Geek Wisdom
Page 6
Catwoman has been played by a different actor every year she’s been adapted into film and television. Michelle Pfeifer was as different from Eartha Kitt as Halle Berry was from Julie Newmar. Still, the character endures.
“THANK YOU, MARIO! BUT OUR PRINCESS
IS IN ANOTHER CASTLE!”
—SUPER MARIO BROS.
IF PINT-SIZE PLUMBER Mario is anything, he’s persistent. Time and again he trudges through strange lands peopled with creatures out to get him, and time and again he appears to have accomplished his goal only to have the rug pulled out from under him. Mario might as well be a blue collar guy trying to get through the workweek. For him the end of the week isn’t the end, it’s just a brief pause before setting off for the next castle, chasing a princess he’ll never rescue because the game is designed to keep her perpetually out of reach. Yet Mario doesn’t seem to mind. He doesn’t even appear to notice. Neither do the Marios of the real world. They chase their princesses, navigating pipes and pitfalls and creatures only to find she’s always in the next castle. The cycle is unbreakable. And so we’ve got to ask, is Mario depressingly oblivious to his circumstances, or is he the admirable embodiment of working-class perseverance? And is there even a difference?
Mario was first introduced as the hero of Donkey Kong in 1981, at which time he was called “Jumpman.” Because, you know, he jumped. He only got his name the following year in Donkey Kong Junior, the only game in which he’s been depicted as the villain.
“LISTEN TO THEM. CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT.
WHAT MUSIC THEY MAKE.”
—DRACULA (1931)
DRACULA’S WISTFUL INTERJECTION has long been the rallying cry of goths worldwide; there’s something about the reverential way Dracula mentioned the wolves outside his door that speaks to the heart of every geek who’s ever been well acquainted with the night. Among geeks, goths are often a breed unto themselves, situated between horror fans and theater nerds. Goths are aesthetically oriented and have a seemingly endless appetite for dark-spun fairy tales and other subtle horrors. They also have the honor of being some of the most misunderstood of all geek-kind by those who don’t seem to grasp the difference between a roleplaying goth and an actual vampire. (It takes all kinds, we guess.) However, most goths are able to shake it off and revel in one of geekdom’s earnest and most active communities, where they can mingle with others who sincerely share their passions. Bonus: The goth music scene is pretty killer, so even the casual-geek passerby can find out just what music they do make.
A lot of kids in today’s steampunk scene used to identify with the goth aesthetic—and are pleasantly surprised to discover that normal adults seem intrigued, rather than alarmed, by this new thing. Well, yeah. People think of goths as weirdoes who take vampires too seriously, and therefore they can’t help being worried on some level that a crazy goth might, you know, want to make them bleed. Whereas steampunks are—what? Weirdoes who take pocket watches too seriously? What are they gonna do, vehemently tell you what time it is?
“THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE.”
—FOX MULDER, THE X-FILES
PROFESSIONAL INVESTIGATORS: detectives, reporters, intelligence agents. They’re incredibly important to us, both in reality and in our belief structures, because we know we’ve gotta be able to rely on someone to uncover the nasty little secrets the world is keeping from us. Specific investigative types have come in and out of vogue over the years; for example, it’s not au courant to trust reporters these days, because large numbers of shitty ones on television have dragged down the standard by which we measure them all. But there will always be hidden truths, and there will always be people who are determined to shine a light on them. The trick is figuring out: Which of these seekers after revelation are really interested in helping you understand what matters to you? Because we’ve all got our agendas, and there’s no definitive guide to them. That fact—not men-in-black conspiracies—is what makes the truth so darn hard to sort out.
Mulder was great, but our favorite TV journalist remains Jack McGee from The Incredible Hulk. In the beginning, he was just after a scoop that would make a great story; by the end of his pursuit, he was deeply invested in uncovering the truth, no matter how far out there.
“I’M NOT ANTI-SOCIAL,
I’M JUST NOT USER-FRIENDLY.”
