geek culture touchstones

Certain movies, TV shows, books, and bands are deeply-held secrets between true fans. Sure, these secrets might be largely mocked and/or misunderstood outside of geekdom, but we don’t care. We have our own fan groups, our own hidden languages, our own shared recognition of something amazing.

For the longest time, J.R.R.Tolkien was one of those secrets. After the hippie flower-children of the seventies, and Ralph Bakshi’s ambitious but incomprehensible 1978 film, The Lord of The Rings languished in geeky isolation until Peter Jackson dragged it into pop culture relevance and approval. ‘Frodo Lives!’ was as strong a geek password in the 1980s and 1990s as it was a generation earlier.

Likewise, geeks know that Rush (the Canadian prog rock band, not the bloated talk-radio toad) is one of the smartest, most literate, and most skilled musical groups ever. The fact that they are just now being possibly nominated to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame is both an insult to their true status, and a grudging admission from pop music gatekeepers that millions of fans must not be wrong. I’m of the camp that hopes Rush declines this honor.

Bruce Willis is no stranger to cool, hip sf movies, but one of the best still has to be The Fifth Element, which is still in use among my friends as a test of geek worthiness. If you like it, you’re part of the family. If not, then we’ll keep you at arm’s length and be politely distant.

Tom Cruise may still claim 1983’s Risky Business, but he runs from his appearance two years later in the visually-stunning Legend. That’s all right. Geeks watch it for the atmosphere and mythic scale, and mourn what it could have been if it hadn’t been cut up and stalled in production.

Which leads me to Babylon 5, the intricately-plotted television opus from J. Michael Straczynski. Most sf&f fans have never heard of it. The ones who have, might hate it. It’s not a dilettante’ s show; you either start watching from the 1990 pilot on through the 1994-1999 series, or you take your toys home and watch Star Trek: Deep Space Nine or something even easier to process. B5 is one of those stories that actively punishes people who miss episodes and skip backstory. Because JMS wrote most of the episodes, he maintained tight control of the story arc. It shows. I started with Tolkien for a reason, because there are strong thematic links between B5 and Tolkien’s even geekier epic The Silmarillion.

I could geek out for several more elitist paragraphs, but I’ll point you to this article over at Tor.com instead:

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/10/all-alone-in-the-night-when-babylon-5-invented-21st-century-fandom?et_cid=29646547&et_rid=403841615&linkid=http%3a%2f%2fwww.tor.com%2fblogs%2f2012%2f10%2fall-alone-in-the-night-when-babylon-5-invented-21st-century-fandom