I think language changes from generation to generation. Each generation retains its own language, its own meanings. Bill Gates was born in 1955. GSP was born in 1981.
The year 1984 saw Revenge of the Nerds, the movie. The nerds in that movie were intellectually accomplished and social lepers. What intellectually accomplished fictional characters have we seen portrayed more recently, and let us see whether they were social lepers. Hermione Granger stood out for her intellectual accomplishments, but was not a social leper. UK of course, but an important character to her American fans. Americans have had cyberpunk heroes since Neuromancer, with Keanu Reeves playing two, William Gibson’s own Johnny Mnemonic, and much more successfully, Neo of The Matrix, the superhacker. Not a social leper. A lot of other association of computer wizardry with more punk/goth outcast-ness than nerd outcast-ness, such as Kate Libby/Acid Burn/Angelina Jolie in Hackers (Jolie is genetically incapable of being a social leper) and the girl with the dragon tattoo, Lisbeth Salander, aka “Wasp”, the last Swedish to be sure but very much embraced by American readers, and anyway I think she’s obviously inspired by earlier incarnations of the similar type such as Kate Libby of the American movie Hackers. Granted, Lisbeth Salander is socially disconnected, but it’s a very different kind of disconnect from the “nerd” disconnect.
What else. Sandra Bullock, Keanu’s Speed costar, in The Net, portrays the socially disconnected computer expert in 1995, and she’s no goth, doesn’t go around in black leather, but she’s still a much, much softer portrayal of the conservatively-dressed nerd, nothing like the taped-glasses nerd of 1984. And it’s Sandra Bullock.
What else? Having trouble thinking of major characters. There’s Gene Hackman in Enemy of the State, another super-hacker of sorts, but while completely isolated, is so for perfectly legitimate reasons. Then there’s the latest Die Hard movie, hacker played by Justin Long, the Mac guy. Not played by John Hodgman, the PC guy. John Hodgman is typecast as the nerd. Justin Long is typecast as not the nerd—and he was the one picked for the hacker role.
I’m out. Can’t think of anything else at the moment.
Edit: The Breakfast Club, 1985, Anthony Michael Hall as the nerd. I’m starting to wonder if 1984/1985 was the high point of the stereotype.
I’ve only seen a couple of the HP movies—is Hermione’s character presented much differently there than in the books? In the books, she’s presented sympathetically, but she also has to navigate being disliked for knowing so much.
Also in the movies, it seemed to me that she was very pretty, while in the books, she seems to have average looks.
Being disliked for knowing so much is not the same thing as being socially inept. But my recollection is that she was attacked primarily for being muggle-born, and more by Draco Malfoy than by anybody else. It’s been a while.
In the first movie Emma Watson was very much like the drawn character, becoming markedly less so in the later movies, maybe in part because the movies were made every two years or so, which meant that the actors quickly outgrew their characters. But the movies have been, I think, very faithful to the books as far as story and character go, within the necessary constraints.
Three nerds on one of the later seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (early 2000s) were socially inept (e.g. completely defenseless against bullying by Spike) and evil though less so than most of the bad guys.
Yes, those were definitely nerds in the bad old dual studious/inept sense. However, Willow Rosenberg was much more central to the series. Wikipedia actually says, “Willow is a shy and nerdy girl with little confidence,” and, “Willow is presented as a bookish nerd with considerable computer skills, dowdily dressed and easily intimidated by more popular girls in school.”
buffy.wikia.com says, “Willow started out as a meek and largely unassertive computer nerd, but eventually grew to be a powerful and authoritative individual,” and, “In her early years at high school, Willow is a shy, naïve nerd with a light, risqué sense of humor. A member of the Math, Science, and Computer clubs, she is the person to go to for tutoring help. Willow is ridiculed by her more popular classmates, including cheerleaders Cordelia Chase and Harmony Kendall.” It includes the corporate explanation of the shift in Willow:
Joss Whedon explained, “The incredibly nerdy clothes that she’s wearing, you’ll see her wearing for exactly one episode, because [the network] kept sending us memos ‘You must make her more hip. You must make her more cool. You must make her more… like Buffy’ which confused me because, you know, I wanted to do an ensemble show and ensemble means that people are different. Besides, I think that outfit’s really cute.”
