So I just saw (for the second time) the very moving film ONE TRUE THING.
The English professor/novelist/husband/dad (played brilliantly by William Hurt) is a multi-faceted jerk. To make a long story short, his narcissism and vanity crowed out any sustained sense of personal responsibility to those he loves. He knows, when he’s honest to himself, that his wonderful and beautiful wife (played by Meyrl Streep) is his “one true thing” (all else being vanity), but he rarely acting accordingly, even when she’s dying painfully of cancer.
You have close to the same professor (although more grungy) in the more enjoyable THE SQUID AND THE WHALE.
I could go on to mention other big-screen jerk professors, and I’m trying hard to think of some admirable ones.
One reason: The whole theory of liberal education kind of includes the gifted and caring professor as role model/hero thing (the whole Socratic tradition and “method,” etc.)
But the democratic techno-view, as described by Tocqueville, reduces professors to ineffective losers, to quarrelsome, contentious, pompous, lazy, etc. And a dominant criticism of the quality and cost of liberal education in America leads with lazy, overpaid, unaccountable, and unproductive professors.
So here’s my mid-term question for YOU: Explain and how and why professors (and especially author/professors) are portrayed in films, giving specific examples.
October 20th, 2012 | 4:17 pm
Please. That was an insipid film based on a submediocre novel by Anna Quindlen. If it was beautifully played, it was because the actors had wretched material with which to work. (The book is actually worse than the film).
The notable thing (in the film) about the professor as played by Hurt is that he is have a bloody time of it confronting middle age and what he hadn’t achieved in his life, but he is too self-absorbed to confront what is happening to his wife and attempts to pretend it isn’t.
And his wife is not ‘wonderful and beautiful’ in spite of the ham-handed efforts of Quindlen, et al to present her that way. She is a pleasant housewife who tolerates her husband’s transgressions and inadequacies (thought the film presents it as ambiguous as to just what they are), rather more characteristic of women half-a-generation senior to the fictional Katherine Gulden than to the usual run of faculty wives born ca. 1940.
October 20th, 2012 | 4:30 pm
AD, I’m merely given his opinion of his wife at the grave-side scene at the end. And the film presents her as more than pleasant. I will admit it does so in a corny and somewhat inartful way. We agree on the second paragraph, but you have to add the easy adulation he gets from his students, the undangerous little affairs he has with them, etc. The film is explicit on transgressions.
Never read the book.
October 20th, 2012 | 4:45 pm
Here’s a review I recently wrote of one the greatest, mostly unknown, films of all time (and certainly the greatest that features a professor as antihero):
Barbarian Invasions includes jarring footage of an aircraft plowing into the World Trade Center. It makes no other direct reference to that event. Instead, it concentrates on the pathetic story of a Quebec university professor who’s a very conventional man of the left. He’s afflicted with typical academic views, as well as a terminal illness that doesn’t shake them—despite his inability to obtain in Canada the healthcare he needs. On his deathbed, he’s reunited with people who have loved him, and still do: a son, an ex-wife, former lovers, and assorted dear friends. To the father’s chagrin, his son is a successful financier who can afford medical tests that the older man’s socialist paradise won’t provide. Alas, they are available only by driving to Vermont, and paying fair market value. From the point of view of the left—and much of the right—markets are inherently corrupting, yet they deliver the low but solid goods that human beings need.
This Oscar-winning but obscure film is the product of the brilliant artistic and political sensibilities of Canadian writer-director Denys Arcand, who, in 1986, delivered its scatological prequel, The Decline of the American Empire. Like the earlier film, the present one is about the descent of public or political man into the private, his slavery to passion, and the shattering disintegration of the modern self when it confronts the inevitable. It’s also about the power and beauty of love in the face of human frailty, and man’s capacity for both forgiveness and denial to the bitter end. It even manages to be a running commentary on art and eros, academic culture, union politics, drug abuse, the emptying of the churches, the bleak nihilism of a world without God, government healthcare, and the broader foibles and cruelties of the administrative state. And it’s much more still. In even the softest democracies, barbarism assaults us more reliably and comprehensively from within than from without. Such assault doesn’t quite shock in the manner of a single dramatic act, but therein lies the danger. As Canadian political philosopher George Grant said, if tyranny is to come to North America, it will come on cat’s feet. In a film that’s a near flawless blend of comedy and tragedy, Arcand allows us to catch seemingly countless glimpses of the silent animal’s approach.
