Time: Are Geeks Mainstream Now?
In the new issue of Time, writer Lev Grossman says "geek culture" has become cool, and mourns a little.
The occasion for his essay is the confluence of movie premieres from Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman, both of whom Grossman interviewed for this piece:
The second part of Grossman's essay finds him musing, with tongue in cheek, about losing the "vanishing dork" to the homogenizing effects of mass culture. Grossman apparently sees value in the separation (if not outright ostracism) of geeks/dorks/nerds from "everyone else." Speaking as someone who was definitely ostracized, the hard emotional shell I built around myself in junior high school did help me cope, in what I liked to imagine was analogous to a secret identity. After all, if knowledge is power, specialized knowledge must be even more powerful. (Still, it would be many long years before my specialized knowledge was put to demonstrable use, wiping the sports-bar floor with my softball teammates in NTN trivia games.)
Perhaps Grossman's point is that the beatings and alienation we nerds have endured were badges of honor, albeit painfully earned, marking us as being envied by a world that fears and hates us. (Even as we have sworn to protect it, of course.) Isn't that what our parents kept telling us -- that we were special in ways our peers never quite saw? And didn't our heroes like Peter Parker daydream horrific consequences for revealing our secret identities and hidden talents to the world? It's called the Fortress of Solitude for a reason, you know.
And yet, I can't help thinking that we still need to reach out, if not evangelize, to the larger world, introducing it slowly into whatever little corner of the subculture we inhabit. When my wife asks, "So how close was the movie to the comic?" I try not to overwhelm her with dissertations on the organization of Gotham mobsters or the role of Gwen Stacy. The mere fact of her curiosity means a lot.
I mean, it's not like we nerds are going to vanish -- quite the opposite. Resistance is futile.
The occasion for his essay is the confluence of movie premieres from Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman, both of whom Grossman interviewed for this piece:
Whedon and Gaiman agree that the line between dork and non-dork has become hopelessly blurred. "When I started doing Sandman, I could look at a group of people lined up to get my autograph, and I knew who was my fan and who was somebody's mum there to get a signature," says Gaiman, who's English. "It doesn't work that way anymore. They're people. They're us. That's what they look like."I'm not quite sure I agree with Grossman's thesis that geek culture, once marginalized, has become mainstream. If that were so, would he have to remind his readers that Neil Gaiman is English? Such an event doesn't seem to have affected comics sales, at least with regard to superheroes -- certainly the "nerdiest" of comics genres. In fact, Grossman might well have asked why Allan Heinberg hasn't driven all those ostensibly nerd-loving "O.C." fans into their local comics shops looking for the latest Young Avengers or JLA.
"They're a lot more attractive than I am, actually," Whedon deadpans. "Which kind of disturbs and upsets me."
The second part of Grossman's essay finds him musing, with tongue in cheek, about losing the "vanishing dork" to the homogenizing effects of mass culture. Grossman apparently sees value in the separation (if not outright ostracism) of geeks/dorks/nerds from "everyone else." Speaking as someone who was definitely ostracized, the hard emotional shell I built around myself in junior high school did help me cope, in what I liked to imagine was analogous to a secret identity. After all, if knowledge is power, specialized knowledge must be even more powerful. (Still, it would be many long years before my specialized knowledge was put to demonstrable use, wiping the sports-bar floor with my softball teammates in NTN trivia games.)
Perhaps Grossman's point is that the beatings and alienation we nerds have endured were badges of honor, albeit painfully earned, marking us as being envied by a world that fears and hates us. (Even as we have sworn to protect it, of course.) Isn't that what our parents kept telling us -- that we were special in ways our peers never quite saw? And didn't our heroes like Peter Parker daydream horrific consequences for revealing our secret identities and hidden talents to the world? It's called the Fortress of Solitude for a reason, you know.
And yet, I can't help thinking that we still need to reach out, if not evangelize, to the larger world, introducing it slowly into whatever little corner of the subculture we inhabit. When my wife asks, "So how close was the movie to the comic?" I try not to overwhelm her with dissertations on the organization of Gotham mobsters or the role of Gwen Stacy. The mere fact of her curiosity means a lot.
I mean, it's not like we nerds are going to vanish -- quite the opposite. Resistance is futile.
posted by Tom Bondurant @ 4:22 PM
1 Comments:
It's probably video and PC games more than anything which have taken so-called geek hobbies out of the marginalization. First-person shooters and sports games are played by those very jocks that Grossman says in earlier days would have been beating the geeks and nerds. Actually, the whole "beating up on others" style of gameplay makes sense in that light.
Never fear. Star Trek, any hardcore knowledge of Star Wars, and anything that looks like a comic book are still marginalized. After all, how many articles reviewing "A History of Violence" have said anything flattering about the source material?
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