Home of the Snarkmaiden

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.

Hal and I watched another episode of James Burke's BBC series Connections last night. Wow this is fascinating stuff! I never watched the series when it aired in the late 1970s, but it holds up surprisingly well for television that's three decades old. Burke is a science historian, and each episode traces the scientific and technological breakthroughs that were stepping stones to some modern technological necessity. The path through the intervening history is always complex and circuitous and each individual stop is a story in itself. The show skips lightly from exotic location to historical re-enactment, guided along by Burke's puckish narration, and inevitably draws connections that I had no previous idea of. For instance (and this will sound mega-dorky) I had simply no idea how interesting and varied is the history of coal tar. The damn' stuff turns out to be crucial to everything from artificial dyes (mauve!) to oxy-acetylene welding to the illumination of London to the invention of artificial fertilizers. And there I thought it was just good for dandruff shampoos... For anyone who means to write alternate history or alternate technology fiction, this series seems like an absolutely invaluable grounding. For that matter, for anyone doing home schooling, they could do a lot worse than getting this series for their charges. If, like me, you've somehow managed to miss it up 'til now, by all means go forth and seek it.