The Electric Company (1971), which Sloth was quoting, may have been one of the most eclectic geek TV shows ever, featuring a PBS version of Spider-Man and launching the career of Morgan Freeman.
“THIS JOB WOULD BE GREAT IF IT WASN’T
FOR THE F—ING CUSTOMERS.”
—RANDAL GRAVES, CLERKS
AS NERDS AND GEEKS, we are often teased in childhood for being so damned smart. As a defense mechanism to help us cope with the accusation that we’re not like other people, we come to embrace the idea that most everyone else is dumber than we are. And we grow up sneering at our peers who seem to have an easy time fitting into society, which we declare is because they’re mundane—even as we secretly resent them for how comfortably they all seem to get along with one another. Here’s the thing: None of it is true. Those non-nerds? Most of them feel like outsiders, too; they’re all just faking it as best they can and trying not to let their insecurities show. So chill out, Randal. The customers in your store only seem so damn stupid because you’ve spent so long nurturing your own identity as a smartypants. Take a moment to remember the last four stupid things you did, and then be nice to the lady who doesn’t understand what it says on the box.
Kevin Smith, writer/director of Clerks, may have been the first writer to formally canonize science fiction as the scripture of pop culture, referring to Star Wars as the “Holy Trilogy” in Chasing Amy (1997).
“WONDER TWIN POWERS, ACTIVATE!”
—ZAN AND JAYNA, THE SUPERFRIENDS
THE PRINCIPAL MESSAGE of the superpowered siblings in this classic cartoon was obvious: We’re better when we work together. However, the underlying subtext of the Wonder Twins was more telling: Sometimes, one of you is going to have the ability to turn into every awesome animal ever, and one of you is mostly going to turn into a pail of water and spill all over the place. It’s a hard lesson. We all want to think that things even out in the end, and that if someone is more talented in one arena, we’ll outdo them in another. Often, that’s the case. But sometimes it’s not, and it’s then that you have to do the work to realize that friendship—or mystical twin-ship, whatever—builds on the work you do together, rather than on one of you standing out. Besides, sometimes it’s a bucket full of water that saves the day. And really the best part of being a Wonder Twin isn’t even having the powers. It’s sharing a secret with your closest friend.
The Superfriends was TV’s original adaptation of DC Comics’ Justice League of America. But unlike past radio/TV creations, like Jimmy Olsen and Kryptonite, that made their way to the comics page, the Wonder Twins have never become a major part of DC’s print mythos.
“FEAR LEADS TO ANGER; ANGER LEADS TO
HATE; HATE LEADS TO SUFFERING.”
—YODA, THE PHANTOM MENACE
YODA was paraphrasing the first great African American geek, George Washington Carver, who said a century ago: “Fear of something is at the root of hate for others, and hate within will eventually destroy the hater.” Carver, a scientist plying his trade in a time when the intellectual inferiority of black people was simply assumed, knew something about suffering. Born into slavery, kidnapped as an infant, threatened repeatedly with lynching throughout his life, and rejected from school after school due to his race, Carver eventually went on to become one of the best-known American researchers in the biological and agricultural sciences. Widely rumored to be gay, Carver spent his life confronting and overcoming the fears of others, earning an iconic place in geek history. Yoda might be the fictional guru we like to quote, but Carver is the real one whose life reverberates through our culture.
Look, we all know that The Phantom Menace (1999) is not a great movie. But the trailer was a great trailer, and this quote was in the trailer. Can’t we just pretend that the trailer had a different movie attached to it?
“FORM FEET AND LEGS! FORM ARMS AND
BODY! AND I’LL FORM THE HEAD!”
