![](\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/08\/chasing-amy-51_1600x900.jpg\")
<\/a>Still from Chasing Amy<\/i>, 1997.<\/p><\/div>\n
Kevin Smith\u2019s romantic comedy <\/span>Chasing Amy<\/span><\/i><\/a>, now almost two decades old, was a big deal for my generation of nerds. Back in 1997, all of our dorky interests, from comic books to video games, <\/span>remained hidden<\/a>,<\/span> far from the prying eyes of the American mainstream. To us, the unapologetic <\/span>fanboy<\/span><\/a> Smith had emerged as something of a nerd culture Shakespeare\u2014the best of us, a man who captured our hopes and dreams in his character\u2019s lengthy, pop culture\u2013laced monologues. <\/span>Chasing Amy<\/span><\/i>, which concerned sensitive-yet-sleazy Ben Affleck\u2019s pursuit of the bisexual comic-book artist Joey Lauren Adams, constituted Smith\u2019s first serious attempt to tell a meaningful dramatic story against the backdrop of the geek demimonde he\u2019d explored in his previous slacker comedies <\/span>Clerks<\/span><\/i><\/a> and <\/span>Mallrats<\/span><\/i><\/a>. We were supposed to identify with (or at least pity) Affleck\u2019s comic-book penciler Holden McNeil as he tried to come to terms with Adams\u2019 sexual history, which involved group sex and gay sex and all sorts of other activities alien to his own heteronormative experience. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Chasing Amy<\/span><\/i> was always an uncomfortable movie, a film that encapsulated the worst aspects of narcissistic <\/span>nerd entitlement<\/span><\/a> at its late-nineties peak, but twenty years later I couldn\u2019t even bring myself to finish rewatching it. When it was released, I begged my father to drive me to Raleigh\u2019s <\/span>Rialto Theatre<\/span><\/a>\u00a0and left that first showing enraptured, believing that some aspect of my privileged nerdy male \u201cstruggle\u201d had been set to film. Kevin Smith was the first director whose <\/span>scripts I had ever read<\/span><\/a>; before I\u2019d encountered his work, I hadn\u2019t ever considered the form. It helped that Smith was such a dreadful cinematographer, <\/span>a fact he admits without shame<\/span><\/a>, because it meant his movies were the equivalent of ninety-minute script readings. Yet why, in the course of dreaming about becoming a \u201cHollywood writer\u201d\u2014whatever that meant\u2014had I lingered over this material? How had it ever resonated with anyone at all, myself included? <\/span><\/p>\n The answer was simple but painful: I was one of those stereotypical \u201cguys who liked movies,\u201d and I was stupid.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n * <\/span><\/p>\n Throughout the nineties, TBS used the tagline \u201c<\/span>Movies for Guys Who Like Movies<\/span><\/a>\u201d to promote a schedule consisting of boneheaded action fare such as <\/span>Universal Soldier<\/span><\/i><\/a> and <\/span>Red Heat<\/span><\/i><\/a>. The testosterone-drenched \u201cguy movie,\u201d which exists as the obverse to the \u201cchick flick,\u201d has supposedly yielded a number of masterpieces. The late-seventies frat comedy <\/span>Animal House<\/span><\/i>, set in the simpler America of the pre-Vietnam sixties, is considered chief among the humorous \u201cguy movies\u201d; it transformed <\/span>wild-man supporting-player John Belushi<\/span><\/a> into a box-office star and milked prison rape and necrophilia gags for all they were worth. People like my brother remembered that movie as some kind of great milestone in cinematic history, a gross-out opus that launched a thousand <\/span>subsequent tales of the old homosocial order<\/span><\/a>: panty raids and hazing initiations generously surrounded by\u00a0memorable quotes (<\/span>\u201c<\/span>Thank you, sir! May I have another?<\/span><\/a>\u201d<\/span>) that could be substituted for punch lines in awkward real-life social situations. <\/span><\/p>\n In my na\u00efvet\u00e9, I assumed that Kevin Smith\u2019s work, which premiered in art-house theaters and looked like it was shot on a VHS recorder, was somehow more elevated than the campy <\/span>Cannon Films<\/span><\/a> \u201cguy movie\u201d dreck so beloved by my father and older brother. There was a self-awareness to it, a wink at the audience: \u201cHey man, you know about these neat things, so we\u2019re in on this together!