October 20th, 2012 | 4:48 pm
Here’s a review I recently wrote about one of the greatest mostly unknown films of all time (and certainly the greatest that features a professor as antihero):
Barbarian Invasions includes jarring footage of an aircraft plowing into the World Trade Center. It makes no other direct reference to that event. Instead, it concentrates on the pathetic story of a Quebec university professor who’s a very conventional man of the left. He’s afflicted with typical academic views, as well as a terminal illness that doesn’t shake them—despite his inability to obtain in Canada the healthcare he needs. On his deathbed, he’s reunited with people who have loved him, and still do: a son, an ex-wife, former lovers, and assorted dear friends. To the father’s chagrin, his son is a successful financier who can afford medical tests that the older man’s socialist paradise won’t provide. Alas, they are available only by driving to Vermont, and paying fair market value. From the point of view of the left—and much of the right—markets are inherently corrupting, yet they deliver the low but solid goods that human beings need.
This Oscar-winning but obscure film is the product of the brilliant artistic and political sensibilities of Canadian writer-director Denys Arcand, who, in 1986, delivered its scatological prequel, The Decline of the American Empire. Like the earlier film, the present one is about the descent of public or political man into the private, his slavery to passion, and the shattering disintegration of the modern self when it confronts the inevitable. It’s also about the power and beauty of love in the face of human frailty, and man’s capacity for both forgiveness and denial to the bitter end. It even manages to be a running commentary on art and eros, academic culture, union politics, drug abuse, the emptying of the churches, the bleak nihilism of a world without God, government healthcare, and the broader foibles and cruelties of the administrative state. And it’s much more still. In even the softest democracies, barbarism assaults us more reliably and comprehensively from within than from without. Such assault doesn’t quite shock in the manner of a single dramatic act, but therein lies the danger. As Canadian political philosopher George Grant said, if tyranny is to come to North America, it will come on cat’s feet. In a film that’s a near flawless blend of comedy and tragedy, Arcand allows us to catch seemingly countless glimpses of the silent animal’s approach.
October 20th, 2012 | 5:45 pm
There are too many movies and novels about feckless college professors who usually teach English, writing, rhetoric, literature, etc. to count. This may be due to the fact that the screenwriters and novelists themselves have been educated in creative writing and film studies departments. The student escapes from college despite his problematic professors, professors who are portrayed as various types not worthy of emulation–the pompous and arrogant, the careerist, the bored and depressed, the cynical, the sensitive, the lonely, the self-medicating, the eccentric, the lazy, etc. They leave college and then write a story about it.
These men (and they are typically men) are generally unhappy characters who have not taken to heart and lived in practice the best that is found in the works of literature, philosophy, theology, and history that they study. The idea seems to be that such things, while noble, are impossible and useless for life—perhaps even corrupting.
George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Prof. Grady Tripp in the Wonder Boys, Prof. Larry Gopnik in A Serious Man, Prof. Dave Jennings in Animal House, Prof. Moses Herzog in Herzog, Prof. Peter Hoberg in the movie you recently recommended, Liberal Arts, and on and on—these are men whose lives are in ruins, and while a few happen to be good instructors, they can have no place in what you called today’s democratic-techno world. As men, they pride themselves on a manly intelligence, able to look unflinchingly at deadly truths with courage and probity, but compared to the men working in finance, fighting in wars, playing football, executing the office of the POTUS, or inventing new gadgets they appear in a dim light. Their alleged virtue also makes them bad husbands, fathers, friends and lovers. Though, if becoming is sovereign, then perhaps they do take their study seriously. It’s interesting how often Nietzsche, romanticism or small liberal arts colleges are mentioned in such stories, and never Socrates, Thomas or a college like Hillsdale! Though Shakespeare is a regular.
Given such weakness and unmanliness, sometimes you have fantasy academics who live secret lives of adventure. In this case their knowledge and expertise is useful for saving the whole world, but such knowledge is often esoteric—if not occult or gnostic, such as Indiana Jones or the Harvard “symbologist” in those silly Dan Brown movies. Though mild mannered, professors of medicine usually fare well in this regard—James Stewart in The Man Who Knew Too Much or Harrison Ford in Frantic. One bad example is the remake of D.O.A. from the late ‘80s. In this film, the novelist/professor (played by Dennis Quaid) gets to play Humphrey Bogart as he foils the plot of his own murder. He still dies, but rather than being unmanly, he is able to act with decision and energy when the occasion calls for it. However, speaking of Quaid, he later played the ineffectual literature Prof. Lawrence Wetherhold who has a severely dysfunctional family in Smart People.
