The Emptiness of Geek Chic

I recently had the odd experience of being introduced to a film by a teenager, who had made a special request to watch Napoleon Dynamite. She put on the tape and proceeded to laugh as loudly as possible, in great barks, "HA..HA...HA..."

I have to admit it, I just didn't get it. I might as well as been watching golf on TV or an infomercial about tractors for all the pleasure and interest it gave me. But over the last couple of weeks, I've been thinking about the film, not so much about Napoleon himself, or the bastardization of Todd Solondz-style American-indie-film-making (well that too) but about the particular trend in American film we shall hereafter call geek chic.

Geek films are those in which the central character is a nerd, dweeb, dork, or some variation thereof. Nothing unusual there. The geek, whether male or female, has always figured large in American cinema. You could argue that certain actors, Steve Martin, Bill Murray, etc., all came to prominence by presenting classic geekdom on screen, but there is something strange, even occasionally unsettling about this new generation of geeks. Instead of being asked to identify or commiserate with them, laugh at their antics or feel pity for their pain, we are instead invited to gawk, as at a good old fashioned freak show (if they were ever, in fact, good).

Booming dork industry

Fashion, on the other hand, may have more to do with it. When the star of Napoleon Dynamite won an MTV Movie Award, a little voice in my head went "Ahhh!" Napolean first became a hit at the Sundance film festival, where it supposedly screened to uproarious laughter, and then MTV and Fox Searchlight picked it up. If Hollywood is largely like high school, only with a lot more money and better clothes, it is again, all the cool kids laughing at the dorks. Even while watching Napoleon Dynamite with the above teenager, each bray of laughter made me think I'm supposed to find this funny, even if it isn't. Made for $400,000, the film has currently made more than $44 million.

The defining quality of the nouveau geek is a degree of separation between them and us. They aren't us, and therefore we are free to watch their various misadventures without ever feeling indicted or included. These films have some commonality: they are usually written and directed, and occasionally even starred in, by the same person. Napoleon was written and directed by Jared Hess and his wife Jerusha. The Hesses were inspired by another team of brothers, the Coens, who pretty much pioneered the ironic hero prototype of which Napoleon and his ilk originate.

Asked about the ironic trend in film making, critic Roger Ebert quoted director Paul Schrader who said "We have passed from the age of the existential hero to the age of the ironic hero: The existential hero asks if life is worth living. The irony hero asks, ‘Who cares?’" In the new ironic movies, he said, everything has quotation marks around it. A person isn't killed, he's 'killed.'"

Dawn of the wieners

The search is already on for the next Napoleon and Thumbsucker may be it. This film also screened at Sundance to great hilarity. Taken from the novel by Walter Kirn, it is the story of odd Justin Cobb and his oral fixations. It has all the trademarks of the nouveau geek genre: title sequences that are purposefully naive, flat inflections, ugly clothes, and humiliating situations. Just another alienated adolescent coming of age agony, but the genre is not confined to teen troubles. There were also elements of it in David O. Russell's I Heart Huckabees, and the work of Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Life Aquatic), and even in The 40 Year-Old Virgin that offers up Steve Carell, as a classic sexless geek from writer/director Judd Apatow who was responsible for the critically loved but short-lived Freaks and Geeks.

But what is so new about this dawn of the wieners? Dawn Weiner perhaps.

Wiener, you may recall, was the ultra-geek gal at the centre of Todd Solondz’s Welcome to the Dollhouse. But unlike the work of Solondz, to which Napoleon Dynamite owes a great debt, virtually aping the style of Welcome to the Dollhouse, Napoleon is missing a certain critical something. Call it humanity, intelligence, or even simple emotion. Superficially, the two films are quite similar in style and tone, but Welcome to the Dollhouse is agonizing to watch, and Napoleon utterly blank.

Solondz, who goes out of his way to deny audiences what he terms a "narcissistic high" from identifying with the triumph of film heroes, has often been accused of actually disliking his characters. As he says, "I make comedies, but they are sad comedies." Everyone has a little wiener dog in them. Solondz wanted to feature actress Heather Matarazzo in his new film, Palindromes, but she said she'd never play the part of Dawn Weiner again, and really who can blame her? Palindromes instead opened with Dawn Wiener's funeral, then went into to tell the tale of Aviva and her quest to have a baby at age 12.

The film has been both praised and panned, but unlike Dawn and Aviva, whose trials and tribulations make you cringe, in Napoleon there is no they're there, as Gertrude Stein might say. No humanity, no real or genuine suffering, merely, the appearance of. Characters are ciphers, often not even looking at the camera, but off to the side as if suffering some sort of visual impairment. There's alienation and then there's just alien.

Making vacant films about ugly adolescents in a post-Columbine era is a tricky business as Gus Van Sant found out when Elephant opened to critical cat calls and general all-around dislike. Watching a film like Napoleon, you can't help but catch the faint echoes of Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, who called their victims nerds before they killed them. There is a level of detachment, indifference, even cruelty, that made me wonder if that is what endears this film to the teen crowd: indie film making as cartoon.

Geek beauty

Occasionally, geek chic can produce a worthy experience.

Me and You and Everyone We Know was a big hit at Sundance and also picked up Camera D'or award at Cannes. In this film, the geek in question is female and a video artist. The same ironic knowing edge is there, the same odd clothes, weird looking people and seemingly random events. But Gol-durn if it ain't art! Writer, director and star Miranda July started out as a performance artist, and it shows in the film in both good ways and bad. Bad in the overly self-conscious, occasionally twee dialogue. Good, in that there are moments of great beauty.

As the film goes out its way to make clear, all we really have is a series of moments. Art occurs in the film in the strangest of places, such as the random lines and dots from a dot matrix printer or a picture of a bird stuck in a tree. But though the film is gentler and arguably far better made than many of its companions, there is still a feel of watching Diane Arbus-like wierdos, from Richard, the shoe salesman with his bandaged white mitt and ill-fitting suit, to his workmate, a would-be defiler of teenage Lolitas, who, when presented with the object of his desire, chickens out. Ms. July, to her credit as a director, manages to sustain a delicate balance between art house introspection and potential perversity involving children -- a trend that seems to preoccupy independent film makers from Solondz (Happiness) to Gregg Araki (Mysterious Skin).

One can't help but wonder if we might look back, some twenty years from now, and be curious about the oddly cut off quality of the films of this period. It’s as if we could only watch these stories if we has sufficient distance from them, not wanting to feel too much, too strongly about people we'd rather not be.

Dorothy Woodend reviews films every Friday for The Tyee.