For those of you that have not seen "The Spectacular Now," or haven’t read the book, it is another teenage love story about how a boy and a girl meet and they overcome adversity in the name of love. Yet, this story, in particular, is so incredibly raw. It doesn’t romanticize perfect relationships, and it doesn’t patronize teenage love and feelings, as so many other films have. Which I can happily say a lot of YA book-to-screen adaptations have done justice of upholding.
Our protagonist for this film is a high school senior by the name of Sutter Keely, and in his high school, he is god-like. He’s always the life of the party, him and his girlfriend Cassidy are the “It” couple in school, and if he shows up anywhere that is the place to be. Until, real life starts intruding on his perfect high school career, and instead of planning for his future he remains living in the “now”. Which is when he meets what should be his savior, Aimee Finicky, and as the story would have it, they become romantically involved. Through many trials and tribulations, he questions himself and his choices and realizes the damage that his actions have caused everyone that is in his life. Blah, blah, blah, cry, cry, cry, sorry no real spoilers.
Now that that is out of the way, you’ll be able to understand why I felt the need to write on such a topic as “What It’s Like to Date a Sutter Keely”.
Throughout high school, I dated a boy who I could swear they modeled Sutter off of.
He was it. He was that cliché “all the girls wanted to be with him, and all the guys wanted to be him.” As he walked down the gym floor for Homecoming Court the principle addressed him with THE before his name, as if he was worthy of special notoriety.
For the love of God, how I wish I was making that up.
If he threw a party, it wasn’t even a question everyone was going. He got in trouble for pumping up the student section better than the designated “Spirit Boys." Teachers held a meeting to discuss how to get him to use his popularity for good rather than evil.
I wish I was making that one up too.
You get my drift. He was ridiculously popular, and I give myself a lot of credit considering he was the loser new kid until I started dating him freshman year, but I digress.
When I saw the previews for "The Spectacular Now" it was already after it had come out on DVD and after my boyfriend and I had broken up (for the third or fourth time). Just from the trailer it resonated with me, and I thought first, “Holy shit, did someone make a movie about my high school relationship” and second, “Man, I’m like the Aimee to his Sutter.”
And boy, was I wrong.
I bought the movie pretty soon after, I didn’t rent it or stream it. I had enough confidence in this movie to just straight up buy it without ever watching more than the trailer, which for me and my pristine movie collection is extremely daring. I sat down in my brand new apartment and started preparing myself to reminisce on our tarnished and broken relationship. But once I got into the heart of the movie I had an epiphany that was inherently unnerving.
I wasn’t his Aimee Finicky. I was his Cassidy.
We were the “It” couple. People knew us as a pair. Almost a year out of high school, I had a waiter at one of my favorite restaurants ask about us and mentioned how in school it was always him and I. Our names were synonymous, never one without the other, even in casual conversation. In my mind, we had an archetype to live up to, a cliché to uphold.
Dating a guy like Sutter Keely made high school beyond enjoyable. Every school event, I had big plans for big parties. But it always made everything more stressful than necessary. He was always getting into trouble, whether it was with the school or at home, or later on, unfortunately, with the law.
My ex was not the stereotypical spoiled party boy, which is another reason he reminded me so much or Sutter. He struggled with a lot of major issue that kids should never have to face. It was like dating a boy with his own mental Alcatraz for the majority of our young relationship.
So when I realized my miscalculation about identifying with Aimee, and accepted that I was, in reality, more like Cassidy, I also realized that meant I wasn’t the one that was saving him, the way Aimee “saved” Sutter.
Which I now can see was just as misleading as identifying with Aimee.
No one in the entire realm of "The Spectacular Now" “yanked (him) out of neutral” as they say in the movie. It was all his doing. He had to want to be a better person. He had to want to choose to see a future for himself. He had to stop ignoring the life he was wasting and stop thinking that living in the now was all that really mattered.
As badly as I wanted to be my ex’s saving grace, I couldn’t. He had to save himself. He had to realize that no matter how amazing the now is there will come a time when you wake up and realize the your youthful now is dead and gone and you have nothing left to show for it but a shrine of empty liquor bottles, a lot of party selfies you don’t dare post and maybe a rap sheet from the county jail.
Dating a guy like Sutter Keely was a lesson in and of itself. I was stuck in this unhealthy relationship. Battling between my heart and my head. I tried to change him, to no avail, and I lost part of myself in that process.
It was like he had fallen asleep at the wheel and I was trapped in the passenger’s seat. I did all I could to wake him, but nothing seemed to work. For anyone that has been in a relationship like this, just know it’s not up to you. You don’t have to shake them out of it.
And for my Sutter Keely, if you ever somehow read this, you have to be your own savior. You have to care enough to yank yourself out of neutral. No one can do it for you. I learned the hard way that it wasn’t up to me. You don’t need an Aimee or even a Cassidy. You need to love yourself. I wanted to be your Aimee, but I think it is better that I wasn’t.
