The THING of the Decade
As Hardison said, "Age of the geek, baby!" As defeatist (and boring) as that last post sounded, the great consolation of the Oy’s, for me and people like me, was – and I mean this in a healthful, life-affirming way – our ruthless and total conquest of the culture. Science fiction, fantasy, superheroes, vampires, zombies and werewolves are the mainstream now. We own your movie theaters, your TV screens, your bestseller lists, even your highfalutin’ literary awards. Even what’s left of the dread New York Literary Establishment has largely succumbed. The remaining anti-fantasm holdouts no longer have the power to infuriate; they are not even tiresome any more because there aren’t enough of them to tire one. On the very rare occasions when one encounters a supposedly serious critic condemning fantastic fiction out of hand, it’s like discovering an eight-track-tape player in a flea market: you marvel that it might still work, but it’s tempered by realizing that it couldn’t play anything that matters to you these days.
Tom Disch declared victory back in 1998, but it’s worth seeing just how total geek culture’s victory has been. A priori, you would expect the "football" and "pickup truck" circles to be pretty distant from the archaic fantasy one on your Venn Diagram o’ American Subcultures. But in this decade we saw both: a season in which the NFL used a Lord of the Rings theme in its promotional spots for the playoffs, and a pickup-truck commercial set in the World of Warcraft. These were major corporations trying to make football and trucks seem cool to the masses – by associating them with fantasy movies and games.
The president reads Spider-Man. Out of the need to represent all the people, he hasn’t made public his views on "One More Day."
In calling the New Geek Mainstream "The THING of the Decade," I’m implicitly saying it’s more central to understanding America in the Oy’s than the GWOT or the bubble-and-bust or The Google, the rise of New Media and all the rest. I’ve conceived a marvelous proof of this assertion, but I have to run errands, so there’s no time.
Comment by dhex —
January 2, 2010 @ 2:43 pm
“In calling the New Geek Mainstream “The THING of the Decade,” I’m implicitly saying it’s more central to understanding America in the Oy’s than the GWOT or the bubble-and-bust or The Google, the rise of New Media and all the rest.”
so is the rise of the “culture of fear”* a result or an explanation of the mainstreaming of sci fi and fantasy? superstates and superheroes and all that jazz.
* perhaps a better term is “this decade’s permutation of the culture of fear”.
Comment by Randolph —
January 2, 2010 @ 3:11 pm
Dreaming about the future is the hope of the future, I suppose.
Certainly wasn’t what our leaders did.
Trackback by Attentiondeficitdisorderly Too Flat —
January 2, 2010 @ 8:48 pm
Carnival of Robot 6…
* It’s a big big day at Robot 6, aka the blog that pays me, because it’s our 1st anniversary. So both at the blog’s page and on the main page of Comic Book Resources you can find tons and……
Comment by Jim Kakalios —
January 3, 2010 @ 4:47 pm
Back in September the University of Minnesota asked me to speak at the new student Convocation, welcoming 7000 freshman and giving them advice on how to succeed in college and life. Here is what I came up with:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72XAXiyXf-k
Needless to say, Jim, I agree with your assessment of the Decade.
Face Front, True Believers!
Comment by Lars Konzack —
January 4, 2010 @ 6:30 am
Back in 2006 I wrote an article for a peer-review conference in Preston, England. It was titled “Geek Culture: The 3rd Counter-Culture”.
See:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/270364/Geek-Culture-The-3rd-CounterCulture
Comment by Jeet Heer —
January 4, 2010 @ 9:06 pm
I don’t know how new this is … Ronald Reagan also read Spider-man (the comic strip iteration, not the comic book).
Pingback by Evergreen Sportsblogging § Unqualified Offerings —
January 10, 2010 @ 3:14 pm
[...] and gets an agent, we call it an eligibility scandal. That’s absurd. I believe in the larger Triumph of Geek Culture, but the collegiate status quo is simply Revenge of the Nerds: petty, resentful and, in practical [...]