is a refugee from Prozac nation. “There’s a lightning storm in my head,” he moans. Largeman’s so numb with guilt and chemicals that he doesn’t even recognize love the first time he sees it, in the form of Sam. When he meets her, in fact, she asks him if he’s retarded. The answer is, of course, yes, but only emotionally. Largeman, with his motorcycle and sidecar, is Marlon Brando’s Johnny, the Wild One, for his generation. Portman’s Sam is his deliverer to the world of authentic emotion. This is, of course, utter fantasy, just like Lorelai and Rory Gilmore’s diet. Sam is a classic “Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” the term coined by Nathan Rabin in his review of Kirsten Dunst’s performance in Cameron Crowe’s dud romantic comedy Elizabethtown the following year.
Sam keeps and buries a lot of hamsters. She still has a piece of her baby blanket (named Tickle) and sometimes reboots her brain by making funny noises. There’s footage of her figure skating while dressed like an alligator straight out of Sendak. She’s chaste but also, crucially, sexy, warning Largeman, “We’re not gonna make out or anything” when he enters her bedroom. Sam doesn’t exist anywhere in nature—only in the minds of writers—but there’s a darkness that she initially conceals and Largeman is too self-absorbed to detect. It gives her depth and makes her more real. Sam is an epileptic. That’s why she is at the doctor’s office, blocking out the reality of the situation by blasting Indie rock into her brain. She’s terrified, with her body betraying her at times.
“I look forward to a good cry,” she tells Largeman. Largeman looks at her as though he no longer knows what that word even means, but by the film’s end she not only has him primal-screaming into an open crevasse, washed clean in a rainstorm, but sexually heals him after all—in the very tub that his mother drowned in, of all places.
“This is good! This doesn’t happen often!” Sam swears to Largeman as he is about to go back to Los Angeles to resume his dead and hopeless life, the familiar. We wonder if he will wise up or get on the plane. He wises up. He runs to her, literally, and they are saved, these two broken heroes for a broken and terrified world.
Braff and the box-office success of Garden State would be chiefly responsible for the homely but sweet new leading men, your Michael Ceras, Jonah Hills, Jesse Eisenbergs, and Seth Rogens. “There’s Channing Tatum, and then there’s those guys,” says Josh Hamilton, star of Kicking and Screaming.
In a 2012 essay in Esquire, the writer Stephen Marche observed of the post–Garden State era, “All the rebels are fey in quirky America.” But are they true rebels, or was the very notion quaint in a post-post-everything world, constantly on orange alert?
Ellen Page’s Juno McGuff is the closest thing the era has to a true Punk. She abhors the then-current trope of the sexy nerd: “Jocks like him always want geeky girls who play the cello and read McSweeney’s and want to be children’s librarians when they grow up,” she says of her crush object, Michael Cera’s Paulie Bleeker. When she and Bleeker do consummate their mutual attraction, Juno is impregnated on the first try and must reckon with this “diddle that can’t be undid, home skillet,” as Rainn Wilson’s drugstore clerk tells her.
Diablo Cody didn’t go undercover in a high school like Cameron Crowe, and the dialogue of Juno has no “this is how they really speak now” verisimilitude. As with Clueless, Cody simply nailed the attitude of young and modern Twees, and inevitably they began speaking in the Cody-invented vernacular in tribute. Like all mainstream Twee fare, Juno is rich in the secret language of detail: Juno’s hamburger phone, her pipe, Bleeker’s orange Tic Tacs. These quirks used to be the domain of the “best friend” or “weird uncle” in movies. Now they are for the leads.
The soundtrack to Juno was an even greater success than the Garden State soundtrack, although, in a post–Garden State culture, perhaps not the same surprise. It topped the Billboard charts, and the film earned more than $100 million at the domestic box office. It was nominated for Best Picture, and Cody, who’d also written a clever memoir, Candy Girl, about her brief time as a stripper, won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar.
Juno has the wide-of-the-mark quality of a dozen after-school specials and One to Grow On–style PSAs on its side, most as tone-deaf as rapping Barney Rubble. Never has teenage pregnancy and abortion been taken on in a way that hasn’t seemed self-righteous or, worse, condescending. It’s broad, almost farcical, and achingly real. When Mr. McGuff says, “I thought you were the kind of girl who knew when to say when,” Juno responds, “I don’t really know what kind of girl I am.”
Instantly all the Holden Caulfield–like tough-kid slang melts away and we, the audience, are faced with Juno’s terrifying dilemma and the immense responsibility that goes with it. She is not even fully formed herself as her baby is forming inside her. “It has fingernails,” an anti-abortion protester tells her. This is why Cody got the gold statue.
Jason Bateman’s Mark Loring, once a promising musician, is as arrested as Juno in his own way. His 1990s heyday is long in the rearview, but he cannot let go. His wife, Vanessa, played by Jennifer Garner, is tired of “waiting around for him to become Kurt Cobain.” She wants to be a mother and can no longer reckon with being married to a man-child.
Mark is astounded by Juno’s facility with retro Punk rock and splatter-film auteurs and falls in love with her for her taste and the youth that she reminds him of. Of course, it’s the teenager who proves herself the mature one, not only surviving her outsider status but also placing the baby with Vanessa even after Mark leaves to pursue a happiness that’s almost guaranteed to elude him. The film ends with a grace note: Juno, reunited with the baby’s father, Paulie, being childlike again, playing guitar and singing the Moldy Peaches ditty “Anyone Else but You,” an update of the Velvets’ sweet duet “I’m Sticking with You.”
Suddenly the Celine Dions of the pop world were the minority and the Elliott Smiths were everywhere. The Moldy Peaches performed the song on The View. Cera and Page became both romantic leads and action stars without having to spray anyone with machine-gun fire or make Stallonian quips. More TV shows with a sweetness at their core were green-lit, from CBS’s The Big Bang Theory, costarring Garden State’s Jim Parsons as a socially awkward physics wiz, to HBO’s Bored to Death, starring Rushmore’s grown-up Jason Schwartzman as a hapless novelist moonlighting as a private detective. “I wanted an ethos of kindness underneath everything,” Bored creator Jonathan Ames says of his Brooklyn-set farce. “It came to that after I got exposed to other TV writers. I was supposed to have a staff. I saw in those people’s scripts that I was sent—everybody was mean to each other. It sounds like a schoolyard thing to say. A lot of the humor came out of put-downs and mockery, whether it be mockery of characters the way they were written or the way they spoke to each other. I didn’t want that kind of humor anymore.”