Generally, I have no problem with extreme nerdiness. To some degree, I am one–I frequent comic book message boards and other card-carrying nerd activities. But this AICN site, which I’ve been looking at recently, completely creeps me out. You can almost smell the Dungeons & Dragons-marathon smell rising from your computer screen–a distinct blend of B.O., cheese doodles, and suburban rec-room fake wood panelling.
I find the popularity of this site interesting. Certainly, no one can honestly say that they read the idiotic, digression-prone reviews for their critical analysis, which is almost always juvenile and absurd. They’re often unintentionally funny, with their numerous typos and malapropisms–“The title FULL FRONTAL is purely allegorical!”[sic]. Knowles himself writes in the dot-dot-dot style of the mid-nineties internet: “Saw TRON for the 400th time…It made me wet down there…”. He also employs a creepy nerd-speak that almost always has something to do with pissing or coming all over yourself: “THE MATRIX RELOADED was so good I squirted a load onto the screen.” I just made that one up, but it has that clammy, sexually frustrated AICN feel to it. You really can’t pin down Knowles’ taste because he seems to like everything–which of course is just another way of saying that he has no taste at all. The completely unwatchable DAREDEVIL movie? “Perfect”. The crappy ATTACK OF THE
CLONES? “Beautiful”.
Knowles strikes me as a perfect example of a particular type that has emerged recently: the sub-literate, fat, 30-something virgin, who, as he’s said, “watches movies 24 hours a day”, and derives his entire world-outlook from crappy Hollywood spectacle. Jesus Christ, if I watched movies 24 hours a day I would blow my brains out. Actually, one could speculate that Knowles, like his pasty-faced followers in the “talk-back” forum, probably watches movies so compulsively to AVOID blowing his brains out. But there was something interesting revealed recently in one of his reviews, something that, from a psychoanalytic persepctive, revealed alot about him. Apparently, his first exposure to film was through his mother, who obsessively watched old-starlet movies like Jean Harlow’s over and over and encouraged little Harry to do the same. One could say that Knowles, with his compulsive viewing-repetition, his embrace of movies for the sake of movies, regardless of how shitty they are, is still feeding from the maternal breast, still the same little boy who needs his mommy in the displaced form of “watching movies 24 hours a day.” Then again, that analysis might be bullshit, but who knows?
Another problem is that a site like AICN is feeding the ever increasing shittiness of Hollywood movies. Crappy, bloated nerdfests like the last two MATRIX movies (I loved the first one) could only have been created in the over-hyped, spectacle-for-the-sake-of-spectacle atmosphere of contemporary Hollywood, an atmosphere that AICN contributes to. Exreme nerd culture of the AICN type is also responsible for the dissapointing new STAR WARS movies which, as they become less fun, less like the originals, and more hermetically nerdy and obscure (when the word “medi-chlorines” was used in Ep 1 you could feel half the audience tuning out) are clearly responding to 25 years of STAR WARS nerd culture, with their eternal debates about Boba Fett’s origin and other bullshit.