—KEITH, VOLTRON
THE WORD organization, at its root, means “to make people function like organs.” When you’re a member of an organization, you and your fellows all fit into a larger system like parts of a body, your individual efforts combining to serve a single specific purpose. Voltron, and similar Japanese sci-fi shows such as Super Sentai (aka Power Rangers), took this concept literally, depicting the adventures of five space-warrior squadron-mates. Each one drove a color-coded combat vehicle that could reconfigure itself into a robotic arm, leg, torso, or head, and all five could then combine into one giant, ass-kicking gestalt of a robot. It’s a premise that makes sense coming from a nation famous for its cultural focus on collaboration rather than individualism. The United States, on the other hand, tends to mythologize solo accomplishment, in the arts as well as in business and politics. Heck, even our sports teams win fame mostly for their standout superstars. A lot of American kids don’t even play sports—and for them Voltron was a powerfully concretized metaphor for the incredible power of teamwork.
Obscure geek trivia: acclaimed artificial-organ engineer James Antaki, Ph.D., is also the inventor of an electric harmonica—an entirely different kind of “artificial organ.”
“SOMETIMES, I DOUBT YOUR COMMITMENT
TO SPARKLE MOTION!”
—KITTY, DONNIE DARKO
IT SAYS SOMETHING about the power of geek that in a movie about a pessimistic teenage boy who time-travels through parallel universes beside a monstrous seven-foot rabbit, the film’s most immortal line is about his little sister’s dance troupe. The same geeks’ dedication brought this film from the verge of direct-to-DVD obscurity to cult classic; they should be duly proud. Of course, part of this quote’s perfection is its perfect storm of relevance to the postmodern era: dead-on suburban satire, overdramatic in-character sincerity, and the comic payoff by the troupe itself. However, the other aspect of Sparkle Motion’s enduring popularity is its meme-friendly resilience out of context. Kitty’s cry of anguish has been neatly appropriated by geeks to become facetious Internet shorthand for the accusation that someone isn’t invested enough in an admittedly frivolous pursuit; it’s a beautiful example of how postmodern geekdom can be self-aware enough not to take everything seriously.
Bonus: Sparkle Motion is also the gift that keeps on giving for anyone who wants to take shots at the Twilight franchise’s glitter-heavy bloodsuckers.
“PINKY, ARE YOU PONDERING
WHAT I’M PONDERING?”
—THE BRAIN, PINKY AND THE BRAIN
MOST GEEKS have non-geek friends. Inevitably, they sometimes don’t know what the heck we’re talking about, so most of us have learned how to break down our thought processes for their sakes—to flawlessly translate even the geekiest of concepts into introductory language. This is a variation on the “double consciousness” concept first described by W. E. B. Du Bois (who wrote science fiction as well as activist commentary) in reference to African Americans’ need to move between two worlds. In many ways, it’s a requirement of any minority population that wants to be accepted by the majority—or at least to be left in peace. But sometimes we get tired of simul-translating our own conversations. Sometimes we just want to relax and be ourselves, even around our non-geeky friends, and sometimes, justified or not, we feel as though we’re the ones who always have to do the interpreting. That’s why so many of us loved it when the Brain didn’t bother, blurting out theories and plans so byzantine no one could possibly follow them—and we loved even more that Pinky didn’t demand an explanation. It’s nice to have a friend who’ll meet you halfway.
The Brain was voiced by Canadian actor Maurice LaMarche, who’s also Futurama’s Kif Kroker and The Real Ghostbusters’ Egon Spengler. Fans are divided on the question of whether he or Vincent D’Onofrio does a better Orson Welles impression.
“MY NAME IS SAYID JARRAH,
AND I AM A TORTURER.”
—SAYID JARRAH, LOST, “ONE OF THE THEM”
IN A SHOW that survived and thrived for six labyrinthine seasons by asking viewers to q
uestion long-cemented notions of “us” and “them,” no character was a better exemplar of this than Sayid Jarrah. The Iraqi. The Muslim. The self-proclaimed “torturer.” Although a Manichean media culture of prefigured heroes and villains could easily have conditioned us to hate and fear such a figure, over the course of the show’s run we also came to know Sayid the technician, Sayid the soldier, Sayid the lover, and even Sayid the poet. All added facets to the character, and all illuminated for us the fluid nature of identity. In the end, “us” and “them” are arbitrary labels, but it was through the specificities, the complexities of Sayid’s character that he achieved a kind of universality, painting a portrait of an individual driven by his own demons trying to do right by himself and others—in other words, someone just like “us.”
