Trigger warning for discussion of rape. Also, this gets a bit personal and ranty. You might want to get comfortable.
I first saw Revenge Of The Nerds on home video, back when you could rent a VHS player in a big plastic case to watch your movie on. It came with instructions on how to hook this strange device up to your television. I was about seven or eight years old. I loved it. I adored it. It was inspirational and wonderful and funny and sexy and true and I imprinted on it like a baby duckling. I did not watch it again until a couple months ago.
Please note the title of this post.
For those who haven’t seen this film, an adequate synopsis is here. For those who have, just roll with me for a bit.
First, the defense of the film. It legitimately is funny in many places, especially the second-act party scene where a lame party suddenly comes to life when Booger pulls out his weed stash. That has a fast string of killer bits, including Timothy Busfield suddenly discovering he can dance:
And an understated sight gag that may be my favorite boob joke ever:
Also, the inspiring speech at the end legitimately works. When you’re a skinny eight-year-old who gets picked on every day at school, it’s hard to overstate how badly you need to hear that speech. It’s wonderful.
Then, too, it has American pop culture’s first and so far only positive portrayal of a gay rapper:
Okay, that’s it for the good stuff. Now on to how this movie ruined my life.
Two minor points first off: Number one, this is a movie about college, about nerds, in which nobody ever goes to class or studies. Seriously, there is not a single frame of this film in which anyone attends a class or cracks a textbook. Not for one twenty-fourth of a second. I’m not saying this movie is the reason my class attendance in college was so poor, but it’s an eerie coincidence. Number two, this movie is hella racist. The Japanese character has the accent Mickey Rooney used in Breakfast At Tiffany’s and his job is annoyingly taking photos of everything. The black characters, apart from the aforementioned gay rapper, appear at the end, where their narrative role is to scare the piss outta white folks. This is aided by the fact that they naturally secrete funk music.
Do not start me on the gay character. I mean, at least he’s in the movie, but good lord.
These, however, are mere quibbles compared to the two largest sins of Revenge Of The Nerds: rape culture and Cartesian dualism.
Let me be clear. Revenge Of The Nerds has so much rape culture, you could use it to make rape yogurt. The women in the film are entirely represented as objects, and their sexual consent or lack thereof is explicitly portrayed as irrelevant. The heroes and the villains are theoretically competing for Adams College’s version of Hogwarts’ House Cup, but in point of fact the prize they’re competing for is the blonde cheerleader, Betty. At the start of the movie, she is the property of Stan Gable, the villain, but in the end, the hero, Lewis Skolnick, triumphs by claiming her as his own via rape.
I’m not kidding, that’s actually what happens. The hero’s big triumphant payoff moment is when he rapes the villain’s girlfriend. And she falls in love with him as a result.
Incidentally, while he’s raping her, his fraternity is having another heroic triumph at the fundraising event, selling nude photographs of Betty that they obtained without her knowledge or consent by planting cameras in her house. (Huge 80s cameras, too. Very difficult to conceal.) Again, this is explicitly presented as a heroic, cool action. When the villain finds out what they’re doing, his reaction isn’t “Holy shit that’s like ten kinds of illegal” it’s “Hey! That’s my pie!”
At this point, I’m wondering who the hell thought this was a good movie to show to an eight-year-old.
The deepest damage wrought by this film, however, wasn’t in how it made me view women (though fucking hell, it did not help). It was in how it made me view myself.
I walked away from the movie with a certain knowledge that I remember quite clearly as a big influence on my thinking growing up: you can be a nerd, or you can be a jock, and jocks are bad. I literally got up from the living room floor where I first watched the movie and triumphantly declared “I’m a nerd!”
Holy shit, has that done a number on me over the years.
I was already, at eight years old, the “smart kid”, and this movie confirmed for me that I was in the right tribe. You could either be smart or athletic, I was assured, and it was time (third grade) to choose. I chose smart because Lewis and Gilbert were the good guys. For years I wanted glasses, not because my vision was bad but because they were the universally-acknowledged symbol of my chosen tribe.
I hated sports, not because I had any real reason to but because they were the symbol of the enemy tribe. Did I know anything about sports? No, not really. I didn’t need to; they were the enemy and that was plenty. I carried this stupid tribal notion around long after I should have outgrown it, and in a lot of ways I still carry it.
Thing is, I’m a strong, physically capable guy. Always have been. I’m fast and graceful and I build muscle easily, but I never developed my body. When I was forced by schools to play sports, I picked up the physical skills easily, but refused to play more than the minimum required. I could throw the ball to any position, sure, but damned if I’d let them make me. Because I was a nerd, not a jock. (Not that I studied. See above.) To this goddamn day, in my mid-goddamn-thirties, I have to overcome a reluctance to exercise, because I still feel like I’m not on the team that exercises. I declared allegiance to the other team during the Reagan administration, after all, and how can I go back on that?