Often times, the published academic novel or produced film is proof of the student’s own ability to take from school whatever lessons his professors impart, but he makes it his own. Only the lessons of experience outside the study of books—even great books—have any important impact. No doubt, in these stories, a line of poetry or a mathematical theorem is a leitmotif that connects an education to a good life, but in the old days, the student could have learned that poem in high school. School, and professors, obviously had an important impact on these students cum novelist/filmmakers, but in the tale told, the student needs to become a man, a citizen, husband, father, etc., and these things are depicted as beyond the ken of the liberal arts. The professors they leave behind are likeable, knowledgeable, witty, and fascinating people you would like to know, but they are abject failures by comparison with the active and productive life—the apparently only serious life.
Sometimes, as in the case with Noah Baumbach’s Squid, the writer director is the son of an eccentic novelist and critic, Jonathan Baumbach. Not that such films are entirely autobiographic coming of age tales, but these kind of academic stories feature the family life—or lack thereof—of the beleaguered professor. In Squid, Jeff Daniels’ portrayal of the professor comes across as both disgusting and hilarious. He encourages his teenage son to play the field with young women. We are given to understand that he didn’t do that when he was young, and he regrets it. But the father makes sure that his son understands that the field should be populated with young Monica Vitti types from an Antonioni movie. He gives horrible advice, but he has excellent taste and judgment! “A Tale of Two Cities is one of Dickens’ minor works”—ha! ha! The son later tells his girl that “This Side of Paradise” is one of Fitzgerald’s lesser novels. Unfortunately this leads him to claiming to his girl that Kafka is very Kafkaesque, and playing off Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” as one of his own songs.
There is a comedy called Tenure which follows the professorial stereotypes, but which also shows the necessity of publish or perish and the inevitability of intra-departmental warfare.
In general, I think your basic premise about the need to be rational and industrious in modern liberal democracy makes it difficult to portray in novels and film the life dedicated to serious study and thought, and the life of philosophy in general. But then Aristophanes had Socrates hanging in a basket measuring the farts of gnats.
October 20th, 2012 | 5:59 pm
BTW, on autobiography in Baumbach’s Squid, see–
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=5gvikDSH23Y
October 20th, 2012 | 6:23 pm
One interesting film depiction of a professor who is just such a self-absorbed jerk, but which rebukes him for it, is The Barbarian Invasions:
http://www.jamesbowman.net/reviewDetail.asp?pubID=1459
October 20th, 2012 | 7:15 pm
“…feckless college professors..” Is that what they call a non sequitor?
October 20th, 2012 | 7:32 pm
I heartily recommend the film adaptation of the play ‘Wit’ with Emma Thompson as a worthy example of the genre.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0243664/
It has the benefit of exploring the professor as jerk but in the process of being redeemed by way of said professor’s mortal struggle with cancer.
The main character, Vivian, is a scholar of John Donne, who had managed to overlook the human and redemptive themes of her own subject of study. Essentially her portrayal is of a professor as elite Gnostic, who, being an elite Gnostic, assumes mastery in her esoteric field as a basis with which to view the less literate, particularly her students, with indifference or contempt.
Her experience fighting cancer forces her to experience what it is like being on the outside of the esoteric circle of her Oncologists who are working to heal her from cancer, even while seeming to ignore the fact that they are practicing on a human with human frailties – an ironic parody of how she as literature professor viewed her job as an instructor to her students.
Her first hand experience of the pain and resulting fear of mortality during her chemotherapeutic treatments and the arrival of her literary mentor who takes on the role of a maternal caretaker rather than esoteric elite collapses what Gnostic pretenses remain and draws her back into the common family of humanity.
Very touching and insightful – the intellectual scholar as Gnostic overcome by the mortal trials of existence and thereby redeemed by a recovery of a more Christian understanding of her place in the world.
In essence I see the entire genre of intellectual’s as jerks as basically a critique, or romanticization, of intellectual Gnosticism, even though the filmmakers may be unaware of it as such. ‘Wit’ succeeds where most of these other films fail because it better understands what it is criticizing in my opinion
October 20th, 2012 | 7:56 pm
The film is explicit on transgressions.
