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Thursday, Jul 9, 2009
Geeks and nerds produced the art and science that define the modern age. But now that everybody's climbing on the dork bandwagon, where's the rage and resentment that fueled their creativity going to come from?
Oct 29, 2003 | At the end of the 1984 classic "Revenge of the Nerds," Louis Skolnick (Robert Carradine) mistakenly ends up with the beautiful temptress of Pi Delta Pi. Stunned by his sexual resourcefulness, she purrs, "Are all nerds as good as you?"
"All jocks think about is sports," he replies. "All nerds think about is sex."
And with that clarion call, dorks all over America began to throw off the shackles that had socially bound them since kindergarten and started to see themselves in a different light. They began to take a little pride in their TRS-80 computers; they banded together to escape dungeons and fight dragons; they even took dodge ball a little less seriously.
It has been a slow climb, but after nearly 20 years, the American dork finds himself sitting atop the cultural heap of history, finally king of the mountain. Think he looks weird? Think his glasses are stupid? The new dork doesn't care -- he prides himself on it.
The bust of the dot-com revolution is misread as a repudiation of technology and the eggheads that came with it. "The end of the nerd as a crossover hit," proclaimed the New York Times, but the paper of record was being hasty and myopic. The true geeks that hammered out code and designed pages for these companies were the first hired and the last fired, and most of them have found new work, with or without a Foosball table in the lobby. The days of overnight millions are gone, but the American love affair with dorks is set in concrete.
But with this ascent to cultural supremacy may come a price. If dorks are no longer despised, from where will they gain the motivation to create the masterpieces of art and science and technology that define modern life?
It's important to define what I truly mean by "dork," just so he or she doesn't get casually lumped in with "losers," "burnouts" and "lone psychopath bullies." To me, the dork is somebody who didn't fit in at school and who therefore sought consolation in a particular field -- computers, "Star Trek," theater, heavy metal, medieval war reenactments, fantasy, sports trivia, even isolation sports like cross-country and ice skating. I'd also include the Anne Rice obsessed (goths), the car enthusiasts (gearheads), and the seemingly homosexual (gaywads).
Early American poet William Cullen Bryant remarked that "difficulty is the harsh nurse of greatness," which is the first lesson most dorks learned soon after they started realizing everyone else in the world was in on some secret that they weren't. Some young dorks generated their quirks from several sources: weird parenting, odd siblings, books around the house -- but most fledgling nerds rose from something much more ethereal. Early on, they were just pegged somehow -- they might have been weaker, they might have looked a little different, they had glasses, they sucked at sports -- but on that day a pheromone was sent forth, a chemical lingering in the social air, perceived by both the dorks and the crowd around them, and it pitched the afflicted into a netherworld that used to take decades (or a lifetime) to undo.
That dynamic is changing. These days, it's tough to find anybody who doesn't think they're a dork. Dork sensibility and "geek chic" have become so prevalent that even the least dorky have glommed on to the title -- not just because the digital revolution made heroes out of nerds everywhere, but because adopting the "nerd" label gives a certain street cred to everyone's early child development. Even if most of it is revisionist history.
Alicia Silverstone: "I'm this weird, dorky girl." Freddie Prinze Jr.: "I was a dork in high school. I barely even got to go to the prom." Mena Suvari, Billy Crudup: "I was a dork." Almost every cheerleader, sorority girl, investment banker, novelist, model or movie star ever interviewed hastens to speak the words. This tends to piss off anyone who actually had their locker defaced, or finally went with their 16th choice to the prom, or used up cases of benzoyl peroxide every week in ninth grade, but it's a testament to the lasting power and redemption of geekery that everyone claims such fervent membership.
