How nerds (almost) took over the world

At the close of Todd Field’s psychological drama Tár, the eponymous conductor Lydia Tár has lost her position at the head of the Berlin Philharmonic. She is estranged from her wife and her child. But she finds a new career: conducting live performances of the soundtrack to the video game Monster Hunter. 

It is not a happy ending. But it feels like a truthful one: for orchestras around the world, performing for nerds, whether soundtracks from video games or blockbuster film franchises, is a lucrative activity. Talk to the number-crunchers at many orchestras, and they will say that their most reliable hall-fillers are live performances of the music from the silver screen or from video games, and an increasingly important part of how they sustain the finances of the orchestra’s day-to-day work.

Such is the power of the nerd dollar. As cultural institutions compete for eyeballs and struggle for loyalty, they have all become more dependent on the enthusiasm of geeks and obsessives: because we can, at least, be counted on to turn up and to spread the word, for good and for ill. 

Since the 2008 release of Marvel’s Iron Man, comic-book adaptations have ruled the roost at the cinema (Marvel films have jointly grossed more than $25bn worldwide), and spawned other, deeper forays into nerd culture, such as Paramount Pictures’ new film Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, a multi-million-dollar bet on the tabletop board game. And high culture isn’t immune to the charms of the nerd. In London, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s take on the classic Studio Ghibli anime My Neighbour Totoro returns to the stage in November after breaking box-office records last year, while the New York Philharmonic will celebrate the life and work of the composer John Williams, best-known for the soundtracks to Star Wars and Jurassic Park, in the spring. 

I’m an unabashed nerd, and I’m also a classical music fan, neither of which were aspects of my personality I would have freely volunteered about myself in teenage years anywhere, let alone in a global newspaper. I think in a strange way what linked the two was the same thing that made me love history and, eventually, journalism: that after every symphony there is another symphony to learn about. For every orc there’s an elf to discover; for every Star Wars character there is another, usually inexplicably related to a third character. 

My obsessive urge to find new things to catalogue is double-edged: on the one hand, it means I discover new films, music and food. On the other, sometimes I realise that it would probably have been better to spend more time on Brahms and less on a series of Lord of the Rings knock-offs. But the cultural tide has gone the other way: classical music is in retreat, but being a nerd has acquired a level of cultural cachet, in large part because of our spending power. If you have money, you’re cool: or, at the very least, if you have money, people are willing to pretend that you’re cool in the hopes of getting some of that money. A measure of that is that being part of a devoted “fandom”, once considered something to keep to yourself, is now something that the cast and crew of many of these properties, from Star Wars to Doctor Who, are expected to at least fake upon the news of their casting. 

The rise of the nerd dollar is the product of a series of changes, many of them, ironically, driven by nerds themselves. Technological inventions by out-and-proud nerds have given the rest of us geeks a measure of reflected glory. But those same inventions have changed how we all consume: in a world of multichannel and view-on-demand culture, something that nerds were once ostracised for — their obsessiveness — has become a valuable commodity. 

Nerds’ spending power is often portrayed as some kind of feel-good story. The geek has inherited the Earth. But look closer and while there is a great deal of material catering towards nerds, much of it is of low quality.

Tár’s final act is instructive: yes, the nerds might provide Tár with a steady income and a sanctuary after the collapse of her top-flight career. But she is, as far as the film is concerned, diminished by her association with these nerds, with their funny costumes and their strange interests. And she is diminished: she has been robbed of what we are shown is the conductor’s great power, to interpret and shape a piece of music.

On the one hand, the relationship between classical music and the nerd dollar is mutually beneficial: the nerds get to hear their favourite pieces played live and brought to life by a professional orchestra, the classical world receives an infusion of cash. But that no one leaves a concert of Star Wars music or selected video game soundtracks any the wiser about the musical lineage that inspired them and that orchestras’ regular audiences continue to dwindle benefits nobody in the long term.

This lack of ambitiousness reflects and contributes to a difficult truth: that the age of the nerd dollar has not made our cultural life much richer. Of the innumerable superhero films released in the past two decades, most people accept that only a handful have been of genuinely top quality, although they disagree about precisely which handful: mine are Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Thor: Ragnarok, X-Men: Days of Future Past and the two Guardians of the Galaxy films.

Geeks and obsessives can be counted on to turn up and spread the word, for good and for ill

The new Dungeons & Dragons film sums up the cultural moment. If you’ve seen a Marvel superhero film you’ll be familiar with the approach it takes: a lot of quips and self-consciously ironic dialogue. It is hardly a classic of modern cinema but it is not actively bad either. But while it shares a setting and captures something of the anarchic feeling of a session playing Dungeons & Dragons, the interest in what makes a game of Dungeons & Dragons “fun” feels wholly absent from the film. Instead what we are treated to is a dutiful run-through of some of the franchise’s most famous locations and spells.

That might be the most harmful consequence of nerds’ greater purchasing power: that instead of seeking new things to do with old stories, much of our common culture is dominated by low-quality remakes, made to secure a fast buck rather than to tell a good story.

We nerds are drivers of the problem, too. Sometimes it can appear that the thing we dislike most of all is someone making the thing we love more accessible or widely known. The TikToker Francis Bourgeois — real name Luke Nicolson — is castigated for being an insufficiently “real” trainspotter and for making money out of his hobby by appearing in adverts for Gucci, despite engaging millions of new fans in the trainspotting world. Star Wars fans appear to be divided between those who complain when the franchise simply replays the hits of the past as in The Rise of Skywalker, and those who become bitterly angry when it doesn’t, as in The Last Jedi: sometimes the biggest thing the nerd dollar does is pay to keep things exactly as they are. 

There are, of course, exceptions. One reason why Everything Everywhere All At Once became a cultural, commercial award-laden juggernaut is that it riffed off nerdy preoccupations about the multiverse to explore deeper themes about the immigrant experience and marriage. The Marvel TV series WandaVision spoofed the conventions of the sitcom genre to tell a clever story about grief and loss. Into the Spider-Verse is a rare example of a mainstream superhero film doing genuinely interesting things with animation and music. The composer Eímear Noone, whose nerd-friendly compositions include the soundtrack for the hit video game series Warcraft, is comfortable talking fluently about the cultural influences that underpin her work in a way that broadens the horizons of listeners, rather than restricting gamers to a cultural ghetto. 

But even these speak to a broader malaise: that it is now considered remarkable for a story to deploy subtext in an intelligent or interesting manner, that the box office success of a film without a pre-existing fan base itself feels like something of a miracle, and that we expect most films and shows to reflect an ossified and predictable version of a story we’ve already heard before.

The answer, surely, is for both the companies that court the nerd dollar and us nerds themselves to demand a little bit more. Nerds should want to understand the complex cultural lineage of the music we enjoy and the games we want to play. But cultural institutions, too, should trust that nerds want and will accept more than just paying to hear or watch familiar favourites. The alternative is that the nerd dollar moves from cross-subsidising almost everything else to drowning it all out.

The purchasing power of the nerd dollar has made the geek unignorable. There is unlikely to be a shortage of video game adaptations to watch. But it has not given the nerd respect: that the nerd might also discover new things or turn up again next week to hear the same orchestra play music from Mozart. Nor are they likely to often be presented with something that considers their beloved franchises as anything other than cash cows to be milked. The nerd dollar now buys almost everything, except perhaps that most important of commodities: respect.

Stephen Bush is an FT columnist and associate editor

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