—T-SHIRT
LOOK, SOME PEOPLE JUST SUCK. Most geeks grow up enough on the fringes to be able to identify a problem crowd when they see one. Those same geeks have gotten pretty good at entertaining themselves. The combination can often result in a group of people with common life experiences enjoying themselves together—and a geek sitting nearby, frowning at their dance moves and tweeting furiously. Dear non-geeks: If you see any geeks wearing this shirt in public, they have come from a long day at the IT mines trying to explain to people how to double-click on something. Leave them be. And to be fair: Dear geeks, We understand where you’re coming from, but every once in a while, if you look closely, there will be someone in the crowd with whom you have something awesome in common. (Hint: +1 for anyone not dancing the Macarena.) Don’t be any more alienated than you really need to be.
Only in the tech world can you call someone a “user” and not mean it as a putdown.
“I LOVED IT. IT WAS MUCH BETTER
THAN CATS. I’M GOING TO SEE IT
AGAIN AND AGAIN.”
—HYPNOTIZED THEATERGOERS, SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE
FOR THOSE OF US whose interests lie outside the mainstream—and if you’re reading this book, yours almost certainly do—most of the people who consume a steady diet of American mass-media culture might as well be hypnotized, droning on and on about how much they like the latest bit of predictable blandness that passes for entertainment in the twenty-first century. Even as we yearn for something better, something smarter, something that engages muscles in our brains and souls we haven’t flexed before, we see our neighbors doing little more than repeating what they’ve heard others saying. The Truly Real Superstar Babysitters of Orange County? They loved it. It was much better than whatever was cool last month. They’re going to see it again and again. And they really will, because mass culture is built to frown upon anything that isn’t conformity. Meanwhile, one thing that has always separated the geek from the pack is that the geek scoffs at conformity. Rest assured, we didn’t love it. We’re not going to see it again and again. And we like it that way.
Though the quote endures, not many people remember that the “it” referred to was a performance by the hypnotist known as “The Amazing Alexander,” portrayed by Jon Lovitz (1986). We think that counts as irony.
“I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?”
—INTERNET MEME
TAKE TWO NEWS STORIES. One is a horrible crime, maybe a double murder. Throw in some arson for good measure. The other involves a YouTube video of an adorable kitten being slapped by a thoughtless teenager. Two dead people and a burned-down house later, there will be ten, twenty, a hundred times more outrage about the slapped kitten. The fact is, we recognize ourselves for the really smart yet often cruel apes we are—and are drawn to what we see as innocence in our cats and dogs. One might call that self-loathing, but it’s more than that. It’s a manifestation of our sense of justice. Humans are victims? Sad, but then, people suck. Kittens are victims? Utterly outrageous! Grab the pitchforks! So when a cheeseburger-loving cat spawned an Internet explosion of grammar-impaired cat pictures, geek culture was doing more than having a laugh. It was putting its protective arms around the very embodiment of the innocence we as a species lack.
While icanhascheezburger.com has become a time-tested favorite, let’s not forget that it all started in 2007 at somethingawful.com.
“LIKE AND EQUAL ARE NOT THE
SAME THING AT ALL.”
—MEG MURRY, A WRINKLE IN TIME
ON THE DISTANT PLANET CAMAZOTZ, humanlike aliens are ruled by an authoritarian dictator in the form of a giant, pulsating brain that mentally directs all their actions. Visitin
g Earth girl Meg Murry discovers this horrific state of affairs when she sees all the kids who live on a Camazotzian suburban block step out of their homes simultaneously and start bouncing their balls in unison—a form of “play” that looks more like the children are mere flesh-colored pistons pumping away in a big machine. In this one freaky image, Madeleine L’Engle made crystal clear the difference between fascism and progressive democracy—a difference that the argumentative rhetoric of today’s political pundits, sadly, has sometimes sought to obfuscate. The “all men are created equal” that is the basis of American civil rights doesn’t mean we think our lives should all follow the same paths. What it means is that no one else can claim a right to take away our shoes and hobble us along the way.
