Conversations with geeks: John Kenneth Muir

MAJ: Oh, I loved Land of the Lost -- I think that may have been the first really weird thing I got obsessed with as a kid. Do you think there’s a certain age at which geekiness has to grab you, and if it doesn’t, it’s too late and you’ll never be a geek?

JKM: Geekiness is definitely a characteristic one becomes aware of at a tender age. The precipitating event is almost universally related to TV or film. It's the first time we saw a program or film that resonated with us. I don't think it can happen later, when the mind is fully developed and "set."

For me, geekiness was forged in a childhood mindset rich with mid-70s pop culture. When Star Wars came around, I was already totally prepped for it. I already had Space:1999 action figures, plush King Kong stuffed animals, and Mego Star Trek and Planet of the Apes playsets before Kenner released the first Early Bird Star Wars figures.

Was I merely the victim of effective merchandising broadcast on TV? Possibly, but I believe the necessary quality of geekiness is the wonderful (and child-like) freedom of imagination to transform what we have witnessed on TV or movie screens into our own personal story. The toys from these shows were the first way to accomplish that, to continue the tales we loved in original, creative adventures that we imagined. And today -- look at us -- we've transformed those first likes not into playtime, but full-fledged careers. It isn't a passive acceptance of what companies sold us, but rather a synthesizing of those productions into the next step: a book of criticism, a film of our own, a web-site devoted to a favorite show or film...

Geekiness starts very young, and I don't think it can really happen later. Witness those who were in their teens or twenties when Star Wars premiered. They don't get what the big deal is. For those of us who were kids at the time, it's like the Kennedy assassination -- a cultural touchstone. It was something we were ready for, and which delivered for us in a big way. A well-spring of geekiness imagination which we could mold and shape with our toys, then write fan fiction about, then ponder, then nitpick, then review, then -- eventually -- surpass. That process takes time (30 years?) so it has to begin in youth...

MAJ: It does seem like there was a "perfect storm" in the cultural zeitgeist in the late 60s and early 70s for creating a generation of geeks: the combination of imaginative, speculative entertainment and the toys that encouraged creative play in those universes. And maybe there is something inherent in the character of Generation X that fostered geekiness, too -- perhaps the fact that so many of us were either children of divorce or latchkey kids. Not to impugn anyone’s parents or anything, because I think most of them were doing what they thought was best, but: Was your childhood one in which you had a lot of time to amuse and entertain yourself?

JKM: I have two incredibly solid and supportive parents -- both are teachers -- and they somehow had the foresight to sit me down in front of entertainment that they thought would inspire me, whether it was Space:1999 or Star Trek.

But I did have a lot of time to amuse myself, because my parents were not what would you call rich. They worked summers painting houses (interiors and exteriors), and sometimes spent nights cleaning offices to help buttress the family income. Often, I would go with them on these jobs, and have to entertain myself for long stretches with toys, crayons, or TV.

I'll never forget my first experience with The Twilight Zone. I was maybe six or seven, and we were at a creepy house that my parents were wall-papering. I remember being up late at night, being surrounded by old ornate furniture under white sheets, when this strange black-and-white vision came on the tube. I even remember the episode: "Will the Real Martian Please Stand Up?" It freaked me out. And it still does.

MAJ: So, ‘fess up: Do you still have toys? Do you keep a couple of action figures around the computer, just for the pleasure of it?

JKM: Hell yeah! Here's the sick part -- I've kept all my toys from age five till now. I work in a home office in my historic home (built 1912), but my room (with 12 foot ceilings) has toy displays from wood floors to plaster ceiling. On every bleedin' wall. I have a very patient wife, and we have a deal that the toys don't leave the room to clutter the rest of the house.

Here's a peek.

Okay, now, MaryAnn, now it's time to turn the tables. We all read your blog (some of us religiously...) as well as your reviews on Flick Filosopher, but what your regular readers really want to know is this: how and when did you start down this road of geekdom? What is your deep, dark, geek secret? And finally, why is it that the "fan boy" is such an established character in TV shows and film (like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, etc.) but only rarely does mainstream society apply the term "geek" or "fan" to a woman? Hmm? Are you in a minority of a minority as a "fan girl," and how hard is that to live with?

MAJ: The road to geekdom? Is that like the road to perdition? Heh. I think books were probably my gateway drug: there were books just everywhere in the house when I was a kid, including lots of SF and mysteries, and I got my hands on those as soon as I could, probably sooner than I would have if I’d had to stumble over them accidentally in the library or discover them some other way. But there were a lot of children’s books around, too, and some of those were seriously freaky and definitely warped my mind. One that sticks with me to this day is a fantasy called The King with Six Friends.

There’s an eerie, almost nightmarish quality to the illustrations that still haunts me. I bought a copy of the book a few years ago (dunno what happened to the one I had as a kid), and... yikes. Oh, this was easily one of my favorite books, and I read it over and over and over as a kid, partly because I think it made me feel scared and safe at the same time -- it was only a book, after all.

My deep dark geek secret? I’ve never read Dune. There -- I said it, and I feel better already.

What’s with the lack of girl geeks? Oh man, John, you read my mind -- this is a topic I want to do some serious exploration of here at Geek Philosophy. Are there really fewer girl geeks, and if so, is it that girls just tend not to have the geek gene as frequently as guys do, or is a function of the fact that men in our culture just seem to have more time to indulge their hobbies? Or are there lots of girl geeks who just don’t stand out as "weird" as much as guys do? Are we just better at intergrating our geekiness into a more fully rounded life? I just don’t know... but I intend to find out.