Nope. Some of what his daughter took to be assignations were travels to a roadside tavern to marinate himself in alcohol. That is what the mother knew that the daughter did not.
And, of course, banging your students is not undangerous in the contemporary academy, professors get little adulation from their students, literature professors seldom produce or aspire to produce creative works, cancer patients seldom commit suicide, cancer patients who do are not typically regarded as ‘strong’ by their survivors, and ordinary housewives with two children and a husband whose job is abnormally secure and incorporates masses of discretionary time are not among the people who require abnormal amounts of strength in this world. Quindlen is a putzette.
October 20th, 2012 | 8:21 pm
AD, I think the exact truth is some but not all. What about the girls gossiping? It’s not so hard to put up with a semi-drunkard husband who feels sorry for himself because the famous writer forgot his novel. There’s gotta be more. The MS character is emphatic is that she allows the completely intolerable to become tolerable because do otherwise “would ruin everything.”
Your second par. is of course mostly right. Professors are semi-slandered in film. That’s my point.
John P’s erudition in accounting for the semi-slander is most impressive.
October 20th, 2012 | 8:23 pm
I guess I disagree with AD on the adulation point. Students do suck up to good and/or entertaining professors at private schools, at least.
October 20th, 2012 | 8:27 pm
And I really admire Pseudo’s summary of WIT. I hope the film lives up to it.
October 20th, 2012 | 8:48 pm
Yo know this one of course, but there is the Steve Carrell character in Little Miss sunshine (lots of issues there – though his particular kind of self-involvement is one aspect of the family’s common problem.)
October 20th, 2012 | 8:56 pm
I’m afraid I can only bring to this real world experience of a short stint as a Visiting Professor after achieving a doctorate. But the types described above are abundantly present in actual universities, usually among Associate Professors who have been rejected for promotion or Full Professors in general.
There seems to be a threshold of about 15 years working in a college or university, after which, academics become totally detached from reality about the world outside of their work. It is so common in real life that the only explanation I can give for it is the accumulated effect of hundreds of people listening to you lecture, writing notes about it down, and hanging on your every word.
Professors are very ordinary, moderately bright people who simply succumb to the constant flattery of their vanity inherent in the trade.
October 20th, 2012 | 9:54 pm
Peter, thanks.
I make no claim, however, to first hand insight of the Professorial class. My appreciation of ‘Wit’ is strictly as someone who empathizes with the tension between theory and existence among those to whom the term “intellectual” applies only in the adjectival sense.
Having said that, I would find a Lawler-esque take to be well worth reading.
Subtle hint, I know …
October 20th, 2012 | 10:33 pm
Joseph Marshall,
I think it is the accumulated effect of not having to keep a regular schedule or report to anyone.
—
Peter Lawler, I think you misinterpret the story. Just to take one example, the Professor is not emotionally undone by the fact that the unctuous Harvard poetry don does not remember the novel said professor published. He is undone by the fact that he is a rank and file academic hack. Even people he knows and have supped at his table cannot remember what he has published. Oliver Most inadvertantly rubs his nose in it.
That the fictional George Gulden is an academic is incidental. It is just a setting in which Quindlen’s imagination could run. She uses the setting to make her points about social life. Consider…
1. Quindlen may have friends who tell her things, but what she knows of academic life is bound to be derived primarily from her years as an undergraduate. She never did any graduate work and her husband is a lawyer, not a professor. She attended a liberal arts college from 1970 to 1974.
2. She was a journalist from 1974 to 1995.
3. Her mother died of ovarian cancer in 1971.
—
The protagonist of the novel and the film is the daughter, a magazine reporter. A professor canoodling with his students with impunity does have a rather 1970s vibe and, again, Katherine Gulden in her habits and occupations is misplaced by half-a-generation. Gracing a working English professor with an aspiration to compose the Great American Novel is pretty hackneyed, not the selection of someone who reads what English professors actually do publish. I submit to you that Quindlen manufactured this tableaux out of bits of her own life as she lived it ca. 1972.
–
And what is the point? The novel is far more vicious than the film in the treatment of George Gulden and the protagonist’s paramour (Gulden ultimately maneuvers to have his daughter take the rap on a criminal charge). Ultimately, Anna Quindlen is a transmission belt for a repulsive aspect of contemporary girl culture. An ordinary woman leading a comfortable life courtesy her husband’s earnings is presented as a tower of strength for just getting through life. Meanwhile the husband is pathetic and disgusting even though he is…just getting through life. The message is that we are wonderful people whose lives are distorted and disfigured by clods.