Which suggests that Whedon wanted to sustain Willow as more of a nerd in all respects, but the suits said no, and so this is why Willow became more of a Hermione and less of a female Anthony Michael Hall. Harry Potter came out in 1997 and Buffy (TV series) came out in the same year. Even though both the HP books and Buffy continued for many years, the characters were sufficiently established early on that my guess is that there was minimal influence.
Thinking of female nerds, The Mummy’s librarian pops into my head. Played by Rachel Weisz. Some degree of social awkwardness, but not really all that much. Definitely studious—knows enough to wake the antagonist.
In light of Whedon’s remark, it looks like you can thank corporate headquarters for the memorable succession of dresses. But Hannigan was smoking hot whatever she wore.
As others have already pointed out, it seems like your set of examples is not representative.
I’m not very familiar with the popular culture from the last decade or so, and what I see of it usually evaporates from my memory quickly. However, one recent major Hollywood movie that I clearly remember promoting extreme negative nerd stereotypes was the 2007 Live Free or Die Hard, which features a “computer genius” character having just about every stereotypical “nerdy” characteristic imaginable. He is even shown as incapable of doing anything productive or profitable with his “nerdy” computer knowledge (he’s depicted as living in his parents’ basement in his thirties).
While that computer hacker lived in his mom’s basement, he was not the only computer hacker in the movie. In fact there was another one, and a much more important one.
For a movie to strongly depict a correlation between X and Y, the movie needs to show X and Y occurring together and not occurring separately. But Live Free or Die Hard does not do this. There is one computer hacker who lives in his mom’s basement, but there is another one who does not and who is going to win the cop’s daughter in the end. Contrast with Breakfast Club or Revenge of the Nerds, where the X and Y occur together and not apart. There are no good students/chess club members in the Breakfast Club aside from the nerd.
It’s easy to charge that I’ve been cherry-picking, and very hard to defend against that charge, so it would be tremendously costly for me to respond in this vein. Listing examples as I did requires a cooperative audience; if the audience turns on you it might be either because the audience is cherry-picking, or because you are cherry-picking, but either way, there is just no inexpensive way to pursue that line of argument at that point.
I am not entirely without defense, because by luck one of the articles recently cited agrees with me about the shift over time in the frequency of what it calls Type 1 nerds. It says:
Type 1: Pasty, weak, Geek Physiques, probably with Nerd Glasses, bullied by the jocks, Can Not Spit It Out if a girl is anywhere within range, working on odd projects in their basements and garages. These are the nerd stereotypes that were most prevalent in the 70s and 80s, the ones that feature in movies like Revenge of the Nerds, the sort that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs looked like back in the day.
Based on the examples I came up with, I gave 1984/1985 as the high point of the depiction of that sort of nerd, which is consistent with “most prevalent in the 70s and 80s”. Furthermore, American Heritage Dictionary’s history of the word “nerd” appears to give 1970 as a lower limit on when the word “nerd” accrued the intellectual element to its earlier “dud” meaning—and this is consistent with, and so supports, the article’s claim that the nerd stereotype was most prevalent in the 70s and 80s. In fact it appears to have come into existence in the 70s, reached a high point in the mid eighties, and largely flamed out, at least in its more virulent manifestation.
But rather than pursue this further, instead, consider my latest comment here, which deals more directly with the meaning of the word.
You’re right, I forgot about that other hacker character. In any case, I will defer to your superior knowledge of the modern pop culture, which I already confessed being largely ignorant of.
On further reflection, you have convinced me that the pop culture stereotypes of technically savvy characters have changed. One possible reason for this is that among the present younger generations, computers are used by nearly everyone for fun in various ways, whereas 20 years ago and earlier, this was much more unusual and mostly restricted to “nerdy” kids. An interesting test of this theory would be to see how portrayals of computer-savvy characters have changed relative to those with other technical and scientific interests which have remained unusual and unpopular among the majority of kids.
This theory seems to me more plausible than the explanation based on the economic success of tech entrepreneurs, both because the public image of tech magnates is still largely “nerdy” and because the status and economic prospects of tech professions have in fact been going down since the early 2000s.
