Geek Wisdom

by Stephen H. Segal

  It’s rarely commented on, since the name Dante experienced a trendy baby boom a couple decades ago, but we do think the idea of naming the protagonist of Clerks (1994) after the poet who famously toured all the torments of Hell is a pretty funny bit of hyperbole.

  “WAX ON … WAX OFF.”

  —MR. MIYAGI, THE KARATE KID

  NO ONE ENJOYS ROTE LEARNING. Memorizing a list of facts and figures may pave the way for a passing grade, but as much as we may love books and trivia, we take little true pride in such mental drudgery; we’re just glad to have passed. Real learning comes when we get our hands dirty: endless hours of building Legos teaching us about structural engineering; summer jobs at the cash register teaching us how to interact as an adult with strangers; college internships at the office showing us how different our chosen field looks in practice than it did on paper. Through the knuckle-rapping pains of experience, we absorb knowledge in a tangible, useful way, not simply learning how things are done but how to do them—and then, how to do them better. If we’re paying attention, then before long, we start trying to innovate; we break down walls and change our piece of the world while we’re at it. We become not just smart—that and a quarter will buy you a gumball—but competent. And if there’s one thing geeks strive for, it’s to be more capable than the norm. Thus, we wax.

  Mr. Miyagi, the guru in The Karate Kid (1984), was portrayed by Pat Morita, who went on to delight geeks by lampooning the role in the cartoon Robot Chicken.

  “THAT IS MOST OF IT, BEING

  A WIZARD–SEEING AND LISTENING.

  THE REST IS TECHNIQUE.”

  —SCHMENDRICK THE MAGICIAN, THE LAST UNICORN

  EVEN A STOPPED CLOCK is right twice a day, and in The Last Unicorn, Schmendrick the Magician manages to hit on more than one home truth amid his self-doubt and suspicion. His struggles to channel and control his magic form a through-line of the novel, though he sums them up in this single throwaway comment that strikes at the heart of the problem for many of us: knowing when to listen, and then—when the time to talk arrives—how to be really heard. Of seeing and listening, too much praise cannot be said (one need only look at any YouTube comments section to understand the value of restraint). When you’re setting out to learn a new skill, attentive observation will do you more good than any other single training tool. The patience to absorb information before acting is the real art; once you’ve mastered that, Schmendrick’s right—what remains is just details.

  Peter S. Beagle’s Last Unicorn is one of the handful of fantasy classics that’s simultaneously considered a classic in a second genre: the pony book. It’s as often found on a shelf next to Black Beauty and Misty of Chincoteague as it is alongside The Hobbit or A Wrinkle in Time.

  “EVEN A MAN WHO IS PURE IN HEART AND

  SAYS HIS PRAYERS BY NIGHT MAY BECOME A

  WOLF WHEN THE WOLFBANE BLOOMS AND

  THE AUTUMN MOON IS BRIGHT.”

  —ANCIENT GYPSY PROVERB, THE WOLF MAN

  THAT COUPLET at the start of 1941’s The Wolf Man begins our brief,* tragic sojourn in the brief, tragic life of Larry Talbot, a good man whose pure heart wasn’t enough to stop an unfortunate encounter with the business end of a werewolf from saddling him with a very hairy problem. So effectively did writer Curt Siodmak weave the mystery and mysticism of extant werewolf lore into his tale that, even today, many viewers fail to realize that he conjured the proverb entirely from his imagination. What Siodmak’s poem signifies is the omnipresent fear we all carry deep inside us that, irrespective of the person we’ve tried to be or the life we’ve tried to lead, circumstances outside our control might force us to do or be something terrible—and we might ultimately be powerless to stop it.

  * Brief, that is, until the first of several sequels came along two years later.

  “THAT RUG REALLY TIED

  THE ROOM TOGETHER.”

  —THE DUDE, THE BIG LEBOWSKI

  IF YOUR HOUSE WAS ON FIRE and you could grab only one thing before running to safety, what would it be? Tough decision? Not for the Dude. For him, that rug is a talisman as powerful and mythic as Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber or Indiana Jones’s fedora, and his stalwart devotion to that artifact provides some insight into why the character resonates. We’ve been conditioned to think of our movie heroes as quick thinking, forceful, and otherwise action-oriented, but the Dude represents a pointed inversion of the classic heroic paradigm. He’s our unfettered id brought to bedraggled, beer-bellied life. There’s a primal simplicity to the Dude’s personal code of honor that we all can relate to—and many of us wish we could embody. Even when offered a cut of the stolen money he’s found, he says, “All the Dude ever wanted was his rug back. Not greedy.” He remains utterly, defiantly true to himself even in the face of an increasing unhinged, nonsensical modern world. Now that’s some good stuff, Dude.

