The Trouble With Geeks
Titanic, a contrabulous fabtraption of a film that towered and tottered with huge follies and foibles, was redeemed by one, simple fact: it was a story about what’s true in us human beings. It took us as whole, integral persons. And it did so perhaps only as a convention of plot derived from historical necessity, a point made all the more poignant by implied and explicit content of Avatar. From the looks of it, two films couldn’t be more different. Titanic was about a love that could only be understood personally and historically, a love that transcended real human time and a real human being, even while residing and abiding completely within it and within her. Avatar looks to be a story about a trans-species love that can only be understood impersonally and ahistorically,* a love of the future (like that in Wall-E) which depends completely on a human perspective even while perversely alienating us from it in the extreme. There is something uncanny, and not in a good way, about a CGI-driven love story about a non-human alien and someone genetically engineered halfway out of their humanity by the government. And the trouble with geeks is that a fair number of them are likely to be so geeked out about the vast possibilities of scientific fantasy that their ability to recognize an uncanny valley when they see one is ruthlessly repressed. The trouble with geeks is that for them, a human love story isn’t cool enough — is simply boring.
*plus gigantic explosions.
I would say that part of it is not just that geeks are bored by love but that they have internalized an idea of intermediated love. The dime-store way of putting this would be to say that the Internet has conditioned them to see love, or the promise of it, anyway, as something that they can access only through the use of an electronic self— they see themselves as having little real world value but great virtual value, and so the only part of them that they see as being worthy of loving is the part which is least like them. Even if that’s too crass, I think there is in the heart of geekdom a deep, unhappy relationship with the real self and the real life it leads. It’s cliche, but sci-fi is escapism that escapes the furthest.
I remember when the original Incredible Hulk movie came out, and I was reading people saying how real and cool the CGI looked, and it was one of those moments when I really felt like I must have been watching some other movie from everyone else. I laughed out loud the moment I saw him, he looked so fake and artificial. There hasn’t been a movie since where I didn’t feel that way, but with all the hype around the new tech in use for Avatar, I held out hope. One shot of that blue elongated tabby and that dream was pretty well dashed.
Incidentally, and strangely, the movie that I feel has had the most realistic, satisfying and believable CGI is the 16-year old Jurassic Park.
— Freddie · Aug 21, 03:16 PM · #
Yeah, but the trailer looks really cool.
(Also, in b4 Romeo and Juliet comparisons.)
— PEG · Aug 21, 03:31 PM · #
It’s true, those dinos really did suspend disbelief. It helped to have Attenborough gawking away. Have you come across Eva Illouz’s “Cold Intimacies”? Check out the last chapter/lecture, “Romantic Webs.”
— James · Aug 21, 03:39 PM · #
“Titanic … was redeemed by one, simple fact: it was a story about what’s true in us human beings. It took us as whole, integral persons.”
It was not, and it did not. That is the last thing Titanic was or did.
— SDG · Aug 21, 04:16 PM · #
My friends and I used to have discussions about the differences between geeks and nerds. I think we all agreed, that one of the prerequisites of being a geek is the willful disillusionment of humanity, as well as gravitating to activates and interests that specifically did not serve normal utilitarian purposes. The geeks I’ve known (many of my old friends) defiantly fall into what Freddie is mentioning about the virtue self (WOW and all that jazz).
One of my favorite CGI experiences was seeing the first Matrix movie. I was blown away at the beginning when Trinity freezes in mid-air and takes out those cops.
I’m really curious to see the 3D technology that Cameron has apparently invented will work with this. But, it could spell trouble having those funny looking blue people in your face for two plus hours.
— bens · Aug 21, 07:12 PM · #
So, your insight here is that among the legions of fanboys for whom the prospect of a movie based on a comic book is exciting rather than dreary, there is a poor appreciation of human emotion and how it plays out in fer-real people.
OK.
— Sanjay · Aug 21, 07:40 PM · #
Eh, part of the problem is when you do an animated film, for various practical reasons, you have to turn a lot of creative control over to the animators. And creatives who are both good storytellers and good visual artists are rare. And you need a system that makes sure that the animators dedicate X block of time and money to tuning an emotional beat perfectly, rather than adding more reflections and light sources to an impressive display of radiance, and that doesn’t happen by itself. Pixar gets the balance right. Disney Animation has at times. Square totally dropped the ball with the Final Fantasy movie – they were known for turning out story-driven games, but they built up a huge CG capability and then turned it over to guys who thought in 40 second cutscenes, and it essentially destroyed them.
— Senescent · Aug 22, 03:56 AM · #
Step 1: to convert this post into ‘The Trouble With Poulos’, bookend the body with quotation marks.
— Kristoffer V. Sargent · Aug 24, 05:25 PM · #
Time for calling JP trite but no time to send me coffee?
We’re back in the house, I guess my dreams of me and my wife sipping your fine brew sitting in the cockpit and looking at the glass-smooth water of early morning will have to wait till next year, unless I brink the boat down South this Fall. Not that I’d count on you to send your much bragged about grounds…
— Tony Comstock · Aug 25, 01:04 AM · #
“The trouble with geeks is that for them, a human love story isn’t cool enough — is simply boring.”
We make a hundred science fiction “geek” movies, many of which contain real actual human love stories, and you pick one of the few about not-human love to complain about? I don’t know how many geeks you know, but most of them think “love” is pretty cool, and they wish they had more of it, especially the human kind.
What you’re saying is akin to complaining that Buck Rogers is always about visiting other planets. “What, isn’t earth good enough for you?”
— Brian Moore · Aug 25, 02:46 PM · #
My first thought on seeing the Avatar trailer: I can smell elements of the original Star Trek’s Captain Pike Very Special two-part episode burbling away in the storyline pot . . . .
— mr tall · Aug 26, 04:26 AM · #
“…it was a story about what’s true in us human beings. It took us as whole, integral persons.”
I don’t dislike Titanic, and once the ship hits the iceberg a lot of the movie is terrific, but I have a hard time defending it as a film that gets at any important truths about human beings, or that treats us (or its own characters) as whole, integral persons. Virtually every character in the movie is a stereotype, the love story is a cliche, and the movie’s portrayal of the characters breaks down, with only a few exceptions, into “First-class passengers were third-class people, and vice-versa.”
Billy Zane’s character is a good example. A movie that had a nuanced and compassionate take on the frailties and virtues of human beings might have sympathized with a man who sees his fiance run off with a charming hobo. It might have portrayed Zane’s character as the wrong man for Winslet, or even as a bad person, but not a person without understandable motives. It might have shown him, under stress, showing his true colors and snapping. Instead, from the beginning through to the end, the film makes Zane a villain who is not only a terrible and abusive fiance (slapping Winslet around, treating her like a piece of property, promising to control her reading habits, etc.), and not only an insufferable and vile human being (blithely commenting that all the best people on board will survive the sinking, using someone else’s child to bluff his way onto a lifeboat, etc.) but also a ridiculous idiot (nattering on incessently about the ship’s unsinkability, dismissing the prospects of a young Picasso, etc.).
The movie doesn’t get better towards the end simply because the ship starts sinking and Cameron starts using his chops as an action director; it gets better because his ridiculous made-up love story is periodically ignored in favor of genuinely moving real (or rumored) examples of heroism and dignity in the face of certain death.
— Charlie · Aug 26, 06:56 AM · #
You had me at gigantic explosions.
— Jeremy Morlan · Aug 26, 05:28 PM · #