Interesting examples. I gotta cite the TVTropes article on Hollywood Nerds:
Type 1: Pasty, weak, Geek Physiques, probably with Nerd Glasses, bullied by the jocks, Can Not Spit It Out if a girl is anywhere within range, working on odd projects in their basements and garages. These are the nerd stereotypes that were most prevalent in the 70s and 80s, the ones that feature in movies like Revenge of the Nerds, the sort that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs looked like back in the day. …Ok, Gates still looks kinda like that, but he’s a billionaire now, wanna make something of it? You would think the nerds ruling the world nowadays would make this a Discredited Trope, but there’s enough Truth In Television to Geek Physiques to keep this one running.
Type 2: Take your average attractive actor or actress and stick on Nerd Glasses, a lab coat and some mussed hair and clothes to make them Hollywood Homely. They are probably also Hollywood Dateless, and the social ineptitude may only be an Informed Flaw. They may even shoot straight into Hot Scientist or Hot Librarian territory without help from their smarts to pull it off. May be involved in an Ugly Duckling Beautiful All Along story if they do get paired off with someone.
I think some of your examples are Type 2 Hollywood nerds: hot people with glasses stuck on. That type does defy the general nerd stereotype, but it doesn’t do so in a believable way, so I’m not sure how much these portrayals actually dent the “nerd” stereotype.
The “hacker” archetype is a bit different. “Hacker” incorporates rebelliousness and creativity which is attractive and high-status, in addition to being emotionally relatable.
Goth and punk aesthetics also relate nerds to rebelliousness and Romanticism.
Justin Long is an interesting character. Why did he become the hacker for Die Hard, other than having good looks? There actually are a bunch of qualities that both Justin Long’s Mac character have, and Hollywood hackers have. Justin Long’s character also exemplifies creativity (Macs are associated with media, and his clothes and hairstyle look artsy) and rebelliousness (against the authority of the PC in the workplace).
The end result is that I only find Long semi-believable as a hacker. It’s much easier to imagine him working in Final Cut Pro than doing scripting. My suspicions were confirmed when I looked up an interview of Long and found he does not have a technical mind: he says that he isn’t good at math and his mind “doesn’t work that way.” Justin Long’s Mac character is a textbook “Hollywood Nerd.”
Technical interests are cool to have as long as you mask them in rebelliousness or artsiness.
To avoid getting far off track, citing these fictions was in order to make a point about the changing meaning of “nerd”. With that in mind, look at what the article you linked to says about real nerds:
In Real Life, nerds can run the entire spectrum of “beauty” and social prowess, from unattractive and socially inept to drop dead gorgeous and a social butterfly. Like most people, most nerds are simply of average looks and social skills. The only thing that really differentiates nerds from anyone else is their intense interest in niche topics.
That’s agreeing with my thesis about what the concept of “nerd” has come to mean recently. The article writer thinks that it is distinguishing real nerds (who are distinguished only by intense interest in niche topics) from Hollywood Nerds (who are type 1 or type 2). But if you simply look at a dictionary (none of them have been updated to reflect the new meaning—the latest shift is too recent), the word “nerd” did not just mean someone with an interest in niche topics. By (earlier) definition, a nerd was not “of average looks and social skills”. The word has been gutted of its earlier meaning and emotional impact, making it no longer, or at least less, painful for someone to call themselves a nerd.
The American Heritage Dictionary traces the meaning of “nerd” through time. In 1957, meant “square”, which, looking it up, meant conventional or old-fashioned or opposed to current trends. Nothing there about intense interest in niche topics. Then in 1970, an uninteresting person, a “dud”. Again, nothing there about intense interest in niche topics. At some point, the concept of “nerd” gained the element of keen and single-minded interest in niche and especially technical topics. while retaining the “dud” element. But now we see, in the article you link to, that “nerd” has, at least for some, dropped the “dud” element and retained only the (relatively new) element of interest in niche topics.
Yup. And there are other examples. Liz Lemon of 30 Rock, another current comedy. But Big Bang Theory is much more hard core. However Big Bang Theory is, I think, not the cultural benchmark that The Breakfast Club was.
