In an op-ed in last month’s Wired, stand-up comic Patton Oswalt called for the destruction of geek culture. It came from a place of love.
A tried and true dweeb of the 1980s, Oswalt was just depressed over the world of geekery his daughter would soon inherit, where anybody, anywhere, can instantly become an “expert” on anything. All it takes is a stroll through Wikipedia and a weekend-long binge via bittorrent. To Oswalt, this has bred a generation of astute pop-culture obsessives, with far less immersion, bereft of the the waiting and wondering that used to surround each dip into a particular oeuvre.
“Everything we have today that’s cool comes from someone wanting more of something they loved in the past,” he writes. “Now, with everyone more or less otaku and everything immediately awesome…the old inner longing for more or better that made our present pop culture so amazing is dwindling.
By the grace of Gollum, his rambling essay — which ends on a description of the cleansing apocalypse we’re supposed to pray for — dropped at about the same time as Roger Ebert launched himself back onto television.
Back in pre-otaku times, Ebert and partner/rival Gene Siskel were providing one of the more necessary gateways to geekery that existed before the Internet was around to give us everything all the time. From 1975 and up through the birth of the web, “Siskel and Ebert At The Movies” was a syndicated (initially public TV) series that managed to serve two masters.
In one corner, mainstream audiences just wanting a nudge in the right direction on their way out to the Multiplex. In the other, folks hungry for thoughtful discussion on the big movies of the week, as well as under-publicized art house or foreign film that might be worth seeking out.
Occasionally, they’d take the time to sell you on a classic. Hearing them chat up an old masterpiece for a couple of minutes was plenty encouragement for a sheltered suburban youth to embark on a little makeshift film-schooling.
And it was good.
After Gene died of a brain tumor in 1999, things began to wind down; his replacement up in the balcony didn’t quite do the trick, and then Roger was struck by cancer that cost him his lower jaw and voice. By this time, there was no shortage of intelligent discourse on film no matter how far out into the sticks you found yourself.
Ebert is no Luddite. A good friend of mine recalls stumbling on his CompuServe page back in the early-90s, when he was 14, and getting into a brief e-mail exchange over Quentin Tarantino. But he certainly seems to have replaced his power of speech with an especially prolific presence on Twitter and his own blog. He’s promised to stream the new series to every LCD screen on the market and try to focus more on the films that enthusiasts care about.
That ambition isn’t totally obvious on the new show, so far. The balcony portion, which is the bulk of it, apes the original series in all but chemistry. The new show is hosted by the Associated Press’ Christy Lemire and Mubi.com critic Ignatiy Vishnevetsky — both super-smart, but you can’t shake the feeling that it was casting that put them together. Now that’s old-school television, whereas one of the greatest benefits of web-based programming is that it usually sprouts from existing relationships, where a first episode can feel as comfortable the 1,000th.
On the plus side, it’s got more megazine-y segments, like Kim Morgan’s stroll (literally, she struts around alongside the clips) through the 1949 film-noir thriller “The Third Man”.
But the far-and-away highlight of the first few episodes has been Ebert himself. In the pilot, he borrowed the voice of Werner Herzog in order to call attention to the apparently charming new animated film “My Dog Tulip.” Herzog’s warm reading over footage from the film really add up to something and lead me to think the whole show would have been great if it were comprised solely of televisual essays.
No doubt TV is better for having this show. The new “At The Movies” might have been better had it started scrappier, and off of television. One reason I’ll never follow Patton Oswalt into his tunnel back to 1987 is that, despite the smug intellectual laziness and ADD our present dystopia abets – there’s a lot of opportunity out there now, especially for folks who might not have landed a hit TV show just talking about what they love.
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