Skip to main content
There's a bit in Patton Oswalt's 2007 standup record, Werewolves and Lollipops, where he says his "geekiness is getting in the way of his nerdiness." To casual fans who came Oswalt's way via King of Queens or Ratatouille, it's circular logic. But for those of us who consider Oswalt the grand arbiter of esoteric dweeb humor, there's a thirst to understand how he could conjure an idea so relatable to the human condition of nerddom. Within his new memoir, Silver Screen Fiend (Scribner, 222 pages, $25), we're given to believe the answer lies in the miles of warm celluloid he ingested early in his career.
A great deal of Oswalt's coming-of-age story has already been told in 2011's Zombie Spaceship Wasteland. Rather than firebrands from the outermost fringes of weirdo society (GG Allin, H.P. Lovecraft), we're given a backdrop of classic film and a tireless obsession to devour as much of it as possible. Oswalt coins the term "sprocket fiend" as his name for "the subterranean dimension of my addiction.â
Oswalt crams his head with classics and crap alike, mostly compelled by a completist obsession to cross each film off a self-compiled master list found in five encyclopedic reference tomes of film history.
While Wasteland feels like a direct line to the part of Oswalt's brain that makes him so undeniably funny, the dark nature of his obsession in Fiend creates moments when you wonder how many alternate personalities Oswalt has hiding behind the acerbic mega-nerd. This book is not very funny. It is, however, important to understanding how he became a punch-up specialist for films as transcendent as Shrek.
Fiend's greatest revelation comes in showcasing Oswalt's misguided ambition of becoming a director through osmosis. Simply by showing up and filling his head with every style of film he could see, quality be damned, he would one day wake up a director the likes of Coppola or Kubrick. "Devouring movies, checking off, and convincing myself that my improving fortunes onstage came from expanding this alternate movie world inside my head."
Oswalt's revelation comes with the much-maligned Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. "Here I am, angry at George Lucas for producing something that doesn't live up to my exacting, demanding, ultimately nonparticipating standards, and failing to see that four hours of pontificating and connecting and correcting his work could be spent creating two or three pages of my own."
The bit about Oswalt's geekiness getting in the way of his nerdiness ends up being about how he would use a time machine to go back and kill George Lucas with a shovel to prevent him from ever making The Phantom Menace. Bitterness aside, the lesson learned from both of his memoirs still holds up.
GO: Patton Oswalt appears at Powell's City of Books, 1005 W Burnside St., 228-4651, on Thursday, Jan. 29. 6 pm. Free.
WWeek 2015