Professional Sweetheart: 11/17/23
It Was Like a Dream
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Just a little note up top — I will be taking next Friday off because I’ll be in Florida, neck deep in a bunch of family stuff. You’ll have a brand new PS in your inbox the week after! I truly cannot believe the holiday season is already here. (I’ll be praying for all of us.)
Also, for those of y’all who are on the Founding Member tier of PS, I wanted to let you know that I’ll be coming around asking you for mailing addresses soon! I’m starting to put together these little packages as some of these custom order items have been rolling in (VERY EXCITING TO ME AND MAYBE ONLY ME?!). Once I get the last shipment in, expect an email from my neck of the woods!
This week in the Film 101 class I’ve been teaching, we finally got to the section of our text book about documentaries and experimental films. I’ve truly been waiting for this moment ever since I was typing up the syllabus! Because this is my first time teaching film, I asked a lot of questions before I started about how far I could take the screenings. What kinds of movies could I show that would feel relevant and teachable but also wouldn’t make a normal 18-20 year old college student taking this class as an elective want to withdraw from my class? Could I go an hour on Jonas Mekas or a hold a lengthy discussion about power dynamics between filmmaker and interview subject in Paris Is Burning (1990)? What do kids these days know? What do they like? What do they want to know and like? The answer I was given by the professors in the department: just go for it and do whatever you want. Of course, this was an extremely exciting prospect but admittedly scary as HELL.
Lost, Lost, Lost (1976)
There always seems to be pressure when you’re curating something for other people, be it movies, music, jokes, information, cat memes, or 1000 level classes at a small university in the country burbs. Not every person is gonna get your vision. And I’ll just be plain ass honest with you: these days it seems slightly terrifying to fuck up anything, in public. In all my years doing what I’ll call “professionally choosing things”, both as a radio/club DJ and as a film programmer, I always felt it was a wise path to keep a balance between what I liked vs. what I thought other people might like. Even when I was lucky enough to have my own franchise on TCM for several years, I still believed that the channel was never supposed to be my personal jukebox at all times. And unlike programming a movie theater, film festival, or museum, there’s a lot of potential eyeballs on a national television network. It always felt like I should try and cover a big spread of potential interests and tastes1. Of course, I had my passion projects, but I did a lot of “one for me, two for them”- ing during my time there. It ended up being a good philosophy as the years went on, from a longevity standpoint, too; it definitely prevented burning up all my good ideas too quickly. Surely you don’t think I was super jazzed about all those multiple, day-long marathons of Andy Hardy movies, do you?!
Holy shit, speaking of experimental films: has anyone seen Martin Arnold’s Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998)?! You gotta track it down if you can — totally insane in the best way.
I try to keep stuff like this in mind as I’ve been teaching the class, especially when it comes to the age gap between myself and the students. I try to meet them where they live a lot of the time. The sad bottom line is that most of who I teach could be my actual kids; I’m at least 20-25 years older than them. When I polled the class very early on on whether they’d ever seen a Wes Anderson film before and they all said no, everything basically went out the window. I’m like two stops away from even being able to point out that Wes would have been nothing without someone like Stanley Kubrick. Showing the majority of class the original Jurassic Park (1993) for the first time, a very popular Hollywood film made by a very famous Hollywood director as I knew it but basically an artifact from the past as far as they were concerned, was wild. If they were blown away by this, I guess nobody would really care that Millie fave One False Move (1992) made it on the schedule. The entire semester has been like this. There is no resting on laurels — “nobody in this shithole gets me” despite me secretly wishing they would. Showing up always feels like I’m about to learn a huge lesson about what happens when you’re outside of your bubble, when nobody around you adheres to or knows the traditional film canon you studied and grew up on. When people have limitless options for entertainment, more dependence on devices, and smaller attention spans, and are therefore less reliant than you were for cinema to get them through life. Some who are probably just taking this class to get an easy A and then will move on to their business or marketing major courses or whatever. I could beat my head and shame them for not liking silent films, or I could try to understand that most of that stuff was made over a hundred years ago now and that is a long ways away if you’re eighteen. Suddenly I’m like the old guys who would show up to Tower Records when I worked there in the late 90’s, waiting for the doors to open at 9:00 AM on a Sunday so they could head straight to the classical music section for a few hours. When I was eighteen, those guys seemed like they operated on the fringes. Is classic film that now?! When did what I like go from “retro” to “ancient”?!
When I was thinking of the right image to illustrate this, for some reason my mind went immediately to Winona Ryder in that bad grandma makeup from the end of Edward Scissorhands (1990).
The most helpful thing I was told by a professor friend of mine was that, sure, you might have the sea of blank faces after showing something you think is an absolute film essential, but the law of averages says at least one person had their mind forever blown, and by semester’s end, that’s why your class exists. I did show them Paris is Burning last week and I’m still not sure how it landed. Another issue is that nobody really wants to talk in front of the class. I remember being scared to death to be called on in my 1000 and 2000 level courses but by the time I was ready to graduate, I was the model of the insufferable college student who had Opinions™ and Wanted to Burn Up All the Class Time Discussing Them™. It does bum me out slightly when nobody is chomping at the bit to give their hot takes but I just chalk it up to age and the fear of public speaking. I give them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the movies I’ve assigned them. When I told them they had to watch Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) this week, I qualified it with, “It’s only fourteen minutes long so you literally have no excuse.” I asked them about it today, and a few of them actually spoke up: “It was weird” (fair enough), “It’s hard when things are silent” (sadly, I figured that out during Harold Lloyd week, which they basically hated), “It was like a dream” (I’ll take it). Then I made them watch documentaries and comp reels of classic American experimental cinema for the rest of class, unsure if I was doing so sadistically or what. To my surprise, nobody left in a huff. I have no idea if any of them will care about any of this after the semester is over. All I can hope for is that at least one of them will be scrolling through their mandatory implanted TikTok-powered medical device years from now and see someone talking about how the aliens who have just conquered Earth look just like the hooded, faceless people from that one Maya Deren movie, and they will think, “Oh shit, I think I saw that in human college once, back before AI Jesus, when that old corporeal teacher made us watch all this really weird stuff from the ancient civilization… ”
Not shown: me scanning the room to see if anyone had fallen asleep while we watched Rainbow Dance (1936) by Len Lye, a four minute movie.
Have a good holiday, see you soon!
Millie
Movies Mentioned:
Paris Is Burning (1990, Jennie Livingston)
Lost, Lost, Lost (1976, Jonas Mekas)
Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998, Martin Arnold)
Jurassic Park (1993, Steven Spielberg)
One False Move (1992, Carl Franklin)
Edward Scissorhands (1990, Tim Burton)
Meshes of the Afternoon (1943, Maya Deren)
Rainbow Dance (1936, Len Lye)
Nothing Lasts Forever (1984, Tom Schiller)
To be honest, I was way more interested in trying to put rare, not-on-home-video films on television as much as I could that my own personal wants were put aside more often than not. The people need to see Nothing Lasts Forever (1984), after all.
I wish I could take your class
Yesterday I rearranged my lecture on the fly when I learned that some of my (very young adult) students did not know who Dolly Parton is. They know now.