All Things Geek and Small

Below is an essay meant to be the opening volley in a blog series my former creative director  with my former employer planned to pitch as a regular iPad feature. It never got off the launch pad. This was one of many brainstorms that fizzled, popped and collapsed in on itself while I toiled for that publisher for pennies on the pound. 

And there were a lot of pounds and very few pennies. 

Bitter? A little. 

I thought it best post it here, lest it be lost or forgotten. 

Imprimis...

HED: Red Shirt Nation

DEK: All Things Geek and Small

By: Cole Hornaday

“So. What kind are you?”

“Pardon?”

“Geek. What kind are you.”

I’m standing in the checkout line at the Petco, a 10 lbs. bag of kitty litter cradled in my arms and I’ve just been outed by the gal behind the cash register.

To my surprise, she’s frightfully earnest. She looks me up and down like she’s running a molecular scan and waits for my answer. There’s no anonymity here. The ears of the elderly woman behind me prick up; a puzzled look washes over her face. This is Terra Incognita and we’re now speaking the lingua franca of Geek.

“Oh, uh. Gosh…you name it,” I stutter. I’m utterly caught off guard. My shirt has been torn open revealing a big golden “S”or a lightning bolt or swollen greenish pecs.

“I’ve been into comics since I was 12. My spare room is stacked ceiling to floor with file boxes.” And then my stammer rapidly devolves into staccato blurts “I collect vintage toys. My apartment walls are filled with shelves of them. I like SF and Fantasy. I write about movies, so I’m really into cinema. Theatre, I studied theatre, so I’m into theatre…”

And in less than 30 seconds I’ve taken a psychic boning knife to myself, revealing each and every one of my otaku.

And the list is long.

Otaku is one of many concise terms gifted us by the Japanese.  Literally translating to “someone else’s house,” otaku once described that narrow strata of lonley little souls who’s obsessive interests; anime, manga, or video games defined the esoteric interests that drove them into isolation. Now no concept better describes the entire spectrum of the Western Geek.

I become painfully aware the elderly woman behind me is fidgeting with her coin purse and my babbling halts. The check out girl simply blinks. “Yep. I thought so. I could smell it on you. It’s my Geek-DAR.” She bags my kitty litter, hands me my receipt and shifts her focus to her next customer with all the ceremony of decrying the drizzly-gray weather.

For a millisecond there I thought this might be the ramp-up to a come-on. Nope. It’s just another day in paradise for the Greater North American Geek and we might as well have been talking basketball scores or escalating gas prices. Geek is common now. Otaku have been long outed. Where once geeks hid our esoterica under the bed or in the back of the closet in a ratty cardboard box, it’s now a pass slid into a lanyard and worn about our necks.

Things have changed so much and therein lies the rub.

In late December 2010 comedian-actor-cultural critic Patton Oswalt proposed via WiredMagazine that the era of Geek isolationism was over and whatever pride we once coveted over our own esoterica was moot because we were now all geeks and there was nothing new under the sun.

Sidebar: Oswalt’s assigns the same power of meaning to terms nerd and geek. Nerd is a term I’ve always found fearfully inaccurate and potentially offensive, but the debate over geek nomenclature is a hair to be split another day.

Oswalt’s point, made with tongue frequently implanted in cheek, is otaku has reached critical mass and that which once made geeks unique, is now devoid of cultural significance because we are now all otaku, we’re all defined by specialized interests and, thanks to new world resources like the interweb and its constant and rapid tilling of the cultural soil we are no longer originals, no longer passing for normal. We are normal.

“Admittedly, there’s a chilly thrill in moving with the herd while quietly being tuned in to something dark, complicated, and unknown just beneath the topsoil of popularity,” says Oswalt. “Something about which, while we moved with the herd, we could share a wink and a nod with two or three other similarly connected herdlings.”

But geek chic ultimately caught on with the masses. By the early 1990s Frank Miller’sBatman: The Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore’s Watchmen had become college Lit course curriculum with Watchmen making the New York Times Best Seller list. Thanks to several generations of electric fan-energy not only did Star Trek remain a buoyant franchise, once rising from the ashes it eventually withered away into a anemic shadow, and how we marveled at its unprecedented reboot and second rebirth in 2009. The geek is no longer a forlorn outcast, but an oracle.

“I know it sounds great, but there’s a danger: Everything we have today that’s cool comes from someone wanting more of something they loved in the past…” says Oswalt, “Now, with everyone more or less otaku and everything immediately awesome …the old inner longing for more or better that made our present pop culture so amazing is dwindling.”

According to Oswalt, we’ve reached a Geek Culture mass-saturation point, an era of anti-esotericism or ETWAF: Everything That Ever Was—Available Forever. As a result, our otakus are now weak and diluted. There is no new art when you live in a reality of sated consumers. The pop-culture soil has been turned too often, the crops not properly rotated, and all has gone fallow. Why bother create when you can poach, cut, sample and rehash it all in iMovie and post it on Youtube over a caffe macchiato?

