With 25 years of hindsight, 1999 was the last breath of rarified air before Hollywood plunged headfirst into “geek culture,” the deep well of intellectual properties born of comic books, pulp novels, cult television, and video games. Though theaters were blessed with a variety of incredible films across genres from The Sixth Sense to 10 Things I Hate About You to The Matrix, the top-grossing film of 1999 was Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, which capitalized on a decade-long multimedia effort to create a new generation of Star Wars fans.
At the same time, a gap in the 20th Century Fox release schedule fast-tracked production on the first X-Men movie. Warner Bros. bought the film rights to the first four Harry Potter novels, while in New Zealand, filming began on Peter Jackson’s unprecedented three-part adaptation of the seminal fantasy novels of J.R.R. Tolkien.
Studios were going all-in on large-scale, effects-driven franchises, and everything any Gen X-er was ever bullied for enjoying was about to become a billion-dollar industry. In the midst of this, there’s Galaxy Quest, a movie celebrating a culture of benign, starry-eyed misfits that no longer exists. In fact, maybe it never did.
More than just a simple Star Trek parody
Galaxy Quest features Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, and Alan Rickman as actors who once starred on an optimistic space adventure TV series based very, very closely on Star Trek, down to the friction within the cast. To their shock, these actors discover that an alien civilization has mistaken their show for a documentary and patterned their entire culture and technology in its image. The cast must use what they remember from TV’s Galaxy Quest to try to command an actual starship through actual cosmic peril.
Of course, most of them don’t actually remember that much about how the NSEA-Protector works. Galaxy Quest was just a gig after all, and not even one they were all proud to have on their resumé. So, when they need a crash course on the inner workings of an imaginary spaceship and the intricate mythology around it, who else can they turn to but their die-hard fans, the Questerians.
As much as Galaxy Quest (the film) is a loving parody of Star Trek, it’s also a gleeful fantasy about fandom. On a literal level, it’s about validation. What if the silly thing that everyone makes fun of you for obsessing over was actually urgently important? What if you were actually cool and smart for caring about it, and now only you can save the day? (This is, essentially, the same fantasy offered by Ready Player One.)
Tim Allen’s character, the pig-headed actor Jason Nesmith, loves the show and its fans as an extension of loving himself — they adore him and made him famous, but he doesn’t really get it. His journey in the film is understanding what makes Galaxy Quest so important to other people, and his responsibility to protect its values of friendship, courage, and self-sacrifice. The Thermians — the aliens who enlist Nesmith and company on their space mission — are the ultimate fans, viewers who were so moved by Galaxy Quest that they completely remodeled themselves in its image. They believe in it like a religion. It gives them meaning and purpose, and shattering their faith is one of the cruelest things you could do to them.
They’re essentially hyperbolic extrapolations of the human Questerians, led by Justin Long’s Brandon, who may lack the resources to make their fantasy a reality but who nevertheless draw strength and community from it. It’s shaped their identity and given them something to believe in, even if they know that something isn’t literally real.
The other thing that the Questerians and Thermians have in common is their status as their respective worlds’ punching bags. The Questerians are depicted, as sci-fi nerds often were at the time, as awkward social outcasts who have lost themselves in fantasy. They have no friends, unless you count the fellow weirdos they met on that newfangled internet in chat rooms or Usenet groups. (The film shows Brandon and his buddies communing via video chat, which was pretty rare in the ’90s but is more interesting to watch in a movie.)
Likewise, the Thermians are cringey and embarrassing to the human actors, and we learn that the interstellar community hasn’t been kind to them, either. The Thermians’ commitment to Galaxy Quest may have ended war and strife on their planet, but they’ve also gotten their ass kicked to the tune of an actual genocide. They’ve literally been bullied to death, with the crew of the NSEA-Protector being the only survivors of their race.
To both the Questerians and the Thermians, the fact that they’re seen as pathetic doesn’t seem to bother them. They know what makes them happy, they know what they believe in, and they value the community with whom they share it, even if no one else does.
This is what “geek culture” used to be.
How geek culture changed (for better and worse)
Flash forward 25 years, and this culture is unrecognizable. Social media has surfaced just how popular these niche interests actually are, shattered stereotypes as to who enjoys them, and allowed them to organize. A generation of validation from sci-fi, fantasy, and superhero blockbusters has made them mainstream. It has also turned “fandom” into an extremely valuable economic force. Fan engagement drives marketing both within and outside of insular fan communities. The cottage industry of fan magazines has exploded into a massive and lucrative world of YouTube channels offering daily updates and analysis, algorithmically incentivized to be either uncritical cheerleaders or venomous haters.
Organized fandom now has the ability to shape how the general public perceives a mass market release through review-bombing and social media campaigns. Fans have always made demands, but now there’s an expectation that those demands will be appeased, and writers, actors, producers, and even other fans can expect harassment if the die-hards are not satisfied. The business behind the stories fans enjoy is more transparent than ever. Publicly-traded media companies, fearful of a bad quarter, are far more inclined to pander to a pre-invested, highly-engaged audience than to risk doing something new or different. Fans understand the leverage they hold over the corporations that produce those stories, and they intend to use it.
But these aren’t the actions of fans. These are the actions of stockholders.
Galaxy Quest is not a documentary, and its depiction of fandom is not complete or unbiased. In its own way, it too pandered to the egos of science fiction fans who ached to see themselves as heroic and powerful. But it is also a “historical document,” a snapshot of a period in culture when there was still something a little cute and pure about being a fan. Somewhere between Galaxy Quest and now, fandom became less about finding belonging in something and more about something belonging to you, something you’ve invested in and is therefore beholden to you.
The limitations of toxic fandom
Toxic fandom is not a new phenomenon. Trekkies sent hate mail to Paramount over the then-rumored death of Spock in 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. What they couldn’t do was actually change the ending of the movie, and when they saw it, they loved it. The solution is also not relentless positivity or deference to the massive conglomerates who profit from the passion of fans. It is possible to enjoy something deeply without trying to exert control over it. It is healthy to love one chapter of a story while being disinterested in another, and to accept that someone with the opposite opinion is still one of you.
What ultimately matters about your Star Trek, your Star Wars, your Lord of the Rings isn’t the canon, the nuts and bolts knowledge that would help you save the day if Jason Nesmith ever called to tell you that “it’s all real.” It’s not real. Even in Galaxy Quest, the thing that made it “real” for the Thermians wasn’t the fact that they built the ship but that it helped them rebuild their lives. It made them better. Corporate profits be damned, that’s where its value lies. If the thing that you love no longer does that for you, if it’s making you worse, you can let it go. It may be part of you, but it doesn’t belong to you.
Galaxy Quest is streaming for free on Pluto TV.
