Wil Wheaton, Superman & righteous revisionism

In a 1978 interview, Christopher Isherwood reflected on his many personal, literary reflections. The impetus for the chat (with the editor of a pioneering newspaper called Gay Sunshine) was Isherwood’s then-recent autobiography Christopher and His Kind, in which he situates the context of the stories that made him famous (and that formed the nucleus of the hit Broadway show and movie Cabaret.) Given the extraordinary social changes between the 1939 publication of Goodbye to Berlin and this ’70s reminiscence, the interviewer inquires about Isherwood’s earlier, nondescript, “I am a camera” tone — one that doesn’t give away much about the sexuality of his narrator — and the more frank and open descriptions of European gay life accounted for in His Kind. “I’m often asked if I regret that I didn’t say outright in The Berlin Stories that I was homosexual,” Isherwood tells the interviewer. “Yes, I wish I had.”

So what’s a regretful writer to do? Paintings are often painted over, music is remixed and remade (paging Taylor Swift), and the Criterion closet is full of post-release “director’s cuts.” Writers, though, don’t often revisit and rewrite. There’s something about this printed word, all that cultural discourse about its fixity and finality. (Or, of course, there used to be; digital ephemerality, from lost links to bit rot, has chipped away at that norm.) Why can’t an author pull up stakes and start again, even decades after publication?

It's happened, on different scales. Consider Walt Whitman, who spent the whole of his adult life writing and rewriting the single collection of poems he’s known for, Leaves of Grass, from a first edition of 12 poems to the “deathbed edition” containing nearly 400. In most cases, these were not minor edits. Whitman reconceptualized the structure of the book, added and deleted entire sections, and constantly tinkered with individual poems. For Whitman, Leaves of Grass was a living document, evolving in parallel with his own life and his vision of America.

More recently, Stephen King leveraged his bestselling clout to restore many of the cuts an editor had made to his 1978 novel The Stand; the 1990 “Complete and Uncut Edition” returns huge chunks of the text (nearly 400 new pages). John Fowles revised his debut novel (though second published), The Magus, and republished it in 1977 with drastic rewrites, a different narrative voice, and an altered plot. In the foreword to the new edition, he claims that the original was a “novel of adolescence written by a retarded adolescent.”

That could be a good jacket blurb for Wil Wheaton’s intriguing, enlightening, and sometimes maddening foray into revision and rewriting, his do-over memoir titled Still Just a Geek — and Fowles' particular adjective is precisely the kind of thing Wheaton rightly would nag.

Wheaton published his first stab at the memoir genre in 2004, called Just a Geek. The book chronicles his difficult family life, his child-actor status as a star of Stand by Me and Star Trek: The Next Generation, and his expanded career as a writer, artist, and TV host. These days, he’s an uplifting (and thus rare) online voice, writing regularly on his blog and posting great stuff to the last truly great social-media platform, Tumblr.

But 20 years changes a person, and not just visibly. Much of the material for the memoir was generated originally for Wheaton’s blog, and if you’ve ever reread your own old blog entries (ahem) you know the feel of that particular cringe. As a professional journalist for 20-plus years myself, I am occasionally thankful when broken URLs cut access to something dopey, hasty, or snarky (i.e., ill-informed) I wrote back when I, say, sported a soul patch. In my media-studies classes today, in fact, we sometimes discuss why the “women in rock” features that I and every other music critic once wrote almost annually might be an ill-advised perspective today (as good examples of bad gender-norming — like, what’s so unusual and thus feature-worthy about women who rock, eh?) or why my participation once upon a time as an editor in a newspaper promotion that solicited and published (completely unverified) photos of “hot” baseball fans is something I would give anything to expunge from the interwebs or indeed the earth’s timeline. Wheaton had some similar moments, it seems, rereading and wincing.

So he set out to correct the record. But instead of simply penning a second memoir, he’s rewritten the first. That is, he republished it riddled with fresh and highly critical annotations of his own writing, his own thinking, and frankly his own social conditioning. Still Just a Geek is still the original book but a unique new one, too — revisionist and well-meaning in all the right ways, thus ultimately enlightening.

Be prepared: it’s apologist to the max. Wheaton’s primary goal in the footnotes is to point out how misguided his previously unexamined ways of thinking were — including sexism (e.g., saying “she didn’t matter” about a Hooter’s waitress and making objectifying comments about fellow actors), ableism (I’d never thought about the adjective “lame” in that context, thank you!), and homophobia (assuring us after one such remark, “I deeply regret thinking or writing this. It’s just so offensive and hurtful, and accept full responsibility for it. I am better now, I promise”) — and to impress upon us how deeply sorry he is for each thought and its previous printing. “I spend a lot of time in Just a Geek blaming myself for things that aren’t my fault, undercutting myself, putting myself down,” he writes early on.

