Wednesday, October 29, 2003

GEEKS LIKE ME: A few nights ago, when Jen and I went out for our anniversary dinner (and, like, wow on that front), we got to talking about growing up and trying to fit in socially, and I mentioned my best friend Craig from high school, with whom I was very close but who also ran with a D&D-heavy crowd that I wasn't as fond of.

But the thing was, while there were D&D geeks back then, and computer geeks, and math & science geeks, there weren't rammaging hordes of pop culture geeks yet. Heck, I wasn't even one yet. There wasn't a geek subculture in which I really fit in.

(High school for me was 1986-90, for those keeping track.)

Why was this? How did it happen that now, there are these masses of pop culture geeks dominating the internet and print media where we did not exist before?

After thinking about it some, let me sketch out three general trends which converged in the early 1990s to make this kind of geekery possible -- something that has led many of you, I figure, to sites like this. Subject to revision, here goes:

1. The technology was ready. Start with cable television and VCRs, the tools that allowed people to rewatch programming and movies over and over again. Until you could watch Top Gun five times a weekend thanks to TBS, you couldn't get past just watching it for story and, while re-watching it for the nth time, start to notice its blatantly homoerotic subtext.

And then Usenet bulletin boards came, and then the Internet, and soon people had a place to share these thoughts, and to unload all the knowledge of The Brady Bunch that years of syndication created. It provided a space where we knew we were not alone. But just as importantly . . .

2. There was a new popular culture worth discussing. And on this, two shows more than any other, which both emerged at around the same moment, lent themselves to the kind of obsessive re-viewing and analysis that is the hallmark of pop culture geekery: The Simpsons and Twin Peaks.

Both shows rewarded detailed re-watching, lending themselves to discussions of minor plot points and obscure characters. And The Simpsons, more than any show before or since, itself was a recycler and interpreter of popular culture, inspiring meta-discussions of formula and stock characters in a way that shows like SNL which mostly stayed at the level of parody.

Moonlighting, too, was often very good at calling attention to its own conventions and spoofing them, but after Maddie got pregnant, it all went to shit.

A few smaller thoughts here on the culture itself: one, that the alternative music explosion -- that is, before we started to have to put quotes around the word "alternative", gave our generation music over which we felt some sense of ownership; two, but related, that the John Hughes films, in catering to our generation growing up, played a strong role in both making us feel part of the popular culture and in providing a common text for discussion.

Also: I think that Kevin Smith, and to a lesser extent Quentin Tarantino, may have had something to do with it, at least in terms of creating a whole "cultural insider"/outsider dynamic where if you were "in", you got the jokes, etc.

And finally on this point: MTV's Remote Control and Trivial Pursuit had something to do with it. Maybe, a lot.

3. Geekery gained legitimacy. In February 1990, Entertainment Weekly debuted. Pop culture snark had a voice. Also, see Prof. Robert Thompson, the man who gave it academic legitimacy.

(There's more to fill in here, I know, but EW's at the center of it, I think.)

There is a counter argument: Maybe pop culture geekery existed all along (see, e.g., Star Trek geeks), and my generation just needed to get old enough to gain the critical distance from the culture to stop merely being consumers and to start being able to focus on both the bigger picture and the details.

But pop culture geekdom isn't just obsessive detail analysis. It's more -- and I know some will scoff at the term -- meta. It's big picture, What Makes This A 'Very Special Episode'/Why Does Ted McGinley Ruin Shows type stuff, as well as just being a mood, a way of watching tv/movies that I don't think really existed before the early 1990s.

Or maybe it did. And maybe I've got this all wrong, or everything I just said is completely pointless, or obvious, or both. How did you become a pop culture geek?

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