Hermits among virtual trees: Falling off the edge of escapism
I trudge along the path behind my Mom, eyes turned stubbornly downwards, a silent protest against the injustice of being forced out into a wilderness filled with mosquitoes, skunks, brambles, and countless other unspeakable discomforts.
“Look,” she points, “a loon!”
I glance up, quickly, and back down, lest she think her attempt at cheering me up came anywhere close to succeeding. We walk on in the silence I continue to impose. Lulled by birdsong and the sound of our footfalls, my mind drifts off to places it would much rather be — struggling across the misty mountains alongside the Fellowship of the Ring, trekking through the realm of the dead with Lyra Belacqua, crossing Tatooine on Bantha-back.
“Do you know what kind of flowers these are?”
Started from my reverie, I raise my eyes, following my mother’s pointed finger towards a cluster of white petals haloing yellow heads. I say nothing, the intrusion on my thoughts refreshing my resolution to remain recalcitrant.
“Fleabane,” she intones, “Supposedly, the fragrance keeps the fleas away. And those over there are buttercups.”
“I know that at least,” I snap, stepping ahead before she says more.
Looking back at this day, and all the countless others like it, I still can’t hold back a welling sense of shame in my chest, that tenseness that every kid feels when they grow up and look back at all the whining, tantrums, and insensitivity they afflicted on their parents. But, another voice intones, it was only natural. Take a nerdy kid and force them to suffer through that perennial white, upper-middle class Canadian experience of “going to the cottage,” with all the outdoorsiness this entails, and you have an unsurprising recipe for bad moods.
I saw little “home” for myself among the evergreens, canoes and moose, none of which I was interested in or good at dealing with. As I grew into an uncoordinated, space-cadet of a kid, home — comfort, happiness, peace — was found increasingly in the realms of fantasy and science-fiction, in paper and circuitry.
Flowers, birds, hikes — all fell squarely into the realm of “the outside,” literally and figuratively. Looking back now, I do not fail to see the irony of idolizing characters such as Aragorn, or Gandalf — the wild ranger and the worldly wizard, surviving on their wits, their knowledge of the world around them, its culture, its geography, its plants and animals — while so staunchly rejecting equivalent knowledge pertaining to the world of my own. But fantasy seemed to afford me my own little safe “outside.” I could be off adventuring with Aragorn and Gandalf while warm, in my bed, surrounded by comforting, familiar, orderly sights and sounds — no whining midges, no steep hills, and no — heaven forbid — lurking daddy-longlegses.
And as we (I use we here to refer to those who might self-identify as being a nerd, however exactly they understand that) grow older, the desire for this little escape proves self-reinforcing. If we feel the “outside” has nothing to offer us, why spend any time learning about it? And the less time we spend discovering the world around us — its culture and society — the more such things appear uninteresting, chaotic, and frightening. We retreat from the vast, complex outside to somewhere within, where we may create and escape to worlds that are comprehensible and appealing.
This rejection forms the basis for nerd escapism, which operates through allowing us to imagine ourselves the competent, appealing, interesting protagonists of universes that are less messy, confusing, and cluttered than our own — an inversion of how we perceive ourselves in relation to the outside.
And there is real and legitimate comfort in such an activity, for it is inarguable that the image of the nerd — as socially awkward, gangly, strange — is still an object of disdain for some young people.
For many nerds, the spaces of comfort offered by escapist literature have become a point of pride, and nerds have fought to present their interests as positive, enabling spaces in which they can find identity, community, and home.
But can such an approach to literature truly be positive?
With the development of newer media technologies, escapism has become both more accessible and more engrossing. As Philip K. Dick has said, “…unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind.”
For postmodern social theorists, this represents a central feature of the current age. With the encroachment of myriad alternative, pseudo-realities and images, the real becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible, to distinguish from the fictional.
Falling down the rabbit hole of pure escapism, we lose the sociocultural footing on which art so fundamentally urges us to reflect. We speak, traditionally, of “consuming” literature — we take texts into our persons, savouring them and, when they truly speak to us, allowing them to shift our perceptions and personalities (as Walt Whitman puts his experience of Edgar Rice Burroughs, “I was simmering, simmering, simmering, Burroughs brought me to a boil”). With escapism, we invert this process. Instead of bringing the texts into us, we attempt to relocate ourselves into them. Instead of considering the text in relation to our home universe, we concern ourselves entirely with the text’s own universe*.
