Manohla Dargis: We're All Geeks Here

MANOHLA DARGIS weighs in in the New York Times today with a lively, lovely, and surprisingly touching essay from last weekend's San Diego Comicon. It's a strange time for those who create and those who consume -- with blurry boundaries and allegiances, and constantly shifting frames of reference. We may disagree on things from time to time, but there's no doubt that something important is happening in the video arts -- and maybe the relationship between comic artist and fan is the leading edge of that. I'm not sure. I just know that reading this article I felt like it was lapping at the shores of something very new in the artist/audience relationship:

The audiences are openly fawning, but you never lose the sense that they could turn against the presenters. The beast is happy as long as it’s fed, but woe to those who don’t feed it.

Such is the nature of fandom, which demands as much as it receives. That seems especially true of comic book fans, who appear to enjoy a more intimate relationship with producers than most pop-culture consumers. Part of this may be rooted in the very nature of the comic book, which is accessible even to young buyers. Comic books fit nicely in your hand, they’re relatively cheap and humbly constructed: just three staples and paper. Just as important — unlike movies, which until the introduction of digital technologies were almost entirely out of reach for most people — comic books are also something that anybody with a pencil and a slip of paper can create. Their seeming modesty is seductive.

At the same time, as Marshall McLuhan pointed out, the elliptical form of the comic book — which forces you to make cognitive leaps from panel to panel, jumping across that stretch of white called the gutter — means you have to fill in more blanks than someone watching a mainstream movie...The wild-eyed, worn-out Comic-Con fans fiercely clutching a cardboard “300” shield in one hand and a plastic bag in the other may not have been thinking about aesthetics and intellectual pursuits. But they were actively engaged in the creation of culture.

So much is changing, so fast, that it's almost painful to try and take a quieter, longer-viewed step back look at the state of fandom and creation today. What I think I loved about Dargis' piece is that it's informed by the truth of our times. She relates earlier in the article her engagement with the underground comix of her youth, when her family ran a bookstore. But the transition that happened in the past -- the "growing up" and "setting aside" of that culture as you aged -- it's not happening anymore. And as much as dumb superhero movies with simple hero narratives does nothing to grow our collective imagination -- I still find myself, when confronted with the old geek or nerd stereotype, feeling like it's a relic of another area. The geeks are not disconnected, they are not marginalized, they have, in fact, won. And Dargis says as much. Again...in a lovely, thoughtful way:

The cliché about fans being losers with no social skills, no friends and no clue is essential to its myths, marketing and even its most loyal readers. In the last few decades the emergence of a geek elite has helped legitimize this outsider culture and helped bring legions of 97-pound weaklings into the sightlines of the industrial entertainment complex. In some respects America is now a country of freaks and geeks, self-professed outsiders who imagine themselves somehow different from the herd, perhaps because they are Americans — radical individuals who are united if only by their increasingly narrow interests and obsessions.

This kind of atomization of the culture has its problems, as we know deep in our bones. Yet for all my worries that we are turning into a nation of iPod people, that’s only part of the big, postmodern, late-capitalism picture. Despite all the plastic and dissembling, events like Comic-Con represent something genuine and true and, yes, powerful about how people live in the modern world. Every day we wake up to navigate through a faceless, inhuman, Made-in-China existence. Some of us escape through literature, some of us burrow deep into movies. And some of us find sweet relief in what, to the outside world, looks entirely disposable, useless and — here’s that word again — childish. They find happiness in Hot Wheels, wonderment in Wonder Woman. Superman teaches them how to fly, and they do.