The editors would like to take this space to ask anyone who has not yet watched Lost to do so … but only the first couple seasons. Don’t be a sadist like we were and watch to the bitter end. You’ll regret it. Really.
“I’M SORRY, DAVE, I’M AFRAID
I CAN’T DO THAT.”
—HAL 9000, 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY
THE most famous computer malfunction in cinematic history saw HAL, the artificial intelligence running the fictional American spacecraft Discovery, go crazy and murder most of the astronauts on board before they reached Jupiter. The sequel revealed that HAL’s psychotic break was caused by an irreconcilable conflict between contradictory instructions: “his” basic purpose of accurately analyzing information for the crew, and his top-secret government directive to conceal Discovery’s true mission from them. You have to feel sorry for HAL—he was experiencing the same ominous dread that infects any of us when someone puts us in the uncomfortable situation of having to lie on their behalf. The classmate who wants to use you as an alibi to cover her misbehaving ways; the spouse who invents a fictional emergency to get out of visiting the in-laws; the friend who doesn’t want you to tell his wife he’s leaving her, never mind that she’s your friend, too. What do you do when your loyalty is at odds with your sense of what’s right? HAL’s story doesn’t offer an answer, but it does illuminate what a good idea it is to avoid such situations in the first place.
In the book version of 2001, Discovery’s mission is to reach Saturn by way of Jupiter; in the film, the ship is simply headed to Jupiter. Author Arthur C. Clarke yielded to the film’s popularity for the sequel novel 2010 and just went with Jupiter.
“I STAYED UP ALL NIGHT PLAYING POKER
WITH TAROT CARDS. I GOT A FULL HOUSE
AND FOUR PEOPLE DIED.”
—STEVEN WRIGHT
STANDUP COMEDIANS don’t just stand on a stage a few nights a week; they stand apart from humanity every day. Though we think of professional funnymen as a breed all their own, at heart they’re pretty much like all the other people who become writers, whether novelists or news reporters. They are outside observers, watching and taking notes on all this fuss the rest of us engage in, all while preparing to turn around and show us something so deeply true about ourselves that we’ just have to react. Steven Wright is the ultimate exemplar of this kind of emotional detachment; his voice during performance as he mumbles his way through one pithy ten-second joke-concept at a time is distant, muted—almost robotic. But when he delivers this one, you can hear surprise register as he hits the punch line, as if with a simple rising inflection he wants to convey: Hey, this isn’t all a theoretical exercise, after all; I really am connected to the rest of the world! In an era when Internet socializing allows us to reduce our mental picture of our fellow human beings to nothing more than a name and a postage-stamp-size picture on a screen, it’s a lesson well worth remembering.
Tarot cards formed the mythic centerpiece of comic auteur Alan Moore’s 1999 science-fantasy series Promethea, about a superheroine conjured from the realm of pure narrative imagination.
“SUGAR. SPICE.
AND EVERYTHING NICE.
THESE WERE THE
INGREDIENTS CHOSEN
TO CREATE THE PERFECT
LITTLE GIRLS.
BUT PROFESSOR UTONIUM
ACCIDENTALLY ADDED
AN EXTRA INGREDIENT
TO THE CONCOCTION …
CHEMICAL X.”
—OPENING NARRATION, THE POWERPUFF GIRLS
GEEK WOMEN—real geek women, that is, not the booth babes or big-eyed anime schoolgirls who dominate the imaginations of heterosexual geek men—are built of strange stuff. Consider what it takes to resist the pervasive sexism of American society, which pressures all women to value themselves on appearance alone. Geek women, however, demand to be recognized for their brains. They want to be admired for their l33t skills in gaming, their clever code constructions, their solid engineering designs. In other words, they’re not all that different from geek guys … which makes things awkward when they turn on a video game or open a comic book to find female characters with size 44F breasts and waists so tiny there can’t possibly be functioning organs in there. That’s why the Powerpuff Girls are such a viciously ironic thrill. The Girls don’t look human; they don’t have the same proportions as the other characters in the cartoon, or even fingers and toes. It’s basically a juvenile twist on the way adult women are generally depicted for men’s viewing pleasure—and yet, the Girls kicked ass. They whomped jerks and monsters. They looked out for one another. And for the few men in their lives who saw them as individuals and valued them for their personhood, they made the world a better place.
