Like a Geek God #6: These Childish Things

15 Sunday Sep 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Disney, Like a Geek God

Tags

Beauty and the Beast, Like a Geek God, Mark Pursell, The Wizard of Oz

Like a Geek God #6 by Mark Pursell

These Childish Things

Geeks have it over Muggles in one very important area: we are highly susceptible to wonder.

Wonder is something I think we all, geek or not, can remember from moments in our childhood, particularly as they pertain to the pop culture we were being exposed to. For example, my generation is permanently marked by Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. Many pop culture artifacts of our childhood didn’t leave a long-lasting impression on us; memories of them now are characterized by a tinge of nostalgia mixed with shame. But many of my peers can recall the first time they saw Beauty and the Beast with breathless clarity: the music, the characters, the beautiful animation. Beast—along with a score of other movies, books, and even video games—stood out from the rest; they seemed to open us up and inhabit us. On leaving the theater, the world looked different. You were left with the indefinable but undeniable feeling that something magical had happened to you.

Many people lose that capacity for wonder as they grow older; the ability to be thrilled by something, to be not only entertained but transported by it, falls by the wayside on the long road to adulthood, independence, and a cohesive sense of self, knocked out of us by disillusionment or exhaustion or resentment or a host of other devils. Geeks, though, retain it. Riding psychic shotgun to a panoply of knights, aliens, outlaws, wizards, and gods, we take flight to realms and eras that exist as distant (but instructive) echoes of our own. This is looked on, in some ways, as being immature. Childlike. Childish, even. Outsiders look at geek culture with its spaceships and dragons and time-traveling doctors and see a population of people stuck at an emotional age of ten, substituting a love of Batman and Lord of the Rings and Star Wars for more “grown up” preoccupations. By this measure, we geeks have never “put away [our] childish things.”

There are many arguments to refute this, not the least of which is that so much of the content in geek culture is as complex, rigorous, and investigative of our humanity as pop culture for adults. (Whatever that means; pop culture for adults these days seems to be comprised of reality housewives and boring “literary” novels about emotionally-stunted people who spend hundreds of pages wringing their hands about their emotional stuntedness). The most compelling argument, however, has to do with that sense of wonder itself. Since when is that ability, so common in childhood—to lose yourself in something, to be, indeed, transported by it, whisked out of yourself to another place entirely, and to be awed (and terrified) by what you find there—a bad thing? Wonder isn’t just desirable for the feeling itself, either; that kind of immersion opens up your imagination and, thereby, your empathy. When the experience is over and that out-of-body feeling jars you—walking out of a dark theater and, blinking, back into sunlight—and, in many ways, recalibrates you. Is this not the goal of all art?

The Wizard of Oz opens with a title card that reads: “For nearly forty years this story has given faithful service to the Young in Heart; and Time has been powerless to put its kindly philosophy out of fashion.” That quote is always hovering somewhere in my consciousness; not because of the movie, necessarily (though the movie is another example of a formative childhood memory of wonder), but because it genuflects towards us, the geeks. We are the young-in-heart, the receivers of wonder. And maybe being vulnerable to wonder is childlike, a vestigial mode that really is meant to be cast off as we take up the mantle of adulthood and begin our long slide to the grave. But the fact that so many of us don’t cast it off—that the wonder we experience in our chosen corner of pop culture enables a perspective and a frame of mind that is more connected and more attuned to the moment, to mindfulness, to compassion, and to self—makes me think that, once again, it’s the grown ups who’ve got it wrong.

___________

Mark Pursell is a lifelong geek and lover of words. His publishing credits include Nimrod International Journal, The New Orleans Review, and The Florida Review, where he also served as poetry editor. His work can most recently be seen in the first volume of the 15 Views of Orlando anthology from Burrow Press. He currently teaches storytelling and narrative design for video games at Full Sail University in Winter Park, Florida.

Like a Geek God #5: Geek is the New Cool

08 Sunday Sep 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Like a Geek God

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Like a Geek God, Mark Pursell

Like a Geek God #5 by Mark Pursell

Geek is the New Cool

My husband is an elementary school teacher. You can imagine the sort of anecdotes he brings home after spending every day teaching a formative generation born with smartphones in their hands. One thing that particularly struck me, however, happened last year. A constant complaint of my husband’s is that the kids at school, especially the fifth graders—teetering on the edge of a hyper-advanced puberty that mainstream pop culture has been trying to shove them into their entire lives—act like they don’t “care” about anything. The social norm that he observed being adopted and, indeed, self enforced, was that it was “uncool” to seem like you cared too much about something, to show too much enthusiasm. He told me that one time, a little girl let her excitement shine through her veneer of above-it-all boredom when a particular lesson (abstract expressionist art) caught her attention; but as soon as she realized what she was allowing herself to express, she carefully withdrew into her “so what?” shell.