Edit: just thinking further, it occurs to me that Albert Einstein, with his dress and his hair, must have greatly informed the cultural stereotype of the badly dressed genius. Doctor Who is I think a sometimes “cool” version of Einstein. I think there’s some overlap between the absentminded professor (as in flubber), the nutty professor (as in Jerry Lewis), Dick Van Dyke of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and the nerd. We have the high intelligence, the being lost in one’s interests, the social awkwardness and obliviousness, and so on. Shared among the absentminded professor types (informed, whether justly or unjustly I don’t know, by the common idea of Einstein) and also the nerds.
I’ll take your word for the cultural benchmark, it didn’t make as much impact on the rest of the world as it did the states (I hadn’t heard of it until 1997)
Speaking of 1985, and crazy scientists you get Doc Brown. Now he was a cool version of Einstein, hair and all. Well actually Einstein is probably considered fairly cool for a scientist, the crazy tongue photo gives the impression he didn’t take himself too seriously.
I think language changes from generation to generation. Each generation retains its own language, its own meanings. Bill Gates was born in 1955. GSP was born in 1981.
The year 1984 saw Revenge of the Nerds, the movie. The nerds in that movie were intellectually accomplished and social lepers. What intellectually accomplished fictional characters have we seen portrayed more recently, and let us see whether they were social lepers. Hermione Granger stood out for her intellectual accomplishments, but was not a social leper. UK of course, but an important character to her American fans. Americans have had cyberpunk heroes since Neuromancer, with Keanu Reeves playing two, William Gibson’s own Johnny Mnemonic, and much more successfully, Neo of The Matrix, the superhacker. Not a social leper. A lot of other association of computer wizardry with more punk/goth outcast-ness than nerd outcast-ness, such as Kate Libby/Acid Burn/Angelina Jolie in Hackers (Jolie is genetically incapable of being a social leper) and the girl with the dragon tattoo, Lisbeth Salander, aka “Wasp”, the last Swedish to be sure but very much embraced by American readers, and anyway I think she’s obviously inspired by earlier incarnations of the similar type such as Kate Libby of the American movie Hackers. Granted, Lisbeth Salander is socially disconnected, but it’s a very different kind of disconnect from the “nerd” disconnect.
What else. Sandra Bullock, Keanu’s Speed costar, in The Net, portrays the socially disconnected computer expert in 1995, and she’s no goth, doesn’t go around in black leather, but she’s still a much, much softer portrayal of the conservatively-dressed nerd, nothing like the taped-glasses nerd of 1984. And it’s Sandra Bullock.
What else? Having trouble thinking of major characters. There’s Gene Hackman in Enemy of the State, another super-hacker of sorts, but while completely isolated, is so for perfectly legitimate reasons. Then there’s the latest Die Hard movie, hacker played by Justin Long, the Mac guy. Not played by John Hodgman, the PC guy. John Hodgman is typecast as the nerd. Justin Long is typecast as not the nerd—and he was the one picked for the hacker role.
I’m out. Can’t think of anything else at the moment.
Edit: The Breakfast Club, 1985, Anthony Michael Hall as the nerd. I’m starting to wonder if 1984/1985 was the high point of the stereotype.
I’ve only seen a couple of the HP movies—is Hermione’s character presented much differently there than in the books? In the books, she’s presented sympathetically, but she also has to navigate being disliked for knowing so much.
Also in the movies, it seemed to me that she was very pretty, while in the books, she seems to have average looks.
Being disliked for knowing so much is not the same thing as being socially inept. But my recollection is that she was attacked primarily for being muggle-born, and more by Draco Malfoy than by anybody else. It’s been a while.
In the first movie Emma Watson was very much like the drawn character, becoming markedly less so in the later movies, maybe in part because the movies were made every two years or so, which meant that the actors quickly outgrew their characters. But the movies have been, I think, very faithful to the books as far as story and character go, within the necessary constraints.
Three nerds on one of the later seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (early 2000s) were socially inept (e.g. completely defenseless against bullying by Spike) and evil though less so than most of the bad guys.
