Culture Shock 01.05.12: 'Young Adult' subverts the traditional rom-com

Mavis Gary is no serial killer, but she's undoubtedly Charlize Theron's most despicable character since she won an Oscar for "Monster."

Mavis is narcissistic, selfish and — ultimately — delusional. That's bad for her but great for us. Fortunately, Mavis is the kind of despicable that is fun to watch. Most of the time, anyway.

Directed by Jason Reitman from a script by his "Juno" collaborator Diablo Cody, "Young Adult" is a romantic comedy waiting to happen. All the pieces are there: a woman returning to her rural hometown from the Big City, an old high-school flame, a former classmate/confidant.

We've seen it a thousand times — usually with Reese Witherspoon in the starring role — and Mavis knows the fairy tale cliché only too well.

But "Young Adult" is not a rom-com. Instead, it's a slightly dark and refreshingly pointed reversal of the lazy, insulting rom-com formula.

After graduating high school, Mavis left her "hick" town for a bustling metropolis — in this case, Minneapolis, where she found modest success as a writer of young adult novels. But with her deadline to turn in the series' final volume looming, Mavis has a sort of premature mid-life crisis, set off by an email announcing the birth of her high-school boyfriend's new baby.

By all accounts, Buddy (Patrick Wilson) is happily married to his wife, Beth (Elizabeth Reaser), but that fact and the couple's new bundle of joy are just minor complications for Mavis, who returns to her hometown with her laser sight on winning Buddy back.

All she has to do is look her best — not a problem for someone who looks like Charlize Theron — inflate her resumé and convince Buddy they are meant to be together. It's just like in the movies.

The only person fully aware of Mavis' insane scheme is Matt (Patton Oswalt), a classmate Mavis virtually ignored in school, although it's subtly implied Mavis might be indirectly (and unknowingly) responsible for the brutal hate crime that left him crippled in more ways than one.

Matt is a geek who shares a house with his dorky sister, makes custom action figures and — in an unorthodox twist — distills bourbon in his garage. He tolerates Mavis only because he's had a crush on her since high school.

As he says during a scene where both are indulging their neediness, guys like him always fall for girls like her.

For the rest of us, Mavis is a hard character to like, and yet Theron still manages to make her sympathetic during fleeting moments, conveying hints of fear behind tired, hungover eyes. There's a real person behind Mavis' self-created, cartoon-character exterior, which evokes at times Paris Hilton, complete with a little dog tucked away in a shoulder bag.

"Young Adult" subverts the typical romantic comedy's clichés by always doing the opposite, but it subverts other Hollywood clichés, too. It says: "Most people are pretty happy. Family life can be fulfilling. Life in small-town America isn't all bad." Maybe those things aren't for everyone, but they're valid choices. The quiet suburban desperation of "American Beauty" says more about screenwriters than it does about the suburbs.

Despite centering on a miserable protagonist, "Young Adult" is a strangely optimistic film. In Reitman and Cody's neighborhood, most people are doing OK. When Mavis drives her trendy Mini Cooper through her old stomping grounds, wrinkling her nose at the chain stores and the combination KFC/Taco Bell/Pizza Hut — a Frankenstein restaurant that reeks of tackiness — she's not actually showing off her good taste. She's just being a snob.

Everyone's happy except Mavis and the people like Matt who are unlucky enough to fall for her.

Culture Shock 01.06.11: Being a geek isn't just about being obscure

Geeks worldwide hammered away at their keyboards last week. Something terrible had happened, and a response was mandatory. To quote a punch line from the webcomic "xkcd," someone was wrong on the Internet.

That someone was comedian Patton Oswalt, who unleashed a manifesto at Wired.com entitled, "Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die."

The title is a movie reference. If you don't know the movie, you're not a geek. But if you're not a geek, you're not Oswalt's target.

For nearly 3,000 words, Oswalt complains that geek culture has become diluted. With DVDs and the Internet, it's too easy to become a geek. And that, he says, is bad. It breeds what he calls "weak otakus," using the Japanese term for obsessive fans.

"I'm not a nerd," he begins, using the terms nerd and geek interchangeably, which alone is enough to drive some geeks crazy. "I used to be one, back 30 years ago when nerd meant something."

Now, he says, it doesn't, because anyone can become a geek with little effort. It used to take long, hard work, back when you couldn't just look something up on Wikipedia or rent geek-favorite movies from Netflix.

"Our below-the-topsoil passions have been rudely dug up and displayed in the noonday sun," he continues. " ‘The Lord of the Rings' used to be ours and only ours because of the sheer ... thickness of the books. Twenty years later, the entire cast and crew would be trooping onstage at the Oscars to collect their statuettes, and replicas of the One Ring would be sold as bling."

So, Oswalt calls for a cleansing. Away with the old geek obsessions and on to new ones, more obscure ones, ones most people have never heard of and which can't be digested by going to the movies or using Google.

"Dark Shadows" and "Dungeons & Dragons" are no longer nerdy enough. They, like so much of geek culture since the dawn of the 21st century, got — gasp! — popular.

But since many geeks have invested countless hours and spent the equivalent of a small country's Gross Domestic Product on favorites like "Star Trek" and the works of H.P. Lovecraft, not everyone took Oswalt's declaration well.

To me his essay seems all too familiar. It's like what I hear from hipsters who get upset when their favorite musicians become too popular. And Oswalt's call for geeks to delve into ever more inaccessible realms of pop culture reminds me of a hipster joke: "I don't listen to albums, only demo tapes." It's obscurity for the sake of being obscure.

Maybe Oswalt never was a geek — or nerd or otaku. He misses the real point of geekdom, which isn't about being obscure. That many geek obsessions were once obscure but are now popular is an accident of history. Being a geek is nothing more than not being ashamed of the things you love.

In the past, that meant defending yourself from jocks, who, paradoxically, never have had to justify their obsessive love of sports. Now it means defending yourself against Patton Oswalt, a comedian who probably benefits from the mainstreaming of geek culture. His routine includes lots of geek humor, and I'm sure he appreciates an audience getting his jokes.

Ray Bradbury, the science fiction and fantasy author and a godfather to all geeks, spoke at the University of North Alabama in 2000. His advice to us in the audience was to never give up the things we love.

That sounds a lot better than Oswalt's broadside.