Yeah, it wasn’t just Revenge Of The Nerds that taught that nerd/jock dichotomy, that told all the little boys that they had to choose between their body and their mind. That line runs through a lot of the culture. But that movie was pretty distinctly what taught me that bullshit false choice, and that hasn’t been good for me. It hasn’t been good for a lot of other men I know, either, guys who learned that good grades were for the other team, that they had to run faster or lift more or throw harder than the other boys instead of getting an education. All of us damaged boys, trying to be either all mind or all body, buying into René Descartes’ lousy dualism centuries after it should have gone out of style.
I can’t say whether this false dichotomy has damaged your own life, reader, in one way or the other. I can’t say what your own experiences with trying to be a nerd or a jock have been, or what your regrets might be. I can only speak from my own experience, the lies I now realize I should never have believed, the doors I closed for the wrong reasons.
In the end, all I can say is this: Fuck you, Lewis Skolnick, you rapist bastard.
I know I’m late to the party here, just wanted to say that I completely empathise with your experience in the jock/nerd smart/strong false dichotomy. I really feel like it hamstrung my thinking when I was younger. I arrived at your blog, by the way, by googling “revenge of the nerds rape”, which was the end result of a google chain that started with me just searching “sixteen candles”. I’m watching Sixteen Candles for the first time right now and, honestly, I’m freaked the fuck out by it. I’m 21 minutes in and I’m mad at pretty much everything that’s… Read more »
Although a horny nerd when I watched this the first time (quick maths … I must have been nearly 20 and desperate to be cured of my virginity), I could see that the premise of non-consensual sex was unlikely result in proclamations of love, regardless of how good it was.
Maybe the movie WAS unsuitable material for a child – for all manner of reasons.
REAL GENIUS <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 !!
@Alex, yeah, that one’s definitely a classic. The only movie of the era that actually GOT smart people in any real way.
Just wondering if you ever saw Real Genius? Another product of the eighties, produced a year after Revenge of the Nerds, it might function in some ways as an antidote — another film that celebrates intellect, but also features students actually taking classes and doing well in them, doing laboratory research, and a sweet, reasonably healthy* relationship between one of the main male characters and an equally brilliant and nerdy female character. Val Kilmer’s character, Chris Knight, combines academic and technical brilliance with athleticism, self-assurance and charisma, making for a far better (if more intimidating — he’s a hard act… Read more »
Latest, but this post is spectacular and I’m going to scribble hearts around it in my Trapper Keeper.
@startledoctopus: Just wanted to add that I had many of the same experiences you describe so your tl;dr was spot on. However, one very good thing I got out of my many many years spent doing most everything I did around mostly guys (sports, school, hobbies, social events, etc) is a good look at all the really awful cultural stuff that guys have to deal with. Along with my irritation at having to constantly shrug off the stupid female shit (no, I don’t like pink; no I don’t want to have babies, no I’d rather watch the football game, no… Read more »
Actually, I probably get where you’re coming from on the “bored with science” heroes Ami. I just try to make people see past the bad for the reasons behind it. Makes me a lot less likely to want to explode at people IRL. Your last post actually was pretty on-topic as I see the topic. You just expanded the “Movie Influenced My Life” into “Visual Media Influenced My Life”. I was influenced more by books than film, music, or television. Fantasy and SciFi mostly. The protagonists there were smart and capable, honorable (mostly), with understandable motives, and a desire to… Read more »
To get back on topic xD When I was growing up I was always torn about who to associate w/… esp as I got older and I knew who I SHOULD associate w/ or traits that I should (unpopular/smart, glasses, sciency, etc) and at the same time whether the char was female xD I felt like this all the time : W/ “revenge of the nerd stuff” it’s always like “wait that’s how I’m supposed to be right? that’s how I am in the mirror and why ppl keep beating me up” at the same time, it was this big… Read more »
Although I’m a woman, I grew up sort of…well frankly, believing everything feminine was bad and weak, and trying to be just like my brothers. I never had any trouble taking away the messages from films about guys because I saw guys as default humans and of myself as a human (who didn’t want to be associated with anything “girly”). So when I saw movies like this, I also resonated with the Nerd Tribe. I’m naturally lazy, so I saw it more as an excuse not to exercise, but then I also eventually gave up even the forms of exercise… Read more »
That sounded kinda cocky/combative 🙁 I rly didn’t mean it to sound like that : I’m sry:
I see what you’re trying to get at :] but I still dun agree, I think we kinda have 2 different ways of looking at this issue and the chars :3
@Typhon: Oh, right.