Read the woman’s old columns in Newsweek or listed to one of her speeches (as I was compelled to do at one of our local colleges about a decade ago). The broad just oozes condescension in print and in person. However, she has done nothing in her life that would justify her looking down on anyone not in the jail or addict population. She does not know who she is…or who anyone else is.
October 20th, 2012 | 11:03 pm
I should have added that–apart from being eccentric–Jonathan Baumbach (Noah’s father) is brilliant. His book on 20th century American lit is great–The Landscape of Nightmare. And his novels are supposed to be good to. I read one called B and would recommend it.
October 20th, 2012 | 11:24 pm
Peter, I think the root of this professor-hating stereotype in movies has to do with the the comparison of college life to the way other parts of the education system are portrayed.
The movies portray numerous, numerous High School teachers as heroes (see “Goodbye, Mr. Chips,” “Dead Poets’ Society,” and recently “Finding Forester”). Notice that two of the examples I gave dealt with glorified private boarding schools of the British sort; that began as a genre of literature and successfully made the transition to the screen.
Many of the original pro-high school teacher movies (like “Goodbye, Mr. Chips”) were made when the average American male did not go to college (i.e. pre 1960s). I think it’s possible that the negative professor stereotype in movies developed back then, since college was so distant and elitist while high school was a universal experience. None of the College teachers are normal people, while high school teachers are normal, connecting students to the best of classical Western civilization or Enlightened, liberated thought, etc. The idea was that even young Johnny might end up in a high school class like that, and wouldn’t that be great.
My alternative thesis: Professors have been portrayed in this negative light alot of literature (see “Professor Moriarty” in Sherlock Holmes or the academic debaters in Ben Jonson’s “Volpone”.)
By the way, here’s one exception to the movie stereotype of bad professors that I noticed recently: The psychology professors in Christopher Nolan’s “Inception” were made to seem really cool
October 21st, 2012 | 12:07 am
AD, I bow to you on your knowledge of Quindlen, and I defer judgment about how much of the book showed up in the movie until I read the book. And you probably quite rightly have given me no reason to read it.
There’s a lot of truth to these words of Joseph Marshall:
But films exaggerate their truth by making what goes on in class, for example, much more vacuous than it even really is.
October 21st, 2012 | 4:22 am
And let me recommend the comedy TENURE. In this film, we see the dangerous eccentricity, the stifling administrative careerism, and the weak and loafing indecision that characterizes the academic ennui that plagues the faculty, administrators, and even the staff in today’s colleges.
This movie TENURE and its main character played by Luke Wilson, does not give an answer to such lassitude. It is a comedy, and in its playful fashioning it may point to a realistic and sustainable answer to problems regarding the lazy and ineffectual professoriate in a way that tragedy (or mere melodrama) cannot show. This movie shows academic collegiality to be a sham, but it is open to ideas of personal friendship and love.
Without giving away the ending, let’s say that the protagonist comes to understand his true talents. If the movie Office Space annoyed you in its ending with the character choosing to work outdoors in construction as a solution, then TENURE will not be for you.
TENURE follows the Matt Crawford soul craft as connected to shop class variety of education–though in actuality, the protagonist’s choice against the regime of tenure will make him find even more constraints the like of which he would never have found at his silly college. At least in the college he had curriculum freedom, in his future he has nothing but pedagogical heteronomy–abstract others telling him what in terms of benchmarks he ought to teach.
At least he is able to make a connection with his father. Perhaps that is all that matters.
But in the sequel to TENURE I suspect that, high school being so rotten (to give away the ending), the main character will be on the street talking to no one and everyone. But he made better connections with friends and family–so he won’t be entirely a madman.
He just won’t make any money, not like he ever did to begin with anyway.
October 21st, 2012 | 6:38 am
God knows why, but the on first seeing the title of this post, I thought of Indiana Jones movies and Harrison Ford as whose heroics were outside of the classroom. When I saw “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, lo, those many years ago I thought how our image of the professor had changed since “The Blue Angel”. But that the idea that the professor is in danger outside of the classroom is similar in both. Different kinds of danger, though.
