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There have only been a handful of times in my life that a song has made me cry, and I find it a grating irony that the most recent was one called "Why Not Smile". Last summer, a friend and I were on our way to a party, the weather was unusually fine and there was every prospect of a perfect evening's revelry ahead of us. He put a CD, REM's Up, in the car stereo and not long after the first words of this song, I felt a melting sensation somewhere in my chest, a lump in the throat and the first wet drops sliding down my left cheek. Five months after the phone call that had ended my previous relationship, there I was, back in the middle of all the feelings I had been busily -- and largely successfully -- repressing.

There was a complicated emotional geometry that led from this song back to her. Rather than trying to describe it to my slightly bewildered friend through senseless blubbering, however, I should have merely handed him High Fidelity, Nick Hornby's novel on love, music and pop misery. Rob Fleming, the book's record-store-owning narrator, muses upon the connection between the fantasy love of pop music and the very real romantic anguish plaguing his and his friends' lives:

"The unhappiest people I know, romantically speaking, are the ones who like pop music the most; and I don't know whether pop music has caused this unhappiness, but I do know they've been listening to the sad songs longer than they've been living the unhappy lives".

As he notes, although our culture is awash in concern about the link between a violent culture and a culture of violence, "nobody worries about kids listening to thousands -- literally thousands -- of songs about broken hearts and rejection and pain and misery and loss". There are, to be sure, a dearth of white papers and think-tank reports being written about the possibility that the romantic misery of pop culture creates a pop culture of romantic misery.

The theme of popular music as an amplifier of lonely-hearted dissatisfaction is embedded throughout High Fidelity, now transformed into an American motion picture starring John Cusack as Rob, who speaks much of Hornby's engaging, heartfelt prose directly to the camera in a series of monologues. We are drawn into Rob's rather limited life: his apartment strewn with carefully-organized records, the local pub where he meets and falls in lust with a singer-songwriter and, most importantly, Championship Vinyl, his shabbily grand monument to the power of music to shape -- and distort -- the lives of those it touches.

Making its point immediately, the film opens with a close-up image of a spinning LP to the tune of "You're Gonna Miss Me" by The Thirteenth Floor Elevators. When Rob isn't standing out in the conveniently timely rain suffering one of many romantic disappointments, he lives and works surrounded by those carefully sleeved and arranged black plastic disks. They become a fetish item in the film and symbolize much of what is going wrong for Rob. Unable to skip out of the groove he fell into after quitting school and working in record shops, music begins to define a more desirable b-side of the life he's currently living. Unable to make sense of where he's been or where he's going, he reorganizes his LPs in ways only he can understand in order to gain a feeling of power over his identity. Finally, their contents, the pop music he so adores, construct Rob's view of live, love and What It's All About.

If Rob needed a warning about the perils of music and love, he needed only to look to Francois Truffaut's 1962 short film Antoine et Colette. The film, the second in the Antoine Doinel series that began with The 400 Blows, opens with a radio blaring the line "Mornings I wake up singing", stirring young Antoine from sleep. His first subsequent act is to put on a record and stand on his balcony while watching the Paris streets below him, the music setting the mood for his day. Antoine, you see, is another music obsessive, and his small portable turntable supplies a soaring instrumental soundtrack for his morning reveries. Antoine works at a record factory, manufacturing the same totemic objects of audiophile desire that are the visual and metaphorical emotional currency of High Fidelity. Unlike Rob, Antoine is mostly a devotee of classical rather than pop music. Like Rob, the only thing Antoine appears to think of other than music is love. Antoine adores Colette, whom he finally gets the nerve to ask out after seeing her repeatedly at a series of orchestral concerts.

Perhaps inevitably, knowing his devotion to music and applying Rob's theory of pop misery to the world of Brahms and Mozart, Antoine is doomed. Despite moving from his apartment -- turntable under his arm -- to another across the street from Colette, Antoine is unable to convince her to be anything more than a friend. In the end, she goes off with another man, leaving Antoine with his music and the suggestion that, for a while at least, he will be waking up crying rather than singing.

Of course, the relationship between music and romance is not always tragic. It's a common feeling in the first magical throes of a new love that every happy song on the radio is about you. On balance, however, misery seems to outpace euphoria in the music world. The theme of music as emotional refuge is an old one. (Although, in our overly-Muzaked world, we may now equally need a refuge from music.) I own a recording of Billie Holiday dated 1957 in which she sings the following lines from "One for My Baby (and One More for the Road)":

I've got the routine/So drop another nickel in the machine
I'm feeling so bad/I wish you'd make the music dreary and sad

Fast forwarding some twenty years, we find the Kinks' "Rock and Roll Fantasy" The song is a striking absence from the High Fidelity soundtrack, since it could have been re-titled "Rob's Theme":

There's a guy in my block/He lives for Rock he plays records day and night
And when he feels down he puts some rock and roll on/And it makes him feel alright

We've all, no doubt, spent our own hours obliterating the world through headphones and speakers. Thus, it is with no small amount of self-identification that we first see Rob cradling his headphones closer to his ears in the wake of his girlfriend Laura's possibly permanent exit from his apartment.

