Scratch a ComicCon geek and nine times out of ten you won’t find a shrewd analyzer of popular art or culture or aesthetic expertise. Not necessarily, I mean. What you’ll almost certainly find, I suspect, is someone who’s thisclose to weeping when something gets to him/her emotionally. You’ll find, in short, a girly girl who’s looking to wet her panties and then cry about it. As some guy who saw The Dark Knight Rises yesterday (and whose reaction was captured by comicbookmovie.com) made clear.
Remember all that fluttery geek ecstasy that greeted The Avengers? All those falsetto hossannahs? Remember how Harry Knowles wept when he saw Armageddon?
In their heart of hearts geeks are fair young maidens singing “some day my prince will come,” except their “prince” is that one super-special, unbelievably cool CG comic-book superflick that will make them really damp and squishy.
Agreed — Chris Nolan is an exceptionally brilliant, high-pedigree, world-class filmmaker, and his three Batman films represent some kind of eternal high water mark, etc. But I think I’ve really tapped into something here. The not-so-secret heart of geekdom is basically feminine in nature. If I was a geek I would make a point of channeling Lee Marvin when I take to Twitter, just to counteract this impression. This is one of the reasons I could never be one. My traditional XY tendencies are too pronounced. On top of which I’m reasonably slim, I don’t wear toenail-fungus-exposing flip-flops, I’m not one for facial hair, and I never wear low-threadcount Hanes T-shirts.