Only last month I finished the round of movies about living in communist oppression that Carl incited for me in the summer. I don’t know that I could get through (or face) all the movies with foolish professors mentioned here. I haven’t seen most of these and confess to being unprepared for the exam.
As an aside, I do avoid anything by Anna Quindlen as fundamentally unsound because of lathered sentimentality, but I know many people, not all women, who love the way she can push emotional buttons, especially about what could be called mundane heroics. Professors ought to be above that? They aren’t.
Which is one reason why “Wit” is as good as Pseudoplotinus says. Though I would add another bit of good, which is that as a rare exception, it has to be better than the play on which it is based. The film brings home the claustral effect of illness; the cinematography is brilliant in that film. But if the character wasn’t giving us John Donne quotes throughout, she would be far less charming.
That character comes to wonder what good she ever did. The “lazy, overpaid, unaccountable, and unproductive” are a blight in society in any profession. College teaching is a comfortable job relatively, whatever its discomforts. There are so many professors anymore since colleges have been a growth sector of the economy. Most people don’t get the best. I’ll bet there are more professors than electricians these days, but who makes movies about electricians? Who as a job class, excepting politicians, soldiers and maybe police, gets more attention in movies? Maybe that is a kind of adulation; so what have we got to complain about?
October 21st, 2012 | 8:17 am
Professors are very ordinary, moderately bright people who simply succumb to the constant flattery of their vanity inherent in the trade.
School teachers are moderately bright people. Professors are drawn from the cognitive elite, as are physicians and engineers. It is just that their line of work is less demanding and generally lacks operational measures of competence; consequently, their workplaces are suffused with institutional politics. The trouble professors have is that they are only bright, and commonly conduct themselves as if they were under the illusion that being bright is the only thing that matters.
October 21st, 2012 | 10:23 am
So AD says a lot in a few sentences: Knowledge isn’t virtue! I certainly agree that collegiality is sham and all that. SO I’m instantly suspicious of anyone who uses the words COLLEAGUE or COLLEGIALITY; it’s the mark of someone playing institutional politics and up to no good. BUT operational measures of competence, as they actually appear, turn out also to be institutional politics or a a cover for petty tyranny.
The message of the very interesting TENURE is that if you’re serious about teaching, go off and teach at a really good high school. Good advice, perhaps, but most professors don’t want to work that hard. And there’s also the fact that members of “the cognitive elite” want plenty of time to make their distinctive contributions to something.
It’s not that many professors don’t work hard. I’m grading papers, writing a “cutting edge” lecture for a cool conference coming up next Friday at BYU, and enlightening the world through my master blogging this Sunday morning. Professors just want to do what they want, work on their own terms.
October 21st, 2012 | 10:28 am
This, by the way, is a great thread. I’ve learned a lot. I hope Sara, Paul Seaton, JWC, and many others join in. And that all the above say more.
October 21st, 2012 | 10:38 am
Brad W–I just liberated your wonderful Canadian contribution from the spam. I hope others will scroll up and appreciate and comment.
October 21st, 2012 | 11:24 am
Brad, I remember hearing great things about Barbarian Invasions when it came out. And now, after reading your review, I will have to see it.
October 21st, 2012 | 12:08 pm
I’ve learned (again) that there are more good films available than I think. “Barbarian Invasions” is not easy to find. Through perseverance I’ve found it, and since that and “Tenure” sound so good — I’ll just have to find time.
A friend who was/is an educator, principal of high schools and now manages non-profit type work with the young says that teachers have impact on students through affirming them as people. This doesn’t always happen through close contact like conversation; the classroom learning situation can be meaningful enough if real learning happens. However, that kind of positive impact comes more easily in a high school classroom where learning comes with the personal. An intent to educate rather than bloviate makes all the difference.
Something else about knowledge, virtue and the cognitive elite is that a solid education or expertise in one area does not mean expertise or even competence in all things. Ah, but then maybe it is a matter of the kind of college where I work. I even have my doubts about the elite quality of professors. The guy who teaches political science in the room next to mine in the period before I teach is about the greatest fathead I’ve ever heard. While preparing for my class the other day I heard, “Republicans want all women to stay home.” which had me biting my tongue and I am always resisting the temptation to confront him for the many absurd things he says. I’ve heard that the best thing about him is grading based on two Scantron exams and no papers.
October 21st, 2012 | 12:21 pm
“School teachers are moderately bright people.”
Really?