Yes, those were definitely nerds in the bad old dual studious/inept sense. However, Willow Rosenberg was much more central to the series. Wikipedia actually says, “Willow is a shy and nerdy girl with little confidence,” and, “Willow is presented as a bookish nerd with considerable computer skills, dowdily dressed and easily intimidated by more popular girls in school.”
buffy.wikia.com says, “Willow started out as a meek and largely unassertive computer nerd, but eventually grew to be a powerful and authoritative individual,” and, “In her early years at high school, Willow is a shy, naïve nerd with a light, risqué sense of humor. A member of the Math, Science, and Computer clubs, she is the person to go to for tutoring help. Willow is ridiculed by her more popular classmates, including cheerleaders Cordelia Chase and Harmony Kendall.” It includes the corporate explanation of the shift in Willow:
Which suggests that Whedon wanted to sustain Willow as more of a nerd in all respects, but the suits said no, and so this is why Willow became more of a Hermione and less of a female Anthony Michael Hall. Harry Potter came out in 1997 and Buffy (TV series) came out in the same year. Even though both the HP books and Buffy continued for many years, the characters were sufficiently established early on that my guess is that there was minimal influence.
Thinking of female nerds, The Mummy’s librarian pops into my head. Played by Rachel Weisz. Some degree of social awkwardness, but not really all that much. Definitely studious—knows enough to wake the antagonist.
“Dowdily dressed”? Not consistently.
After 10 years, I still remember the impression a succession of dresses in season 3 made on me.
In light of Whedon’s remark, it looks like you can thank corporate headquarters for the memorable succession of dresses. But Hannigan was smoking hot whatever she wore.
As others have already pointed out, it seems like your set of examples is not representative.
I’m not very familiar with the popular culture from the last decade or so, and what I see of it usually evaporates from my memory quickly. However, one recent major Hollywood movie that I clearly remember promoting extreme negative nerd stereotypes was the 2007 Live Free or Die Hard, which features a “computer genius” character having just about every stereotypical “nerdy” characteristic imaginable. He is even shown as incapable of doing anything productive or profitable with his “nerdy” computer knowledge (he’s depicted as living in his parents’ basement in his thirties).
While that computer hacker lived in his mom’s basement, he was not the only computer hacker in the movie. In fact there was another one, and a much more important one.
For a movie to strongly depict a correlation between X and Y, the movie needs to show X and Y occurring together and not occurring separately. But Live Free or Die Hard does not do this. There is one computer hacker who lives in his mom’s basement, but there is another one who does not and who is going to win the cop’s daughter in the end. Contrast with Breakfast Club or Revenge of the Nerds, where the X and Y occur together and not apart. There are no good students/chess club members in the Breakfast Club aside from the nerd.
It’s easy to charge that I’ve been cherry-picking, and very hard to defend against that charge, so it would be tremendously costly for me to respond in this vein. Listing examples as I did requires a cooperative audience; if the audience turns on you it might be either because the audience is cherry-picking, or because you are cherry-picking, but either way, there is just no inexpensive way to pursue that line of argument at that point.
I am not entirely without defense, because by luck one of the articles recently cited agrees with me about the shift over time in the frequency of what it calls Type 1 nerds. It says:
Based on the examples I came up with, I gave 1984/1985 as the high point of the depiction of that sort of nerd, which is consistent with “most prevalent in the 70s and 80s”. Furthermore, American Heritage Dictionary’s history of the word “nerd” appears to give 1970 as a lower limit on when the word “nerd” accrued the intellectual element to its earlier “dud” meaning—and this is consistent with, and so supports, the article’s claim that the nerd stereotype was most prevalent in the 70s and 80s. In fact it appears to have come into existence in the 70s, reached a high point in the mid eighties, and largely flamed out, at least in its more virulent manifestation.
But rather than pursue this further, instead, consider my latest comment here, which deals more directly with the meaning of the word.
You’re right, I forgot about that other hacker character. In any case, I will defer to your superior knowledge of the modern pop culture, which I already confessed being largely ignorant of.
On further reflection, you have convinced me that the pop culture stereotypes of technically savvy characters have changed. One possible reason for this is that among the present younger generations, computers are used by nearly everyone for fun in various ways, whereas 20 years ago and earlier, this was much more unusual and mostly restricted to “nerdy” kids. An interesting test of this theory would be to see how portrayals of computer-savvy characters have changed relative to those with other technical and scientific interests which have remained unusual and unpopular among the majority of kids.
