AmericanStudies: March 13, 2025: Spring Breaking at the Movies: Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise
[With one
son in college and another about to be, Spring Break is a lot more than just a
concept or a professional reality for this AmericanStudier. So this week I’ll
AmericanStudy a handful of cinematic portrayals of Spring Break, leading up to some
weekend reflections on being a college Dad!]
On
American anti-intellectualism, and the worse and better ways to challenge it.
As I noted
in this post on my
friend Aaron Lecklider’s great book Inventing the Egghead: The Battle over
Brainpower in American Culture (2013), published exactly 50 years
after Richard Hofstadter’s influential Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1963),
the precise origins of anti-intellectual attitudes and narratives in American
society are a bit unclear and contested. But whether those national narratives
are foundational (as Hofstadter argues) or more the product of Cold War
anxieties (as Lecklider does), I would say that there can be no argument at all
that by the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st
century these anti-intellectual threads have become dominant ones in our
cultural pattern. And, more exactly and crucially, that the development and
deepening of those narratives throughout the 50 years or so between
Hofstadter’s book and the 2016 election helped bring us
to the presidency of Donald Trump, a culmination of these anti-intellectual
trends as of so many of the worst and most divisive impulses of American
politics and culture.
Which
brings us, obviously, to the Revenge of the Nerds film series. Beginning
with the 1984 original film, and featuring three sequels over the next decade
(including 1987’s Spring Break-set Revenge
of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise, the ostensible focus of this post
but, like yesterday’s subject From Justin
to Kelly, not a film that needs an entire blog post on its own terms I
assure you), the nerdy protagonists of this series challenged the Reagan era’s
deepening anti-intellectual sentiments, triumphing time and again over their
popular jock adversaries. The first film has in recent years received a good
deal of justified criticism for the fact that its triumphant sex scene would
actually have to be
classified as a rape scene (nerdy hero Lewis has sex with his crush
while pretending to be her boyfriend), among quite a few other problematic
moments. And in truth, those specific problems illustrate a more
fundamental issue with all the Revenge
films: their mostly unlikable heroes don’t triumph through meaningful use of
their intelligence, but rather through things like sexual deception and
violence (in Nerds in Paradise the
climactic victory involves a tank and a punch). The message seems generally to
be that nerds can be just as awful as the rest of society.
Fortunately,
the Revenge of the Nerds films were
not the only 1980s cinematic challenge to anti-intellectualism. The heroes of
1985’s cult
classic film Real Genius are also
nerds, brilliant and eccentric students at the fictional Pacific Technical
University [SPOILERS in what follows, although the undeniable pleasures of Real Genius aren’t in
its plot surprises]. These nerds likewise find themselves pitted against Reagan
era tropes, this time Cold War militarization and the use of science and
technology for dastardly and destructive ends (aided and abetted by their
villainous Professor
Jerry Hathaway, William Atherton’s second deliciously
evil character in two years). But in this case the heroes’ climactic
triumph is entirely due to their intellectual prowess, which they use to outwit
Hathaway and his military allies and to turn weapons of mass destruction into,
well, popcorn. Score
one for a more thoughtful and inspiring American intellectualism!
Last
Spring Break film tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Responses to this film or other Spring Break texts you’d share?
