Legendary ham Adam West and legendary ham William Shatner appeared together in an early-1960s pilot for the would-be television adventures of Alexander the Great. Alas, it didn’t happen, and we had to settle for Kirk and Batman.
“REPENT! THE END IS EXTREMELY
F—KING NIGH!”
— 28 DAYS LATER
THE AWKWARD THING about living in a postmodern world is the general expectation that everyone has a quip ready to go when the monsters attack. (If you don’t have one ready, think of one now. We’ll wait; this is important.) The darker side of general-monster-preparedness is the accompanying general expectation that we’ll all be able to handle it with the aplomb of a balding franchise headliner, when really, if hideous hordes ever came at us snarling and clawing, it would be exactly as horrific as it sounds. In the Internet age, a lot of cultural coolpoints are derived from seeming jaded enough to joke about genuinely terrible things; as we’ve noted, many an Internet meme has sprung up around natural and humanitarian disasters. While humor is a well-known coping strategy, there’s also nothing wrong with getting upset for the right reasons—so go ahead and call bullshit when people dismiss problems that you know matter. And if you get shit for it, you have a quip ready to go! (Emergency preparedness: Geeks have it.)
The zombie film 28 Days Later (2002) gains extra geek points on top of its fundamental awesomeness for featuring Christopher Eccleston, who three years later would star in the triumphantly relaunched Doctor Who.
“THERE’S ONLY ONE RULE THAT I
KNOW OF, BABIES—GOD DAMN IT,
YOU’VE GOT TO BE KIND.”
—KURT VONNEGUT
MAN SHOWS INHUMANITY TO MAN. It’s axiomatic of our existence. It’s the story of our past, it’s the story of our present, and it will very likely be the story of our future. Indeed, it’s a lesson that’s reinforced every day, whether we’re watching the evening news or the latest entry in the Saw series. However, our history is also littered with awe-inspiring examples of men and women showing incredible compassion in the face of unspeakable evil and insurmountable odds. Every story of tragedy has a story of heroism to go with it. For every Holocaust, there’s a Schindler. Vonnegut’s words, spoken so simply, are nonetheless laced with considerable profundity. The imperative to be kind to one another may seem obvious, but part of being human means that both the right thing and the wrong thing are forever at arm’s reach. It doesn’t hurt to be reminded every now and then which one we should choose.
Vonnegut’s novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) is less overtly geeky than the likes of Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, and The Sirens of Titan, but aside from being just as great, it does tie into the rest with several cameo appearances.
“SO SAY WE ALL.”
—BILL ADAMA, BATTLESTAR GALACTICA
WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT, that all men are created equal.” These words, from the American Declaration of Independence, represent an admirable ideal that America took rather a long time to live up to. Fortunately for most of us, these words eventually came to represent more than landowning white men. Bill Adama was Battlestar Galactica’s Thomas Jefferson, and BSG was, at its heart, the story of a nation’s formation. Like Jefferson, Adama was a man of great contradiction: a supposed visionary who lied about the vision (the mythical existence of Earth); an authoritarian who turned out to be more democratic in principle than the democratically elected president he served; a confessed bigot who allied with, and even came to love, the objects of his hatred. The resolution of the story ultimately came down to the question of whether disparate groups—military and civilian, human and Cylon, even humanoid Cylon and robotic Centurion—could learn first to recognize one another as people, then to live together. Eventually, they did. Thus Adama’s words, which first applied only to members of the military under his own command, came to embrace all of humankind, and humanity’s children as well.
Bill Adama was actor Edward James Olmos’s second chance to explore dangerous, artificially created humanoids; the first was Blade Runner (1982).
“MISTER MCGEE,
DON’T MAKE ME ANGRY.
YOU WOULDN’T LIKE ME
WHEN I’M ANGRY.”
—DAVID BRUCE BANNER, THE INCREDIBLE HULK
“PARDON ME FOR
BREATHING, WHICH
I NEVER DO ANYWAY SO I
DON’T KNOW WHY
I BOTHER TO SAY IT, OH
GOD I’M SO DEPRESSED.”