This isn’t a new story, or even a particularly interesting one at this point in American culture. The twin paradigms of “geek” and “cool” have orbited each other like binary stars—locked in opposition but never touching—since the 1950s and possibly before. To be “cool” is be unaffected, imperturbable—“not bothered”, as comedienne Catherine Tate puts it in one of her schoolgirl sketches. Yes, you seem jaded and uncaring, but you also seem strong, walled in your own armor of dispassion. If you don’t care about anything, you’re not vulnerable. You can’t be hurt. By comparison, geeks—and by “geek” I mean “a person who displays deep knowledge of and great or even excessive enthusiasm for a particular thing or subject”—are walking, talking targets. Our unfettered enthusiasm is a weakness.

When our fearless leader here at The Drunken Odyssey, John King, first approached me about being a contributor to his daily/weekly cultural blog project, it didn’t take us long to arrive at the perfect area for my column: geek culture. (It is possible that, after being Facebook friends with me for a while and being subjected to an endless onslaught of 3:00am rants about superhero movies and lazy worldbuilding in MMORPGS, this is entirely what John had in mind in the first place). But after we had decided on this and I began brainstorming about possible column ideas, I found myself thinking less about the specific subjects I was going to write about and more about being a geek in and of itself: what it means to be a geek, and what it entails. Is geek even the right word for us? We, the lovers of Star Wars and Star Trek, the cosplayers and the con-langers, fanboys and fangirls with our fingers on the pulse of everything from Bioshock Infinite to Sailor Moon—what are we? Mainstream culture has always tossed a plethora of pejoratives our way, in an attempt to minimize and disenfranchise our pop culture power and capital. “Nerd”, “dork”, “dweeb”: those of us who dare to violate the Code of Cool in some way are appropriately labeled and pushed to the fringes. (While it is helpful to lump us, the Great Uncool, into a single subcultural bracket, there are distinctions to be drawn. “Nerd” connotes academic and scholarly excess; “dork” and “dweeb” evoke social anxiety, interpersonal clumsiness).

In the last decade or so, however, geek culture has become less ghettoized, more standard than ever before. You have only to use America’s most cherished yardstick—the financial one—to see that this is true. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Hunger Games: geek culture is culture these days, and those are only three franchises in a teeming subculture of science fiction and fantasy properties that is less “sub” with each passing year.

Does this have to do with geek pop culture properties in and of themselves? I don’t think so. There have always been (and always will be) people who love wizards and aliens and every permutation thereof, in all their otherworldly, operatic glory. And being a geek isn’t just about science fiction and fantasy; you can be a geek about geology, or presentation design, or antique furniture. Being a geek isn’t about the object; it’s about the state of mind, about having the self confidence and the security in yourself and who you are to not only care deeply about a given thing but to be zealous and unabashed about it, to display that enthusiam without worrying about who is going to cut you down for it.

And who knows: maybe the affected apathy my husband sees in his students, in the up-and-coming generation, is nothing more than a by-product of adolescence and navigating the strangeness of school—here today, gone tomorrow. Or maybe the new generation will see all our hype-blogging, button-clicking, multiple-tabs-opening frenzy as a waste of energy and recalibrate accordingly, greeting the psychic bombardment of the Information Age with chilly disdain. But as a first-wave Millennial with one toe on the Gen X line, I look around and see my peer group (twentysomethings and thirtysomethings) repudiating apathy—on every level, from pop culture to politics—with the fervor of proselytizers. In this sense, being a geek has become—at least for a little while—the New Cool.

___________

Like a Geek God #4: The Uncomfortable Question of Orson Scott Card

01 Sunday Sep 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Blog Post, Like a Geek God, Science Fiction

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Harrison Ford, Like a Geek God, Mark Pursell, Orson Scott Card, Science Fiction

Like a Geek God #4 by Mark Pursell

The Uncomfortable Question of Orson Scott Card

Separating the art from the artist is a necessary element of art appreciation in any medium, but in the Information Age, it’s easier said than done. The Internet affords a heretofore never-experienced level of accessibility to one’s favorite singers, writers, actors, etc. And unless you’re a conscientious objector to all things Internet—even if you are—exposure to the thoughts and feelings of pop culture figures is nearly impossible to avoid. Odds are you’ll stumble across Katy Perry’s tweets or some distillation of them even if you don’t use Twitter…even if you’re not a fan. The least thing a pop culture figure posts, tweets, pins, or reblogs becomes a refraction of that person and, in an era where we paw frantically at surface-level approximations of connection like rats at a pleasure-inducing switch, is endless turned over and microscopically examined until every trace element of the person in question is shaken out, squeezed dry, raked over. In essence—for good or ill—these figures become their social media posts. You are what you tweet.

