Geek Girls Unite

People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.”

“People ask me, ‘How can you be making movies about men? When you’re, you know, a woman.’ I recently read that [director] Mike Leigh gets the same kind of question about making movies about women. He gets really pissy and says, ‘I make movies about people.’ And that’s a perfect answer. There’s this theory of multiple intelligences, and I may not be smart on many of the others, but my emotional intelligence is pretty high up there. I’ve always been a close observer of human beings and what makes them tick, regardless of gender.”

For this reason, film geek girls have a tendency to be hyper self-aware, which can often lead to thoughts like, “Am I normal?” “What is normal?” “Do I even want to be normal?” Not only can such internal dialogues drive a girl into existential overload, but long-winded discussions with oneself can be utterly exhausting. It’s no wonder that, at the end of the day, these she-geeks prefer to silence the voices by escaping into someone else’s world for eighty-eight minutes. Sometimes our armchair artistes feel safer as a visitor in a foreign cinematic land than as an active participant in their own reality. Hell, real life can be scary. When you have something to say, you can’t always find the perfect words, and when you want to take a risk, you can’t always work up the nerve. That’s why watching films can also be cathartic for our she-geeks; they can watch their onscreen counterparts do and say all the things they wish they could in real life.