I would note here that I reject the elitist, nostalgia-driven fatalism to which postmodernist theorizing often leads. I aim no critique at the relative quality of literature typically associated with escapism, and I believe that the act of escaping to a far-removed universe is a positive and important activity for any creative, critical mind.
But I feel that nerds at times steps too far off the deep end of escapism, the dangers of which are obscured by a culture that rallies against any perceived criticism of the activities it has sought for so long to legitimate.
And dangers there certainly are.
For one, any attempt at total escapism is doomed to failure — the outside does not go away, and fiction will always be fiction. The real world *is* messy, scary, unfair, and stressful. But this is something to be met head on. Running from reality is as futile as it is increasingly damaging. As the internet erodes the boundaries between identities and social spaces, the demographics and voices within the nerd community are shifting. The rise of Gamergate has brought the uncomfortable racial and gendered tensions inherent in this shift into the limelight, as the white male voices long dominant in nerd culture increasingly find themselves challenged, questioned, and critiqued. The violent response to this perceived intrusion demonstrates that the culture of escapism has left the nerd community profoundly unprepared to deal with the difficult, deeply important questions such a shift entails. A culture based around interest in fictional universes that vastly simplify or, more frequently, exclude entirely issues of racial and gender discrimination has learned few of the skills necessary to comprehend emerging discussion along these lines. What is more, in its continued struggle to legitimate itself, nerd culture effectively sanctifies certain franchises, frequently failing to recognize the difference between a critique of a specific text and a critique of nerdiness as a whole. This risks a position where any acknowledgement that even the most appealing, fantastical of stories has emerged from a potentially problematic sociocultural context becomes intolerable. But perhaps there is more to this behaviour than a failure to recognize a difference. If nerd escapism entails the relocating of our sense of belonging into an alternate reality, and our identity as nerds emerges out of our relation to that reality, it is only natural that we should feel the need to defend our new home.
Second, a focus on escapism can and does serve to significantly drain the potential for artistic experimentation and diversity of voices in the high-complexity industries of modern media. When vast amounts of resources and person-hours are required for each project, the logic of capitalism necessitates a focus on return of investment that encourages products that appeal to the widest possible audience. When that audience is more concerned with the creation of universes that make sense to them, to which they can safely escape, than the development of complex, realistic, interesting characters and stories, artistic innovation stagnates. Take, for an extreme example, the Japanese animation industry. As Hayao Miyazaki, one of the patron saints of anime, has written, the anime industry has been overtaken by Otaku — animation nerds. For these people — for me, at least — anime offered an escape from the challenges, stress, and pressure of everyday life. Yet in our desire for universes that make sense to us, where we can find safety, we have encouraged an approach to design that is so formulaic that we can quite literally code and map out the small range of stock character types and plot devices. When we are primarily concerned with creating places that we can comfortably escape to, we become more focused on the intelligibility of these places and their inhabitants than on the development of more interesting, complex, and real people or plots. We begin to become, as Miyazaki says, “humans who can’t stand looking at other humans.”
But perhaps most damningly of all, a focus on escapism to the detriment of lived experiences diminishes the lustre of the escapes themselves. I think, the day I walked with my Mom at the cottage — every day I walked with my Mom at the cottage, in the messy, irritating, unpredictable outside — she was giving me one small opportunity to build my own, unique social, cultural, and intellectual home, identity, and point of view. I never did learn what Fleabane smells like. But if I had plucked a flower on that day, perhaps I would know something of what Aragorn smelled when he made the poultice that would save Frodo’s life after that most terrifying and enthralling encounter on Weathertop.
*Look no further than the obsession with the concept of “canon” in regards to settings such as Star Wars, or the Marvel universe. As nerds we spend far more time in fleshing out and concretizing the finer points of the fantastical universes we read about than we do reflecting on how those universes speak about our own.