JKM: Books as are a great gateway drug to geekdom. As a kid, my favorite story was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea -- I was a Jules Verne geek -- but I also read tons of Hardy Boys Mysteries, Tom Swift adventures, The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and A Wrinkle in Time. Loved all of 'em. I don't know The King with Six Friends, so what was it about? Was it the fact that the story had a dark, adult side that grabbed you initially, do you think? Within those pages, were there things that inspired you to go further, to imagine that world in more detail?

I really wonder about female geeks and why they seem to be an under-represented minority mainstream media and entertainment. Are geeky men just funnier to stereotype? Or -- are geek males in control of the media, so they put themselves in movies and TV? Is the paucity of geek female images in film and TV a result of the fact that maybe some geek men find female geeks threatening in some fashion?

I wonder. This might be a stupid or ignorant question -- but do you have a female geek peer group? I know I have a full range of male friends -- from geek to dork to nerd (and I'm probably a dork...in good company with Mulder...) but you are my only bonafide female geek friend!! I have one or two other female geek acquaintances, but by-and-large, geek women are far outnumbered I think. Based on my experiences.

My deep dark geek secret: I really could never get into Babylon 5. I totally don't get why people think it's so good. At all. A friend of mine recently bought me the whole series -- all five season on DVD -- and my wife and I are making an effort to get through it. We're still in the first season...

MAJ: I don’t remember being inspired by The King with Six Friends to do anything fannish -- write stories, paint pictures, etc. I just remember being so haunted by the illustrations, which were dark and moody and creepy. The story was a fairly simply fantasy about a wandering, kingdom-less king and his adventures with his friends, each of whom had some sort of magical ability to turn into something else: one was a guy with flame-red hair who could turn into fire, another one could turn into a snake, stuff like that. I guess it was the whole package that somehow lodged itself in my brain and became the seedcorn of my geekiness.

(I also read Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson and the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and pretty much everything I could get my hands on!)

A female geek peer group? Hah. I do have a couple of geeky female friends, but a group of them? No way. I almost can’t even imagine a big gang of girl geeks all hanging out together -- it’s not within the realm of my experience.

So, John, do you see a future for healthy geekiness? Will the geek ethos continue to expand its influence on pop culture and the culture at large? Or have we reached the limit of what geekiness can do for society?

JKM: Geekiness is enduring a crisis. America has officially entered the era of what I term "Geek Dread," when Geeks are deeply concerned about the future, and it is starting to be reflected in our mass entertainment. Why the concern? Well, an endless War on Terror for one, and the slow erosion of civil liberties for another. Apocalypse seems to beckon around every corner (nukes in North Korea and Iran, Bird Flu in Vietnam, creationists in public schools, Bush packing the Supreme Court, housing bubbles waiting to burst...). All of our movies, from Batman Begins to Revenge of the Sith to Land of the Dead to War of the Worlds are exhibiting this anxiety about our society's very continuation.

On a much less catastrophic note, Geeks are also simultaneously dealing with a time of important endings and an age of entertainment plenty. On one hand, Star Wars and Star Trek -- two tentpoles of Geekdom -- have have come to an end in one summer. On the other, the availability of DVD boxes means that old favorites are no longer such "holy grails," forever out of view and out of touch. Now we can own every episode of Space:1999, Land of the Lost, Star Trek, whathaveyou, and some essential element of "the geek quest," is gone forever. We geeks thrive when we're in search of something, like the bootleg Roger Corman Fantastic Four, or the rarely seen Uncle Jack-Third Season of Land of the Lost. Suddenly all that is coming to an end with the proliferation of new DVD sets, and we are going to have to focus on other things. New Things. That's different, because geeks traditionally focus on the past; what we loved as youth. That's what binds us: the lyrics to old TV shows like Gilligan's Island, and the plots of old All in the Family episodes.

Honestly, from my Geek perspective, 2005 looks more like the end of the millennium -- a fin de siecle -- than the year 1999-2000 did. The familiar is gone (Indy IV where are you?) and the future looks grim. As a nation we can't even agree on basic facts, and this development concerns geeks, who are fact-takers, cross-referencers,, and synthesizers. Without facts, what are we to do? What is to be the basis of our society? Our common existence?

The war to bring facts and civility back into American public life may be the significant war of our remaining lifetimes. That is our challenge and our calling, and I think that it's only now starting to become evident, as we near forty.

What do you think? What will Geeks do next, without Star Wars? What will our greatest contribution to American society be, in the long run?

MAJ: I’m not quite so pessimistic as you are, John -- and believe me, it shocks me to hear myself say such a thing. I certainly agree that our society is a mess and our culture is reflecting that, but I think the anxiety and the fear that is currently overwhelming a lot of what we consider "geeky" -- like the zombie movies and the dark comic book films -- is going to get a lot more sophisticated as we Xers start producing movies and books and comics and other pop culture in larger numbers. I don’t think it’s a bad thing that series like Star Wars and Star Trek are coming to an end -- it’s time to make room for the stuff that we’re gonna make. And I do think Xers will be responsible for a new golden age of pop culture -- like what we saw in the late 1930s and through the 1940s -- and that we’re probably invent some new form of entertainment, perhaps an amalgam of the Sims and TV shows, an entertainment in which we are all active participants, not merely consumers. That would be the logical outcome of all the ways from which we’ve approached entertainment all our lives.

JKM: I would like to think that you are right, and I'm just being dark. I think it's only fair to point out that my wife calls me Mr. Morose sometimes. One thing's for sure, I look forward to the era not just when we have Geek-made entertainment in which we can participate, but when America has a....Geek President! (You know, Al Gore would have been close...). Think about that: a Geek who came up through Nixon to Bush Jr. and KNOWs this country can do better. One who keeps the Jedi Order and the Prime Directive compartmentalized in his or her brain. Now that's a day worth getting excited about...