The Powerpuff Girls ran for six years (1998–2004)—longer than the age of the titular characters.
“UNTIL A MAN IS TWENTY-FIVE, HE STILL
THINKS, EVERY SO OFTEN, THAT UNDER THE
RIGHT CIRCUMSTANCES HE COULD BE THE
BADDEST MOTHERF–ER IN THE WORLD.”
—NEAL STEPHENSON, SNOW CRASH
THE MALE GEEK has largely made it a point of pride to distance himself from the stereotypical tough guys of the world. But the male geek is deluding himself. Fact is, we’re not all that far removed from each other, geeks and jocks. Stephenson nails why: The notion that, if circumstances were right, we could be “The Man” is the impulse that fuels male fantasies, from Mickey Mantle to Batman, from Muhammad Ali to Casanova. Nerd or not, men dream of inspiring awe in those around them—and by “awe” we mean “adoration,” and by “those around them” we mean “mostly women.” What separates male peer groups is the form these dreams of prowess take. The athlete dreams of attainable feats of athleticism; the geek, lacking such physical agency, just goes ahead and fantasizes much bigger. Win the playoffs? Pffffft. We’re here to save the universe! Even if that’s just our own self-doubt pushing us to overcompensate in the realm of imagination, one thing is clear: There are times when, no matter how outlandish it seems, we’re determined to believe that maybe, just maybe, we’ truly are capable of becoming the badass we dream of.
Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle has become known as his magnum opus, but Snow Crash (1992) made his name as one of the icons of cyberpunk.
“I HAVE BEEN, AND ALWAYS SHALL BE,
YOUR FRIEND.”
—SPOCK, STAR TREK II: THE WRATH OF KHAN
SPOCK’S DYING WORDS, uttered upon sacrificing his own life to save the lives of his friends Kirk and McCoy and all their crewmates, are a favorite quote used to express geek camaraderie. But here’s a question that’s rarely asked: What made these guys such great friends, anyway? It wasn’t just the fact of their shared experiences on the Enterprise; after all, you probably have coworkers you wouldn’t give your life for. No, what brought Star Trek’s trinity together was that, though all three were men of great passion and great intellectual achievement, they channeled those impulses differently. Scientist Spock carried the flag for the rational approach to life; “just a country doctor” McCoy championed the empathic approach; and Kirk their captain mediated the two, navigating the right blend of emotion and critical thinking to make their way through any situation. We should all have friends who are simil
ar enough to relate, but different enough to challenge us—who respect our thoughts and opinions even while they’re telling us how wrong we are.
Daily Show correspondent and “PC Guy” John Hodgman quoted this line to President Obama while grilling him on his geek knowledge at the 2009 Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner.
“DO NOT MEDDLE IN THE AFFAIRS OF
WIZARDS, FOR THEY ARE SUBTLE AND
QUICK TO ANGER.”
—GILDOR, THE LORD OF THE RINGS
ON THE SURFACE, this warning to the hobbits of The Lord of the Rings appears to be another manifestation of Tolkien’s views on social and class structure (most notably on display in Sam’s subservience to Frodo). Gildor implies that the wise and great cannot be understood by the merely ordinary, who would do best not to interfere with their betters. Yet look closer: By the end of the story, Gildor and the elves have departed Middle Earth, and the very affairs the hobbits were warned not to meddle in would have gone badly were it not for their meddling. The warning, then, is not to avoid crossing paths with your betters—in fact, it’s not about one’s “betters” at all. Gildor may have meant it that way, but Tolkien clearly didn’t. Rather, the point is that to get involved with those who carry the weight of responsibility on their shoulders is to take on a measure of that responsibility ourselves. Meddle in the affairs of wizards at your own peril, lest you find yourself carrying a similar burden.
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