It’s been my experience that school teachers (not all, of course) are a bit slow on the uptake. In many instances they are derailed modernists and progressivists who perfervidly embrace the the state, and end up existing as apparatchiks, depending on their college majors and the courses they teach.
Usually those ‘teachers’ who count themselves as ‘Christians’ believe in some, very strange, social-Jesus doctrine that requires their membership in the Democrat Party and frequent financial contributions to Planned Parenthood, in order to further the slaughter of the innocents.
October 21st, 2012 | 12:30 pm
Yeah, a very fine thread despite its frightening aspects for myself, and Barbarian Invasions, Wit, Tenure, and One True Thing go right onto my NF queue. Not so sure about this Squid flik, or the supposedly Kenyon-depicting LIBERAL ARTS, which Peter did not recommend, actually.
One of the interesting things about the latest Stillman film, DAMSELS IN DISTRESS (profs in it, BTW, are presented as respectable enough, but largely absent and irrelevant–the campus security guards/grounds-keepers matter more), is the way the main character Violet pushes a program of dating doofi, i.e., someone rather less intelligent than you. Her motives for this are complicated and the scheme ultimately doesn’t work, at least for her, but she does truly and sincerely fall in love with one of the said frat-boy doofuses. She makes a real go of experiencing what the intellectual might have to learn from the common humanity they share with the far-less intellectual and/or intelligent.
Reminds me of one of the most haunting of Pascal’s Pensees, the one where he wonders why it is we don’t tend to get angry at someone not blessed with the gift of beauty, strength, etc., but we do tend to get angry at those who do something unintelligent, even if they are, well, less intelligent than average.
October 21st, 2012 | 1:13 pm
So I wish I liked Stillman’s DAMSELS more. It seems better when talking about it than actually watching it.
Professors, who are virtually absent, are spoken of with respect–one in particular. We also are told that college students are interesting companions because they can talk about their classes. But the talky girls, who are fairly smart and sort-of literate and interesting, almost never do speak of their classes. The girls seem to be good students, but we don’t know why. The movie offers a fascinating rebuttal of the claim that frat guys are privileged elitists who must be crushed. As average college males, they can barely function in daily life and deserve or need plenty of help from smart stylish girls. We also learn, of course, that such DOOFI are lovable, partly because they have so little vanity (much less than the more intellectual kind of student). One of the film’s main targets is the relational obliviousness of political correctness. Another is the perverse privileging of nonreproductive sex (in the mode of the pagan Cathars).
Another still, as Carl explains, is the privileging of intelligence and productivity is our sophisticated social life. There’s nostalgia for the time when dressing and dancing well (doing real dances to dancable music) were real clues to class.
October 21st, 2012 | 2:15 pm
It’s been my experience that school teachers (not all, of course) are a bit slow on the uptake.
Compared to whom? I suspect that you would find that those who complete the certification process (rather than the broader population who acquire teacher training degrees) are (on average) moderately bright. I suspect you would also find that a disproportionate share (most especially among the administrators) are easy marks for the peddlers of stupid social ideologies at war with the vocation of teaching. (See Michelle Kerr’s writings on this point). Being moderately bright does not protect one from one’s own bad judgment. Nor does it mean that the population of teachers is what it could be. Thomas Sowell has emphasized this point: that the screens applied which produce the population of teachers generate a less able population than laissez-faire in the market for teachers’ services would. It does not mean that teachers are dopey, just that they are not as bright as they might be (and easy marks for dreck peddled by teacher training programs).
October 21st, 2012 | 4:11 pm
My opinion re: the intellectual capacity of state trained teachers is from my own experience as a student and interlocutor. I didn’t mean to imply that they’re “dopey” rather that they, almost universally, seem to have swallowed the progressivist koolaide (peddled dreck) and after years of teaching, tend to become mind numbed apparatchiks.
October 21st, 2012 | 4:31 pm
DAMSELS is uber-Stillman, Stillman on steroids. There is something initially appalling and unlikable about that…definitely not as accessible as the other films. It is out on video now, so I propose that folks here try to see it in the next two weeks, and then we’ll talk it up good…and it certainly is solid fodder for good talk. Come November 8 or so, we’ll probably need something more to talk about than why Obama lost and what the Romney admin will be like, and God forbid, why democracy stinks and Americans were deluded and deceived enough to re-elect the O.