A Swiftly Tilting Planet, the second sequel to A Wrinkle in Time, prefigured the basic premise of the sci-fi television classic Quantum Leap—the hero entering the body of a person in the past to set right a glitch in destiny—by a full decade.
“A CONCLUSION IS THE PLACE WHERE
YOU GOT TIRED OF THINKING.”
—STEVEN WRIGHT
BEING A GEEK can be mentally exhausting; we totally get it. However, the collective short attention span we’ve inherited from the Internet age means that it’s all too easy to answer a pressing question by glancing at Wikipedia and calling it a day. Occasionally that’s all you need; it doesn’t take too many sources to corroborate the orbital period of Venus, for example. On the other hand, it seems vaguely disheartening that, with access to more information than ever before, so many Internet fights boil down to two people with violently opposing viewpoints attacking each other based on incorrect and incomplete data sets. It’s our responsibility as geeks to make sure we never stop learning, that we take little for granted, and that we look at every statement not as a conclusion, but as an invitation to more research.
For all his geek cred, standup comedian Steven Wright has only one clear-cut geek-themed performance to his credit: the 2005 comic-book movie Son of the Mask.
“WE’RE ALL MAD HERE.”
—ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND
FEW LITERARY HEROES have the universal, all-ages appeal of Lewis Carroll’s rabbit-hole-investigating young miss. In her day, she’s been held up as a model of whimsical childhood, as a surrealist pioneer, as an extended metaphor for the society of her contemporaries. (There really is something about a dodo race that’s so very open to interpretation.) However, throughout the myriad adaptations of this iconic tale, its core has remained intact: a world that makes no sense, and a girl who’s stuck in it with no way out. It’s a telling arc, quite different from many of the other coming-of-age stories that pit their young protagonist against an evil that can be defeated. Alice is more world-weary than that, and it’s that perspective—the misunderstood, often-frustrated outsider—that makes her such a hero in the lit-geek circle. Because let’s face it: Sometimes the only way to face the world is to go a little mad.
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (note the proper title) was published in 1865; the sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, in 1871.
“THERE’S JUST SOMETHING ABOUT AN
ANATOMICALLY CORRECT RUBBER SUIT
THAT PUTS FIRE IN A GIRL’S LIPS.”
—POISON IVY, BATMAN AND ROBIN
THERE ARE TWO WAYS to look at Batman. For the past decade or so, pop culture has approached him as the down-and-dirty antihero whose Gotham City is a gritty chaos. This interpretation was a pretty direct backlash against the 1997 movie Batman and Robin, which had more color than a box of Crayola and all the dramatic tension of a blooper reel. However, Batman’s always been as much high camp as high -noir, even when the line between the self-referential and the markedly unaware is thin. Believe it or not, this offers a valuable lesson: Multiple readings of a text can be equally valid—a fact that can be easy to forget in an era when Internet comment sections often read like the transcript of the weekly debate of the Extremists’ Society.* Some interpretations might be less successful, which this movie outing certainly was, but just disliking an interpretation doesn’t invalidate it. Worth remembering, the next time you encounter someone who’s wrong on the Internet. (There’s also a second lesson to be found in this quote: Don’t wear an anatomically correct rubber suit unless you want to put fire in a girl’s lips. More specific, but equally handy.)
* This is a joke. There is no such thing as the Extremists’ Society. And if you disagree, you are a Nazi who should die in a fire.
“THERE’S NO CRYING IN BASEBALL!”