In so many words Oswalt calls for an anarchical implosion of popular thought. His manifesto is not unlike that made by the Dadaists, those pesky early 20th-Century artist-anarchists hiding out in Zurich around World War I, declaring bourgeois complacency and aesthetics the root and cause of Civilization’s fall. It was time to turn art inside out, said the Dadaists, in order to revitalize the culture before it destroys itself.

We’ve lost the joy in our otaku, people, and now it’s time to burn it down. How do we do this? Oswalt says he’s already seen the synthesis begin; Freddy Vs. Jason, Predator Vs. Alien but it must go further by turning our otaku inside out in a head-on collision of orgiastic absurdity: “The Human Centipede done with the cast of The Hills and directed by the Coen brothers.”

Personally I thought we’d hit the end times when the Geico cave-guys got their own sit-com, but truth be told one can find no greater portent than Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark.

Oswalt portends the look and feel of the future, leaving us a plethora of cool notions to Google within the next six months, but gives us no means by which to rally the call to action. Leave it to Harry Knowles, the spokesperson of all things geek to make the first substantial rebuttal. Knowles disagrees with Oswalt, claiming that the drive for excellence in otaku is as vital as ever before and the geeks are all well awake and aware. “Patton bemoans the death of the culture because everything is accessible. Tell that to folks that try to collect Mondo Tees posters.  Hell, I’m a geek that has a massive collection, brought on by my deep love of Citizen Kane and Kane’s collecting habits.”

I must admit, I share Oswalt’s disillusionment to an extent, but disagree that a collision of the esoteric must take place in order for Geek Culture to thrive. Oswalt claims he never suffered isolation—the guy was damn lucky if you ask me. I envy the young; technology has given them a rising convergence of Geek Culture I only dreamed of.  Perhaps Knowles will concur when I say a path through the mundane and mainstream was paved by we old guard geeks, and the internet logosphere has opened doors onto a playground we never knew existed.

“Geek Culture takes care of its own,” says Knowles. “We’re a community. If you have Geek Values you cherish and wish to take root – we as a culture now have given you the power.   You can throw Backyard Film Parties for your neighborhood with a very reasonable investment.”

 “The coolest thing about GEEK CULTURE is the sharing of it,” says Knowles. “That’s the primary lesson we take from Forrest J Ackerman’s life.  The sharing of our obsessions lead us to new things.”

Since the day I saw those first black and white images of Forrie’s Ackermansion in Famous Monsters, I wanted to build a Monster-Mancave just like it. Several thousand long boxes and carded action figures later I am not even close. And that’s okay.

Shortly after I graduated from college, I noticed a vibrant community of geeks-turned-pro rose and took hold of the mediums it once helped to define. We now live in an age I never believed possible, where the super hero genre is a mainstay of the film industry, where trilogies (ever the domain of Fantasy and SF) were under serious consideration by the Academy of Motion Picture Sciences as a dramatic category, where best-selling writers pen equally successful comic books and fan favorite comic writers pen blockbuster screenplays.

True, Everything That Ever Was (is) Available Forever, but you’ll always need a guide to walk you through the brambles because we cannot possibly consume it all, noting “You could watch for your whole life, non stop, and not even see 15% of everything filmed that is cool.   Same with books, music, art, food and life experiences in general.   To geek about these things with one another, to be able to find a friend no matter what hour you’re obsession has kept you up pursuing…  that’s the dream man.   We’re living it.”

I guess I’m just a little slow on the uptake at times. That little gal at Petco?  She’s in the Geek Culture mode, I just wasn’t listening as well as I should. There she was, always seeking, always on Geek-DAR monitor duty. Mayhap she wasn’t hitting on me (sad discovery for my own part, unsurprising to my X’s) but on the lookout for someone into something outré and new—someone to geek-out with.

A lifetime spent in theatre; amateur, professional and otherwise has taught me community is about deeds as much as it is about words, lighting and good scenic design. We’ve been brainstorming Red Shirt Nation here at Boxoffice Media for some time, refining our goal of participating in as much as reporting on geek reality.

Some nights I can’t sleep for contemplating the sweetness of life with a copy of a Yesterday and Today pasted over “butcher” cover, a pristine print of Welles’ Chimes at Midnight, signed copy of Catcher in the Rye, The unpublished Swamp Thing  #88, or a Glasslite Vlix action figure in my possession.

Fire up your Geek-DAR. There’s a whole world of extraordinary otaku out there and I cannot to wade in up to my neck.

Welcome to Red Shirt Nation.

The line for registration forms here…

Cole Hornaday

Seattle

3.2011