Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that the entertainment industry is now the Death Cult’s propaganda organ. The more astute observers know that the subversion of Hollywood started decades ago.
The movie, music, and game industries aren’t alone in their anti-evangelism for the new civic religion. Almost every major corporation has enthusiastically jumped on the antichrist bandwagon. As a matter of fact, they’re driving it.
Here’s megacorp uber-nerd Bill Gates explaining his plan to make people imbibe shit. The fact that a captain of industry is trying to literalize an old insult tells us two things:
- The heads of megacorps have too much money and power.
- The folks in charge of those megacorps are unserious nerds living out their most paranoid power fantasies.
Even the more astute cultural observers who see that the rot started as far back as the 60s tend to have a blind spot for the 80s. But the Death Cult’s hold on major studios hadn’t slackened since The Pawnbroker and Easy Rider. Amid the pulp resurgence led by relative outsiders like George Lucas, it was easy to miss the ongoing subversion beneath the surface.
A vector for that subversion that largely flies under the radar is the nerd comedy subgenre that carved out a niche in the 80s. 1984’s Revenge of the Nerds is the prime example, but all of these flicks had the same basic premise: a motley gang of college misfits get hassled by the football team and use their smarts to get even. Hilarity ensues.
Because people naturally root for the underdog, audiences overlooked the subtext of these movies. The sympathetically drawn protagonists were always a bunch of neckbeards, spergs, and effeminates–including drag queens–put upon by normal people.
If you’re at all clued in to how the Death Cult operates, that inverted dynamic will look awfully familiar. Like all religions, the Cult gives its adherents an identity. That identity, which is on thinly veiled display in the nerd revenge flicks, is that of the long-suffering underdog persecuted by the tyrannical majority. Even in the 80s nerd movies, the tyrants are always straight, white Christians.
It’s no accident that those movies’ plots look like 2010s Reddit with a time machine. The whole point is to portray deviancy as smart and cool while denigrating normality. That’s culture war in a nutshell.
Fast forward thirty years, and real-life nerds who watched these movies in high school now run global corporations with undreamed-of war chests. Guys like Bill Gates, Tim Cook, and Sundar Pichai still see themselves as victims just because normal Americans exist. They’re still fighting the Man long after having become the Man. It’s a Nerdocracy, and we’re all WASPish ski instructors.
I suggest reclaiming what dignity you can by not contributing to our nerd overlords’ war chests.
Before Revenge of the Nerds there were no portrayals of nerds as anything but antisocial weirdos. Even with the subversive attempts to change that, it remained like that in the public consciousness for a long time. Most of the 1980s movies still featured normal people as the main characters, even in the sleazier pictures. Not to say there weren’t continuations of the degenerate good, normal bad subversive ideas being spread, but even then it was still thought of as wrong to be antisocial and deliberately weird.
For instance, Family Matters always portrayed Steve Urkel’s nerdiness as his character flaw meant to be laughed at. His nerd side was always the punchline. It was only at the end of the show when he finally shed that side of him and became normal that he finally got the girl he had been chasing for so long. And that was the 1990s.
I do wonder how much this contributes to the love of making “flawed” protagonists and the hatred of normal people in main character roles that has become expected these days. You can’t write an “interesting” character unless they’re apparently a degenerate of some kind or are damaged by trauma. It’s a baked-in hatred of the world that really began in earnest with that Hollywood formula pushed by people who hate you.
And Revenge of the Nerds was always a bad movie.
I have an alternate theory, which is that the “damaged or degenerate principal” trope results from damaged or degenerate writers, who can’t seem to write anything else, finding similar audiences, who can’t seem to enjoy anything else. Perhaps wounded souls have less capacity for empathy, if they’re not narcissistic, and thus can’t make sense of a story with a bona fide hero in the starring role. A story written that way is too fantastic for them to believe. (The anti-heroes of action movies and cape comics probably don’t help, either. Whoever invented Wolverine and Deadpool owes the entire Western world and apology. ) At worst, they may need to see someone in a principal role who’s more or less a proxy for themselves in order to engage with the story at all. That might explain the push for “representation” in fiction by groups who’ve been taught to value their minority status above all.
