Geek Wisdom

by Stephen H. Segal

  “THE DANGER MUST BE GROWING

  FOR THE ROWERS KEEP ON ROWING

  AND THEY’RE CERTAINLY NOT SHOWING

  ANY SIGNS THAT THEY ARE SLOWING!”

  —WILLY WONKA, WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY

  THE EXTERNAL FORCES that shake up our lives and plunge us headlong into trouble are often far less worrisome than the trouble we cause for ourselves. That’s because we’re often our own worst enemy, accelerating trouble or worsening a coming train wreck by making poor (and often selfish) decisions. It almost seems to defy common sense. With foreknowledge of growing danger, you’d think our instinct would be to be more cautious, more careful, more mindful of the things we do. Instead, humans do the opposite. We’re rash. We’re reckless. We’re selfish. Even knowing that bad times are ahead offers little protection against this self-sabotage. Willy Wonka knew it, teasing the children in his chocolate factory about the mounting danger in front of them, taunting them with looming troubles ahead—and ultimately confirming his suspicion that most of these kids would be sunk not by the depths of his wondrous chocolate river, but by the foolishness of their own actions. The rowers can keep on rowing and the danger may be growing, but the biggest dangers we face are often our own poor choices.

  Geek-war alert: We hereby declare that this scene in 1971’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory proves that—our fondness for Johnny Depp aside—Gene Wilder will never be supplanted as the one true Wonka.

  “BUT I WAS GOING INTO

  TOSCHE STATION TO

  PICK UP SOME POWER

  CONVERTERS!”

  —LUKE SKYWALKER, STAR WARS

  “WHY ME?”

  —GARION, PAWN OF PROPHECY

  OH, WHINY SUBURBAN TEENAGERS. Can you not just shut up and do what needs doing? If you could, you would be heroic romantic figures; just look at Westley from The Princess Bride (this page), who, like you, was just a poor boy from a rinky-dink farm right outside of town. But instead you spend half your time moping, and, we have to tell you, it’s not particularly attractive. Hey, Luke, you know why you didn’t get the girl? It’s not because she’s your sister. No, George decided to make her your sister because it was painfully obvious that the ladies were hot for Han Solo, who, for all his problems with dodging the collection agencies, at least didn’t bitch about it. Likewise your medieval-fantasy counterpart Garion from David Eddings’s Belgariad, whose sword was just as big and glowy, whose princess was just as opinionated, and who let grownups tell him what to do even while he complained every step of the way. Here’s the deal, teenagers: If you have real problems in your life, then of course yes, call for help. But if you’re just bored? If you just don’t feel like doing your chores? Quit your yapping.

  Unlike lots of 1980s epic fantasy that ripped off Tolkien, Eddings’s Belgariad read more like a fuller, richer Star Wars saga dressed up in Arthurian drag.

  “YOU KEEP USING THAT WORD.

  I DO NOT THINK IT MEANS WHAT

  YOU THINK IT MEANS.”

  —INIGO MONTOYA, THE PRINCESS BRIDE

  HERE’S WHY WE LOVE INIGO MONTOYA: there is not a cynical bone in his body. When the mercenary boss Fezzini kept screaming that it was “inconceivable!” his schemes could be defeated, the little loudmouth knew precisely what the word meant—he was simply such an irrepressibly arrogant ass that he was determined to insist the word was warranted when it really, really wasn’t. Inigo could have pointed that out. But he didn’t. He gave Fezzini the benefit of the doubt and suggested that perhaps, just possibly, the pompous Sicilian was confused about his dictionary definitions. Whether Inigo was being sincere or incredibly subtly sarcastic, he sounded sincere—thus graciously giving Fezzini a chance to step back from his idiocy and rethink things. That Fezzini didn’t take that chance meant his fate was inevitable; that Inigo offered it meant he was willing to consider all things possible. Until proven otherwise, of course.

  William Goldman, writer of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, wrote both the novel and the movie version of The Princess Bride; it may be the most perfectly cross-medium-rendered story in history and, not coincidentally, one of the most frequently quoted.

  “CAN IT BE DONE, FATHER?

  CAN A MAN CHANGE THE STARS?”

