Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die
By Patton Oswalt
Looking back, we were American otakus, says comedian and author
Patton Oswalt, who has a plan for reviving geek culture.
I’m not a nerd. I used to be one, back 30 years ago when nerd meant
something. I entered the ’80s immersed, variously, in science
fiction, Dungeons & Dragons, and Stephen King. Except for the
multiple-player aspect of D&D, these pursuits were not “passions
from a common spring,” to quote Poe.
I can’t say that I ever abided nerd stereotypes: I was never alone
or felt outcast. I had a circle of friends who were similarly drawn
to the exotica of pop culture (or, at least, what was considered
pop culture at the time in northern Virginia)—Monty Python, post-punk
music, comic books, slasher films, and videogames. We were a sizable
clique. The terms nerd and geek were convenient shorthand used by
other cliques to categorize us. But they were thin descriptors.
In Japan, the word otaku refers to people who have obsessive, minute
interests—especially stuff like anime or videogames. It comes from
a term for “someone else’s house”—otaku live in their own, enclosed
worlds. Or, at least, their lives follow patterns that are well
outside the norm. Looking back, we were American otakus. (Of course,
now all America is otaku—which I’m going to get into shortly. But
in order to do so, we’re going to hang out in the ’80s.)
I was too young to drive or hold a job. I was never going to play
sports, and girls were an uncrackable code. So, yeah—I had time to
collect every Star Wars action figure, learn the Three Laws of
Robotics, memorize Roy Batty’s speech from the end of Blade Runner,
and classify each monster’s abilities and weaknesses in TSR Hobbies’
Monster Manual. By 1987, my friends and I were waist-deep in the
hot honey of adolescence. Money and cars and, hopefully, girls would
follow, but not if we spent our free time learning the names of the
bounty hunters’ ships in The Empire Strikes Back. So we each built
our own otakuesque thought-palace, which we crammed with facts and
nonsense—only now, the thought-palace was nicely appointed, decorated
neatly, the information laid out on deep mahogany shelves or framed
in gilt. What once set us apart, we hoped, would become a lovable
quirk.
Our respective nerdery took on various forms: One friend was the
first to get his hands on early bootlegs of Asian action flicks by
Tsui Hark and John Woo, and he never looked back. Another started
reading William Gibson and peppered his conversations with cryptic
(and alluring) references to “cyberspace.” I was ground zero for
the “new wave” of mainstream superhero comics—which meant being
right there for Alan Moore, Frank Miller, and Neil Gaiman. And like
my music-obsessed pals, who passed around the cassette of Guns n’
Roses’ Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide and were thus prepared for the shock
wave of Appetite for Destruction, I’d devoured Moore’s run on Swamp
Thing and thus eased nicely into his Watchmen. I’d also read the
individual issues of Miller’s Daredevil: Born Again run, so when
The Dark Knight Returns was reviewed by The New York Times, I could
say I saw it coming. And I’d consumed so many single-issue guest-writing
stints of Gaiman’s that when he was finally given The Sandman title
all to himself, I was first in line and knew the language.
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. 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.
When our coworkers nodded along to Springsteen and Madonna songs
at the local Bennigan’s, my select friends and I would quietly trade
out-of-context lines from Monty Python sketches—a thieves’ cant, a
code language used for identification. We needed it, too, because
the essence of our culture—our “escape hatch” culture—would begin
to change in 1987.
That was the year the final issue of Watchmen came out, in October.
After that, it seemed like everything that was part of my otaku
world was out in the open and up for grabs, if only out of context.
I wasn’t seeing the hard line between “nerds” and “normals” anymore.
It was the last year that a T-shirt or music preference or pastime
(Dungeons & Dragons had long since lost its dangerous, Satanic,
suicide-inducing street cred) could set you apart from the surface
dwellers. Pretty soon, being the only person who was into something
didn’t make you outcast; it made you ahead of the curve and someone
people were quicker to befriend than shun. Ironically, surface
dwellers began repurposing the symbols and phrases and tokens of
the erstwhile outcast underground.
Fast-forward to now: Boba Fett’s helmet emblazoned on sleeveless
T-shirts worn by gym douches hefting dumbbells. The Glee kids
performing the songs from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And Toad
the Wet Sprocket, a band that took its name from a Monty Python
riff, joining the permanent soundtrack of a night out at Bennigan’s.
Our below-the-topsoil passions have been rudely dug up and displayed
in the noonday sun. The Lord of the Rings used to be ours and only
ours simply because of the sheer goddamn thickness of the books.
Twenty years later, the entire cast and crew would be trooping
onstage at the Oscars to collect their statuettes, and replicas of
the One Ring would be sold as bling.