—JIMMY DOUGAN, A LEAGUE OF THEIR OWN
SOME GENERALIZATIONS are just more immortal than others. When reluctant Girls’ League coach Jimmy Dougan berates weeping right-fielder Evelyn with this gem, it’s both hilarious and patently untrue—I mean, sports were basically invented so men can fight one another and then cry, right? In context, the tirade says more about Dougan’s still-lingering misogyny than anything else. However, it’s been neatly co-opted by geeks, and as such has become a go-to response for anyone that’s taking something too much to heart. It’s equally untrue every time (if something’s worth caring about, someone has cried over it), but there’s a je ne sais quoi about the vast and epic sweep of the generalization involved that’s reclaimed this phrase to be almost encouraging—the sort of suck-it-up advice one gives to a fellow soldier in the trenches. So geeks, keep on caring enough to cry, even when people tell you there’s no crying in … well, anything.
Things in which there’ definitely is crying include comic books, Star Trek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and, of course, I Love Lucy.
“I WILL NOT BE PUSHED, FILED, STAMPED,
INDEXED, BRIEFED, DEBRIEFED,
OR NUMBERED. MY LIFE IS MY OWN.”
—NUMBER SIX, THE PRISONER
WHEN PATRICK MCGOOHAN’S Number Six angrily defies his captors with this litany in the seminal British secret-agent series’ opening installment, he crystallizes everything we need to know about the battle of ideas, ideology, and identity that spans the show’s all-too brief run. The premise, featuring the dogged, dogmatic Six bedeviled at every turn in his attempts to escape from mysterious captors and reclaim his identity, hinges on the idea that we’re all boxed in by a system—whatever that system is—that controls us at every step, and any notions of breaking free from that box are themselves just one more level of control. This makes for one big puzzle of positively Kafka-esque proportions. Although The Prisoner goes to great lengths to hold any definitive answers at arm’s length, the mere fact that McGoohan’s character clings so desperately to his individualism, yet is never more than a number to us, is ample testament to the ultimate futility of his struggle.
The free-will-versus-determinism debate embodied by Number Six in The Prisoner (1967) also lies at the heart of the character of the Cylon Number Six in Battlestar Galactica (2005). Coincidence? We think not.
“SO IT GOES.”
—KURT VONNEGUT, SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE
STRANGE AS IT SOUNDS, the most disturbing and tragic part of Kurt Vonnegut’s meditation on war, inhumanity, and suffering isn’t the violence and horror he shows us, it’s the impassionate distance at which the narrator puts himself from it all. Men are born. They suffer. They slaughter one another before dying themselves, often horribly, often at the hands of another human being. So it goes. If we can embrace such coldness, are we then empty shells or are we merely protecting our psyche from deep emotional damage? Cynical as Vonnegut was, it’s nice to think he wanted us to take away the latter rather than the former. We can neither take part in the horror of man’s violence nor give in to it, but we must acknowledge it. In some way we must come to grips with what we’re capable of doing to one another. We are a beautiful, terrible, sleepless species. And sometimes we’re still animals. So it goes.
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) is often grouped with several other geek novels from the 1950s and ’60s: Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22. Lesson: Brainy s
atire and titles with numbers work well together.
“SPECIALIZATION IS
FOR INSECTS.”
—ROBERT HEINLEIN, TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE
THINK ABOUT your favorite handheld device. Dollars to donuts says it doesn’t just serve as a phone, or a camera, or an automatic coffee stirrer. It probably does a whole bunch of these things. You love it for that very reason. After all, if electronics are capable of doing so many incredible things, why shouldn’t one device be able to handle them all? Robert Heinlein thought the same should apply to human beings—and he was right. Heinlein was a boot-strappy Libertarian amid liberal peers decades before it became trendy, and he took his fair share of criticism for those stringent beliefs. But one thing he can’t be accused of is underestimating the human ability to achieve. Excel at many things, he told us. Be capable. Be adept. Be smart and strong and focused. That is our mandate as human beings, and Heinlein’s stories are littered with people who show us how. We can say what we will about his views on, say, war, but few can argue against aspiring to be a well-rounded, multitalented person. So go forth and learn how to fix a bicycle, and how to understand ancient history, and how to vacuum corners, and how to calculate a number sequence. You’ll be happier.
The rest of the quote from Time Enough for Love (1973) is long but worth memorizing: “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.”