  Jeff Bridges may not be the cultural signifier that Johnny Depp’s presence in a film is, but his offbeat selection of roles—The Dude, Tron’s Kevin Flynn, Iron Man’s Obadiah Stane, Starman’s titular alien—definitely marks him as a geek star.

  “WORST. EPISODE. EVER.”

  —COMIC BOOK GUY, THE SIMPSONS

  “BAZINGA!”

  —SHELDON, THE BIG BANG THEORY

  IF GEEKS ARE ANYTHING, WE ARE OPINIONATED. We wield our views like +1 spiked clubs, casting judgment upon throwaway entertainment as if we were debating scripture (ahem). Those of us who’ve prowled Internet forums and chat rooms don’t just know people like The Simpsons’ infamous Comic Book Guy, we’ve been them. We walk a fine line between commendable passion for that which we love—starships, superpowers, costumes, fantastic stories—and an almost frightening militancy about the Right Way to Enjoy Them. It’s part of what makes us who we are. The Comic Book Guy is revolting not simply because he’s loathsome—though he is—but because in our worst moments we, too, can be blindly critical and socially inept. Thankfully for the modern geek, those moments are rarer than they used to be. We long ago crawled out of the basement, took hold of popular culture, and developed the ability to laugh at the image of who we collectively once were.

  And yet—sometimes we backslide.

  One of geekdom’s most visible ambassadors this decade, The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon Cooper is a theoretical physicist who has mastered everything from a prepuberty Ph.D. to the rules of that classic game, Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock. Lifting the old stereotype of the asexual braniac to new heights, Sheldon is a derisive, hygienic, methodical academic who nonetheless benefits greatly from the company of his friends. On paper, he’s exactly the person many geeks would point to as a flag-bearer. But as the show’s ongoing narrative evolved, the other characters’ jabs at Sheldon’s expense became something he increasingly played into: His fastidiousness became infantilization, his wry observations started to sound like full-on pompous taunts, and his inside jokes turned into shorthand punch lines to any scene the writers couldn’t end coherently. (Lookin’ at you, “Bazinga.”) Geeks of the world, don’t let this happen to you. We know you love to revel in your geekiness, but it’s easy to slip to the dark side; try hard not to turn into a caricature of yourself. And if you must have a signature catchphrase, for God’s sake, try to keep an eye on how often you’re saying it.

  TV producers, take note: Geeks know when you’re laughing with us and when you’re laughing at us. Sheldon and Comic Book Guy: with us. Steve Urkel: at us.

  “FEAR IS THE MIND-KILLER.

  FEAR IS THE LITTLE-DEATH THAT

  BRINGS TOTAL OBLITERATION.”

  —BENE GESSERIT LITANY AGAINST FEAR, DUNE

  SHE’S THERE, across the room, and her hair is long and it’s lovely, and so is she, and you keep stealing glances, you can’t even control them, and every time she glances back you avert your gaze because, dear lord, if her eyes were to meet yours. If she could see into yours, she’d know. She’d know what you’re feeling and thinking, and that would be so unbearably embarrassing. Your friends nudge. Go
, go, they say. You can’t. Your limbs are frozen, your tongue fat and heavy and swollen. Go talk to her, they say. But you won’t. You are afraid, and in your fear you’ve already failed. You know she is already lost to you—or. Or. Or maybe you can suppress that fear. Can think, act, do, talk; can embrace reason and confidence over raw emotion. Can just go ahead and talk to her, so then maybe, maybe, she’ll talk back to you. And you can smile.

  Frank Herbert’s groundbreaking science-fiction classic Dune (1965) was rejected twelve times. Herbert did not let fear of failure prevent him from continuing to send the book out until he found a publisher who believed in it.

  “IF MY DOCTOR TOLD ME I HAD ONLY SIX

  MINUTES TO LIVE, I WOULDN’T BROOD.

  I’D TYPE A LITTLE FASTER.”

