December 2014
English Professors are Sick, Sick, Sick
12/09/14 Filed in: Arts
I am afraid my profession has never fared well in film. Anthropology professors look like Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Physics professors look like Kelly McGillis in Top Gun. They conquer the world and get the girl or guy in the end.
Male English professors are pathetic serial philanders. The best we can hope for is to lose our jobs and become unemployed stoners hooked up with Frances McDormand like Michael Douglas in Wonder Boys.
But female English Professors have it even worse. What do they get to do? Lose their memories and die. The newly-released Still Alice stars Julianne Moore as a linguist with early-onset Alzheimers. It reminds me of Do You Remember Love, a 1985 film that start Joanne Woodward as an English Professor with early-onset Alzheimers. (It was shot at Pomona College, and Woodward borrowed an academic gown from my favorite professor, who looked like a movie star and kept her memory and critical faculties through four decades of teaching.) In Wit, Emma Thompson was a Renaissance scholar who died of cancer, but lost the ability to deal anything more complicated than The Runaway Bunny before the end. Call in the CDC: we have a pattern.
I know that English teachers don't do anything very dramatic—the best we can hope for it to be inspiringly fired the way Robin Williams was in Dead Poets Society. All the same, can't Hollywood come up with a better plot for the female Professor of Language & Literature than "She dies in the end"?
(If script-writers have a body-count quota to meet, might I suggests clearing out the School of Education and the administration building?)
Male English professors are pathetic serial philanders. The best we can hope for is to lose our jobs and become unemployed stoners hooked up with Frances McDormand like Michael Douglas in Wonder Boys.
But female English Professors have it even worse. What do they get to do? Lose their memories and die. The newly-released Still Alice stars Julianne Moore as a linguist with early-onset Alzheimers. It reminds me of Do You Remember Love, a 1985 film that start Joanne Woodward as an English Professor with early-onset Alzheimers. (It was shot at Pomona College, and Woodward borrowed an academic gown from my favorite professor, who looked like a movie star and kept her memory and critical faculties through four decades of teaching.) In Wit, Emma Thompson was a Renaissance scholar who died of cancer, but lost the ability to deal anything more complicated than The Runaway Bunny before the end. Call in the CDC: we have a pattern.
I know that English teachers don't do anything very dramatic—the best we can hope for it to be inspiringly fired the way Robin Williams was in Dead Poets Society. All the same, can't Hollywood come up with a better plot for the female Professor of Language & Literature than "She dies in the end"?
(If script-writers have a body-count quota to meet, might I suggests clearing out the School of Education and the administration building?)
