Monday, August 27, 2012

The quote-unquote "College Experience"

So I volunteered to teach a section of "first-year seminar," which is a one-credit hour course that first-semester Rockhurst students take.

One of the goals of the course is to acclimate students to university culture at Rockhurst. Tomorrow is our first day. Well, it's our first day in the classroom. I met my section last week. We had lunch. I learned a lot about each of the students, like how Logan has 14 chickens (13, actually; one just died) and can name each of them, and how Claire really likes giraffes, and how one student ain't afraid of receding hairlines.

But, tomorrow, I get to the serious work of acclimating these students to the college experience, which is why I'm starting with the "quote-unquote 'college experience'"--the fantasy of college life that is peddled by Hollywood movies.

My plan is to take students on a jaunt through popular campus movies of the late twentieth century, ask them how popular representations of campuses have changed in the twenty-first century, and then ask them how their actual first week on campus compares to their expectations of week one.

Starting with the 1970s:
Animal House (1978)

This is a good place to start, I think, not only because of Animal House is THE iconic campus film, but also because it's likely to be a film that is equally alienating to me and my students. I've never admitted this to anyone, but I do not get John Belushi. He's never seemed even remotely funny to me. Tomorrow's my chance to see if ol' Bluto means as little to my students as he did to me. 

The 80s!
Real Genius (1985)

There are so many great things about this movie. As a kid, it convinced me that college was this magical place where eccentrics ran amok and created exploding apples for their teachers and mini ice ages in their dorm halls. It was were mysterious, bearded men lived in underground lairs behind trapdoors in dorm closets and cracked the codes of corporate sweepstakes. It was were you became friends with the kinds of people you never knew existed and, with that friendship, foiled your evil professor's plan to sell laser technology to the U.S. military. This movie convinced me to go to college and stay there.  

The dream of the 90s is alive in PCU
PCU (1994)

I was doing some serious mental preparation for college when I first saw this 1990s homage to the fratty hijinks of Animal House. I never bought this film's message, which is basically that all that alienated, angsty Gen-Xers need to be happy is a healthy dose of 1970s kegger nihilism. But I did aspire to the cool comprehension of college displayed by Jeremy Piven's character. Plus, I was still recovering from having had my heart broken by the movie, Rudy (1993), and I liked seeing John Favreau again (even if in dreds). 

And now for a very special episode of Generation X Goes to College
Higher Learning (1995)

Higher Learning kind of blew my mind. It was like that "very special episode" of your favorite sitcom (the "sitcom" in this analogy being campus movies) where some downright serious issues got addressed. This movie was a real introduction to identity politics and their stakes in young people's lives. It was also my introduction to John Singleton. 

If Val Kilmer in Real Genius taught me how to want to be a college student, Laurence Fishburne in Higher Learning taught me how to want to be a college professor. Minus the bowtie.  

Saturday, August 18, 2012

Welcome 2.0

One of my very first blog posts was about how I'd recently learned a new technology--the animated movie-making software at xtranormal. It's been nearly eight months, and in that time, I have not advanced at all in my knowledge of that technology. In fact, looking over the new "Welcome" movie that I just made for my Literature and Cinema class, I notice how similar that "movie" is to my first effort:
In a half a year, all I have taught myself how to do is make bald men stand amid blank chroma key mattes and talk and gesture awkwardly. To boot, I apparently don't understanding continuity editing at all--I haven't seen that many alienating jump cuts in a single minute of film since that car scene from Breathless.

So I haven't grown as a filmmaker. This fact was clearest to me when I stumbled upon this short film made by a recent Rockhurst U graduate and soon-to-be super-famous person:
 
Both a brilliant film and a world-class morale boost, no?

Dear incoming and future freshperson, take my advice: Watch this film, a lot. Bookmark it and re-watch it whenever you feel the duress of demanding professors and the strain of your own lofty professional ambitions.

If I'd only seen such a film when I was a freshman, I'd have had fewer bouts of alienation, or I'd at least have been inspired to make better movies.

Happy fall!