“You’re not a geek, you’re a lot of fun,” Marisa Tomei’s cute and perky diner owner says to William H. Macy’s computer programmer in the all-around abysmal Wild Hogs, which opens today in theaters. Macy’s character is a total nerd, the worst and most negative stereotype of a geek: more comfortable with computers than with people, and especially awkward around women; physically uncoordinated and weak; all the usual nonsense. And so naturally he could not possibly be a geek and be a lot of fun at the same time. This is hardly unexpected: the movie is a sitcom in which every character is a cliché, and Wild Hogs is aimed at an audience older than Xers for whom geek is likely nothing but a dirty word, if it means anything at all. The director, Walt Becker, born 1968, is an Xer, so you’d think he might know better, but then again, he also directed the awful college frat fantasy Van Wilder, which makes me suspect he was probably one of those guys who wasn’t into computers in high school and now feels left behind to see that it’s all the geeks making good and getting all the chicks and needs to compensate for that somehow.
On the other there, though, there’s Zodiac, also opening today, in which the main characters are all Baby Boomers or Silents -- the story takes place in the 1960s and 1970s -- but the creative team spans the full spectrum of Xers: director David Fincher was born in 1962; star Jake Gyllenhaal was born in 1980. And geekiness is in its very soul. And not just geekiness but an appreciation of geekiness and its worth. The telling of the reign of terror of the serial killer known only as the Zodiac is told mainly through the eyes of a San Francisco Chronicle editorial cartoonist played by Gyllenhaal who become so obsessed with the case that he takes it upon himself to try to solve it. The Zodiac sent letters and cryptic codes the Chronicle, and because the cartoonist liked puzzles, he figured he’d have a go at deciphering them, and it spirals into deeper geekiness from there. (Another character, a columnist played by Robert Downey Jr., chides the cartoonist for being the kind of person who actually goes to the library and reads books. Heh.) The thing is, though, that the cartoonist is the hero of the film -- long after the cops have all but given up on finding the Zodiac, the cartoonist is still hanging on like a bulldog, because he can’t stand not finding an answer. The word geek is never used, but geekiness is held up as a kind of ideal. Which is very cool.
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