No Love for the Deschanels' Faux Social Pariahs

[akirlu]

Previously, the main thing* I'd ever seen Zooey Deschanel in was Big Trouble, a greatly underrated comedy classic, as far as I'm concerned, and a movie of which I am thoroughly fond. In it Deschanel plays the too-cool-to-emote teenage daughter of Rene Russo and Stanley Tucci, and acquits herself perfectly well in the role. So I was a bit baffled by all the online scorn I would periodically see for her and how abidingly annoying she was. As far as I was concerned, she was far and away the less annoying Deschanel sister. Because really, I hate Bones with a deep and fiery passion.

Then last week I was surfing Netflix for something new to watch while finishing the scarf I was working on, and summoned up a couple of episodes of New Girl. Zoiks. Zounds. Dear god and all his little holy fucks, man that character is annoying. As if in response to big sister Emily Deschanel playing a smugly faux geek in Bones, in New Girl we get Zooey playing a smugly, sneeringly faux dork. It's excruciating, and awful, and yes, really, really annoying. I don't know to what degree either actress can be blamed for the obnoxiousness of the character she plays, but it's easy enough to conflate the actor with the character if you're not careful. And by golly Deschanel's New Girl character is annoying. As fuck.

(Brief review of social outcast taxonomy for those less familiar: geeks are highly intelligent under-socialized specialists, typically obsessively interested in, and more knowledgeable than anyone else in the room about, one or a few areas of some esoteric, abstruse, difficult or technical area of knowledge, especially, but not limited to, maths and sciences; nerds are highly intelligent and under-socialized generalists, possessed of ridiculously broad knowledge on a range of subjects, some technical, some not; dorks are the only averagely smart under-socialized, and while they may be obsessive about some area of interest, this will not be a technical subject, merely so far out of the mainstream and trivial-seeming that virtually no-one else cares about it, not even other social outcasts. And while geeks and nerds may have a few socially graceless, mawkish, cringe-worthy behavioral tics, for the dork, these are a manifold defining trait.)

Okay, so I probably should confess that of all the social outcast types, I am least enamored of dork protagonists. I vastly prefer geeks and nerds. I am quite the fan of Big Bang Theory, and cheered as much as anyone when we first got a nerd victory in Revenge of the Nerds. I still love Real Genius. But Napoleon Dynamite is just painful and horrifying all the way through. I enjoyed the original of The Office despite my squirmy discomfort with Ricky Gervais' character's dorky qualities, not because of them. I do make an exception for Milton in Office Space, who somehow manages to be dorky but charming, but in general I would rather not watch movies or TV shows about dorks at all, despite their overwhelming popularity. (In fact, one of our household bits of jargon is aimed specifically at the entire genre: YAMAD, Yet Another Movie About Dorks - and few things kill the likelihood of my seeing a movie faster than a trailer that gives indications of being YAMAD.) So New Girl was never going to be a show for me.

But beyond that, there's a hollow falseness about Deschanel's dork, a sort of smugly winking See-I'm-cool-but-I'm-playing-a-dork-for-the-lulz quality to the performance, that makes it outright unpleasant. Deschanel does not own the dorkitude, she holds it at arms length and so even the sad shreds of affection one might hold for a Napoleon Dynamite are lost. Not recommended.

* Other than minor, down-cast parts in things like Mumford and Almost Famous where I have no memory of her at all.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The only one of these I've seen is Napoleon Dynamite, which was one of those, "Why did I waste two hours of my life watching this?" movies.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes I saw it on, I think, Vanessa Schnatmeier's strong liking for the film, and this turned out to be a case where mileage varied a lot.

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

I wasn't aware that anyone had so precisely categorized social outcasts into types.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Oh, sure. It's hardly original to me, and there are various break-downs out there, differing somewhat on how and where they draw the lines. Sadly, I was unable to dig up the post/essay/article that gave the definitions that come closest to matching the usage as I observe it "in the field".

[lauradi7.livejournal.com]

As annoying as Jess (the character), I was more annoyed by the characterization of Jess as "adorkable" in various reviews when the show first came out.
She was the main character's flight attendant sister in Almost Famous, I think.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

"Adorkable"? Yeeg. Bad, bad, ptui. But you may be right about Deschanel in Almost Famous.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I hadn't seen that taxonomy of social outcast types either. The distinction between "geek" and "nerd" as a usage seems arbitrary to me, although the types being distinguished make sense.

I myself like Bones okay, although I've only watched reruns, so who knows what I would make of the rest of these things. (I've seen a few episodes of Big Bang Theory, and I guess I like it okay too, but I'm not much of a fan of sitcoms in general.) I think I probably share your distaste for dork stories.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I see some people using "geek" and "nerd" somewhat interchangeably, but with the verb forms, "to geek" or "to geek out" being used specifically for that sort of intense, excited chatter about a fondly held and at least somewhat esoteric subject, I don't think the distinction of the terms is totally arbitrary. I'd be reasonably happy calling you a bit of a film geek, for instance, whereas I wouldn't call you a film nerd, so yeah, I think it's right to use "geek" for a focused speciality. In fact, I think when you call someone an "X geek" where X is whatever specialized hobby the person has, I think a lot of the sense of social awkwardness disappears, and the meaning tends to allude primarily to the depth of knowledge and degree of focus.

Or at least, that's what my linguistic field observations suggest. YMMV.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Good argument for your definition of "geek," but I think it still leaves this usage of "nerd" (as a smart generalist) a matter of the word being available. Not that there's anything wrong with that!

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I am not a fan myself, for much the same reasons. Her character falls in the large category of TV show characters you'd like to smack on the head and order them to be less annoying... David Brent is there too.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes, much of the frustration I feel undoubtedly stems from the thwarted desire to reach through the television screen and smack some righteous head.

[greyorm.livejournal.com]

Huh. Wife and I discovered that show via Netflix and found the show, and Deschanel's character, adorable and amusing.

However, I found Napoleon Dynamite impossible to enjoy, let alone watch, and got about 15 minutes in before I was thoroughly un-sold on it and shortly thereafter found something else to indulge in.

[bemused-leftist.livejournal.com]

Deschanel does not own the dorkitude, she holds it at arms length

I've been aiming my fire at the scriptwriters and perhaps the director. Spock and Holmes are celebrated for their detachment; Brennan is like Data, wanting to be human, collapsing when someone shakes their finger and says "That's a no-no." Except when after a few shakes she breaks right through that barrier and gives the right diagnosis damn the torpedoes, and is right. (Example tactlessly asking where the little girl got the bone cancer, and pursuing that.)