Revenge of the Nerds: Redux

One of the most resonant moments of my childhood hit me square in the self-image. My friend and I were taking turns banging our locker door into our heads, giggling all the way (we were freshmen). A girl from our homeroom, Julie, looked on in disgust, then shook her head and muttered “You two are such nerds.”
We stopped banging our heads and stared at each other. Julie’s comment hurt more than the grated metal door crashing into our craniums; the door bounced back, but her words stuck. I think she knew we took it badly, because she offered a quick caveat before the bell rang and we all hurried off to class. But you never remember the apology; you only remember the wound.
Little did my friend and I know in that moment of condemnation that the groundwork had already been laid for when being a nerd would be not a mark of shame but a badge of honor. “Revenge of the Nerds” (soon enough followed by 2-4) was in its theatrical release. Bill Gates’s computer operating system was quickly becoming the lingua franca of the new global economy. Oscar-caliber actors such as Robert Downey Jr. and Halle Berry were on their way to being fitted for spandex body-suits and masks. Little did we know nerds were already taking over the world.
In his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz declares the 1970s “the dawn of the Nerd Age,” which, judging from the novel’s cultural reference points and his age (b. 1968), makes him ONE OF US. He is, I imagine, salivating over the impending theatrical release of “The Watchmen” and wondering whether Marvel Entertainment Group is going to screw up The Avengers. He is, I imagine, trying to contain his look of smugness when late-to-the-party fanboys go on incessantly about how awesome “The Dark Knight” is on Blueray. I imagine him doing these things because nerdiness loves company; for people who grew up ostracized from the COOL KIDS, solidarity is almost as awesome as the new Star Trek trailer.
It strikes me, however, that many among the nerd elite emerged from their ostracism with some anger issues. A mere forty pages into Diaz’s novel (which I inherited from my mother-in-law after her women’s book club unanimously condemned it as awful) I’m struck by the violence of the language and the animalistic descriptions of female characters by male characters. I’m not saying I don’t like the book; I’m saying I can understand why my mother-in-law declined to endorse it.
I’m reminded by Diaz of Quentin Tarantino, whose films are similarly sensational in their crassness and violence, whose depictions of women in films such as “Kill Bill 1 & 2″ are empowering only under a surface that is apparently exploitative. There’s a hyper-reality that runs through the creations of these neo-nerd savants: Women are not just pin-up girls; they’re pin-up girls with brains, guns and mad ninja skills. (Some of them are robots.) Men aren’t just misanthropes, they’re violent misanthropes with a charming misogyny streak. They cuss and spit and don’t shave, and they’re celebrated for it.
I’m likewise reminded, oddly enough, of Zach Braff, whose films (particularly “The Last Kiss”) and television show Scrubs assign a celebratory nostalgia to juvenile humor, from imagining two girls kissing to taking turns smashing heads into locker doors; and of Tina Fey, a sex symbol unlikely in earlier epochs when glasses were a sign of weakness and snarky wit was a defense mechanism rather than a genetic marker for homo superior. You can count on several elements of the new comedic nerd chic, among them quirkiness bordering on absurdity; poignancy at the far end of silliness; sex and fart jokes delivered with a sentimental wink. Adolescence is being relived by the nerd elite, from its existential details to its lingering effects. Trust me when I tell you that lifelong nerds find vindication in this reconstruction of our (I mean their) narrative, where the center of gravity shifts so that the formerly ostracized become the lead actors and actresses, the heroes on the hero’s journey.
Everybody loves a good table-turning, right? When the tables are turned, however, what becomes of the major players of the past? Hyper-realized secondary characters – perfectly amalgamized into some idealized mix of beauty and power, or perfectly juxtaposed between physical perfection and evident moral depravity, or perfectly reconceived so that the nerd’s nemesis is not stud but beast – are no longer true women and men. They are dehumanized, reduced to “lives” that are, according to the new narrators, nameless and brief. The nerds who refashion our universe in these ways are dehumanized as well: no longer a person among people, our hero is now a caricature of him- or herself, a force to be reckoned with. It’s no surprise to me that Diaz prefaces his whole novel with a quote from the Destroyer of Worlds off the pages of The Fantastic Four: “Of what import are brief, nameless lives…to Galactus??”
Nerds (and I count myself among them) should take a cue not from Galactus but from Star Wars. The original trilogy, launched in Diaz’s dawn of the Nerd Age, was slated to end with The Revenge of the Jedi until some bright mind thought that revenge is a behavior befitting a Sith lord, not a noble jedi. Hence the more satisfying yet still apocalyptic Return of the Jedi, and the greater poignancy of the later trilogy’s bridge-building finale, Revenge of the Sith.
Revenge is not a behavior appropriate to the Nerd Age or any age. A more appropriate behavior is reconciliation, the kind modeled for us when ostracized Africans took over governing South Africa from Dutch Whites, and Bishop Desmond Tutu convened the Truth and Reconciliation Committee to air and resolve the pains of Apartheid. Tutu’s South Africa was not composed of Whites and Blacks and various Others; it was composed of South Africans. He took his cue from the apostle Paul, for whom there is “neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).
This kind of solidarity, we learn from the apostle Paul and the witness of South Africa, is infinitely more awesome than the new Star Trek. We learn through the lens of solidarity that in truth everyone is a geek about something, whether dungeons and dragons or sports and fitness or Calvin and Luther, and that we can come to appreciate the differences between us when we view ourselves communally, as distinct parts of a greater whole. If my friend and I, and the girl who took our nerdiness to task, had paid attention, we might have learned this lesson in time to usher in a kinder, gentler Nerd Age, because a message of solidarity serves as the final word for 1985′s “The Breakfast Club”: “Each one of us is a brain…and an athlete…and a basket case…a princess…and a criminal.”
In other words, each of us is a nerd, and a God of grace loves us all.