—MARVIN, THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY
GEEKS notoriously have trouble expressing emotion. That’s why Spock became our great iconic hero: he, too, dealt with the confusing struggle of his feelings by burying them beneath a near-fanatic devotion to intellectual calculations and philosophical ponderings. And the fact that he came from a whole race of people like that gave us hope that maybe we weren’t as pathetic and alone in our fear of emotional vulnerability as we thought we were. Doctor Banner’s famous line from the opening credits of The Incredible Hulk perfectly encapsulates this inner turmoil, saying what all repressed geeks wants to say whenever people try to get under their skin: I have made staying in control of myself a firm rule of life, and I fear that out-of-control me will be something terrible to behold, so why don’t you just not make me go there. The flip side of this phenomenon is the cynical geek who, rather than burying all emotion beneath reason, buries any explicit acknowledgment of idealism or romance beneath a protective shield of pessimism: because this geek “knows everything already,” you see, there’s nothing to get excited about. That, in a nutshell is Marvin, the super-genius robot in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy—he wants you to know just how depressing the whole world is, because it can’t possibly present anything new or interesting to him. But it could, if he’d let it—just as Spock, Banner, and all the other nerds out there could figure out how to enjoy being a little bit out of control once in a while if they’d just stop envisioning their primitive impulses as a terrifying, rampaging monster.
“VIOLENCE IS THE LAST REFUGE
OF THE INCOMPETENT.”
—HARI SELDON, FOUNDATION
INTELLECTUALS BELIEVE in the power of the mind. If you have to resort to force, you’ve already failed. This is a noble and admirable belief, and muchly if not entirely true—but there’s something more interesting at work here. We all tend to believe that our own best characteristic represents “true strength,” just as we’re all instinctively inclined to believe that a person who agrees with us a lot must be a very smart person indeed. Therefore, as intellectuals, we find physical force abhorrent in the extreme, in part because it just plain is, but also in part because our self-esteem depends on believing that mental power is more important. At the same time, it’s worth noting that, in Foundation, überbrainiac author Isaac Asimov deliberately crafted a story where the careful application of nonviolent smarts was able to triumph over every single violent threat that his protagonist nation faced—which rather flies in the face of all human history. Sometimes, violent people make targets of the most peace-loving among us, and the choice to fight for survival doesn’t necessarily mean we’re incompetent; Asimov, a WWII–era Jew, never argued in real life that military force shouldn’t be employed to stop the Nazis. The key to fully embracing this quote lies in the particular diction: not tool, but refuge. Violence may be sadly necessary at times, but anyone who finds solace in its application is a poor human, indeed.
“TRY NOT. DO. OR DO NOT.
THERE IS NO TRY.”
—YODA, THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK
YODA OFFERED LUKE SKYWALKER THIS WISDOM in reference to extricating a crashed X-Wing Fighter from the swamp on Dagobah, but he might as well have been talking to Thomas Edison as the first inklings of incandescent light germinated in his mind. He might as well have been talking to Michael Jordan as he laced up before his first college game. He might as well have been talking to you before going in for that big promotion. Far too often, our fear
of running headlong into our own limitations contents us with merely trying to accomplish our goals. That way the bar is adjusted downward to mean that, hey, even if we didn’t succeed, we didn’t really fail either. And though there are times, sure, when the effort we invest in a task can be its own reward, let’s be honest with ourselves: there are other times when effort can be measured only against its completion. So don’t look for reasons why a thing can’t be done. Just go ahead and make it happen.
Nike is not as wise as Yoda but does make very effective commercials.
“RAYMOND SHAW IS
THE KINDEST, BRAVEST,
WARMEST, MOST
WONDERFUL HUMAN
BEING I’VE EVER KNOWN
IN MY LIFE.”