  —WILLIAM THATCHER, A KNIGHT’S TALE

  THIS QUESTION, THE CENTRAL THESIS of the romantic jousting comedy A Knight’s Tale, gives us an excellent example of (a) how easy it is to conflate the modern science of astronomy with the archaic practice of astrology and (b) how poetically satisfying it can be to do so as long as you’re not taking it too seriously. When the motif is first introduced, a grizzled old squire tells the young peasant boy William that he can no sooner become a nobleman than he can change the stars—a clear reference to the astronomical fact that the stars, a fact of nature, will be as they are and do as they do, with no relation to the actions of humans muddling along on earth. The boy’s father then tells him that if a man is brave and determined enough, he can accomplish anything he sets his mind to. William takes this advice to heart and dedicates his life to “changing his stars”; with that possessive pronoun added, the stars cease to be a metaphor for the implacable universe and become a reflection of the would-be knight’s personal destiny. William, in all his lack of education, takes for granted the astrological model of the heavens as our controlling power—and then, at the same stroke, turns it upside down, insisting that he’ll master his own fate and the heavens be damned. It’s an elegant lesson in the power of myth and metaphor in shaping a narrative—whether that story is the one you’re watching or the one you’re living.

  “WHAT’S THE POINT

  IN BEING GROWN UP

  IF YOU CAN’T BE

  CHILDISH SOMETIMES?”

  —THE DOCTOR, DOCTOR WHO

  “SECOND STAR TO THE

  RIGHT, AND STRAIGHT ON

  TILL MORNING.”

  —PETER PAN, PETER PAN

  AT SOME UNDEFINED POINT in time between 2006 and 2010, Doctor Who became the new Star Trek. Which is to say, it ceased to be that goofy British sci-fi show with the laughable special effects that even most American nerds had never really watched, and instead it became the new geek pop-culture touchstone, general knowledge of which marks someone irrefutably as one of the tribe. Why did this happen? In part, it was because there was a void—J. J. Abrams notwithstanding, Trek ran out of steam years back—and, in part it was because the Internet-fueled ease of viewing a BBC show in real time, instead of months or years later on PBS, finally made the show widely accessible in the States. But there’s something deeper at work, too: the Doctor is a hero for our times. Where latter-day Trek gave us an engineer’s vision of the future, Doctor Who and its semianarchic, semiabsurdist mad-genius time traveler in a galaxy-hopping police telephone box reflect a present era so casually insane that it often feels like the best we can do to overcome our sticky dilemmas is to take a deep breath, think hard, giggle nervously, and try something crazy from the weird part of our brains while crossing our fingers and swearing love and good wishes to the world at large. The Doctor represents not only “the triumph of intellect and romance over brute force and cynicism,” as Craig Ferguson so eloquently put it, but, more specifically, our unsullied, childlike vision of a universe where all things ought to be possible. He’s a grownup Peter Pan, always collecting new young friends and teaching them to fight the good fight on Earth rather than in Neverland. That’s a pretty great feat for a 900-year-old alien.

  “I’M CRUSHING YOUR HEAD!”

  —MR. TYZIK, THE KIDS IN THE HALL

  IT’S ALL ABOUT PERSPECTIVE. Can you crush someone’s head between your thumb and forefinger? Of course not … unless you stand ten feet away and hold your hand up to your own eye, in which case, yes, their head is clearly a mere grape to be squashed between your massive, unstoppable digits. It’s an illusion, naturally, but illusion is a powerful tool. Geek tales often consciously use this kind of Escheresque frame-of-reference shift—for instance,
when Doctor Who’s TARDIS can fit an endlessly huge spaceship interior inside the door of a four-foot-by-four-foot-by-seven-foot box, because, you see, the inside dimension is in a realm far distant from the outside dimension. Or when Obi-Wan Kenobi told Luke that his earlier assertion that “Darth Vader betrayed and murdered your father” wasn’t a lie so much as a spiritual interpretation of the truth. Getting a different perspective on things is one of the best ways there is to kick your imagination or your problem-solving brain into high gear; that’s why companies hire outside consultants or take the staff out of the office on retreats to ponder the challenges that lie before them. And it’s just as helpful in your daily life—so, today, why not walk a different route? Maybe you’ll see something you’ve been missing. And that something probably won’t crush your head—but, you know, it might just blow your mind.

  “THIS MUST BE THURSDAY. I NEVER COULD

  GET THE HANG OF THURSDAYS.”