  —ISAAC ASIMOV

  THAT ASIMOV meant what he said is plain to see in the immense library of knowledge and wisdom he imparted to us during his extraordinary lifetime—a library we’ll likely continue to benefit from for time immemorial. But you don’t have to be Isaac Asimov to understand his broader point. From the moment we’re born, the clock begins to tick, daring us to accomplish all that we need to before that last grain of sand drops through the hourglass. Whether, per Asimov’s hypothetical, we know how much time we have left, the knowledge that we’re engaged in a race we’ve been engineered to lose can become reason for despair or a clarion call to action. For anyone who’s ever been driven by the creative impulse—by the all-encompassing need to take what’s inside and put it out there—Asimov’s words don’t merely ring true; they carry the weight of gospel.

  During the 1960s and ’70s, Asimov’s huge output as popular science writer, best-selling novelist, and futurism lecturer made him a particularly high-profile ambassador for geekdom. In today’s splintered media world, that role may never again be so thoroughly captured by a single person.

  “SNOZZBERRIES? WHO EVER HEARD

  OF A SNOZZBERRY?”

  —VERUCA SALT, CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY

  BRATDOM. The four kids adventuring alongside Charlie Bucket in Roald Dahl’s master piece were part of it, and when spoiled-rotten-girl Veruca famously uttered this sneering inquiry, it epitomized an idea that recurs regularly in the sacred texts of geek wisdom: Being a know-it-all isn’t smart; it’s a sign of closed-mindedness. What the brats in life fail to grasp is that the trails of history are blazed not by those who cling to what is, but by those who dare to seek out what might be. We could offer examples of such folks, the ones who proclaimed their righteousness most belligerently, but history’s ultimate judgment can be found in the fact that their names have largely been forgotten—whereas the names of Copernicus, Galileo, and other such curious truth seekers will be enshrined for eternity. As Veruca Salt is hoisted by her self-possessed petard, she reminds us of the simple lesson that believing your own press is dangerous. Despite her loud mouthings to the contrary, there really were snozzberries in Wonka’s world—just as there really did turn out to be planets and atoms and quarks in ours. We just have to be open to finding them.

  There are four Veruca Salts: the one in Roald Dahl’s book (1964), the one in the classic movie (1971), the one in the remade movie (2005), and the Chicago indie-rock band who borrowed her name in 1993 and are still making music today.

  “TO ERR IS HUMAN; TO REALLY SCREW UP

  REQUIRES THE ROOT PASSWORD.”

  —COMPUTER GEEK TRUISM

  POOR WIL WHEATON. He came back from a postadolescent slump as a seemingly over-the-hill child actor to have a triumphant second act as one of the most popular bloggers on the Internet. He spent years rebuilding his mojo at wilwheaton.net. And then, one day in September 2005, he decided to climb down into the code and fiddle with his database—and in an instant, his digital world was kaplooey. Borkded. Over. Fortunately for Wil, Google can be most forgiving, and although wilwheaton.typepad.com may not glide off the tongue as euphoniously as his original website did, it’s easily found. However, unlike our virtual existences online, a human life has no reset button. In real life, things can be broken irreparably and irreplaceably—a treasured heirloom, a marriage, a nation. So before yielding to the impulse to poke at the soft underbelly of things, it’s worth asking: Do you know how not to break that? Are you sure?

  The root is the all-access user account that can control all the files in a Unixlike computer operating system. Wil’s database snafu involved a different system, MySQL. Lest you think we’re fake geeks, we point out the technical difference while making the fundamentally sound analogy.

  “WHY, HELLO, CLARICE.”

  —HANNIBAL LECTER, THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS

  “IF YOU ONLY KNEW THE

  POWER OF THE DARK SIDE.”

  —DARTH VADER, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

  STEP INTO MY PARLOR, said the spider to the fly.” What did Clarice Starling feel as she set down that dank prison hallway to her first encounter with Hannibal Lecter? Probably the same thing we felt as we accompanied her: terror, revulsion, and … curiosity. That’s always the appeal of evil. It’s the temptation of the forbidden, the allure of the illicit, and even though our rational side knows that no good can come from that path, there’s another side that longs to push the boundaries to see what happens. The slippery slope is a cliché because it’s real: one moral compromise can easily lead to another, and another. And whether we’re talking about fictional characters like Lecter and Anakin Skywalker or real-life scenarios like the animal-torturing child who grows up to be an abusive parent, history is replete with the testimonials of those who’ve taken things one step too far. Yet still we persist in looking the devil in the eyes—perhaps to prove to ourselves that we can. That’s why Agent Starling keeps going back even as Lecter pulls his knot of terrifying mind games ever tighter. And let’s be honest: It’s also why we keep watching. The sequel to The Silence of the Lambs wasn’t called Clarice, after all.

