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"Rushmore" and The Rise Of Geek Cinema
In many ways Max Fisher, the hero of the new movie "Rushmore" is an all-too familiar geek from hell - rebellious, grumpy, obsessive, determined and brilliant. An almost visceral outsider, he - and the straight culture around him - are doomed to contend with one another until one side or the other lies crushed. The movie portrays the bizarre test of wills between a 15-year-old it's almost impossible to like and the rest of the (equally unpleasant) earth.
When it comes time for Max to make piece with one of his many adversaries he offers a choice of the only two things he prizes - his school punctuality and attendance pins.
These are golden times for geek cinema -- a sizzling new genre of film - and it's very unlikely stars. Geek movies can be studio-made or independent, or produced by bands of young filmmakers with credit cards. What defines them is their portrayal, celebration and de-construction of alienation, the ever blurrier boundaries between people others like to call freaks and people who like to think of themselves as normal.
Geek cinema sometimes focuses on the brainy loners who often become the freaks and outcasts of society, from high school on up. Sometimes the subject is nerd techno -culture and its growing power to run the systems that run the world. Although it varies wildly in depth and duration, the experience of alienation is close to universal among geeks, nerds and Webheads, the people who dreamed up, built and inhabit the most vital parts of the Net and the Web.
Hollywood, with its unquenchable lust for hipness, has latched onto this idea. But it's of several minds about where to go with it. Movies (and TV) are, after all, one of a culture's most revealing, reliable mirrors - and what this one shows is ambivalence.
If geeks were once universally reviled, they are now - at least through the prism of geek cinema - both feared and celebrated. Geeks bit the heads off of chickens and rats in carnivals at the beginning of the century in exchange for room and board. The term has broadened steadily in recent years to mean a number of things, but most recently and pervasively (it was co-opted by communal Net homesteaders in the late 80's to describe themselves) people who embrace technology with attitude, from hackers to Web designers to programmers.
For most of history, the essence of being a geek was that straight people wouldn't give you the time of day. But geeks are getting plenty of attention now.
"Enemy Of The State" reflects society's growing fear of geek power, portraying a cadre of NSA computer nerds who gleefully invade privacy, condone murder and use digital technology in the classic Orwellian way, to invade the most intimate parts of our lives, erode our freedom, control our behavior. Geeks have rarely been portrayed as quite that powerful.
In "Happiness", Todd Solondz, the Orson Welles of alienation, takes the very idea of being an outsider and a freak (check out the classic CD-Rom, the "Resident's Freak Show") to astonishing new levels, including mainstream culture's first-ever sympathetic portrayal of a pedophile. One of the best movies of l998, don't expected any Hollywood nominations or awards. We haven't come that far.
Then there was Alexie Sherman's "Smoke Signals," which beautifully captured the strange and sometimes hilarious journey of two Native-American geeks (the director's own description) who leave their Idaho reservation in search of a father's remains.
The latest is "October Sky" - out this week - a rich, touching story based on the so-called "Rocket Boys" in a small Appalachian coal-mining town who defied teachers, peers, cops and parents to battle their way into the Space Age, designing and launching their own rockets.
Although wildly uneven, often with clunky plots and focused narrowly on the deep sci-fi vein of geekdom, the "Star Trek" series almost single-handedly kept outcasts and nerds going to move theaters for years. And, coming soon to every theater near you, there is the mother of all geek cinema, the "Star Wars" prequel.
Meanwhile, enter "Rushmore", the story of 15-year-old walking nightmare of a kid who's ruling over a prep school of the same name until he's expelled. When it comes to geek cinema, "Rushmore" maybe be in a class all by itself.
Although it was technically released in l998 to qualify for the Oscars, "Rushmore" kicks off the geek cinema cycle of 1999 with a bang; it's the funniest and most idiosyncratic addition to this deliciously strange new genre.
As played by Jason Schwartzman, Max Fischer is a dreadfully arrogant and ambitious young human being who, when he grows up, may well be a tycoon just like his friend Herman Blume (Bill Murray).
Brave and bizarre - Wes Anderson, who co-wrote and directed the cultish "Bottle Rocket" - "Rushmore" is a portrait of an oddball way beyond the conventional categories of outcast and weirdo. An academic failure, he runs every club in the school, and is a ruthless and inveterate schemer, a mogul desperate to escape from the constraints of a teenager's life. Fisher tyrannizes the school with his ingenuity and the power of his personality, even as he's an irresistible target for almost everyone in it.
Max ends up nearly bringing down "Rushmore," the town and himself as he battles Murray for the woman they both love,a young pre-school teacher mourning her late husband.
The movie walks a skillful line between the grotesque, maudlin and outrageous, at times coming close to one or the other, but never crossing the line. The plot gets clunky at times, but the movie is rescued by its innate quirkiness.
Anybody who has ever proudly carried or grimly endured the mantle of geek, nerd or worse will, despite a tendency to empathize, want to slug Max - even as they root for him to succeed. The movie culminates in a memorable Vietnam play, staged by Max with real dynamite and other vivid special effects in front of a high school audience armed with goggles and earplugs. Max triumphs not because he becomes more mainstream or likeable, but because his obsessive instinct to create things means that sooner or later, even he must score.
Like the classic geek, Max lives out of the mainstream culture, but is dependent he is on it. He can't live with it or without it. And it's in the interaction of the two worlds that the movie really shines.
Geek cinema is a Godsend, a miraculous new addition to movie-going. It's impossible to imagine movies like "Happiness," "Smoke Signals" or "Rushmore" even being made in America ten years ago, let alone playing in mall megaplexes. Freaks who would never make their way into a Hollywood drama now seem the subject of a string of creative and provocative films.
Pass the popcorn. It's a good time to be a geek.
Skip now if you are expecting another Katz Bashing.
Ok, without debating the point of what qualifies as a 'Geek Film', I think there is a quickly evolving genre of sci-tech films that are often mistakenly being grouped in the Geek/Nerd/Hacker bucket.
There is nothing new about the sci-tech genre of films, it has always existed but the context of the sci-tech has evolved. For the mass media, computers and programming are the modern equivalents of alchemy or building ion-based propellants for space ships - they are thrilling, exciting, and sometimes frightening subjects because most people do not understand the truth of the subject. The image of an all-powerful computer system or hacker that reads your email, crashes the NSA's software infrastructure, and then redirects all of your savings into a Swiss bank account is popular because of the 'mystery' that surrounds the sci-tech itself. This is not new, mass media has been doing this for hundreds of years - the thrill is in the unknown.
Why is "Pi" considered a 'Geek Film'? How many people in an average movie going audience could explain (or have even heard about) the Golden Spiral theory? Nothing that mysterious, but it's a mystery to most, so it carries the aura of excitement.
My opinion of a captivating sci-tech film is a recent indie called 'Cube'. It's sort of a Hitchcock-ian sci-fi thriller that exudes the threat of technology rather than slamming it down your throat (read: there are no "let's hack the mainframe" lines in this film). It's on tape. Go rent it.
-b