Rare[ Moldovan the State of Play: Geektopia in Ready Player One

242 Caietele Echinox, vol. 32, 2017: Images of Community Rare[ Moldovan The State of Play: Geektopia in Ready Player One Abstract: The paper looks at the figure of Back to the Same Future the “geek” in popular culture, and especially in Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One, also his article looks forward to a film with a view towards the forthcoming adap- Tthat does not yet exist. We know its tation directed by Steven Spielberg. Tracing release date, the 30th of March, 2018, we the contours of the geek imaginary, the know its director, Steven Spielberg, and we have learned more about what seems to be paper looks at its inscription in popular cul- an inspired cast over the last few months. ture, political economy, it explores nostalgia The book that it adapts, by first time geek as an enabling force, modes of community, writer Ernest Cline, was undoubtedly a sociability and socialization, building toward hit, but I think we can safely assume that the unlikely concept of “geektopia.” when the film is released it will represent Keywords: Cultural Theory; Pop Culture; the pop culture apotheosis of the geek, in Geek; Nerd; 80s; Virtual Communities; Gam- the medium that helped mould and foster ing; Utopia. this cultural icon. It will also signal, with a sort of half-baked irony, a late, reiterated Rareș Moldovan victory and “revenge of the nerds.” Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania Forged in the bland basement dun- [email protected] geons of Smallville, U. S. A., as well as in DOI: 10.24193/cechinox.2017.32.20 the virtual dungeons ardently imagined by teenagers gathered round to the play the legendary RPG Dungeons and Dragons, the figure of the geek1 has over the past four decades, accrued considerable sta- tus. Initially distributed somewhat evenly across American suburbia, and redistrib- uted at key symbolic nodes in the cultural demographics, the geek and his sometime alter-ego, the nerd (these figures coalesce or develop separately, in variation2) have colonised a swath of American film and The State of Play: Geektopia in Ready Player One 243 television, tailored suitable narratives, and large it opposes dystopian corporate amassed a Pantheon of (super)heroes, cre- capitalism and ends on the big note of ated a cult of collectibles, made gaming geeks with money vowing to end world cool, invaded countless message boards poverty. Geeks with money and a hyper- across the Internet, migrated to new archi- bole of redistribution are much better than pelagos such as YouTube and Twitch, and corporations; perhaps this is also a dig at even provided a specific form of sociability the likes of Facebook or Google, or at how and a model for community. In the words they’ve turned out. of one famous geek: But geeks have always been about saving the world. Whereas, arguably, geek Today, geek is no longer a four-letter representations thrive naturally in a come- word. Fantasy subcultures have shift- dic environment – from Ferris Bueller to ed from the fringe to pockets of cool, the cult TV show Freaks and geeks to the and their associated terminology and more recent grown-up geeks sitcom The cultural references […] have been ab- Big Bang Theory – the quintessential geek sorbed into the mainstream.3 sits squarely at the centre of a salvation fantasy. An unlikely hero, like the hobbits From a peripheral spectre in youth that were its hallowed proto-forms, the culture, bullied and derided, to an indis- geek’s story arc is usually a quest (like most pensable agent (most films and TV series game and film narratives these days), and nowadays come with a complimentary his ultimate role is soteriological. Ready geek) is no mean feat, but beyond the rise Player One and Cline’s second novel, Ar- and rise of the geek, in “absorption,” a host mada (2015), are such quests, of course, but of phenomena are busily, systemically at one can think of much earlier examples. work. They circumscribe its traits with- One instance, which Cline re-utilises in in a larger, and largely for profit, cultural Ready Player One is the 1983 film Warga- economy. In this line of thought – which mes, in which David Lightman, played by sketches the reentry of an earlier irritant Matthew Broderick, must save the world into a dynamic of lucrative leisure and rec- from a computer bent on starting a nucle- ognition – Cline’s novel and Spielberg’s ar war between the United States and the film represent sanctioned re-appropria- Soviet Union. Similarly, in The last star- tions. Sanctioned by geeks everywhere, fighter (1984), a film that inspired Cline’s surely, since they have turned the novel Armada, Alex Rogan, a trailer park teen- into a howling success and will doubt- ager who masters the eponymous arcade lessly flock to see the film too, this aging game, becomes the hero in a space war. The geek