I think your theory has a lot of merit, as well.
“Before Revenge of the Nerds there were no portrayals of nerds as anything but antisocial weirdos.”
It depends on how one defines “nerd”, but comics have a long history of nerd or nerdlike heroes. Peter Parker was sort of a “science nerd” type (at least in the original Steve Ditko era; he got a bit “cooler” in the John Romita, Sr. era), and the Superman/Clark Kent dynamic was literally created due to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s frustration over being unpopular nerds that girls didn’t like.
As Jerry Siegel himself explained:
“You see, Clark Kent grew not only out of my private life, but also out of Joe’s. As a high school student, I thought that some day I might become a reporter, and I had crushes on several attractive girls who either didn’t know I existed or didn’t care I existed. As a matter of fact, some of them looked like they hoped I didn’t exist. It occurred to me: What if I was real terrific? What if I had something special going for me, like jumping over buildings or throwing cars around or something like that? Then maybe they would notice me.
That night when all the thoughts were coming to me, the concept came to me that Superman could have a dual identity, and that in one of his identities he could be meek and mild, as I was, and wear glasses, the way I do. The heroine, who I figured would be a girl reporter, would think he was some sort of a worm; yet she would be crazy about this Superman character who could do all sorts of fabulous things. In fact, she was real wild about him, and a big inside joke was that the fellow she was crazy about was also the fellow whom she loathed. By coincidence, Joe was a carbon copy (of me).”
JD
And yet this movie inspired the neurodiverse to presume they were the scret kings whose greatness was always thwarted by the jocks and normals.
Fast forward 35 years later and the neurodiverse now run the world but still don’t get it. As I remarked at Alexander Hellene’s blog, the neurodiverse are simply incapable of dealing with the give and take of social communication, it overstimulates them and resort to AI to flatten the nuances of social communication. And combined with the grievance nursing secret king neurosis we now find ourselves in the present circumstances.
The solution is to put the neurodiverse back in their place of programming or creating new gadgets and stay out of running society or to paraphrase you: locker stuffing will continue until behaviour changes.
xavier
We tried rewatching this movie a few years ago. It’s stunning that the Nerds were considered “the good guys” in this movie. There is the installing cameras in the girls dorm, which is supremely creepy but also very proto coomer in light of OnlyFans and such. Then there is the climax of the movie, where the lead nerd ‘wins’ by having nonconsensual sex with the cheerleader, who thinks she is screwing her boyfriend, but can’t see his face because he is wearing an animal costume (degeneracy on degeneracy). It’s okay that this person she hated all movie is suddenly graping her, because nerds are secretly the best lovers ever. It really is pure Reddit style gamma entitlement.
“Here’s megacorp uber-nerd Bill Gates explaining his plan to make people imbibe shit.”
Jonathan Swift wrote about scientists figuring out a way to turn excrement back into food in “Gulliver’s Travels”, but that was meant to be satire.
“Scientists discover fertilizer, only horrible and expensive.”
This is like that time a bunch of Silicon Valley types figured out how to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and turn it into building material, only without using a tree like some filthy peasant.
“The whole point is to portray deviancy as smart and cool while denigrating normality. That’s culture war in a nutshell.”
Here’s a short scene from The Fog that more or less says it outright:
https://youtu.be/N9ATvl_nPbc
I’d forgotten about that one. Carpenter can be hard to read since he mixes a lot of based messaging with his cringe, but we may have to rule the former accidental.
John C. Wright likes to attribute the former to the Muses; I’m fond of remembering that the Spirit moves where He will, and if he can make use of an ass or even someone like me, why not Hollywood types? 🙂
Either one explains how we get people like Carpenter, or things like George Lucas giving us things like both the Original Trilogy and the Indy/Marion relationship.