I dunno why we’re still arguing about this xD (and honestly I don’t want to : my point wasn’t to get into a nitpicking battle) But if you want to go searching for specific incidences go ahead xD But it’s not the general tone of the chars, or how they react to things. If you need to search out every scene that they “learned” something… I think it shows you rly rly have to be a geek of the show to pick that up… xD (which is fine, I’m a huge geek of the show too xD the Tok’ra is… Read more »
In the “I’m bored” scenes, are the scientists using layman’s terms, (as in approachable and readily understandable) or are they using technical jargon? I’m sure you’d probably glaze over if I started to tell you about the alignment of the magnetic domains and how with a tunneling magnetic microscope you can read the intensity of the flux and deduce some or all of what the overwritten data is on a hard disk drive. Or the proper flow rate of fuel from your injectors into a V8 versus a two-stroke engine. Now if I told you that we have to randomly… Read more »
For more analysis of the concept “nerd,” check out the book Nerds by David Anderegg. While I disagree with Anderegg in some cases (e.g. dismissing the notion of Asperger’s Syndrome), he has some excellent literary analysis of some of the tropes in American literature that influence how we think about masculinity. Anderegg argues that in the 19th century, a dichotomy developed between “men of action” and “men of reflection” in American thought. This dualism presented the man of action as positive and masculine, while the “man of reflection” was the “effete intellectual” or clergyman, associated with femininity and homosexuality. He… Read more »
@ Brian
“Watchmen, where the rape victim is totally her own character who has her own clear though still somewhat messed up reasons for having sex with her rapist after he raped her.”
The Comedian didn’t rape the original Silk Spector; He got the crap kicked out of him by Hooded Justice before anything happened.
So it was an attempted rape.
@Danny: Very nice, thanks for the links. I think you have a point that all the abuse in Full Metal Jacket is ultimately variations on misandry, but I think there’s another step further to take that: ultimately, the recruit’s gender could just as easily have been female, had the Marines been taking ladies in that film. What Hartman was doing was stripping them of their fundamental human dignity, via whatever means presented themselves. Check out some of the resources available on rankism and dignitarianism and see how they resonate with you. @doubletrack: Thank you! That’s always a nice thing to… Read more »
If you want to rid this culture of the poison of Cartesian dualism, be my guest–good riddance to the goddamn idea–but you’ve got a long, *long* way to go…
“Revenge Of The Nerds has so much rape culture, you could use it to make rape yogurt.”
Excellent.
Also, I love this blog. And I especially love your posts, Noah, which have made me look at things in a new light and/or change my mind a great number of times. The way this place brings together feminists, masculists, and people who mistrust either (/both?) of those labels, is truly exciting.
You know I’ve gone back and looked at some movies from the past. I did the same with our friend Gunnery Sgt. Hartman from Full Metal Jacket.
(I also did one a while back about how The Breakfast Club would be cast today.)
They did pick up things as the series went on, as they were brought up and seemed like they’d be useful again. I doubt Jack remembered that you could slip past Goa’uld shielding by vibrating really fast after the incident with the bracelets that Tok’ra gave them (and her name, the name of the bracelets, and the episode name are all escaping me now, great). Anyway, I could probably find examples of Jack or John having picked up this or that science concept or technobabble thing… just not off the top of my head. If you’re truly interested, I’ll go… Read more »
Having never seen the actual movie, I’m going off TV Tropes for my summary, but:
Trust me, it gets so much worse than a rape-by-deception joke.
Whole page of examples, only one of which in my opinion is done well. (Watchmen, where the rape victim is totally her own character who has her own clear though still somewhat messed up reasons for having sex with her rapist after he raped her.)
I think I compare it more to Star Trek and esp TNG, where even Riker knows quite a lot about science and stuff and at least still makes an effort to listen to Geordi and Data when they’re talking :] It’s not the lack of specialty, it’s the lack of INTEREST. : or at least the perceived lack of interest from the way the chars are written, and the “bored now,” attitude given to science. : I mean even Daniel and McKay learned how to fight and use guns later on… I think if I was on an SG team,… Read more »
Oh, I was getting off my own fanboy train. Sorry. I’m a Stargate otaku. Loooooove Stargate. Ah, I do see your point on the “I’m too cool for science” thing. But put it another way. Considering how much malware you get on your computer, do you think it’s reasonable to get a BS in Computer Security, or use an expert? All the SG teams have the people whose job it is to be smart, and the people whose job it is to protect those smart people. You can be both, but why intentionally dilute yourself? You’re good at the intimidation… Read more »
Okay I was afraid somebody would bring that up and then it’d become a thing xD So I dun rly want to argue about fanboy/girl stuff : But my point wasn’t that they’re not SMART, but they treat science as something not worth knowing (given how often teams get trapped off world, you’d think they would have taught the military ppl how to move the crystals around the DHD for instance) and the whole “I don’t want to hear the explanation” thing irks me, b/c we alrdy are having an issue in society where scientists and science is kinda distrusted… Read more »