Geek Heresy

I self identify as a geek.

Obviously. People who don't think of themselves as geeks don't maintain a blog about a bunch of cartoons and the writings of a particular science fiction writer.

We're generally a pretty ecumenical lot, we geeks, being a loose assembly of fans of media outside the mainstream. We understand what it's like to be scorned and everyone is welcome under our big tent, role-players, cosplayers, furries; whatever weird thing you're into, your fellow geeks might not understand it, but we are, by and large cool with it. Credit (or blame) the geek social fallacies if you like, but there are few cardinal sins in geek culture.

But I'm going to commit one today.

What can I say that will get me excommunicated from the Church of Geek?

To digress for a moment, you may or may not like Aaron Sorkin, but he's generally considered a very good writer, even by people who don't share his opinions. He wrote A Few Good Men and won about a zillion Emmy awards for The West Wing, so by any objective measure, he really is a good writer.

Many genre fans feel the same about Joss Whedon, 

but Joss Whedon is not a good writer.

Oh, he can be, mind you. I still think Buffy Seasons 2 and 3 are some of the best genre TV ever produced. But he doesn't write like that any more. And sometimes I think, in light of absolutely everything that came after that, that those seasons were a fluke, an aberration, not representative of what we could expect from him.

I don't think that's true, though. I think there are two explanations.

Either, he's just pandering to the lowest common denominator or he's just fucking lazy.

...

Take a look at Avengers trailer. It's awesome...and it's everything that's wrong with geek culture.

 Oh, hey, Tony, you get to make a clever remark AND defy an authority figure? If there were a girl there you could touch, it would be the geek trifecta! 

The whole thing is just a series of softballs pitched at Stark.

Stark: And you, big fella, have managed to piss off [all of The Avengers]
Loki: That was the plan-
Stark: (faster and louder) Not a great plan.

-

Loki: I have an army-
Stark: (faster and louder) We have a Hulk.

It's like watching Mark McGwire hit home runs off a pitching machine. Did you see that?!  He knocked it out of the park! And he did it again!! Oh, and...again. This machine...isn't really much of a challenge, is it?

Years ago, I was watching some daytime TV with my friend Dave. It was some trashy Jerry Springer show, and the woman on stage yelled something and the audience started clapping and then Dave started clapping too, and said "Oh yeah! You raised your voice! All right!"

And that's all that I think of when I see this bullshit.

To return to Aaron Sorkin, he's probably even more liberal than I am (and that's pretty liberal), but at least he eschewed the use of straw men. His viewpoint certainly informed his work on the West Wing, but when writing lines for people who held opinions with he did not agree, he didn't make them stupid. Sure, he gave the better lines to his viewpoint characters, but it came across as a conflict between a smart person and a smarter one.

I don't have a problem with smart and smarter. I have a problem with "stupid"  and "average" pretending to be smart and smarter.

But, it's sure easier to write. Most writers are not, in fact, super intelligent.  So, like Thorton Melon told us in Back to School, "If you want to look thin, you hang out with fat people."

But, look at Loki in that clip. I don't think he could be a shift manager at a McDonald's. He's rasping his barely coherent threats and Stark is batting them back, as anyone over twelve could. And I think that's the core of Whedon's appeal. The people in the audience are saying, "Fuck, yeah! That's what I'd tell 'im!"

And that's fine. Everybody loves a popcorn movie.  I could let it go without bitching about it, if not for Downey's smirk. I guess we're supposed to believe that his lines are clever.

People are, generally,  good at their job or they don't keep it for long.

Bad guys are good at their job too. I mean, Jesus, which is more frightening, a villain who is smarter than you are, or one who's a buffoon you handily best in an exchange of quips taken from back cover of The Beginner's Dictionary of Clichéd banter, First Printing?

This is what ruined everything about Whedon's work after 1999. The idiotic smugness that seems to suggest that minimal competence is actually transcendent brilliance because every else around you is even dumber.

Oh, hello. I didn't see you there.

I want to watch people I like overcoming obstacles. I don't want to watch people I dislike overcoming mildly strenuous situations, while smirking like backwards-cap-wearing douchebags from a Mountin Dew commercial.