You’d think that his new paradigm would cause pop culture figures who are in the public eye, whether by choice or consequence, to adopt a hard line of circumspection regarding what they let fly in the blogosphere. However, many of these creative types—especially those who have crossed over into the sphere of true celebrity—elect to control their own content on social media rather than turning it over to the auspices (and more objectively critical eye) of a social media manager. It’s a gamble that you see play out with varying degrees of success and return investment, particularly in the world of pop music. Cher’s loveable tweets about politics—mispelled and sometimes inscrutable but always knowledgeable—have only served to increase her still-potent pop culture capital. Others, such as Lady Gaga or Kickstarter wunderkind Amanda Palmer, trade on accessibility to their fans but run the risk of alienating people when their off-the-cuff online posts betray hints of narcissism or perspectives of entitlement.

Unfortunately, what this means is that, more than ever, being a fan of a given pop culture object seems to demand that you simultaneously must be a fan of the pop culture creator. Separating the artist from the art is much less of a given; it’s been my experience in the last several years, especially, that people feel little responsibility to distinguish their feelings about a piece of pop culture from their feelings about the person who created it or embodies it.

This whole question of online accessibility and art-from-the-artist is particularly problematic for geeks. The entire concept on which the notion of being a geek is predicated is intense, unapologetic enthusiasm, often to obsessive or minutely-detailed levels. The persons at work behind many of our beloved geek culture touchstones are as revered (or reviled) as their creations. Joss Whedon, Russell T. Davies, J.J. Abrams, Christopher Nolan; these creative personages attract devotion worthy of saints, and loyalty to match. And they are far from the only ones. Fortunately, for the most part, geek culture grande dames tend to be more judicious with their online postings than your average pop music star. But what happens when a widely lionized geek icon takes to the public sphere to air opinions that are not only unpopular, but unhinged?

Which brings us to the uncomfortable question of Orson Scott Card.

Orson Scott Card is a true geek icon. He has written many famous and well-loved science fiction novels, but arguably the most famous, and the byword of his personal celebrity, is 1985’s Ender’s Game, an enduring classic in which gifted children are enrolled in a high-pressure school focused on military simulation; the ostensible purpose of the program is to train a new generation of warriors to battle a particularly aggressive interlocutor of Earth (but, of course, all is not what it seems). Ender’s Game has enjoyed great success and fame in the decades since it’s release, spawning a bestselling franchise for Card and, as of 2013, a long-awaited adaptation for the big screen. I’m personally a huge fan of the original Ender’s Game novel and could have happily gone my entire life knowing nothing about Orson Scott Card other than that he existed and at some point in the early ‘80s wrote this book of which I am so fond.

But the Internet—or really, the 24-hour media cycle—will insist on broadcasting information that I, and many others, could happily have gone without knowing. Card, a longtime member of the Mormon religion, has gone on record in multiple op-ed pieces since 2009 as being opposed to gay marriage for various nonsensical reasons. Go ahead, Google “orson scott card gay marriage.” I’ll wait. (The most entertaining of Card’s assertions is that the gay marriage “agenda” is a vehicle for leftists to establish anti-religion childrearing norms).

This is all embarassing enough—by going on record repeatedly about your opposition to marriage equality in this day and age, you cast yourself headlong into the eventual “wrong side of history” pot along with the enemies of the civil rights movement, the enemies of women’s suffrage, the enemies of abolition…take your pick—but it turned out to be the very thin icing on a much more complex layer cake of crazy. In a May blog post, Card attacked President Obama directly, accusing him of totalitarian maneuvering and intentions to set up his wife, Michelle, as a puppet dictator. The blog goes on to theorize that Obama intends to arm urban gangs and mobilize them as his own fascist national police force.

It’s a difficult moment when the person responsible for creating something you love betrays himself to be not only disconnected from facts and logic but also guilty of cultivating a personal brand of bigotry and racism that, inexplicably, seems alien to the moral quandaries and lessons of compassion found in their work (like, for example, Ender’s Game itself). It is impossible, whenever something like this happens, on any sort of scale, to not feel deceived, hoodwinked, shaken down. As a political lefty and a gay man, it’s equally impossible to sort of not take this particular incident personally. And I’m not alone. There is a movement to boycott the release of the Ender’s Game movie, a movement with a high-enough profile that it has been written about extensively in the online media and which has prompted direct comments from director Gavin Hood and star Harrison Ford (all to the purpose of distancing the movie from Card’s ravings).