But then, to his considerable credit, he remodels the same text to highlight things that were his fault and correct what he has the power to correct. “Younger me was SUPER judgmental,” he admits, and so is the adult Wheaton — just from a place of greater education, discernment, and compassion. (Clearly, though, this has been his m.o. from the start. Even the original ’04 text contains now-meta evaluations of his original blog like, “I am so embarrassed when I read that and compare it to the way I write now.”) Granted, given that many of these gaffes are directly related to changes in public perception of social identities during the same span of two decades, the newest version can reek of “wokeness” in ways that would make a MAGA head implode. The perspective of the revised book, however (and this very commentary), is that the admission of any problem is the first step to its recovery — and that such recovery ultimately is good not only for Wil but for the world.

---

Layered, freewheelin' chat with Wil on Mayim Bialik's podcast!

The medium is a crucial message here — and I’d advise reading the print version (I have no info about the audiobook). In Apple’s Books app, the footnotes are actually endnotes, requiring a click on each superscripted asterisk in order to flip waaaaay ahead to the additional text, which is then read mostly apart from its material context. This gets real tedious real fast, leading to an evolving dread upon flipping the page and seeing the next one liberally peppered with asterisks.

While annotations of a previously published text often occur posthumously or in separate volumes, often by others (like my copy of Don Gifford's very necessary Ulysses Annotated), Wheaton is to be commended for taking advantage of correcting his own record on his own terms while still above ground. As such, Still Just a Geek winds up as a distinctly modern and transparent iteration of the revisionist writing project. While the authors above revised their words in order to perfect their artistic vision or streamline a unified body of work, Wheaton's reboot is a public-facing act of personal and social reassessment. He could have stuck to the traditional template and simply released a new edition, but the newer text makes the act of revision the central theme. So the book is not just a revised text, it’s an open-source conversation with a past self. The annotations and footnotes are corrections, simply, but really they're a public performance of individual and social progress. The revision is not primarily about perfecting prose for the sake of aesthetics but about addressing past ignorance and hurtful language through a contemporary lens. By holding his younger self accountable for problematic jokes and perspectives — the parts he “recoiled” from, horrified by a “gross male gaze” and some privileged ignorance — he achieves something really important, I think, especially to younger potential readers.

This, of course, stems from contemporary cancel culture debates: If something from the past is troubling now, do we erase it or amend it? Wheaton throws in with the latter, siding with a spirit of public education, accountability, and responsibility. By leaving in the warts and all — but directly annotating them with his current shame and regret — he makes a crucially public statement about personal growth and changing social norms. Open dialogue beats discursive replacement every time.

Isherwood’s explanation for his original caginess was to keep his narrator from becoming too distracting — an out protagonist at that time would have taken too much oxygen away from someone like Sally Bowles, who was meant ignite it so powerfully — and, thankfully, the later wisdom from which Christopher and His Kind is offered avoids overwriting the original text and even intent. Wheaton’s reassessments often aren’t as deft in reaching that overall goal, and it would be easy to criticize the revision (and maybe even its antecedent) as supremely solipsistic. The annotations indeed inflate the historical situation of this Wil Wheaton person.

But I chose to go ahead and lob these thoughts into the digital abyss a few years late because (a) I only recently read the new book, and (b) we just saw the new Superman. (Talk about a socially conscious rewrite!) Two moments in the film actually made me think of Wheaton’s book. First, there’s a great winking nod to the infinite-monkeys theorem midway through the movie — a visual gag showing a lab in which Lex Luthor has trained a lot of viscous-looking primates to type hateful bile into social media around the clock. Much of Wheaton’s written posturing the second time around is founded in an early naivete (that we all had) about the propensity of internet platforms to encourage the worst expressions from good people, and portions of his text here could be assigned usefully in a contemporary media-literacy course (I probably will).

Secondly, one of the lengthier annotations in Wheaton's book deals with an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race — a moment that made Wil weep. As one of the contestants was being eliminated, RuPaul “gently, kindly, with no judgment, asked, ‘What’s going on with you, baby?'” Wheaton was suddenly overwhelmed, thinking of his individual circumstances and the numerous times such an easy inquiry from someone would’ve made a massive difference and lightened his own load. He concludes with a reminder that should be on billboards everywhere: “We never know what’s going on in someone’s life, and it’s important to remember that everybody is going through SOMETHING.” Showing everyday kindness — as Superman says to Lois Lane, and as Wheaton embodies fairly consistently nowadays — might be pretty punk rock, after all.

---