The topsoil has been scraped away, forever, in 2010. In fact, it’s
been dug up, thrown into the air, and allowed to rain down and coat
everyone in a thin gray-brown mist called the Internet. Everyone
considers themselves otaku about something—whether it’s the mythology
of Lost or the minor intrigues of Top Chef. American Idol inspires—if
not in depth, at least in length and passion—the same number of
conversations as does The Wire. There are no more hidden
thought-palaces—they’re easily accessed websites, or Facebook pages
with thousands of fans. And I’m not going to bore you with the
step-by-step specifics of how it happened. In the timeline of the
upheaval, part of the graph should be interrupted by the words the
Internet. And now here we are.
The problem with the Internet, however, is that it lets anyone
become otaku about anything instantly. In the ’80s, you couldn’t
get up to speed on an entire genre in a weekend. You had to wait,
month to month, for the issues of Watchmen to come out. We couldn’t
BitTorrent the latest John Woo film or digitally download an entire
decade’s worth of grunge or hip hop. Hell, there were a few weeks
during the spring of 1991 when we couldn’t tell whether Nirvana or
Tad would be the next band to break big. Imagine the terror!
But then reflect on the advantages. Waiting for the next issue,
movie, or album gave you time to reread, rewatch, reabsorb whatever
you loved, so you brought your own idiosyncratic love of that thing
to your thought-palace. People who were obsessed with Star Trek or
the Ender’s Game books were all obsessed with the same object, but
its light shone differently on each person. Everyone had to create
in their mind unanswered questions or what-ifs. What if Leia, not
Luke, had become a Jedi? What happens after Rorschach’s journal is
found at the end of Watchmen? What the hell was The Prisoner about?
Why create anything new when there’s a mountain of freshly excavated
pop culture to recut, repurpose, and manipulate on your iMovie?
None of that’s necessary anymore. When everyone has easy access to
their favorite diversions and every diversion comes with a rabbit
hole’s worth of extra features and deleted scenes and hidden hacks
to tumble down and never emerge from, then we’re all just adding
to an ever-swelling, soon-to-erupt volcano of trivia, re-contextualized
and forever rebooted. We’re on the brink of Etewaf: Everything That
Ever Was—Available Forever.
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. Action figures, videogames, superhero movies,
iPods: All are continuations of a love that wanted more. Ever see
action figures from the ’70s, each with that same generic Anson
Williams body and one-piece costume with the big clumsy snap on the
back? Or played Atari’s Adventure, found the secret room, and
thought, that’s it? Can we all admit the final battle in Superman
II looks like a local commercial for a personal-injury attorney?
And how many people had their cassette of the Repo Man soundtrack
eaten by a Walkman?
Now, with everyone more or less otaku and everything immediately
awesome (or, if not, just as immediately rebooted or recut as a
hilarious YouTube or Funny or Die spoof), the old inner longing for
more or better that made our present pop culture so amazing is
dwindling. The Onion’s A.V. Club—essential and transcendent in so
many ways—has a weekly feature called Gateways to Geekery, in which
an entire artistic subculture—say, anime, H. P. Lovecraft, or the
Marx Brothers—is mapped out so you can become otaku on it but avoid
its more tedious aspects.
Here’s the danger: That creates weak otakus. Etewaf doesn’t produce
a new generation of artists—just an army of sated consumers. Why
create anything new when there’s a mountain of freshly excavated
pop culture to recut, repurpose, and manipulate on your iMovie? The
Shining can be remade into a comedy trailer. Both movie versions
of the Joker can be sent to battle each another. The Dude is in The
Matrix.
The coming decades—the 21st-century’s ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s—have the
potential to be one long, unbroken, recut spoof in which everything
in Avatar farts while Keyboard Cat plays eerily in the background.
But I prefer to be optimistic. I choose hope. I see Etewaf as the
Balrog, the helter-skelter, the A-pop-alypse that rains cleansing
fire down onto the otaku landscape, burns away the chaff, and forces
us to start over with only a few thin, near-meatless scraps on which
to build.
In order to save pop culture future, we’ve got to make the present
pop culture suck, at least for a little while.
How do we do this? How do we bring back that sweet longing for more
that spawned Gears of War, the Crank films, and the entire Joss
Whedon oeuvre? Simple: We’ve got to speed up the process. We’ve got
to stoke the volcano. We’ve got to catalog, collate, and cross-pollinate.
We must bring about Etewaf, and soon.