Because of the echo chamber that is the Internet, a baby-with-the-bathwater tendency is usually what greets celebrity outbursts like this. But is that right, or even fair? Does Orson Scott Card’s personal status as a righty whack job invalidate the excellence of the Ender’s Game novel or its themes? Yes, some people (including yours truly) zealously defend the distinction between art and artist, and some people come to that understanding due to work in a given academic or professional discipline. But we are all geeks—superfans, if you will—and in a world that is ready at any moment to throw a scrap of gossip or a loony sound bite at our feet and watch us turn on our icons, our institutions, and sometimes each other, the “art-from-the-artist” paradigm is more important than ever. Do I agree with Orson Scott Card and support his views? No. Will I ever directly and knowingly give him my money again? Absolutely not. But am I also going to burn my copy of Ender’s Game (which, it must be said again, is devoid of the fringe sentiments Card has been publicly voicing)? Not on your life. The book is not the man, and the man is not the book. The question of the movie is a bit more complicated, but I wasn’t going to see it in theaters, anyway; how you handle that is between you and your god. Ultimately, I think, the lessons we can take away from this, or from any time celebrities use the media-net as a megaphone for whatever nincompoop notions pop into their pinheads, is not to turn with vitriol on the objects that bring us joy or enlightenment or meaning just because of the people behind them. Like so many other situations related to the Internet and its pitfalls, we must learn—and strive—to react without being reactionary.

___________

Like a Geek God #1: Pacific Rim and the Ballet of Mayhem

11 Sunday Aug 2013

Posted by thedrunkenodyssey in Film, Like a Geek God, Science Fiction

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Like a Geek God, Mark Pursell

Like a Geek God #1 by Mark Pursell

Pacific Rim and the Ballet of Mayhem

Mayhem is problematic. In recent years, it seems as if action filmmakers have lost the thread of what makes grand-prix melee both engaging and eye-widening. The fight scenes in the Transformers movies are a dark, disorienting blur of flailing metal. One can hardly tell what is actually happening, much less who is doing what, or even which giant robot is which. The Avengers is smarter than your average superhero flick, but even it suffers from what I call “mayhem fatigue”; in the lengthy final confrontation of the film, the camera zips drunkenly from Avenger to Avenger, lingering barely a moment on the havoc each hero is wreaking before looping away, giving the action a seasick, attention-deficit quality that enervates the viewer instead of elating her.

However, consider Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim, a sci-fi actioner in which the human race constructs giant manned Jaegers (robots) to battle an incursion of Godzilla-like kaiju (monsters). Now, Pacific Rim is not a very good movie in general. The dialogue is wooden; the characters range from forgettable to obnoxious. But that’s not what we really went to see it for, right? We went to see it for giant monsters fighting giant robots. The spectacle of such a concept is enticing. It evokes the titanic struggles of myth, gods and monsters locked in combat across the face of the cooling earth, wreathed in mist and flame.

Del Toro does not disappoint on this score. The film’s second-act centerpiece—in which our plucky heroes in their single, beat-up Jaeger confront not one but two of the deadly kaiju—is a triumph of fight choreography. The Jaeger and the kaiju batter away at each other with a slow but bone-crunching inexorability that makes more physical sense than the super-fast, hard-to-follow movements of other movie behemoths. The confrontation is balletic; del Toro frames every punch with an eye towards maintaining a sense of epic scale in the imaginations of the audience, rather than dissipating it by keeping the camera too close or allowing the pace of the action to exceed the visual acuity of the viewer. The result is a greater, more genuine feeling of engagement from the audience. I had my problems with the movie as a whole, but I winced and cheered and gasped along with everyone else in my crowded theater during this sequence. At one point, our heroes direct their Jaeger to pick up a wrecked cruise ship and use it as a weapon against the kaiju. It’s a dizzying moment that sounds a bit silly on paper but the audience reaction was palpable; not only audible but environmental, a frisson in the air.

Action—fight scenes, chases, narrow escapes, etc.—is endemic to the DNA of geek culture. But with the advent of more-and-more refined CGI technology, it seems that many movies of the last decade focus on how a given monster or robot or alien looks as opposed to how it moves. Think back, though, to the heartstopping action set pieces of James Cameron’s early films; remember the frenetic and super-stylized but always comprehensible gun battles in The Matrix. Action like this—the kind to make you stand up and cheer at the conclusion of a given set piece—is largely the exception in today’s geek culture properties, rather than the byword. It’s my hope that the current crop of filmmakers—or even the next generation, still in their formative years—view Pacific Rim and take away its lessons. “Fast” doesn’t always equal “intense”. “Disorienting” doesn’t read as “suspenseful”. Battle must be brutal, but it must also—paradoxically—be beautiful.

___________