Abstract

Anybody engaged in serious thought about American culture would do well to re-watch the opening scene of Jeff Kanew’s directorial magnum opus, Revenge of the Nerds. The sequence introduces Lewis Skolnick and Gilbert Lowell, the eponymous nerds who are leaving their parents’ homes to board at college where they will both study computer science. Within the film’s first three minutes – which ostensibly depict little more than Lewis and his father collecting Gilbert from a suburban home – Revenge of the Nerds presents a peculiar though telling series of events. Gilbert reveals a well-nigh pathological reluctance to leave his mother and unconvincingly attempts to mask this condition with concern for her wellbeing, he and Lewis laugh about ARVs , and with Lewis’ father they crack jokes about genitalia and speculate that soon their greatest concern as “college men” will be “getting laid.” Even though an excess of bawdy and bodily humour might invite the labeling of Revenge of the Nerds as “bad cinema,” this is not why the film’s prefatory moments are significant. Rather, I find Revenge of the Nerds particularly interesting from its outset because it opens by throwing the two protagonists down a passage of adherently Freudian psycho-sexualisation. What we witness is Lewis and Gilbert’s evocation of their own progression through the five stages of development mapped out in Sigmund Freud’s “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality” . The two nerds rapidly advance from the oral stage through anal to phallic, at which point the narrative pauses for the opening credits, bringing their development into la- tency. 1 They finally reach genital stage just prior to driving through the campus’ open gates, speeding in with a visual echo of every train-through- tunnel metaphor put to celluloid. It is only apposite then, after this diegeticdevelopmental charge and upon their arrival at Adams College, that Lewis exclaims, “You know Gilbert, I feel different already. More mature.”"