—BENNETT MARCO, THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
“YOU TAKE THE BLUE PILL,
AND THE STORY ENDS;
YOU WAKE IN YOUR
BED AND YOU BELIEVE
WHATEVER YOU WANT TO
BELIEVE. YOU TAKE THE RED
PILL, AND YOU STAY IN
WONDERLAND AND
I SHOW YOU HOW DEEP
THE RABBIT HOLE GOES.”
—MORPHEUS, THE MATRIX
WE’RE BEING BRAINWASHED CONSTANTLY. Not necessarily by communists (like in 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate) or a transnational corporation (like in the 2004 remake), but by talking points. After all, what is Ben Marco’s rote description of his wartime compatriot, implanted in his mind by a sinister Sino-Russian cabal and repeated ad nauseam, but an expression of the talking points that saturate the mediasphere daily. They ensure that debate has already been framed and decided for us long in advance of our forming an actual opinion. They let us know what to think without having to do the hard work of getting there on our own. Whether we’re talking about Raymond Shaw or WMD or death panels, the inherent danger of talking points is that they become so ingrained through sheer force of repetition that we’re rendered incapable of seeing the reality that may be lurking just underneath. Luckily, Bennett Marco broke through his conditioning in time to give his story a semblance of a happy ending. So did Neo, who needed the symbolism of Morpheus’s red pill more than he needed the pill itself. As Confucius said, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. More precisely, it begins by choosing to take that step—even when the consequences of that choice are as yet unknown.
“I’M THE BEST THERE IS AT WHAT I DO.
BUT WHAT I DO ISN’T VERY NICE.”
—WOLVERINE
WRITER CHRIS CLAREMONT committed these two sentences to the page in 1982, and in doing so cemented Wolverine’s place as a geek icon long before Hugh Jackman turned him into a movie idol. Although this epigraph refers to the character’s lethal skill with his knuckle-knives, it could just as easily be applied to Han Solo shooting Greedo (first!), Dirty Harry roughing up Scorpio, or John Bender mouthing off to Principal Vernon. It’s why we love our antiheroes: They do what we wish we could do and say what we wish we could say. In fiction, if not in life, antiheroes offer a release for the frustration we feel from the bonds of polite society, and we tacitly accept that though they may not conform to our notions of civil justice or (in the case of Bender) polite discourse, their personal codes are no less “pure.” What Wolverine does is indeed not very nice—and yet there’s an important addendum implicit in the above: “But it needs to be done.”
Exercise in geekery: How many multisyllabic rhymes for “Wolverine” can you find? Extra credit for a complete sonnet.
“THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE.”
—HIGHLANDER
IN THE DAYS WHEN VIDEO GAMES weren’t much more than a bunch of squares shooting at other squares, Highlander vicariously offered us the ultimate concept in live-action roleplaying. The movie and TV series characters—most of them too shallow to be anything but archetypes or caricatures—satisfied a visceral urge in all of us, an unfulfilled yearning for the romanticized rugged individualism of earlier days. Thus these rampantly macho, stubbornly primitive warriors never sought to band together or forge their own society, nor did they impact society in any of the thousand ways that the presence of a separate subspecies of humanity should have affected the world, realistically speaking. No, they stuck to swords even into the age of Glocks and persisted in honoring their frankly nonsensical rules—e.g., no killing on holy ground—simply because to do otherwise would break character. In the end, it didn’t have to make sense and wouldn’t have been half as much fun if it had. Who doesn’t secretly yearn to be able to swing a real sword, whether during a combat reenactment at the Society for Creative Anachronism or just during a bad day at work?
A friend of a friend of ours reportedly liked to utter another Highlander quote midcoitus: “What you feel is the quickening.” This is geekery at its creepiest. Don’t do it.
“TAKE YOUR STINKING PAWS OFF ME,
YOU DAMN DIRTY APE.”