  —ARTHUR DENT, THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY

  IN ARTHUR’S CASE, Thursday began with the demolition of his house, continued with the demolition of the entire planet Earth, and eventually culminated in him getting tossed into deep space without a spacesuit. Most people’s Thursdays can’t compare … and yet it’s not hard to relate to what Arthur was going through. Because every day of the week presents its own unique problems. Monday, obviously, is the beginning of the work week—ugh. Tuesday is almost worse, because it’s practically as far away from Friday night as Monday is, but without the satisfaction of being able to complain about it being Monday. Wednesday is the day when you realize that the glorious things you intended to accomplish this week probably aren’t all going to happen. Thursday we’ve discussed already. Friday might be the very worst, because you have a sense that people are having huge amounts of fun on Friday evening, and if you’re not, something must be wrong with you. Saturday is wonderful, unless you have chores that need to be done—and you do. And Sunday? Sunday is the Wednesday of the weekend, except that on Wednesday at least half the week is over, and on Sunday it’s all ahead of you. Let’s face it: Arthur was doomed no matter what day the Vogons blew up the Earth.

  II.

  FORM FEET AND LEGS

  (WISDOM ABOUT RELATIONSHIPS)

  “YOU—YOU’VE GOT ME? WHO’S GOT YOU?”

  —LOIS LANE, SUPERMAN: THE MOTION PICTURE

  PEOPLE GREATER THAN ourselves do what they do with no wires and no safety net. They fly free, able to accomplish things that we not only can’t do, but that we can’t even imagine doing. But this doesn’t just apply to those who perform astonishing feats of derring-do. Think of a parent—maybe your own, maybe a single mother, maybe a struggling couple. On a daily basis, they swoop up beneath their children, holding them aloft, saving them from hitting the ground too hard when they fall off one of those metaphorical skyscrapers whose edge they hadn’t seen coming. Quietly, parents are all Supermen and Superwomen holding up their Lois Lanes and Jimmy Olsens—and the same truth applies to anyone whose efforts support another. Enter Lois’s question: If all these people have got her covered, who’s covering them? When it comes to the unsung heroes of the world, the answer all too often is, “Nobody.” In the real world, they don’t have a Superman of their own. That they persevere nonetheless makes them superheroes by any measure.

  Superman: The Motion Picture (1978) marked the introduction into the Superman mystique of such concepts as the cold and sterile planet Krypton (in the comics it had been a colorful civilization) and businessman Lex Luthor (in the comics he was a scientist).

  “FACE IT, TIGER, YOU JUST HIT

  THE JACKPOT!”

  —MARY JANE WATSON, THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN

  ONE OF THE MOST dramatic entrances in comic-book history was more than the introduction of a vivacious, sexy redhead—though it certainly was that!—it was also a lesson in the nature of expectations. For months Peter Parker’s elderly aunt had been nattering on about her friend’s niece, Mary Jane Watson, but Peter just rolled his eyes and brushed off the old bird’s ham-fisted attempt at matchmaking with nary a second thought. He never expected that Mary Jane would be so WOW. That’s the thing about life: We find gems in the most unexpected places. Always down on his luck, confused and confounded by the opposite sex, and burdened with personal problems that never seemed to go away, a guy like Peter Parker doesn’t expect much good to come his way. Do any of us? Experience teaches us young the danger of being eternal optimists. Yet there she was. The famous comic-book panel of Mary Jane standing in the doorway, a cat-who-ate-the-canary grin on her face while Peter reels, stunned at seeing such a knockout, has come to define having your pessimistic expectations shattered. The jolt of something so happily vibrant is a jackpot, indeed.

  One of the bitterest comic-book flamewars of the decade was prompted when Marvel Comics decided to retroactively undo Peter and Mary Jane’s two-decade-long marriage via a literal deal with the devil to save Aunt May’s life.

  “I ASK FOR SO LITTLE.

  JUST FEAR ME,

  LOVE ME, DO AS I SAY

  AND I WILL BE

  YOUR SLAVE.”

  —JARETH THE GOBLIN KING, LABYRINTH

  “YOU HAVE NO POWER

  OVER ME.”