October 21st, 2012 | 5:26 pm
DAMSELS, in the words of one astute critic, is the most pretentious script ever written. Not that there’s anything wrong with that if you’re READING it.
October 21st, 2012 | 8:29 pm
Saw Damsels with my wife, who will never forgive me for the experience I put her through.
My impression is that Stillman was lacking the cast and setting for what he wanted to accomplish. In his previous installments he built stories around young boomers whose pre-boomer sensibilities were misplaced in the cultural changes occuring about them. The charm of his films consisted in watching these hyper-articulate well meaning characters attempt to come to grips with the resulting disorientation.
In damsels, the story was set in the present where there are no more college age kids who hearken back to the days of debutant balls in manhattan and so Stillman concocts a small coterie of eccentric girls who sound suspiciously similar to the upper haute bourgeoisie of his previous films but with none of the generational back story or context. Instead we learn that the eccentric leader is basically crazy, though in a benevolent sort of way, and her followers are never developed sufficiently to explain their fellowship with her.
My impression was the group lacked the coherent identity that defined the UHB’s of Stillman’s previous movies and as a result the cultural disorientation that was put to such good use was lacking making the girls motives and mission seem eccentric at best, arbitrary at worste.
Most of all I found myself missing the original core group of actors who were in the first three films. This cast seemed to be far less well suited for the wordy, rapid fire sort of dialogue that Stillman relies on in his stories.
Having said that, I certainly hope Stillman gives it another try, perhaps moving on to a different theme altogether.
October 21st, 2012 | 8:44 pm
I’m coming late to this conversation, as usual. I appreciate many insights on the vanity and insularity of the professoriate. At bottom this vanity and insularity stem from the very posture of scientism, in which the scholar adopts a position beyond the merely human concerns of citizens, lovers, etc. Pierre Manent: the pagan philosophers claimed to be a superior human being; the social scientist is superior to our very humanity. I can see at work the attractions of this hyper-uranian appeal to students in political science who are flattered to leave behind the messy disagreements between liberals and conservative and fly to the sterile planet of quantitative methodology, from whence they can observe such debates with lofty indulgence.
Meanwhile, please indulge my maudlin sentiment in favor of One True Thing. I have never read Quindlen, and I grant your points about defects in the movie. And yet, for me, this is the essential: this film debunks intellectual vanity and the vanity of philandering, and dares suggest that some One True Thing might lie closer to the loving loyalty of a (house)wife and mother. That’s no mean affirmation in our world, and so I’m for that movie.
October 21st, 2012 | 8:56 pm
This is too serious. How about Back to School with Rodney Dangerfield falling in love with his English professor who teaches him to enjoy things he never knew existed and embarrassing his business professor who knows nothing about business. Real Genius is another fun movie (albeit terrible) in which the professor sells out to the military to create weapons and uses his students to do it.
October 22nd, 2012 | 5:59 am
BACK TO SCHOOL really is an erotic appreciation of liberal education and a fine display of the absurdity of going to college to learn something about business from professors “who never met a payroll” or paid off the mob. It also reminds us how shameless colleges are when a rich guy comes to town. It’s better than several other movies mentioned here. Thanks to Ralph for affirming the core message of ONE TRUE THIING, which shines through despite the idiocy of the novel’s author.
October 22nd, 2012 | 7:11 am
And yet, for me, this is the essential: this film debunks intellectual vanity and the vanity of philandering, and dares suggest that some One True Thing might lie closer to the loving loyalty of a (house)wife and mother. That’s no mean affirmation in our world, and so I’m for that movie.
1. I doubt Quindlen actually believes that affirmation as stated. The story is about a professional woman coming to appreciate her mother because her mother has put up with the big He (and has some skills her daughter had taken for granted). The fictional Katherine Gulden is someone to be admired, not emulated. “Ellen Gulden” is in a ‘relationship’. How is that man portrayed? Is there anything about the association between men and women as portrayed in the film that would lead a professional woman to the conclusion that such associations are worth it?
2. That affirmation is corrupted by all kinds of other crap.
October 22nd, 2012 | 7:20 am
Good point on admired versus to be emulated
October 23rd, 2012 | 6:32 pm
I am a little surprised no one has mentioned SHADOWLANDS – starring Sir Anthony Hopkins as CS Lewis.
I cannot explain how good this movie is either. It has to be experienced.
October 23rd, 2012 | 7:48 pm
But in that the professor is heroic, not the opposite of a hero.
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