Real Genius (1985)

5 months ago

IT’S A MORAL IMPERATIVE

by Elizabeth Wilcox

I don’t know anyone who dislikes Real Genius. I’ve been trying to figure out precisely why that is. In keeping with the spirit of the movie, I’ve come up with a sort of preliminary equation/hypothesis:

[80s Nerd Revenge Narrative x (Val Kilmer + College Dorm)] ÷ Authority FIgure Villain = “I Can Relate To That” + Nostalgia

How does this work? Let’s break it down, term by term.

1. College Dorm

The college movie has a particular appeal. Like the high school movie, films set on college campuses ooze out the ebullient, lubricating joy that is life before age 25. People eat food off of trays. Sunny days mean frisbee outside, popsicles, pools. Everyone is in his or her physical prime—tight muscles, taut and tan skin, white-toothed smiles, springy steps.

Even at geeky Pacific Tech (a not-so-subtle CalTech clone), the students know how to have fun. They skate/sled in their dorm hall on some kind of crazily engineered evaporating ice! They hold a wild indoor waterslide party with super hot girls! Chris Knight (Val Kilmer), Pacific Tech’s Golden Boy, wears antennae headbands and says things like “I didn’t want you guys to think I was stuffy. You know, no fun. All brain, no penis.”

College dorms are gigantic bubbles that look like “real life,” but do their best to shut out the realities of the work force, electricity bills, family responsibilities—all the things that come along with taking care of someone (a spouse, a baby, an aging parent) other than yourself. Hell, for most college kids, even basic city orientation/directional knowledge is irrelevant. I was on USC’s campus yesterday and overheard a student (who looked like a junior or a senior) trying to give directions to a friend over the phone. “Where are you?” he asked. “All I know is that the 101 or something goes right by here.” Mmm-hmm.¹

So the college movie is given a sort of carte blanche with its plot—since even “real” college isn’t “real life,” it’s not a HUGE stretch to buy semi-ridiculous occurrences in onscreen colleges. In fact, I think the parts of Real Genius that probably seemed the most silly in 1985 now look eerily prescient. When the studious, 15-year-old freshman Mitch Taylor (Gabe Jarret) walks into the lecture hall to find that not only have all the students dropped off tape recorders and abandoned the classroom, but the professor has also jumped ship and left a recording of his lecture, I can’t help but think about today’s online courses and teachers who rely on Power Point presentations to do their work for them.

All this is to say that Real Genius does not disappoint in its representation of Life On Campus, as wacky as that life may sometimes be.

2. Val Kilmer

I am the first person to admit that I love Fat Val Kilmer. I find him immensely (pun intended) enjoyable. I think there are even circumstances in which I love Fat Val Kilmer more than Young And Attractive Val Kilmer.²

However, the role of Chris Knight fits Val Kilmer like an awesome, sexy glove, one that you buy and say “I WANT TO WEAR THIS GLOVE EVERYWHERE” and then you kiss it and then it insults you but does it in a really witty way so you still love it. Knight is an asshole (“Do you mind if I name my first child after you? ‘Dipshit Knight’ has a nice ring to it”), but the right kind of asshole, the kind that can get the ladies (“Don’t you know that eating that stuff can give you very large breasts? Oh my God! I’m too late!”). And on top of that, he wears penguin slippers and has great taste in T-shirts!

Though Real Genius can be seen as a coming-of-age narrative for Mitch Taylor, Chris Knight makes the film. He’s the wacky, somewhat-jaded spirit guide who takes Mitch from teacher’s pet/brainwashed sycophant/introverted loner to independent adult/morally superior thinker/normal kid who knows how to have fun (and even kiss a girl). It’s a character that could easily come off as grating or wildly improbable in the hands of a lesser master of wit, but Kilmer’s delivery of practically every line in this movie is spot-on. There’s no question in my mind that we wouldn’t be nearly so eager to label this movie an “80s classic” if some other actor had landed the role.

3. 80s Nerd Revenge Narrative

Yes, Revenge of the Nerds really cornered the market in this category. That movie is probably the best-known version of the classic nerds-versus-jocks battle—and since Real Genius’s Pacific Tech is an all-nerd college, there are no non-nerds for the nerds to rise up against. (In fact, one of the movie’s least-likable characters, Kent, is despicable precisely for the extent of his humorless, tattletale, teacher’s pet nerdiness.) So Real Genius doesn’t really give us that nerds-are-cooler-than-“popular”-kids story line.

What it does do, though, is just as kick-ass: it asserts that intellectual and moral truth can triumph over the gross politics and underhanded dealings of the “system”—and that sometimes, “kids” know better than adults. It stages that classic student fantasy of getting back at authorities who confuse the goal of education with the attainment of power.

