They're here, they're the mainstream, they dominate our popular culture. Xan Brooks investigates the inexorable rise of the geek.
There is a key scene in the film American Splendor in which nerdish hero Harvey Pekar accompanies his still-more-nerdish sidekick Toby to a showing of the 1984 comedy Revenge of the Nerds. Toby is a devoted fan of the movie, which he interprets as a clarion call to arms. Harvey is more circumspect. He dismisses the cast as "preppy Ivy League nerds. Not real ordinary slob nerds like us".
The irony here is that American Splendor is everything that Revenge of the Nerds pretended to be and wasn't. The winner at this year's Sundance festival, the film's stars are a motley collection of dysfunctional file clerks, twitchy comic-book artists and self-diagnosed anaemics who emerge victorious over the bastions of mainstream cool (as represented by MTV and the David Letterman show). It's the movie that assures us that, yes, it's OK to be a nerd.
Out in the wider world, the revolution is well underway. Over the past decade, those cultural phenomena that we once filed as geeky minority pursuits have become our masters. The internet now boasts a global community numbering 679 million. Video gaming pulls in more annual revenue than Hollywood. For its part, the film industry seems increasingly in thrall to the comic book (Spider-Man), science fiction (The Matrix) and wizards (Harry Potter). Now, with the release of the final instalment of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, surely the most monumental nerd-fest of all is upon us.
Could it be that there are more nerds today than there were before? If so, shouldn't we attempt to make friends with them before they start bludgeoning us with plastic light-sabres or introducing viruses into our PCs?
"It's not that there are more spotty teenage boys around, it's simply that we've all become more like spotty teenage boys."
Adam Dawtrey, European editor Variety
But there is a further, more troubling possibility. Just what constitutes a nerd these days anyway? Might you conceivably qualify as one? Perish the thought, might I?
According to the Collins English Dictionary, a nerd is something you emphatically don't want to be. It defines the term as "(1) a boring or unpopular person" or "(2) a stupid and feeble person", both of which sound a little harsh.
But the nerd has been on the rise since the mid-'70s, when Woody Allen pioneered a new breed of movie hero who was at once unabashedly wimpish and unaccountably attractive to women. Running parallel to this came the rise of the movie brat, as spearheaded by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg: nebbish film-school dweebs who remade themselves as enviable Hollywood billionaires.
Lynn Bartholome, of Britain's Popular Culture Association, has argued that the rise of the nerd "has a lot to do with the computer revolution, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Those guys were, quoteunquote, geeks, and for baby boomers, they've now got what's important: prestige, money and power."
In the meantime, the nerd has replicated and sub-divided to the extent that it's tough keeping tabs on him. The fantasy junkies who thrill to roleplay games form one obvious tribe. So do the sci-fi aficionados who graduated from Star Trek conventions to the sleeker fashions of the Matrix movies.
Your standard comic-book buff divides into those who follow Marvel's high-concept superhero antics and those who appreciate the more esoteric stylings of artists such as Daniel Clowes (Ghost World) and Harvey Pekar (American Splendor). And then you have the video kids: street-savvy, pop-culture omnivores who dig Japanese Manga and obscure B-movies and find patron saints in Kevin Smith and Quentin Tarantino.
The trouble is there's a great deal of movement between these tribes, and many nerds juggle different enthusiasms. Could it be that a nerd is defined not so much by his specialist genre as by the intensity of his interest?
It's hard to overstate the impact of the internet on this new world order. It has been argued that fan sites and chat forums have legitimised the nerds, giving them a voice and making them an important demographic.
Film studio New Line assiduously courted the Tolkien fan sites when it began its Lord of the Rings trilogy, keeping them appraised of fresh developments, lavishing them with sneak previews of the script and flying fanboy Harry Knowles (founder of Ain't It Cool News) out to the shoot in New Zealand.
Over at Marvel studios, there is a similar respect for the web user. "I used to hate the internet," studio chief Ari Avad recently confessed to USA Today. "I thought it was just a place where people stole our ideas. I now consider them (internet fans) as filmmaking partners."
American web users are seen as the perfect demographic, in that they tend to be non TV-watchers with an income over $60,000, "pre-marital interests" and a strong brand awareness. According to Yankee Group analyst Rob Lancaster, "technology users are a great group for marketing products to because they're very loyal to products and their interest is heavy. They get very passionate".
Adam Dawtrey, European editor of Variety, attempts to put this in context. "It's not that there are more spotty teenage boys around, it's simply that we've all become more like spotty teenage boys. There's been a trend in popular culture towards legitimising child-like or adolescent pursuits. Previously, we were supposed to grow out of stuff like that. Now that notion has broken down."
Playmate toys recently revealed that the largest market for Simpsons merchandise was those aged between 18 and 35. In recent years the cartoon's creators have slyly acknowledged this breed of adult fan in the shape of the Comic Book Guy, an overweight, pony-tailed malcontent who scoffs "breakfast burritos" and is given to complaining in clipped tones that last night's show was the "Worst. Episode. Ever".
Alternatively, one could argue that the Comic Book Guy harks back to an obsolete image: the "boring, unpopular" loser of the Collins English Dictionary or the bespectacled stripling of a thousand Gary Larson cartoons. In years to come, such stereotypes may prove dangerous. Because if you class everyone who uses the internet or digs Star Wars or plays a video game as a nerd, then you automatically risk offending a community that numbers in the hundreds of millions.
This once-derided minority has mutated. The unloved school swots of the 20th century have blossomed into the alpha group of the 21st. They have gold cards and chat rooms and a whole rash of "pre-marital" (and sometimes post-marital) interests. They have dictated the mainstream and spirited us all along for the ride. I am reminded of the circus performers' chant at the end of Tod Browning's 1932 classic Freaks: "One of us. One of us."
- Guardian