R2D2COOL2B4GOTTEN

3 July, 2012 at 4:45 pm (clerical, film)

This blog doesn’t get many comments. In part because, well, who reads it? I get my fair share of hits from people searching for images of the lady who was fired for being too hot and for Patrick Bateman’s business card, but few people actually stop here and smell the proverbial roses. I am not controversial, trendy, clever, or charismatic enough in person or in print to have “followers”. My twitter feed and my defunct Beehive forum testify to this. I have achieved relative peace with this fact.

So it was a mild shock to receive an email from WordPress saying that some rando had been incensed enough with my eight-year old post about Star Wars vs. Annie Hall that he needed to set me straight! All comments are moderated, so it sits sadly in limbo until I’m done with this post, and then I will send it to its stygian destiny. Because, well, it’s idiotic. He wiffles on for 200 words about how Star Wars, because it’s imaginary, took more creativity in its writing and production, because making up names like “Dirk Starkiller” is haaarrrrrd. Despite his lack of capitalization and despite a superfluity of appalling clauses, someone had successfully taught this young padawan that one should concede a point to the opposing view to show that one is not a complete rhetorical monster. He does this with the following:

Annie Hall made ​​me such a good time but did not reach me emotionally like star wars.

But his ultimate conclusion is that, “Annie Hall will be quickly forgotten.”

I have this absurd fantasy of running for governor of the state of New Hampshire on the platform of bringing greater flexibility to the state’s popular and lucrative vanity plate program. I would campaign for the addition of punctuation, currency symbols, accented letters from Spanish, French, and Scandinavian alphabets, and the odd internet-friendly character. My first order of business upon election would be to decree this into being. My second act as governor would be to resign and hand off the office to my vice- or lieutenant-governor, secure in the knowledge that I had done what was necessary. Similarly, were I rich, I would make sure that every venue that hosted a Star Wars panel, from Celebration conventions to minor facets of the Emerald City ComicCon, would receive sufficient funds from me that I would be ensured naming rights of the various halls. And I would name every single one of them “Annie Hall”. Sure, there might be some mild confusion on the maps, and even the occasional misattribution that the convention spaces might be so called after “Anakin”. But it would be worth it.

My point in the original post — which isn’t much worth repeating, since it’s still there to read — is that Annie Hall is plenty nerdy, and that nerds shouldn’t feel like Nerd Culture got screwed over by not getting the Oscar in 1977. So I was particularly interested to read a contemporary account of watching the Oscars by Michael Palin in the first volume of his reprinted diaries. Prior to appearing on Saturday Night Live, he attended a party at Studio 54, invited by Lorne Michaels and rubbing elbows with the likes of Truman Capote, Mick Jagger, Jerry Hall, Dick (of Rowan &) Martin, Brooke Shields, and Salvador Dali. After listing off these luminaries, Palin records:

[455]

Annie Hall was a win for East Coast elitism, sure, but look how Palin describes Allen’s contemporary persona: “critical, introspective, tasteful”. Isn’t this how all nerds want to be perceived? Isn’t modern nerditry, at its heart, a belief that one has searched out and found the best of culture and entertainment, regardless of what is spoon-fed to the mainstream? Once again, Annie Hall‘s victory was a victory for the nerds.