If you think your only two choices are to be a nerd or a jock, writes Noah Brand, you are doomed from the start.
Previously published at No Seriously What About Teh Menz.
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.
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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.
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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 think that because of the mean things Betty Child’s and the rest of the Pi sorority did to the poor nerds, Betty and the rest of the Pis got what they deserved in return when they were photographed nude and recorded nude and when Betty got tricked into fucking one of the nerds she thought she despised so much. Remember, these girls set Lewis and Gilbert up to be humiliated by the Alpha Betas, then unleashed a bunch of pigs on the nerds’ party to ruin it. Karma is a bitch. The girls payed the fiddler.
Fuck you too, Noah. It’s a fuckin comedy you asshole. You have your inattentive parents thank for letting an 8 year old watch an R rated movie.
An interesting take. I agree that the attitude toward women is a bit iffy, but I have to say I really don’t see the dualism you talk about with regard to sports. I mean, doesn’t the competition involve sports-related events? I too saw the movie as a relatively young kid, and the image that sticks most in my mind is the aerodynamic javelin. I too am a lifelong proudly self-proclaimed nerd, but I ran on the track and cross-country teams without thinking anything of it and enjoyed soccer and other physical activities. The only sport I felt active antipathy for… Read more »
It’s interesting how different people can have completely different takeaways from a movie. I’m definitely more aware that the cameras, pies, and the moon walk scene were wrong now than I was when I first saw the movie, but my takeaways were much more positive. I saw that it was OK to exercise, even if you weren’t a jock. (Wermser and Lamar exercise a lot, and very few of the nerds were soft and doughy. I saw that it was possible to be nice to jocks, even if they weren’t nice to you (while not strictly a nerd, I had… Read more »
I loved this article. I can’t even begin to tell you how many times this exact same thing has happened to me. Last year, in my (first college semester) anthropology class, we watched a documentary about the Kalahari bushmen. In the documentary, it shows how westerners came and the destruction it had on their society. The part that resonated the most was when the camera crew for The Gods Must Be Crazy asked N!xau to be in the film. The tribe endured much hatred, fighting and jealousy they had not yet experienced until that point. Everything I had felt about… Read more »
I saw this movie at about the same age (and short thereafter I saw Childsplay). I guess I didn’t get much entertainment out of this movie because I hardly remember any of it by the time I made it to highschool. And even in HS these things didn’t come up much because when you have a class full of 20 people there is going to be some overlapping in stereotypes. We had ample nerd/jocks. I took on the nerd/stoner role. There was no one that could fit into one group or another because there just weren’t enough of us to… Read more »
WOOWWWWWWWWW. So much beta maling, white knighting and putting women on pedastals in here. Seriously the movie is R rated for a reason kid. To the dude above that the cheerleader woman didn’t deserve anyone’s affection? Really dude? Misogynistic much brah? Stop putting women on a pedestal as sweet little perfect angels and treat them like HUMAN BEINGS!!! No, don’t be disrespectful and still be a gentleman but they are just like you’re guy friends except attractive, different plumbing and usually smell a lot better. Nothing more, nothing less. This movie wasn’t objectifying women, it was a spoof movie having… Read more »
So, no bullying takes place in mandatory boys’ P.E. classes? Is that what you’re saying? Oh, please …
Please don’t be so arrogant. Your experiences haven’t necessarily been shared by everyone else. In fact, I know they haven’t. Clearly some guys were bullied by jocks in high school — not that you would care.
It would do certain men a world of good to shut up every once in awhile and perhaps learn a thing or two about other men’s experiences instead of immediately going for the jugular in time-honoured high school “pack” tradition and dismissing them as “beta males.” It takes a great deal more courage an integrity for a man to expose oneself in an essay like than it does to great-beat like a jackass at that mans expense.
“beta”? “Alpha”? If you still thing your gonads work like wolf packs work (according to dicsovery channel, that is), you need a good neutering vet!
Excellent commentary. Most movies are a reflection of the times they were produced in and this movie was clearly a spoof of the mid 1980’s where humans hadn’t evolved to the level of the navel gazing of today. My apologies to the women out there if this was truly perceived as a hallmark of our “rape culture” which I sincerely do not support.
The rape yogurt line made me laugh very hard.
Um, I was never a jock, but didn’t really regard myself as a “nerd” either, though others might have but I didn’t care. This movie came out while I was in college, and it struck me as an “Animal House” rip-off without that better movie’s smarter social and political humor. Sorry something so frivolous screwed up your life.
Huh. See, my problem with movies like this (such as Superbad) isn’t really the nerd-jock dichotomy. It’s the idea that having sex with beautiful (often perfect) women “makes up” for all your other “undesirable” qualities, like being a geek or a fatso.
Not only does this objectify women as some kind of trophy, it also objectifies men and essentially implies that not getting laid is what makes you a loser–not whether you’re a nerd or a jock.
It’s saying, “Don’t worry, it’s cool to be a nerd as long as you screw just as many chicks as the jocks do.”
Which of course reinforces the idea that a man’s sex life is a defining feature of his manhood.
