Film

Ready Player One panders

to a lame, sexist nerd
culture that needs to die

Ready Player One teaches us that men are still cultural gatekeepers
(Photo: Warner Bros)

by
Rhiannon Williams
2 days Wednesday March 28th 2018

What does it mean to be a nerd in 2018? In an age

when we all own a smartphone, coding’s on the
curriculum and Game of Thrones is the world’s
favourite TV show, the line between niche and
normality is thinner than ever.

Being a nerd is no longer a form of social

resistance, but a prerequisite to gaining a place
among the world’s richest men (Bill Gates, Jeff
Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg). Once the underdogs,
there’s no doubt the geeks have indeed inherited
the Earth.

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The Cambridge Dictionary defines a nerd as both

“a person, especially a man, who is not attractive
and is awkward or socially embarrassing” and “a
person who is extremely interested in one subject,
especially computers, and knows a lot of facts
about it”.

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The Ready Player One poster is intended as a homage to the ’80s

films Cline fetishises (Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images)

Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One is Hollywood’s

latest attempt to define and explore the
boundaries of modern-day nerdism, largely by
plundering the past.

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 Watts
Wade  (TyeSheridan)
 is an 18-year old living
in a trailer park on the outskirts of Columbus,
Ohio, in a dystopian 2045, following a global
energy crisis which has plunged much of the world
into abject poverty. Watts and the rest of humanity
escape the drudgery of the real world through the
Oasis, a virtual world where you can be anyone
and do anything you please.

James Halliday, the reclusive co-creator of the

Oasis, a Steve Jobs-esque tech hero, announces a
competition on his deathbed to inherit his vast
fortune and control of the entire platform,
triggering a worldwide scramble to solve a series
of fiendish clues in an Easter egg hidden deep
within the Oasis universe.

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Watts, in the guise of his online alias Parzival,

encounters mysterious fellow “gunter” (egg hunter)
Art3mis (Olivia Cooke) in his race to solve Halliday’s
clues and save the Oasis from falling into the
clutches of the shadowy megacorp Innovative
Online Industries (IOI, headed by Ben Mendelsohn
as Nolan Sorrento) in a furious whirlwind of
relentless 1980s pop culture references. Video
games, TV shows, books, cartoons, music, films,
adverts: nothing is safe.

Art3mis / Samantha is stripped of the limited autonomy she had in

the book, and has to be rescued in the film (Photo: Jaap Buitendijk,
Warner Bros)

Whereas The Matrix was a triumphantly executed

cautionary tale warning of the dangers of
simulated realities, Ready Player One is both thin
and overwrought, prioritising spectacle over any
kind of substance and lacking any kind of menace
which could have underpinned it with a certain
amount of depth. As it is, it’s a never-ending retro
I-Spy game. Freddy Krueger? Check. Chestburster
from Alien? Check. Hello Kitty? Weirdly, also check.

If the 2011 source novel – which rapidly became a

New York Times best-seller – was a tedious
cavalcade of author Ernest Cline’s sheer eagerness
to demonstrate just how much he knows about
the 80s, the film is even worse. It differs from the
book in almost every major plot point – not always
a bad thing, given Cline’s predilection for blow-by-
blow descriptions of Watts playing various games –
but in the process still manages to make the entire
exercise feel like being made to watch someone
else playing Xbox for 140 minutes, or having them
mansplain why Final Fantasy VII is so much better
than Final Fantasy VIII.

Men run the Ready Player One universe entirely, even when the
threat they represent is insubstantial (Photo: Warner Bros)

Ready Player One is a celebration of everything

modern society should be moving away from:
white, heterosexual male relegation of women into
minor supporting roles, cultural gatekeeping (see
also: mansplaining), toxic masculinity and lazy
rehashing of nostalgia presented as art. In her first
encounter with Parzival, Art3mis has any agency
she possessed in the book stripped away from her
as she is recast from rescuer to helpless princess.
Having rescued Watts from certain doom in the
book, in the film, she becomes the victim in need
of rescuing. 2011’s Art3mis may be two-
dimensional, but to render her even more helpless
in 2018 makes for uncomfortable viewing.

The Suicide Squad backlash shows ‘nerds’ still

crave validation

In the Ready Player One universe, women are only

considered equal if they can reel off inane quotes
and possess an encyclopaedic knowledge of media
popular decades before they were even born.
Given the resounding success of Wonder Woman
and Black Panther, Ready Player One feels not only
like a step backwards, but culturally problematic,
points out Ryan Broderick, BuzzFeed’s deputy
global news director, and co-host of the podcast
Internet Explorer.

“It feels irresponsible to pander to men in a post-

Gamergate society,” he says, in reference to the
2014 online hate-storm over sexism in video game
representation, during which women received
rape and death threats from men denying the
industry had a problem. “There’s nothing romantic
about the white male nerd, especially when they’re
holding culture hostage.”

Broderick raises an interesting point. Nerd culture

has never been more synonymous with
mainstream interests, and the enormous success
of the superhero films, which dare to put women
and black social issues centre stage point to a
much wider audience hunger for narratives and
characters outside the male, pale and stale tropes.

The film also lapses into mere spectacle over any kind of substance
(Photo: Warner Bros)

Yet here we are, in 2018, watching a film directed

by Steven Spielberg which references multiple
films by Steven Spielberg. The director has said in
an interview that after he was given the script he
was determined to cut “at least 70 per cent of my
own cultural references,” leaving around 20 per
cent from the book. “I pride myself on my
modesty. But I was part of the 80s, and I know
that,” he added.

It’s also interesting to note the film is being

released at a time when VR is arguably at its lowest
ebb for years. Sony’s PlayStation VR headset has
sold briskly, beating its rivals Oculus Rift and HTC
Vive to be the first platform to cross the million-
unit sales mark, but a lack of seriously compelling
games and price tags too high for the merely
curious consumer, mean VR is still very much a
niche pastime.

Now we’re all cultural and social nerds, the scope

of what it is acceptable to obsess over has
considerably widened beyond solely pop culture
and by extension, technology. Ready Player One is
a wearying, outdated memorial to a narrow brand
of nerdism, which still panders to a demographic
who refuse to acknowledge that they are no longer
the sole arbiters of taste.

Plus, the film’s closing line is “Reality is the only

thing that’s real,” which goes to show that being a
nerd is no guarantee you are intelligent.

‘Ready Player One’ is on general release from

today

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