Sometimes I wonder how the world would be different if 1984’s Revenge of the Nerds had never been made.
Among cinephiles, it’s an interesting exercise to wonder what the world would be like if a given film didn’t exist. Without the one-two punch of Jaws and Star Wars, would some other directors have given birth to the modern blockbuster model? How much of an impact did The Day After really have on turning Americans against a hyper-aggressive Cold War posture? Film is a powerful medium, and one of its unique abilities is to effectively crystallize ideas that are floating around the collective consciousness and make them stick. Over the years, people heard isolated stories about Orca whales attacking their trainers, but Blackfish put these stories into context and turned large numbers of people against Sea World. Scientology had weathered decades of bad press, but Going Clear brought a lot of the horror stories to the forefront.
There’s a dark side to this power, too. Sometimes films combine a lot of bad ideas and manichean slander into a compelling narrative, become popular, and set those ideas in stone in the popular imagination. 1982’s First Blood, for instance, has done substantial harm to the cause of American peacemaking. The American war in Vietnam was almost genocidal in scale, killing more than 1/5 of Vietnam’s population and dropping more megatonnage on Indochina than had been dropped in the rest of human history combined. Part of why America had to end this slaughter, besides the heroism of the Vietnamese people, was disobedience by American GIs and widespread resistance at home.
However, when a country fails to conquer its enemy, a standard right-wing trope is to rehabilitate the struggle and blame the failure on leftist saboteurs and sundry domestic untermenschen. This was the case with the American aggression against Vietnam in the Reagan ’80s, and the background for First Blood. Animated by this reactionary brew, the first Rambo outing is singlehandedly responsible for popularizing the image of the spat-upon GI–of which there were zero reported cases before the film’s release. That idea alone combined countless chauvinistic myths of liberal treachery, creating an indelible image that would be of service to American nationalists for decades to come. The Persian Gulf War, which began a decades-long campaign of misery for the Iraqi people, was hailed for “exorcising the ghosts of Vietnam.” When American began a full-scale war against Iraq in 2003, anti-war opposition was piously framed in terms of respect for the military and love of The Troops. From Barack Obama to Chris Kyle, warmongers of all stripes have tapped into the visceral power of an image that First Blood is almost solely responsible for popularizing.
As the birth of John Rambo and the “spat-on GI” meme, First Blood is an obvious offender. Still, for my money, I wonder what culture and labor would be like if the college comedy Revenge of the Nerds didn’t exist. Nerds is the story of a group of, well, nerds, who go to college and start a fraternity against a reigning group of athlete alphas (literally the Alpha-Betas). However, for the ostensible heroes, the nerds are kind of creepy pieces of shit [Trigger warning: talking about the plot of Revenge of the Nerds, here]. Hijinks against the jocks include surveilling sorority sisters and distributing stolen nude photos. Also, the main character definitely rapes the head jock’s girlfriend. Sure, they’re nice to the black fraternity and they kick down some weed, but those are some big marks in the “against” category.
Naturally, there were bigger social forces at play in the mid-’80s. Neoliberalism was staging a counter-revolution against the radical movements of the 1960s. A crucial component of this reaction was how substantive, material positions were divorced from politics. One example is the New Age movement, which borrowed the revolutionary enthusiasm and consciousness, hollowed it out, and made it about apolitical self-empowerment. Billions of dollars a day are spent by advertisers and corporations to convince people that who they are is a set of easily swapped brand markers and consumer choices.
With this set of material circumstances shaping society, it stands to reason that whether or not someone is “good” boils down to whether or not they have aligned themselves with the right surface signifiers. Thus, nerds are good because jocks are bad, because jocks exercise and are thuggish misogynists who don’t respect women. By definition, then, nerds are good and do respect women, even if they steal photos of naked women without their consent and commit the occasional rape.
These are often the sorts of non-defenses offered when tech culture, the ivory tower of nerddom, comes under attack. In the 2010s, tech has come under attack for its insularity and its entrenched sexism–its “bro-eyness,” to borrow a term that’s been unfortunately abused. Studies support the fact that women are underrepresented in tech work. And despite all the prattle about a meritocracy, studies show that most employers value the “personality” of an applicant the most, followed by “cultural alignment,” with skills a distant third. If most of a company’s employees are young men in STEM, then “cultural alignment” dictates that prospective hires had better like Family Guy and rape jokes. In response to this, critics have called out “brogrammers” and Silicon Valley’s “disturbing frat culture” for its entrenched exclusionary prejudices.
And in response, one of the reflexes for Silicon Valley’s defenders has been to adduce Nerds’ status as The Good Guys. Entrepreneur Mark Andreesen, one of the most powerful men in tech and possibly the world, said it best:
https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/515753307856310272
Nerddom’s siege mentality, black-and-white boundaries, and sense of virtue has been a major ingredient of what David Futrelle calls “the new misogyny.” Pick-up artists, for instance, are quick to defend their shady set of manipulation skills by saying it’s a self-esteem booster for insecure men. The reality, though, involves a lot of lying, insults, touching, and the tactical use of pressure and threats of social disapproval in order to get sex. “Nice guys,” Gamergaters, and the creeps behind “the Fappening” all owe a little something to the meme that Revenge of the Nerds popularized.
And it’s not just sexists who make the category error of lumping people into immutable “good” and “bad” categories. Critique drift and the economics of writing on the internet led to several years of mostly well-meaning thinkpieces making the same mistake. A 2014 Vice article is a perfect example. Offering “An anatomy of MRAs,” the piece recapitulates the popular caricature of a misogynist through broad surface strokes: “Yeah, he has a fedora, [and] He doesn’t have a lot of followers on Twitter,” etc. We all loved Fedoras of OKCupid, but regressive attitudes don’t have anything to do with popularity or headgear, and it’s dangerous to act otherwise.
Since 1984, nerd culture has become simultaneously, and paradoxically, both exponentially more dominant and more defensive. As tech writer Evgeny Morozov puts it, Silicon Valley is the “Teflon Industry,” at once uniquely powerful, strident, and untouchable. Even as it reshapes the economic and social fabric of most human lives, the tech industry is heralded in utopian terms.
However much people like president Obama discuss its unique transformative power, though, tech culture is overwhelmingly bourgeois, white, male, and politically liberaltarian. These are as important to contemporary nerd culture as the constellation of surface signifiers. How much of tech culture’s untouchability has to do with nerddom’s underdog narrative? If there’s one thing that’s easier to sell than flashy tech baubles, it’s a “weakling makes good” story.
The idea that nerds are inherently good by virtue of not exercising is largely informed by one film from 1984. It’s not the only source for this idea, any more than Rambo invented the myth of liberal subversion. But it definitely popularized it in a way nothing else did. Reactionary attitudes are hard enough to get rid of; unfortunately, sometimes a single movie makes it even harder.
Action Park 