\u201d Men have long fancied themselves spelunkers of the unknown, roaming the caves of the underground so that they can be the first to force potential romantic partners to sit through ten hours of <\/span>The Wire<\/span><\/i><\/a> or a bunch of <\/span>Captain Beefheart LPs<\/span><\/a>. Smith, like a lot of other <\/span>almost-famous 1990s male artists<\/span><\/a> and entertainers, piled on the references to win us over\u2014and his attempts had the same hard-sell, look-at-me quality that Holden McNeil used to temporarily win Joey Lauren Adams\u2019s affection. Wasn\u2019t it all so smart, so important, so precious? And when Smith, playing his trench coat\u2013clad \u201cSilent Bob\u201d character, opens his mouth to deliver <\/span>the payoff \u201cChasing Amy\u201d monologue<\/span><\/a> to a disconsolate McNeil, we\u2019re quite literally listening to the author demand that we acknowledge he\u2019s an auteur. <\/span><\/p>\n As a piano tinkles in the background to underscore the gravity of what he\u2019s saying, Silent Bob explains that he shouldn\u2019t have reacted to the knowledge that his then-girlfriend had a threesome by calling her a \u201cslut\u201d and dumping her, but instead should have understood she \u201cwasn\u2019t that girl anymore\u201d and was now \u201clooking for the Bob.\u201d This condescending realization is intended as an indication of broad-mindedness, letting sensitive, insecure men like Holden McNeil know that it\u2019s okay to date girls who are more sexually experienced than they are. By the time Smith utters the titular line\u2014\u201cso I\u2019ve spent every day since then chasing Amy, so to speak\u201d\u2014it\u2019s obvious that his speech is male-oriented 1990s pop culture in microcosm. In the era just before the explosive growth of the Internet <\/span>enabled individuals whose voices had long gone unheard<\/span><\/a> to engage in a much wider conversation, we witnessed the last gasp of the \u201cBig I,\u201d the <\/span>lone male mastermind<\/span><\/a> who lured us back into his apartment and then demanded that we inspect his carefully curated collections of cultural ephemera, whereupon we would inform him what a thoughtful guy he is.<\/span><\/p>\n For many years, this was what I assumed masculinity, particularly nerd masculinity, was all about. Like Steve Buscemi\u2019s seventy-eight-rpm record-collector <\/span>Seymour in <\/span>Ghost World<\/span><\/i><\/a>, the true alpha nerd hunkered down in his rat hole of an apartment amidst a gilded gallery of material\u2014references to drop, recommendations to make\u2014and awaited the right moment to sweep some unwitting stranger off their feet. \u201cI\u2019ve never met anybody like you,\u201d we all hoped our partners would tell us, even if that foreshadowed a bittersweet conclusion when we were informed that we were \u201ctoo much.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n I ruined several romantic relationships in precisely this fashion. In each case, I wanted someone to tell me how brilliant and sensitive I was, how deserving of love I had made myself. I wasn\u2019t like my emotionally distant grandfathers, <\/span>one of whom<\/span><\/a> could barely even speak English. Unlike those two shell-shocked veterans of the \u201c<\/span>Greatest Generation<\/span><\/a>,\u201d I had a million sweet nothings to say, and I only needed a best friend\/romantic partner who would willingly listen to them all. I would save them from a life spent with some <\/span>uncommunicative lummox<\/span><\/a>, and they would rescue me from my parents\u2019 basement. This is, of course, an unacceptable burden to place on someone else, and it invariably blew up in my face\u2014though that was to be expected, maybe even desired, because it demonstrated that no one <\/span>deserved the gift of my life<\/span><\/a>. When it did, I turned to the melancholy music I thought provided the sound track to <\/span>my so-called life<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n *<\/p>\n \u201cWe were good as married in my mind \/ But married in my mind\u2019s no good,\u201d laments Rivers Cuomo on the Weezer ballad \u201c<\/span>Pink Triangle<\/span><\/a>,\u201d which the eighteen-year-old model of myself once saw as profoundly affecting. Like <\/span>Chasing Amy<\/span><\/i>, the song explores a relationship, in this case a totally hypothetical one with an inaccessible woman, doomed by the unbridgeable chasm of sexual preference. Cuomo, who elsewhere in the tune hints at having also engaged in same-sex relations, whinges about how this particular <\/span>manic pixie dream girl<\/span><\/a> can\u2019t bring herself to \u201cbe a little straight\u201d for his sake. (Affleck\u2019s Holden, interestingly enough, <\/span>orders his best friend Banky to have sex with him<\/span><\/a> as a way of saving their relationship, then French kisses him.) Such empty-gesture moaning was familiar territory for the Weezer frontman, who won a sizeable audience by pairing \u201cBig I\u201d pretensions with simplistic chord progressions and then packaging that work in memorable <\/span>Spike Jonze<\/span><\/a> and <\/span>Marcos Siega<\/span><\/a> music videos. <\/span><\/p>\n More to the point, Cuomo\u2019s lachrymose lyrics offer insight into the psychological terrors at the heart of this kind of \u201cBig I\u201d work. Far from being the dashed-off musings of an insouciant mastermind, a song like \u201cPink Triangle\u201d is actually an admission by the artist that he is terrified by the possibly that <\/span>he doesn\u2019t matter<\/span><\/i>. The narrator confesses that this very meaningful-sounding relationship is a complete fiction, that his own heterosexuality (which he hopes his dream girl will embrace!) is itself suspect, and that his deepest desire isn\u2019t so much dating her but planning his wedding, floral arrangements and all.<\/span><\/p>\n Fin de si\u00e8cle <\/span>nerd masculinity was so pushy and demanding\u2014look at how awesome I am!\u2014because, deep down, its practitioners were panicked and insecure. This kind of full-court press, all hipster Cyrano speeches and slick presentation, was analogous to <\/span>bodybuilders hiding their inner weakness behind a wall of hypertrophied muscle<\/span><\/a>: ditch the packaging, they worry, and their admirers will ditch them. The self floats on the surface; nothing lies beneath.<\/span><\/p>\n Some of this material is better than the rest, albeit no less problematic. <\/span>David Foster Wallace\u2019s writing<\/span><\/a>, for example, is overstuffed and show-offy, but the narrator is so distant and so brilliant that he doesn\u2019t appear to want our affirmation (even if he so desperately does, because he recognizes, as in his lauded short story \u201cGood Old Neon,\u201d <\/span>how empty the life of a lonely genius is<\/span><\/a>). Quentin Tarantino\u2019s movies about movies are open to charges of <\/span>misogyny and racial insensitivity<\/span><\/a>, but they appear to exist in a parallel universe that has nothing in common with this one except spaghetti westerns and blaxploitation flicks. Even so, it seemed there was no end to this generation of <\/span>singularly deep young men<\/span><\/a>,<\/span> each of whom appeared hell-bent on forcing us to operate with blown minds and broken hearts. Some were more accomplished than others, but each positioned himself as a sensitive artist desperate to be told how clever he was.<\/span><\/p>\n But the passing of time is neutral, and pieces praising generations of rising stars eventually yield to postmortems recapping what the heck actually happened. Such is the epilogue to <\/span>Chasing Amy<\/span><\/i>: after Ben Affleck and Joey Lauren Adams have their final <\/span>meet-not-so-cute<\/span><\/a>, Adams\u2019s new girlfriend asks her who Affleck is. \u201cOh, just some guy I knew,\u201d she replies. The same could be said of who I was\u2014who many of us were\u2014during this turbulent transitional period just before crowd-pleasing filmmakers such as Christopher Nolan and J. J. Abrams fused nerd and mass culture into one all-encompassing monoculture, forcing privileged nerds to concede their private spaces to a larger and more diverse public now interested in that formerly \u201cunderground\u201d material. Kevin Smith is still around, making <\/span>small and forgettable horror movies<\/span><\/a> on the Hollywood periphery, but his moment in the semi-spotlight has passed. <\/span><\/p>\n He did get pretty close to the big time, though. Once the stuff of fanboy dreams, Smith\u2019s unproduced <\/span>Superman Lives <\/span><\/i>script<\/span><\/a> continues to float around the Internet. It was commissioned by Warner Brothers in 1997, at the height of the writer\/director\u2019s fame, and now seems small and quaint by the standards of today\u2019s <\/span>bloated by-the-numbers Marvel Studios blockbusters<\/span><\/a>. One scene, however, warrants mention: after dealing with the threat posed to Earth by a rebuilt Brainiac, Superman turns to Lois Lane and quips, \u201cFrom now on, I\u2019m going to be more man than Super.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n That\u2019s keen if slightly vague advice for all of these <\/span>nerdy masterminds<\/span><\/a>, so eager to impress by behaving like someone they aren\u2019t in order to prevent others from learning who they actually are. Such masculine panic and posturing ultimately comes to naught, because it turns out nobody else is searching for that underlying reality and we\u2019re only deceiving ourselves. Acknowledging this truth by replacing the entitled attitude of the know-it-all indie nerd with candor and genuine vulnerability is a tall order, but it seems like a necessary step for improving relationships with friends and romantic partners.<\/span><\/p>\n