included; but what this indicates is an symptom that most interests me in this re- unsolved contradiction between geek and peated, repetitive pattern is the operation system. Ready Player One embodies and of short-circuiting. In Wargames, the socie- thematises this problem at the same time: tal dimensions of age, class, expertise, state as on object within this cultural economy, and military security vanish as if by magic, it is subject to the money making machine in The last starfighter, interstellar distances, created by its existence; as a narrative, by in Back to the future, time is malleable and 244 Rareș Moldovan rewritable. The geek’s skill in some aspect stronger bosses, greater distances and chal- of technology (the brave new world of lenges, ampler worlds. On the other hand, computers, gaming etc.), or even only his the quest is offered, not to say administered, proximity, as is the case with Marty McFly, as form prepared in advance, tuned to the make all solid barriers melt into air. boundary conditions that the economy of In this short-circuit, the suburban re- pop culture has established, and which it alism of these stories, to which they are but keeps enforcing. At the nexus of an econ- tenuously anchored anyway, is subverted; omy of desire and an economy of profit- which by itself is banal since fantasy always able cultural artefacts, the quest is not only short-circuits realism. What also becomes phantasmal and mythological retread; it is, transparent, however, is the structure and each time, economic recycling, the repli- the scale of geek desire: geeks yearn big. cation of the same structure of production This yearning recruits the nearly unfath- and consumption. Thus the future is for- omable potential of technology: in these mally set in advance, in a perverse refor- films, and in many others, technology is a mulation of Aristotle, the form is indeed portal, skill and knowledge are the key, an prior. In 2018, when Spielberg’s adaptation axiom of geekdom if there ever was one. It is released, like so many before it, but also is a simplified arrangement of aptitude and like countless others in the future will al- adversity, and the same pre-disposition of ways return us to the same form. As one (super)hero and (super)villain that comics famous producer and screenwriter mor- have hammered for decades in the geek dantly noted: imaginary, replicated at different orders of magnitude. Obstacles are often displaced “Once you spend more than $100 and reconfigured as extraneous to immedi- million on a movie, you have to save ate social reality, in a magnifying projection the world,” explains Lindelof. “And in which the constricting milieu becomes when you start there, and basically say, a trifling circumstance. Some “nerd” narra- I have to construct a MacGuffin based tives – especially in the teen, romance, and on if they shut off this, or they close college genres, and their various hybrids – this portal, or they deactivate this are undoubtedly about social acceptance4, bomb, or they come up with this cure, but geek tales that weld sci-fi and fantasy it will save the world – you are very aim outside the social arrangement, out- limited in terms of how you execute side the world, often through the world, that.5 rendering, at least temporarily, immaterial. Therein lies the insoluble ambiva- Within geek stories, galaxies far far lence of such narratives. On the one hand, away may be the limit, but the boundaries the quest is a historically sedimented re- of the narrative resonate to the mean tune sponse to juvenile geek desire that sees it- of average satisfaction. The culture industry self dramatically frustrated and shackled foresees (this we’ve known for a long time); by its circumstances, so that the way to go its ominous prophecy ensures that wherev- is understandably hyperbolic, as it is, for er we may roam we are within this other instance, in video games: bigger battles, “final frontier”: the same future awaits. The State of Play: Geektopia in Ready Player One 245 Past is Prologue: Wielding Nostalgia territory, already addressing those who would recognize it. Several remembrances he geek imaginary is destinal with are conflated in the single first verb: from respect to its overarching redemptive beyond the end of the story to the begin- hope,T it is equally devoted to figments of ning of the story (which is set around the past and future as escapist portals from the year 2045), and from that future the re- frustrating present, but the otherworldly membrance to the time that provides the Kyber crystal that powers its lasers, inten- codes for the quest: the 1980s. Nostalgia sifies its emotional force and multiplies its inserts itself into the texture of memo- tonal midichlorians is nostalgia: ry at this point; 80s nostalgia is quintessential for most first generation geeks.

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