For all of High Fidelity's sad attempts at trying to shoehorn Nick Hornby's boring pseudo-hipster protagonist into the faux-world of Chicago indie rock, the basic story still works, regardless of Rob Gordon's ill-fit in the movie or Hornby's fairly-banausic prose in the book - the fact of the matter is that Hornby did a good job at laying the typical Western culture male mind bare. Of course, as usual, we have to qualify this with a "obviously not across the board" clause, but you get the idea.
Actually, I have no idea if the High Fidelity model of male insecurity, that is, in a break-up, the guy only becomes truly despondent when he finds out that his ex has had sex with another man, I have no idea if this is really an accurate depiction of the (Western) male mind for even a decent portion of the populace. Sure, this particular emotion must be common enough, or else Hornby wouldn’t have connected with so many people (I was going to say despite his shitty writing, but I guess a lot of people like what I think is shitty), but the fact that all the characters that I can remember going through this have all been insecure music nerds could mean something. Why this sub-group?
Okay, so “all the characters I can remember” equals Rob Gordon and now Seth Cohen, that doesn’t do wonders for this notion, for two people sets absolutely no trend, and furthermore, that kind of despondency that I talked about above probably just comes from insecurity and has nothing to do with music nerddom, that is, it’s probably insecure people period that feel this way, and the music part is just incidental, and maybe The O.C. writers wrote this episode with High Fidelity in mind so that the two examples I picked out are actually just one example and an homage.
Screw it. The point is that in this episode, the realization that Summer and Zach probably had sex devastates Seth and we get to see his hideous insecurity warp him into some kind of creepy, smelly wraith of a shadow. Other things happen in this episode too, like the further deterioration of Sandy and Kirsten’s marriage (Boo), but the Seth thing was the funniest part. Seriously, when he approaches Zach to ask him – I mean, it’s a total parody, but the writers really nailed the underlying feeling.
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