  —SARAH, LABYRINTH

  GIRLHOOD IN GEEKDOM HAS NEVER BEEN EASY. Apart from the usual difficulties of growing up geeky—fitting in, finding oneself, learning that it’s okay to be smart and that “eccentric” is in the eye of the beholder—geek girls who are so inclined also have to deal with geek guys. Who are, shall we say, works in progress at that age. Which may be why David Bowie’s androgynous, seductive, and artful Goblin King won the hearts and fantasies of so many geek girls. He was a bad boy … and yet, a pretty good babysitter. He had a castle inspired by Escher and suggestively talented fingers. And, yeah, he was old enough to be Sarah’s grandfather and kind of creepy to boot—but as teen girl fantasy objects go, it could’ve been worse. Perhaps most important of all, Sarah found that he had no power over her, other than what she gave him. It’s fascinating to consider just how few fantasy heroines have been able to assert themselves and remain single in the face of a romance. Bucking the trend of the typical Hollywood epic, Labyrinth showed a young woman learning to take responsibility for her actions, persevere in an unfair world, and own her sexual identity. She wasn’t just a babe—she was the babe with the power.

  David Bowie has been an alien (The Man Who Fell to Earth, 1976), a Goblin King (Labyrinth, 1986), and a human superscientist (The Prestige, 2006). His fans were lobbying hard for him to play Elrond in The Lord of the Rings, too.

  “ELEMENTARY, MY DEAR WATSON!”

  —SHERLOCK HOLMES, REPEATEDLY

  NO OTHER QUOTE so quickly puts poor Watson in the hot seat, does it? And it’s really not fair. The general public perception of Watson as a bumbling oaf couldn’t be further from the character who narrates Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, who’s both a clever doctor in his own right and more socially perceptive than the genius with whom he keeps company. But sidekick syndrome can be a big damper on any circle of friends. All it takes is one socially unaware friend who’s better-versed in something to put the group rudely in their place. That friend has likely explained to you the detailed virtues of, say, shiraz, or Jonathan Demme’s film career, or how your iPod really works—snidely and at great length, thus killing forever any interest you might have had in it. It can be a lot to take, but Watsons of the world can take heart: Popular culture is beginning to realize that, for all his genius, Sherlock Holmes still didn’t know that the earth revolved around the sun, and that Watson saved his pal’s bacon more than once. And if you recognize yourself more in Sherlock than in Watson, it might be time for a round of apologies to your social circle.

  Testifying once again to the power of mass media, the well-known phrase quoted above is a formulation of the 1929 movie The Return of Sherlock Holmes, not of Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories.

  “YES. YES, I DID IT.
I KILLED YVETTE. I HATED

  HER, SO … MUCH … IT–IT–THE

  F–IT–FLAME–FLAMES. FLAMES, ON

  THE SIDE OF MY FACE.”

  —MRS. WHITE, CLUE

  THIS IS HOW LIFE WORKS: We all want to be the butler, but really we’re all Mrs. White. Betrayed by the people we trust, sabotaged by those we don’t expect, patronized by houseguests, and always on the verge of boiling over—and, finally, feeling as though our feelings are palpable. Of course, few of us ever give in to our darker sides quite as murderously as Mrs. White did; that doesn’t mean it’s not tempting to tell people exactly what you think of them. That urge for brutal honesty can threaten to overcome all the hard-won social graces we acquire over the years. The good news is, once in a while, that scorched-earth approach can be just what we need to separate ourselves from a bad situation. We recommend, however, that you keep your revenge limited to a few scathing e-mails. These days, not a lot of people buy the “Why don’t you come with me to this remote British manor where we can be alone?” approach.

  There is hardly a line of dialogue in the entire movie Clue (1985) that has not become a cult-classic quote. Kudos to filmmaker Jonathan Lynn.

  “HEYYY YOU GUUUUYYS!”

  —SLOTH, THE GOONIES, CHANNELING THE ELECTRIC COMPANY

  THE GOONIES isn’t the greatest search-for-treasure adventure movie ever made (that’s Raiders of the Lost Ark), nor is it the greatest group-of-friends-has-their-final-adventure-together movie (that’s Stand by Me), but it might be the greatest we’re-misfits-and-we-belong-together movie. It all comes down to Sloth. He’s big, ugly, and maybe a little slow. But he’s also loving, and in need of love, and someone who has seen far too much abuse at the hands of others. So when Sloth bellows his proud greeting and jumps into the fray with his newfound friends, it’s not just an awesome movie moment, it’s a celebration of acceptance for someone who has never before been accepted. Because when you’re an outcast crew like the Goonies, you just can’t pull the same dirty tricks of shunning and snubbing that other cliques have pulled on you—it would be like stabbing yourself in the heart.