![uncommunicative lummox<\/span><\/a>, and they would rescue me from my parents\u2019 basement. This is, of course, an unacceptable burden to place on someone else, and it invariably blew up in my face\u2014though that was to be expected, maybe even desired, because it demonstrated that no one <\/span>deserved the gift of my life<\/span><\/a>. When it did, I turned to the melancholy music I thought provided the sound track to <\/span>my so-called life<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n*<\/p>\n\u201cWe were good as married in my mind \/ But married in my mind\u2019s no good,\u201d laments Rivers Cuomo on the Weezer ballad \u201c<\/span>Pink Triangle<\/span><\/a>,\u201d which the eighteen-year-old model of myself once saw as profoundly affecting. Like <\/span>Chasing Amy<\/span><\/i>, the song explores a relationship, in this case a totally hypothetical one with an inaccessible woman, doomed by the unbridgeable chasm of sexual preference. Cuomo, who elsewhere in the tune hints at having also engaged in same-sex relations, whinges about how this particular <\/span>manic pixie dream girl<\/span><\/a> can\u2019t bring herself to \u201cbe a little straight\u201d for his sake. (Affleck\u2019s Holden, interestingly enough, <\/span>orders his best friend Banky to have sex with him<\/span><\/a> as a way of saving their relationship, then French kisses him.) Such empty-gesture moaning was familiar territory for the Weezer frontman, who won a sizeable audience by pairing \u201cBig I\u201d pretensions with simplistic chord progressions and then packaging that work in memorable <\/span>Spike Jonze<\/span><\/a> and <\/span>Marcos Siega<\/span><\/a> music videos. <\/span><\/p>\nMore to the point, Cuomo\u2019s lachrymose lyrics offer insight into the psychological terrors at the heart of this kind of \u201cBig I\u201d work. Far from being the dashed-off musings of an insouciant mastermind, a song like \u201cPink Triangle\u201d is actually an admission by the artist that he is terrified by the possibly that <\/span>he doesn\u2019t matter<\/span><\/i>. The narrator confesses that this very meaningful-sounding relationship is a complete fiction, that his own heterosexuality (which he hopes his dream girl will embrace!) is itself suspect, and that his deepest desire isn\u2019t so much dating her but planning his wedding, floral arrangements and all.<\/span><\/p>\nFin de si\u00e8cle <\/span>nerd masculinity was so pushy and demanding\u2014look at how awesome I am!\u2014because, deep down, its practitioners were panicked and insecure. This kind of full-court press, all hipster Cyrano speeches and slick presentation, was analogous to <\/span>bodybuilders hiding their inner weakness behind a wall of hypertrophied muscle<\/span><\/a>: ditch the packaging, they worry, and their admirers will ditch them. The self floats on the surface; nothing lies beneath.<\/span><\/p>\nSome of this material is better than the rest, albeit no less problematic. <\/span>David Foster Wallace\u2019s writing<\/span><\/a>, for example, is overstuffed and show-offy, but the narrator is so distant and so brilliant that he doesn\u2019t appear to want our affirmation (even if he so desperately does, because he recognizes, as in his lauded short story \u201cGood Old Neon,\u201d <\/span>how empty the life of a lonely genius is<\/span><\/a>). Quentin Tarantino\u2019s movies about movies are open to charges of <\/span>misogyny and racial insensitivity<\/span><\/a>, but they appear to exist in a parallel universe that has nothing in common with this one except spaghetti westerns and blaxploitation flicks. Even so, it seemed there was no end to this generation of <\/span>singularly deep young men<\/span><\/a>,<\/span> each of whom appeared hell-bent on forcing us to operate with blown minds and broken hearts. Some were more accomplished than others, but each positioned himself as a sensitive artist desperate to be told how clever he was.