This theory seems to me more plausible than the explanation based on the economic success of tech entrepreneurs, both because the public image of tech magnates is still largely “nerdy” and because the status and economic prospects of tech professions have in fact been going down since the early 2000s.
The explanation from the rising popularity of tech does seem highly plausible.
Interesting examples. I gotta cite the TVTropes article on Hollywood Nerds:
I think some of your examples are Type 2 Hollywood nerds: hot people with glasses stuck on. That type does defy the general nerd stereotype, but it doesn’t do so in a believable way, so I’m not sure how much these portrayals actually dent the “nerd” stereotype.
The “hacker” archetype is a bit different. “Hacker” incorporates rebelliousness and creativity which is attractive and high-status, in addition to being emotionally relatable.
Goth and punk aesthetics also relate nerds to rebelliousness and Romanticism.
Justin Long is an interesting character. Why did he become the hacker for Die Hard, other than having good looks? There actually are a bunch of qualities that both Justin Long’s Mac character have, and Hollywood hackers have. Justin Long’s character also exemplifies creativity (Macs are associated with media, and his clothes and hairstyle look artsy) and rebelliousness (against the authority of the PC in the workplace).
The end result is that I only find Long semi-believable as a hacker. It’s much easier to imagine him working in Final Cut Pro than doing scripting. My suspicions were confirmed when I looked up an interview of Long and found he does not have a technical mind: he says that he isn’t good at math and his mind “doesn’t work that way.” Justin Long’s Mac character is a textbook “Hollywood Nerd.”
Technical interests are cool to have as long as you mask them in rebelliousness or artsiness.
To avoid getting far off track, citing these fictions was in order to make a point about the changing meaning of “nerd”. With that in mind, look at what the article you linked to says about real nerds:
That’s agreeing with my thesis about what the concept of “nerd” has come to mean recently. The article writer thinks that it is distinguishing real nerds (who are distinguished only by intense interest in niche topics) from Hollywood Nerds (who are type 1 or type 2). But if you simply look at a dictionary (none of them have been updated to reflect the new meaning—the latest shift is too recent), the word “nerd” did not just mean someone with an interest in niche topics. By (earlier) definition, a nerd was not “of average looks and social skills”. The word has been gutted of its earlier meaning and emotional impact, making it no longer, or at least less, painful for someone to call themselves a nerd.
The American Heritage Dictionary traces the meaning of “nerd” through time. In 1957, meant “square”, which, looking it up, meant conventional or old-fashioned or opposed to current trends. Nothing there about intense interest in niche topics. Then in 1970, an uninteresting person, a “dud”. Again, nothing there about intense interest in niche topics. At some point, the concept of “nerd” gained the element of keen and single-minded interest in niche and especially technical topics. while retaining the “dud” element. But now we see, in the article you link to, that “nerd” has, at least for some, dropped the “dud” element and retained only the (relatively new) element of interest in niche topics.
I agree with you that the concept of “nerd” has been slowly changing, but I think it’s still pretty bad.
The nerd stereotype is alive and thriving in the big bang theory.
Yup. And there are other examples. Liz Lemon of 30 Rock, another current comedy. But Big Bang Theory is much more hard core. However Big Bang Theory is, I think, not the cultural benchmark that The Breakfast Club was.
Edit: just thinking further, it occurs to me that Albert Einstein, with his dress and his hair, must have greatly informed the cultural stereotype of the badly dressed genius. Doctor Who is I think a sometimes “cool” version of Einstein. I think there’s some overlap between the absentminded professor (as in flubber), the nutty professor (as in Jerry Lewis), Dick Van Dyke of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and the nerd. We have the high intelligence, the being lost in one’s interests, the social awkwardness and obliviousness, and so on. Shared among the absentminded professor types (informed, whether justly or unjustly I don’t know, by the common idea of Einstein) and also the nerds.
I’ll take your word for the cultural benchmark, it didn’t make as much impact on the rest of the world as it did the states (I hadn’t heard of it until 1997)
Speaking of 1985, and crazy scientists you get Doc Brown. Now he was a cool version of Einstein, hair and all. Well actually Einstein is probably considered fairly cool for a scientist, the crazy tongue photo gives the impression he didn’t take himself too seriously.
Darwin vs Einstein, who is cooler?