  In The Silence of the Lambs, the interrogation scenes were filmed in the bowels of Pittsburgh’s Soldiers and Sailors Memorial building, just up the road from the geek mecca of Carnegie Mellon University.

  “NO, I NEVER DID IT!”

  —CLAIRE, THE BREAKFAST CLUB

  CLAIRE THOUGHT SHE WAS HOT STUFF, didn’t she? That is, until she was finally worn down and had to admit to being the inexperienced, insecure girl she’d tried to conceal. Whether we cheered at seeing Ms. Perfect taken down a peg or sympathized with the persona she felt forced to put on doesn’t matter. What does matter is that Claire, along with the other misfits of The Breakfast Club, showed us that we weren’t alone in seeing through the phony B.S. that was high school. Sure, we all had our cliques and circles and groups—and heaven forbid they should ever intersect with another—but hell, if the hot, rich, redheaded darling was in truth an insecure, awkward teen, too, where does that leave us losers who felt lucky to get to second base by sixteen? It leaves us realizing that those people in school we thought were so, so, so much cooler and hipper and more with it than we were … weren’t. Because Claire? She never did it.

  The Breakfast Club (1982) costarred Judd Nelson, whose geek credentials were further enhanced when he starred as Hot Rod in Transformers: The Movie (1986).

  “NO MATTER WHERE YOU GO …

  THERE YOU ARE.”

  —BUCKAROO BANZAI,

  THE ADVENTURES OF BUCKAROO BANZAI ACROSS THE 8TH DIMENSION

  AS NOTED IN THE INTRODUCTION, statements uttered as jokes can be taken far more seriously than ever intended. Heroic polymath Buckaroo Banzai, while taking a break from his duties as a nuclear-physicist-brain-surgeon-action-hero to play some piano-bar ballads in his alternate guise as a rock star, offered up this little gem to settle down an unruly crowd. Screenwriter Earl Mac Rauch employed it for humor, befuddling the audience both onscreen and off with what sounded like a semantically empty phrase, a sorta-Zen-shaped existential tautology that seems hilarious in its unhelpfulness. But it does mean something real—which is easier to grasp if, in the seco
nd clause, you remove the emphasis from the word there and put it on the word you, instead. The saying isn’t intended to mean “Everyplace is a place” but, rather, “You can’t run away from yourself.” You are the single common factor in every situation—so perhaps the best way to improve your surroundings is to improve yourself.

  Buckaroo Banzai (1984) may be the ultimate achievement in deadpan storytelling: Even dedicated science-fiction fans often call it an awful mess on their first viewing, only to watch it again and realize that the filmmakers were engaged in subtle comedy all along.

  “THERE ARE VOCAL QUALITIES PECULIAR

  TO MEN, AND VOCAL QUALITIES PECULIAR TO

  BEASTS; AND IT IS TERRIBLE TO HEAR THE ONE

  WHEN THE SOURCE SHOULD YIELD THE OTHER.”

  —H. P. LOVECRAFT, THE CALL OF CTHULHU

  IS THERE ANYTHING that can strike fear into our hearts more effectively than seeing, experiencing, or even just hearing someone’s humanity stripped from them? The very idea of uncontrollable fear chills us, because it underscores just how tenuous our grasp on our humanity truly is. We tell ourselves we are not beasts—we are human beings. Fear, though, is a primal thing. Civilized as we may be, fear has a way of worming under our skin and burrowing into the soft, fleshy parts of us we pretend aren’t there. Your childhood poison may have been the dark, or heights, or spiders, or clowns, but the results were always the same. Loss of control. The feeling that even when you knew you had nothing to fear, your body and mind could paralyze you. In those moments you were not human, you were beast. And more than any darkness or clown or spider, that’s what frightened you the most: the terror of losing yourself to something hidden within.

  H. P. Lovecraft had lots of friends and interacted with them mostly through written correspondence; he also wrote horror stories featuring thinly disguised versions of his own childhood imaginary characters. In short: He was the original emo geek.