A. D. Jameson, _I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture_

TO TELL THE truth, I read a short story by Jameson in Conjunctions that I admired and bought this thinking it was a collection of short stories. It is not even close to being a collection of short stories. Careless of me! Always read the subtitle. 

To tell a further truth, I am not much of a fan of the films whose popularity Jameson explores here—superhero movies, Star Wars, Star Trek. I’ve watched a few examples of each category and liked them well enough, but never got the bug, really. But Jameson writes well, and I am at least curious about how the Avengers etc. came to dominate the cinematic landscape, so I gave it a go.

Jameson comes up with an intriguing paradox: what geeks love about fantasy is realism. For example, that Han Solo’s space ship is a little battered and occasionally breaks down, just like a real life vehicle, adds a certain frisson because the “secondary world,” the world of the fantasy, thereby imitates the actual world, and the secondary world accordingly seems that much more credible. 

Jameson is particularly lucid on what he calls the “Holodeck” effect, after a recurring feature of the Star Trek franchise: “In order to please geeks, artworks must function like Holodecks, creating the impression of a secondary world without any boundaries” (134). In the famous cantina scene in the original Star Wars, for example, geeks are hooked by the idea that every customer has a name, a home planet, a story that the film could pursue if it wished, just like Richard Linklater’s Slacker…or, for that matter, like any actual bar in your neighborhood. The elaboration and exploration of these latent potentialities behind any detail in any fantasy world is the heart of the geekiness.

A lot of the book seems a riposte to Peter Biskind or anyone else who has lamented that the gritty, experimental New Hollywood of the 1970s was hip-checked into limbo by Star Wars and its innumerable progeny. I understand Biskind’s frustration, especially in the summer, when all we get at the local multiplex is the latest installment of this or that or the other franchise. But Jameson’s argument that geek films have an aesthetic of their own, and by no means an inferior one, makes sense.