It has already started. It’s all around us. VH1 list shows. Freddy
vs. Jason. Websites that list the 10 biggest sports meltdowns, the
50 weirdest plastic surgeries, the 200 harshest nut shots. Alien
vs. Predator. Lists of fails, lists of boobs, lists of deleted movie
scenes. Entire TV seasons on iTunes. An entire studio’s film vault,
downloadable with a click. Easter egg scenes of wild sex in Grand
Theft Auto. Hell, Grand Theft Auto, period. And yes, I know that a
lot of what I’m listing here seems like it’s outside of the “nerd
world” and part of the wider pop culture. Well, I’ve got news for
you—pop culture is nerd culture. The fans of Real Housewives of
Hoboken watch, discuss, and absorb their show the same way a geek
watched Dark Shadows or obsessed over his eighth-level half-elf
ranger character in Dungeons & Dragons. It’s the method of consumption,
not what’s on the plate.
Since there’s no going back—no reverse on the out-of-control
locomotive we’ve created—we’ve got to dump nitro into the engines.
We need to get serious, and I’m here to outline my own personal
fantasy: We start with lists of the best lists of boobs. Every
Beatles song, along with every alternate take, along with every
cover version of every one of their songs and every alternate take
of every cover version, all on your chewing-gum-sized iPod nano.
Goonies vs. Saw. Every book on your Kindle. Every book on Kindle
on every Kindle. The Human Centipede done with the cast of The Hills
and directed by the Coen brothers.
That’s when we’ll reach Etewaf singularity. Pop culture will become
self-aware. It will happen in the A.V. Club first: A brilliant
Nathan Rabin column about the worst Turkish rip-offs of American
comic book characters will suddenly begin writing its own comments,
each a single sentence from the sequel to A Confederacy of Dunces.
Then a fourth and fifth season of Arrested Development, directed
by David Milch of Deadwood, will appear suddenly in the TV Shows
section of iTunes. Someone BitTorrenting a Crass bootleg will
suddenly find their hard drive crammed with Elvis Presley’s “lost”
grunge album from 1994. And everyone’s TiVo will record Ghostbusters
III, starring Peter Sellers, Lee Marvin, and John Candy.
This will last only a moment. We’ll have one minute before pop
culture swells and blackens like a rotten peach and then explodes,
sending every movie, album, book, and TV show flying away into
space. Maybe tendrils and fragments of them will attach to asteroids
or plop down on ice planets light-years away. A billion years after
our sun burns out, a race of intelligent ice crystals will build a
culture based on dialog from The Princess Bride. On another planet,
intelligent gas clouds will wait for the yearly passing of the
“Lebowski” comet. One of the rings of Saturn will be made from
blurbs for the softcover release of Infinite Jest, twirled forever
into a ribbon of effusive praise.
But back here on Earth, we’ll enter year zero for pop culture. All
that we’ll have left to work with will be a VHS copy of Zapped!,
the soundtrack to The Road Warrior, and Steve Ditko’s eight-issue
run on Shade: The Changing Man. For a while—maybe a generation—pop
culture pastimes will revolve around politics and farming.
But the same way a farmer has to endure a few fallow seasons after
he’s overplanted, a new, richer loam will begin to appear in the
wake of our tilling. From Zapped! will arise a telekinesis epic
from James Cameron. Paul Thomas Anderson will do a smaller,
single-character study of a man who can move matchbooks with his
mind and how he uses this skill to pursue a casino waitress. Then
the Coen brothers will veer off, doing a movie about pyrokenesis
set in 1980s Cleveland, while out of Japan will come a subgenre of
telekinetic horror featuring pale, whispering children. And we’ll
build from there—precognition, telepathy, and, most radically,
normal people falling in love and dealing with jobs and life. Maybe
also car crashes.
The Road Warrior soundtrack, all Wagnerian strings and military
snare drums, will germinate into a driving, gut-bucket subgenre
called waste-rock. And, as a counterpoint, flute-driven folk. Then
there’ll be the inevitable remixes, mashups, and pirated-only
releases. A new Beatles will arise, only they’ll be Iranian.
Shade: The Changing Man will become the new Catcher in the Rye.
Ditko’s thin-fingered art will appear on lunch boxes, T-shirts, and
magazine covers. Someone will write an even thinner, sparser, simpler
version called Shade. Someone else will write a 1,000-page meditation
about Shade’s home planet. Eventually, someone will try to kill the
Iranian John Lennon with a hat, based on one panel from issue 3. A
whole generation of authors under 20 will have their love—or
disgust—of these comics to thank for their careers.
So the topsoil we’re coated in needs to wash away for a while. I
want my daughter to have a 1987 the way I did and experience the
otaku thrill. While everyone else is grooving on the latest Jay-Z,
5 Gallons of Diesel, I’d like her to share a secret look with a
friend, both of them hip to the fact that, from Germany, there’s a
bootleg MP3 of a group called Dr. Cali-gory, pioneers of superviolent
line-dancing music. And I want her to enjoy that secret look for a
little while before Dr. Cali-gory’s songs get used in commercials
for cruise lines.