—TAYLOR, PLANET OF THE APES
IMAGINE FOR A MOMENT that you’re Colonel George Taylor. You’ve woken from the two-thousand-year nap of a one-way space trip—only to find that, of all the planets in the universe where you could possibly have landed, you happen to be on the one where talking, intelligent apes like to hunt human beings like you for sport. But it doesn’t stop there. In rapid succession you’re shot in the throat, caged, beaten, and burned. You’re forced to mate in front of an audience like an animal and threatened with emasculation. You see your fellow astronaut stuffed and mounted in a museum; you’re whipped, dragged by horses, and pelted with fruit. Now, in the final indignity, you’re captured in a net and are being jeered and clawed at by a gathered crowd of simians. Let’s face it. It’s been a bad couple of weeks. After all that, what would you say? Yep. Standing up for yourself feels good, doesn’t it?
“A STRANGE GAME. THE ONLY WINNING
MOVE IS NOT TO PLAY.”
—JOSHUA, WAR GAMES
THERE IS A WORD, a concept, in Zen Buddhism that doesn’t quite translate perfectly into the English language: Mu. Mu is the response given by a Zen monk to a question that cannot be meaningfully answered. It suggests that the question’s premises are not real, that there is a state of emptiness that lies beyond yes and no, that the asker should unask the question—indeed, that anyone who would ask such a question in the first place might do well to question his entire perspective on life. Though the word was never uttered in 1984’s seminal teen-computer-hacker-political-thriller War Games, the idea lies at the heart of the conflict that fuels the movie: a new Pentagon supercomputer that controls the nation’s nuclear launch codes is caught up in a relentless war-game simulation trying to answer the question, “How can the United States win a nuclear war?” We all know it’s a flawed question—the whole point of the Cold War arms-race theory of “mutual assured destruction” was that, in a world of opposing superpowers, the sheer volume of weaponry is meant to deter the use of any nukes at all. But back in 1984, when computer networks were new and exotic, it seemed entirely reasonable to worry that an artificial intelligence might start firing missiles based on the inhuman outcome of an algorithm. Of course, the computer finally found its Zen. What about you—can you tell when it’s time to remove yourself from a defective game board?
The first several years of Matthew Broderick’s career were all about nuclear paranoia: first War Games, then Project X (1987), wherein laboratory chimps suffered inhumane radiation testing.
V.
BILLIONS
AND BILLIONS
(WISDOM ABOUT THE UNIVERSE)
“ALL THESE WORLDS ARE
YOURS, EXCEPT
EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO
LANDING THERE.”
—ARTHUR C. CLARKE, 2010: ODYSSEY TWO
“A STARSHIP CAPTAIN’S
MOST SOLEMN OATH IS
THAT HE WILL GIVE HIS LIFE,
EVEN HIS ENTIRE CREW,
RATHER THAN VIOLATE THE
PRIME DIRECTIVE.”
—JAMES T. KIRK, STAR TREK, “THE OMEGA GLORY”
THE EARTH WON’T ALWAYS BE the only place where humankind rests its collective head. Assuming we don’t destroy ourselves first, we’ll one day find that our grasp extends upward and outward, to places about which only the geek has daydreamed. Considering how well we’ve managed this blue orb in our 5,000 years or so of recorded history, Arthur C. Clarke’s warning (delivered through the entities that control his mysterious monoliths) about not treading on places that may contain life appears well founded. See, Europa is a special place. No other body in our solar system has a better chance of containing life than that ice-covered moon of Jupiter. Through wit, intelligence, and innovation we’ve earned the right to tread on other celestial bodies … but have we earned the right to interfere with life not of this Earth? With life only just beginning its own journey down the evolutionary path? Given history, it’s hard to answer in the affirmative. Gene Roddenberry took this same concept and extended it far beyond Europa to cover the entire galaxy; the Prime Directive of Star Trek is that Starfleet officers must not interfere with the natural development of less technologically advanced alien species. And though Captain Kirk did somersaults around that directive as often as he followed it, his success at doing so seems to be the exception that proves the rule.
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