Somnopolis

One of the nicest aspects of Chuck is the theme of having to grow up. The star and his civilian buddies are mostly twenty-something (and in Jeff’s case middle-aged) retail clerks trapped in a state of arrested development. Tony Hale, Buster from the much lamented show Arrested Development, even plays scheming Assistant Manager Emmet in the second season.

Adulthood is something to be feared and avoided at all costs. After all the pettiness of Emmet seems the standard method of getting ahead in life. Chuck was framed with the crime of cheating and kicked out of Stanford. He retreats into gaming and nerd trivia as a way of coping with how unfair the real world is. It was the last straw, after years of disappointment with the adult world – his own father is a demented screwball who abandoned the family. Chuck’s colleagues Morgan, Lester and Jeff are even worse off, going out of their way not to work as much as possible. Lester applauds their manager Big Mike at one point as being an inspiration to slackers everywhere, for bunking off work to go fishing at every opportunity.

This is their only remaining goal in life. Goofing off and schlepping by on 12 dollars an hour.

Chuck is therefore is as much a critique of the Slacker ethos, as it is a standard bearer for the trope created by Richard Linklater’s Slacker and Kevin Smith’s Clerks. Overeducated, alienated and bereft of ambition, the geek was promised the world by the likes of Bill Gates and Richard Branson, but the slackers discovered that all that awaited was a lifetime of white collar slavery. The fantastic narrative of Chuck – nerd enters the dangerous world of espionage, becoming the greatest Marty Sue this side of Fleming’s Bond – is underlined by the growing understanding that Chuck is capable of so much more than retail.

The show has its cake and eats it too by casting well-known names with tremendous geek cred. One running joke in the show is the mockery of Chuck for hanging on to a poster of Tron (interestingly NSA agent John Casey is also mocked for his reverence of Ronald Reagan). Bruce Boxleitner, the actor who played Tron, as well as John Sheridan from Babylon 5 (double geek points) is cast as Chuck’s sister Ellie’s father-in-law.

The actor who played Officer Al (Reginald VelJohnson) from Die Hard, who developed such a heart-warming rapport with Bruce Willis, also appears in a very similar role as…..Officer Al. Ok it’s an identical role.

John Larroquette (Stripes & Boston Legal) appears as one of three proxy Bonds introduced into this show about spies. Tricia Helfer, who memorably played Six in Battlestar Galactica plays yet another agent just as fond of guns as John Casey. Then there was the Candyman Tony Todd as a high ranking mem

ber of the CIA; Scott Bakula from Quantum Leap as the disturbed father of Chuck and Ellie; and last but not least Saturday Night Live’s Chevy Chase imitating Steve Jobs.

There was even a reported incident with Zachary Levi and Joshua Gomez, who play Chuck and Morgan respectively, running up to Adam Baldwin excitedly after they heard his voice work on a video game. Even though Gomez himself has also done video game voiceover work, not to mention Yvonne Strahovski acting in both Mass Effect games.

Yvonne Strahovski in 'Mass Effect

This is a show by nerds, for nerds, but equally it proves that it is not enough to simply be nerds. There’s more to life than nostalgia. When I went to see Kevin Smith’s show in Vicar Street I was bitterly disappointed with how much the man who made Clerks seemed to be resting on his laurels. Now credit to the man, he’s made half a dozen films since, including a sequel to his first picture. Yet here he was complaining of problems with directing Bruce Willis in his latest movie Cop Out (what an apt title), as the actor proved unwilling to recreate some of his fanboy director’s favourite childhood scenes from Moonlighting. Well of course. It sounds like Willis had Smith’s measure here, just another fanboy trying to recapture his youth. To be honest I’m sure he was quite insulted by the request. It sounds like Smith still has a lot of growing up to do.

No harm having some fun every now and then though….I’m going to watch that Tron Legacy trailer again I think.

When trying to explain my enjoyment of the Venture Brothers, or Edgar Wright’s Spaced, I find myself often describing the references to other shows/movies/music employed by the writers. To me this is an attraction, but I am conscious that it’s a strange claim (this show is really good – it spends half the time referring to other shows!)

If I think about it, I conclude that this form of humour is something I was introduced to by the double-hit of Wayne’s World and The Simpsons. First off the SNL spin-off piggy-packed on late 80’s, early 90’s metal culture like a carrier signal and then transmitted its story content via references to dated television shows – The Mary Tyler Moore sequence; the discussion of Dick York/Dick Sergeant from Bewitched; the Mission Impossible sequence with Garth – and movie referencing – the appearance of Robert Patrick in character as the T-1000; “remember that scene in Scanners when that dude’s head blew up”. While the characters had the superficial appearance of metal-heads, they were in fact revealed to be giant nerds.

It’s almost as if some fiendish plot was unleashed to subvert the dangerous connotations of ‘Heavy Metal’ and render it absurd.

The Simpsons similarly comes on like some brash animated version of the anti-Waltons. A paen to family dysfunctionality. Then it rolls out the Kubrick homages; the nerd-central guest stars (Leonard Nimoy, Alan Moore, Stan Lee, Mark Hamill, John Waters); and once again, referencing on old television shows. While Barbara Bush attacked the show for its ‘wrong values’, secretly it delivered its payload of pop-cultural footnotes, generating audience enthusiasm through creating this sense of a shared history. One we could laugh at.

Pop-culture is always a moment away from eating itself, yet somehow the Simpsons set this tendency free. South Park was unleashed as an all-out libertarian assault on popular culture. Family Guy has increasingly become caught in a pop-culture rut, wallowing in its excessive reliance on in-jokes. Then the Brat-Pack itself – Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, Jack Black, Owen Wilson – utilising this sense of nostalgia for the adolescence of twenty-thirty-somethings to fatten the comedy potential of their movies.

Is it any wonder that we’ve come full-circle in a way? The Brat-Pack having inherited many of its members from SNL, which created Wayne’s World. Really my question is does this qualify as post-modernism? Or is it just unfettered nostalgia? Seeing as our generation now regards knowledge as something which is a google-search away, everything becomes trivia – random information with no purpose. So too with humour.