<\/span><\/p>\nBut the passing of time is neutral, and pieces praising generations of rising stars eventually yield to postmortems recapping what the heck actually happened. Such is the epilogue to <\/span>Chasing Amy<\/span><\/i>: after Ben Affleck and Joey Lauren Adams have their final <\/span>meet-not-so-cute<\/span><\/a>, Adams\u2019s new girlfriend asks her who Affleck is. \u201cOh, just some guy I knew,\u201d she replies. The same could be said of who I was\u2014who many of us were\u2014during this turbulent transitional period just before crowd-pleasing filmmakers such as Christopher Nolan and J. J. Abrams fused nerd and mass culture into one all-encompassing monoculture, forcing privileged nerds to concede their private spaces to a larger and more diverse public now interested in that formerly \u201cunderground\u201d material. Kevin Smith is still around, making <\/span>small and forgettable horror movies<\/span><\/a> on the Hollywood periphery, but his moment in the semi-spotlight has passed. <\/span><\/p>\nHe did get pretty close to the big time, though. Once the stuff of fanboy dreams, Smith\u2019s unproduced <\/span>Superman Lives <\/span><\/i>script<\/span><\/a> continues to float around the Internet. It was commissioned by Warner Brothers in 1997, at the height of the writer\/director\u2019s fame, and now seems small and quaint by the standards of today\u2019s <\/span>bloated by-the-numbers Marvel Studios blockbusters<\/span><\/a>. One scene, however, warrants mention: after dealing with the threat posed to Earth by a rebuilt Brainiac, Superman turns to Lois Lane and quips, \u201cFrom now on, I\u2019m going to be more man than Super.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\nThat\u2019s keen if slightly vague advice for all of these <\/span>nerdy masterminds<\/span><\/a>, so eager to impress by behaving like someone they aren\u2019t in order to prevent others from learning who they actually are. Such masculine panic and posturing ultimately comes to naught, because it turns out nobody else is searching for that underlying reality and we\u2019re only deceiving ourselves. Acknowledging this truth by replacing the entitled attitude of the know-it-all indie nerd with candor and genuine vulnerability is a tall order, but it seems like a necessary step for improving relationships with friends and romantic partners.<\/span><\/p>\nOliver Bateman<\/a> is a historian and journalist who lives in Pittsburgh.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chasing Amy\u00a0and the toxic\u00a0\u201cnerd masculinity\u201d of the nineties.\u00a0 Kevin Smith\u2019s romantic comedy Chasing Amy, now almost two decades old, was a big deal for my generation of nerds. Back in 1997, all of our dorky interests, from comic books to video games, remained hidden, far from the prying eyes of the American mainstream. To us, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1034,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[16426,5995,23948,154,11058,1125,23949,23947,12612,662,23952,23950,10595,2832,23953,3988,17342,23955,23951,10401,23954,3270],"class_list":["post-101557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-1990s","tag-ben-affleck","tag-chasing-amy","tag-david-foster-wallace","tag-genius","tag-ghost-world","tag-indie-culture","tag-kevin-smith","tag-masculinity","tag-men","tag-movies-for-guys-who-like-movies","tag-nerd-culture","tag-nerds","tag-quentin-tarantino","tag-rivers-cuomo","tag-romance","tag-selfishness","tag-steve-buscemi","tag-tbs","tag-the-nineties","tag-toxic-masculinity","tag-weezer"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n\u2018Chasing Amy\u2019 and the Toxic \u201cNerd Masculinity\u201d of the 90s<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Oliver Lee Bateman remembers the sexist, self-aggrandizing nerds of the nineties, too busy heralding themselves as geniuses to bother being real men.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/08\/16\/the-big-i\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Big I by Oliver Lee Bateman\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"August 16, 2016 \u2013 Chasing Amy\u00a0and the toxic\u00a0\u201cnerd masculinity\u201d of the nineties.\u00a0Kevin Smith\u2019s romantic comedy Chasing Amy, now almost two decades old, was a big deal for my\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/08\/16\/the-big-i\/\" \/>\n<meta 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