Things to Understand

The thing that didn't occur to me until later, the reason that Salon piece, this whole campaign, had left me with a nagging deja vu, is that I've heard this all before--

Because didn't we, as geeks, all have a duty to go and see Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, to demonstrate there was indeed a market for smart and funny and inventively geeky movies that spoke to us?

And didn't we as geeks have a duty to go and see Serenity, to demonstrate there was indeed a market for smart and funny and inventively geeky movies that spoke to us, and also to stick it to Fox for killing Firefly?

And I mean that hunger--that hunger to see something that looks like you up on the billboards in Times Square and in the commercials on heavy rotation on Hulu and the posters and the marquees--that's a mighty goddamn hunger; it might at first blush seem odd to turn the act of buying a ticket to a movie into a duty, a social responsibility, but it's at your peril that you mock the power of dreamstuff deferred.

But still. --A duty? --And anyway the geeks ate the world already, right? Lord of the Rings winning Oscars™ and D&D jokes on primetime television and in The New Yorker and all those comicbook movies and Lost, amirite? But it's not enough; the good stuff withers on the vine; we're told there isn't any money in it and SciFi has to go SyFy and show a bunch of ghost-hunting talking-to-the-dead reality-show shit and we have to keep begging and Guillermo del Toro can't get At the Mountains of Madness made.

And women--54% of the population--are in the same damn boat? --Well yes white women of a certain narrow set of socio-economic classes, but that's still an awful lot of money on the table, going begging; but even so, it's not enough: women, we're told, will get dragged to men-movies by men, but men won't go to women-movies, it's all in the numbers, you know?

Oh but really if it were really all about the numbers and the money, then one of this summer's comicbook movies would look a lot different:

To less than 100,000 readers a month the Green Lantern is a white guy--to millions of television viewers he is a black man.

So there's that. --But there's also this?

@carlafrantastic esp. as [Apatow] is also producing @lenadunham's Girls.

Social responsibility; first world problems; seeing yourself; small steps? I guess?