I went out with this girl once. Her name was Rachel. She was a Rotten Tomato.
Not that I held that against her. She was a total movie nerd, so we got along right from the get-go. Her encyclopaedic movie knowledge was impeccable – one that outweighed my own. It made it much easier to ignore the fact that she had a giant tomato for a head.
Being an expert on movie dating, I made the wise choice of taking her to see This is the End – a star-heavy comedy that didn’t take itself too seriously and kept us laughing throughout. It also had demon dicks and rape jokes, but I suavely avoided bringing those up in conversation.
Her overwhelmingly rigid view was intimidating at first, but my passive demeanour easily gave in to her quirk. To me, there’s nothing sexier than a woman who is that sure of herself, an attraction of mine that Freud would figuratively and literally poke holes into.
I’m not going to lie: agreeing with Rachel about This is the End felt pretty amazing. Being on par with someone on such a high cinema-knowledge pedestal (one I admittedly put her on) reinforced my own opinion about the movie. I couldn’t wait to see her again.
But then we went to see The Lone Ranger…
She continued to belt me with tomatoes as we left the cinema.
I couldn’t understand it. I enjoyed The Lone Ranger for reasons I thought were… well… reasonable, only to have her shoot my opinion down with a batch of rotten tomatoes. I think her exact words were “You’re 30% of a total idiot”.
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t feel like I had the right to rebuttal – my inferior film brain was not on the same level as her meaty movie mind. There was nothing I could do, except take my verbal beating like the bitch I am.
She eventually calmed down, and amazingly, I somehow scored a third date. It was terrifying.
She took me to see The Way, Way Back, which I had been eagerly awaiting. I loves me a good coming-of-age film, and having Steve Carell and Sam Rockwell starring in it was a total bonus. Rachel, having already seen it, said she “certifiably loved it“. So I was gonna love it too, right?
Nope. In fact, I hated it.
I hated the annoyingly introverted lead character, I hated the absurdly cute girl-next-door who had no reason to be interested in him, and I hated the film’s inability to express the obvious father issue the boy had been presented with. But I couldn’t tell her that.
I needed to convince her (and myself) that my opinions were as valuable as every other films critics out there. But more importantly, I didn’t want her turning my ass into purée again.
So I did what any other self-disrespecting man would do in my position: I lied to myself.
Every film she declared ‘rotten’, I would convince myself it was ‘rotten’ as well. Every film she said was ‘fresh‘, I’d say it was ‘clean‘. It helped me climb her Tomatometer for a while, until she caught on…
She broke it off.
She told me she felt 12% attraction to my lack in independence and self-belief, and that imitating her was 83% certifiably creepy. She then apologised about the whole Lone Ranger incident (though her eye twitched angrily when she said it), saying that it was unfair to throw a rotten batch of tomatoes at me just for liking that film. She went on to say some other stuff, but I didn’t quite catch it – I was too busy thinking “Do not cry, do not cry, do not cry…”
I got over the dumping quicker than I thought. It was for the best, really; Rachel seems much happier with her new partner.
