Review: I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing: Star Wars and the Triumph of Geek Culture
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
As a delightfully interminable Star Wars fan, this book triggered all the feels. Jameson provides a personal and cultural history of geek culture since the emergence of Star Wars in the 1970s. He marks Star Wars as the birth of geek culture's rise to pop culture dominance in TV, film, conventions, and much more. Throughout, he explores the pivotal ways in which Star Wars and other major geek-entities (comic books, RPG tabletop gaming, fantasy books, etc) played pivotal roles in making geek culture more mainstream culture. Of course, within that, he acknowledges the tension between those who are hardcore fans of the cultural product in its "original form" (whatever we want to mean by that) and in its various adaptations, remakes, deviations, etc. He has a very strong bone to pick with Peter Biskind and his film and cultural histories, believing Biskind, among others, have disregarded and devalued what films like Star Wars truly are. In fact, in a later chapter, Jameson gives one of the most powerful and fascinating analyses of Star Wars as a reflection of the New Hollywood crew that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in their aspirations for realism and pushing back against the industry models.
In many ways, I appreciate this book because it resembles my own experience both in enjoying geek culture growing up, reading comic books, watching Star Wars a bajillion times, and getting my hands on so much fantasy. Equally, the high points that Jameson mentions are ones that I too would likely have called out were I writing such a book--from the emergence of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight to the first X-Men film to the Batman trilogy by Nolan, these are definitely hallmarks that decry a shift in the things that once were considered to nerdy to be spoken about in public. If you want a nostalgic but thoughtful and critical venture down pop culture in the last forty years, this is definitely worth the read.
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