And when he feels the world is closing in/He turns his stereo way up high
He just spends his life living in a rock and roll fantasy/He just spends his life living on the edge of reality

,As reassuring as we find the ability to burrow into the enveloping duvet of our music collections, however, there is a second -- and far more cutting -- side to the link between music and love: music may have some role in driving us under the covers in the first place. Ray Davies, who had by the late seventies seen quite a bit of rock 'n' roll reality, concludes:

Don't want to spend my life living in a rock and roll fantasy.

But of course, cautionary words notwithstanding, we do tend to want that. By the end of High Fidelity, it's not any amount of musical meandering that repairs the relationship between Rob and Laura. It is rather the more mundane prescription of serious talks and meaningless sex with other people that eventually bring their orbits back into some sort of compromised harmony.

As Rob, Antoine and Ray all suggest in their various ways, musical romantic fantasies may make a poor foundation for the house of love. In creating a map for our longings, an expectation that true romance can live up to the concentrated passion embodied in the three and a half minutes on track six of our favorite CD, music creates an expectation that can rarely be met. If it fails -- and let's face it, it usually does -- our path has long before and repeatedly been plotted as surely as a turntable needle will hit that smooth plastic corona around the label.

Rob is inescapably aware of this. In response to Laura's lackluster, compromising explanation of why she's returned to him -- one part of which involved her feeling sick when she listened to a tape he'd made for her -- Rob considers the way that music had sold him a deceptive bill of goods regarding "real" love. In particular, he points to Dusty Springfield's rendition of "The Look of Love," which had affected him at an "impressionable age":

I thought there was going to be this sexy woman with a sexy voice and lots of sexy eye makeup whose devotion to me shone from every pore. And there is such a thing as the look of love -- Dusty didn't lead us up the garden path entirely -- it's just that the look of love isn't what I expected it to be. It's not huge eyes almost bursting with longing situated somewhere in the middle of a double bed with the covers turned down invitingly; it's just as likely to be the look of benevolent indulgence that a mother gives a toddler, or a look of amused exasperation, even a look of pained concern. But the Dusty Springfield look of love? Forget it.

Along with High Fidelity's suggestion that music shapes our expectation of romance, however, the blame might equally be laid at the foot of films very much like this one: our fantasies are tinged as much by celluloid as by vinyl. In our media-saturated age, we are encouraged -- in fact increasingly required -- to see ourselves as the director, producer and, above all, star of the full-length feature film of our lives. Unlike, say, The Truman Show, our lives are not, of course, actually broadcast for the consumption of an international viewing audience of several hundred million. Yet within the fantasies through which we construct our perception of reality we continually shape our own perpetual stardom. Where the Truman Show included unsubtle advertising messages incorporated into Truman's life, we assemble particular belongings to advertise our adherence to the style of the moment. We design our own sets, compile our own soundtracks, and do our own costuming. We communicate through pre-fabricated artifacts of fantasy, as does Rob when he makes a compilation tape for a woman he hopes to interest:

"To me, making a tape is like writing a letter....a good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do."

We write letters in the words of others (after all, it's all been written/sung/acted before) while these creations simultaneously tell us how we should feel. It's far easier to be consumers now rather than really producing anything so arduous as individually articulated emotion. This distinction between production and consumption is nicely captured in again comparing High Fidelity and Antoine et Colette. Whereas Rob gives Laura a tape of songs he's compiled, Antoine gives Colette a vinyl disk he's manufactured on a machine at the record factory. In Rob's world, having the taste to distinguish between "good" and "bad" music (the skill of the consumer) is presented as a hard-won accomplishment in itself. The discernment of "knowing" a particular chord progression or melodic pattern is superior to another is an assertion of power, a claim-by these obscure, confused men-that they have some way of creating their own hierarchies their socially insecure lives.

We relate to others, in part, through borrowed poetry from the singers, writers and filmmakers of the world. "Why Not Smile", the song that inspired my own fit of crying, had found its way onto a compilation tape I made for the person I associated with it -- as had Dusty Springfield's classic angst-anthem "I Just Don't Know What to Do With Myself". Judging by the number of people I know who identify with Rob's view of things, I'm not alone in making gestures like this. We're all left constructing our lives, particularly our romances, as scenes from films, lines from songs, and pages from books. As someone recently told me, Andy Warhol only got it partly right: rather than fifteen minutes of fame, we've all become famous stars of our own existence, for every day of our lives. If we're very lucky, we're able to wake up singing more often than not.