Gee, maybe I missed something, but I don’t remember any rape in Revenge of the Nerds. I grew up fairly nerdy, but I do have a track letter from high school, and did six years in the Army. Fighting was mandatory in my neighborhood, and I was good enough at it that I beat up the star end on our high school football team when he tried to bully me. I did six years of aikido and karate after I got my PhD at age 51. I liked RON because it got at one of the embarrassing features of high… Read more »
I love your style, Noah. I can’t wait to hear how Revenge of the Nerds 2 saved your life. Maybe it’s just me misreading this, but I didn’t get the feeling the author was presenting a somber analysis of how ROTN deeply impacted him from age 8 to a couple months before writing the piece. I saw it as a writer taking artistic license, and turning a boring premise (ROTN had bad messages) into an entertaining piece about an impressionable 8 yr. old and why these messages are bad. It’s not hard to believe it contributed to his ideas of… Read more »
I’d say that it wasn’t an accurate portrayal of college life but I think it might be a stretch to say it ruined your life.
The problem that I have with the wornout Jock/Nerd paradym is I have had several friends that were both. When I was in High School our star quarter back was also third in academic standing. Your thinking yeah and they had twenty in the class. Nope our senior class was 1,046 students. Charlie Brown (I kid you not, good Cherokee name) was an unstoppable quarterback and an inredable scholar. Often he was the only person that could understand what I was talking about. I was 87 but my English teacher was flunking me because I refused to play football. Charlie… Read more »
I love this post and it is so funny yet true! I love the nerd and the jock. I find them both sexy for separate reasons. But there is NOTHING SEXIER than a nerd disguised as a jock or vice versa. That is like being with a centaur but instead of half horse, half man you get half nerd, half jock. The half nerd composes the upper body i.e. the brain, heart, sentiments etc. The half jock composes the lower body i.e. all the below the waist essentials plus he can be an ass at times. Asses aren’t bad in… Read more »
Dude, it’s a movie. Get over it.
The oral sex scene where the king of the nerds has sex with the cheerleader while wearing the vader mask (and fooling her into thinking he was the jock) was problematic. I think another problem I see with the movie is that the leading girl was so obviously a status seeker, and shared in the humiliation of the nerds. In the real world, quite frankly the lead girl wasn’t deserving of any1’s affections as she was just as bad as about any of the male characters. This movies was bad in a number of ways, but sometimes you at least… Read more »
I saw the movie and thought that it was hilarious. I’ve also seen Porky’s, Animal House, etc. It’s just the genre. It’s not intended to be taken seriously. I was a book worm in school and was never good at sports or so I thought. In high school I took up weight lifting and kick boxing. I found out it was team sports that I wasn’t good at. I wouldn’t say that I was one of the cool kids, but I was no longer classified as a nerd or at least no one would say so to my face. I… Read more »
The movie didn’t do anything to you–you did. Maybe your parents should have stopped you from watching this. I watched it around the same age as you did though. I certainly didn’t base my worldview on it. Why the hell would you? And even assuming that you could base your life on it, why blame the movie instead of yourself? We all watch crappy shows at a young age. We also have filters in our minds that can call something BS if need be. If your filter didn’t call BS on this movie, you have some serious problems.
I saw the movie as a kid and found it to be hilarious.
The only thing I saw was that being fit in mind and body meant that you could excel all around.
But I can see how a lot of guys did receive a skewed perception of reality from this film and ones like it.
Not to mention all the other college films out there which focused on partying and getting the girls.
Darnit, why wasn’t Revenge of the Nerds full of boring, classroom scenes where Poindexter challenges professors on complex points about computer science???????????
So, I have several issues with this article, but before we get to that, I just want to acknowledge that the line “Revenge Of The Nerds has so much rape culture, you could use it to make rape yogurt.” is glorious and you deserve some respect on that fact alone. However, the rest of this article is just… I’m not even sure what category of wrong to place it in. So let’s go step by step shall we? (Actually, just very quickly, I will amend that statement slightly. Your article is 7 kinds of wrong AFTER you get past your… Read more »
I think you should be looking at your parents when you are thinking who ruined your life. Seriously who lets an 8 year old kid watch an R rated movie. I begged my parents to let me watch this movie but they never relented.
I own the movie and have never thought about this way before, it really should be banned.
So, why did your parents let you watch an R-rated movie in third grade???!!!
I’d forgotten that Betty has sex with him under false pretenses. That reminds me that Farmer Ted scores the hottie in SIXTEEN CANDLES thanks to drunken mis-identification, too. Wow.
Stopped reading after Rape Culture….
Ditto. Once a buzzword comes along, the author’s credibility drops to zero and there’s no point in continuing.
Really? Any buzzword at all? And the author loses ALL credibility? Dosen’t that seem an extreme reaction?
After all, buzzwords are just handy terms used to encapsulate complex ideas so we don’t have to flesh them out in full every time we mention them. They’re really convenient, like, 99% of the time.
That’s too bad. He points out how truly effed-up Revenge of the Nerds is with respect to Rape. I do remember the seduction of the feminine trophy object and even I found it disturbing or a pile of BS way back when that there was seduction by fraud. That was not cool. That said I was ok with the video taping of women in the shower and partially undressed at that time. These days, I realize that women should be PAID to appear in a state of nudity (thank god for strip clubs and porn) and only be viewed au… Read more »
It’s a strange notion to suggest that something like ROTN was TEACHING anything.
You’re quite right. However, we do learn a whole lot just by osmosis. That’s the reason that some films are G and others are R. Regardless of whether the intention is to teach, something is imparted all the same.
To be honest the 1st time I watched Revenge of The Nerds was on public television so I wasn’t exposed to the harshness of the subject matter. I didn’t see it uncut until I was well into my mid twenties where I could better compartmentalize reality….The Women were treated badly in the movie.
Still…
What rational human being would be dumb enough to pull life affirming wisdom from an 80’s wild comedy?
A young one?
Too bad, you deprived yourself of a good read.