You see, Professor Jerry Hathaway (William Atherton) has sold his intellect to the dark side—a CIA-led effort to develop a deadly weapon that can laser-zap specific targets from outer space (eerily similar, actually, to today’s precision drones). When the group of students that Professor Hathaway has working on his laser system figures out what the technology’s going to be used for, it’s up to them to put an end to it.

It’s ridiculous, sure. I mean, what kind of CIA security guards let a truck driven by teenagers with fake moustaches and fake IDs drive onto a secret weapons testing ground? But we need that “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for” moment—somehow, the sheer power of Chris and Mitch’s intellectual honesty has blinded the Bad Men.

This overarching narrative is reflected in the little subplots sprinkler throughout the movie. The ex-grad-student Lazlo Hollyfield (Jon Gries), who lives in an underground hideout accessible via a system of tunnels that begins in Chris and Mitch’s closet, for example, uses his understanding of statistics to crack a Frito Lay mail-in contest.

Kent, the godawful Pacific Tech suck-up, commits the crime of intellectual arrogance, academic sabotage, and just plain meanness; as a result, he becomes the idiotic victim of a prank that makes him think he’s talking to Jesus. He confesses he’s been playing with himself again. We laugh along with Chris (who explains to Mitch that getting revenge on Kent is a “moral imperative”), and wish every asshole could get a similar comeuppance.

4. Authority Figure Villain³

Speaking of assholes, Professor Hathaway is clearly the worst offender. Not only is he in cahoots with politicians to kill unsuspecting people from outer space, he also hates dogs. Seriously, how can you yell at a dog? I think that’s probably a universal sign for Person With No Soul.

William Atherton, like Val Kilmer, is great in this movie.⁴ Whereas Knight is the student we all wish we’d been, Hathaway is the professor we all wish we’d had. Not because he’s a good professor, by any means, but because he’s the perfect scapegoat on which to rest the blame for everything that’s wrong with education—teaches who care more about themselves than their students, who attempt to “indoctrinate” students into their own worldview, who confuse power with truth. How many times did you dream of getting revenge on a professor for that D on the exam, that office hours conference where you were told to re-write a paper, those extraordinarily boring lectures? How many times did you want to aim a laser into that professor’s house and destroy it from the inside out with something as seemingly innocuous as popcorn?

5. “I Can Relate To That”

Which brings us, of course, to “I Can Relate To That.” Some of us were Mitches in high school and college. Some of us trusted authority figures and numbers and the idea that if you studied and went to bed at 9 pm and didn’t drink or do drugs, you’d get ahead. And when that narrative fell apart, how happy would we have been to have a Chris Knight there to show us the alternatives?

Similarly, some of us were Chris Knights on campus, and acted out, and oozed self-confidence, and told adults off right and left. For the Chris Knights out there, though, how many saw that strategy pay off? How many would have loved to be validated in their worldviews by Evil Men With Immoral Weapons?

Yeah, like any good 80s movie, Real Genius ensures that we can relate to the characters’ struggles—and the fantasies we didn’t see fulfilled in real life feel play out satisfyingly on the screen.

6. Nostalgia

So, finally, there’s nostalgia. Nostalgia for college life, sure (see section 1). But more importantly, nostalgia for the years when the world was more black and white, for when there were Bad Guys and Good Guys, for narratives like the Cold War that seemed morally clear. Nostalgia for a time when, if you had both the right equations and the right intentions, you could come out on top.

I don’t know if that time ever existed, but I guess that’s part of the appeal of nostalgia—not knowing whether you’re craving a real memory or a fake one, an actual moment in time or a completely invented scenario. Either way, you know your own present won’t do. Even the characters in Real Genius seem to be sensing the end of the pitch-perfect tone of their world—as Lazlo drives off with 31.8% of the Frito Lay winnings and a gorgeous Mensa groupie, he confesses that “it’s getting a little too weird around here.” Lazlo, whose tunnel walls bear the extremely bleak Friedrich Schiller quote “Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.”

But for 108 minutes, anyway, the gods (both in heaven and in Kent’s braces) are allowed a sweet—or maybe buttery—victory.

______________________________

[1] If you live in Los Angeles or look at Google Maps it is pretty obvious that the 101 “or something” does not actually go “right by” USC.

[2] See, for example, Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

[3] This item is obviously the denominator of the proposed equation because it’s an evil value that comes to less than 1, so dividing by it actually increases the power of the numerator.

[4] I will also admit to saying several times, while re-watching this movie a few weeks ago, “William Atherton is kind of hot in this movie.” Reader poll: Am I crazy or is this true?

______________________________

Elizabeth Wilcox is actually taking a physics class right now, in which she hopes to learn more about lasers. She is also serious about wanting to know whether she’s crazy for thinking William Atherton is hot in this move. She tumbls here.