Today my husband and I watched How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, an underwhelming but pleasantly diverting Simon Pegg vehicle about a hard-hitting but unbearable celebrity journalist who can’t get ahead in his career due to his tendency to do things like accidentally unleashing pigs at BAFTA parties. He eventually sells out to get ahead, of course, and just as inevitably un-sells out (sells in?). It’s a nice enough film if, like me, you find Kirsten Dunst inexplicably charming.
Anyway, one of the things that’s meant to brand Pegg’s character as obnoxious is that he announces, at a swank celebrity party, that Con Air is the greatest film ever made (Dunst’s character favors La Dolce Vita; everyone else, all employed in the film business, doesn’t seem to care for movies much). You’ve got John Malkovich for your acting chops, he points out, and Nicholas Cage for action and Steve Buscemi for comedy (a distinctly Buscemian sort of comedy, I must say, with immortal lines such as “this one girl, I drove through three states wearing her head as a hat”). I agree wholeheartedly with this thesis, and would go farther and add that it also contains 1) Ving Rhames, who always creates a sort of vortex of badassity around himself; 2) a plane landing on the Las Vegas Strip; 3) “Put the bunny back in the box.” The only way it could be more awesome was that if it joined forces with another such classic to create the modern masterpiece Cons and Snakes and Also Steve Buscemi on a Plane.
The thing is, as an academic a couple of months away from getting a PhD in early modern British literature, an instructor at an R1 university, a shaper of young minds, I feel a little guilty about that. But I believe, and try to impart to my students, that there are links between what thrills us when we sit on the couch with a bowl of popcorn and what artists do to create art. We don’t have to apologize for loving something un-intellectual, but there’s also nothing wrong with, as freshmen are often known to accuse, “reading too much into it”–exploring the link between literary analysis and pop culture. Of course, many pop culture scholars have been doing this longer and better than me, so I’m not breaking any new ground here—I’m just using this space to explore my own feelings about what I do (analyze texts) and what I enjoy (films and television of all sorts, including that which often goes against the political and aesthetic sensibilities I embrace as an academic).
What’s in the space between art, intellect, politics, and entertainment, and how, as a teacher, should I approach that space? How pretentious is one allowed to be when one has already set Cons and Snakes and Also Steve Buscemi on a Plane as the benchmark for awesome, and will they revoke my forthcoming PhD when they find out that I’m constitutionally incapable of flipping past Armageddon when it’s on TV? Can really I be a good feminist if I watch this much Tarantino? Those are some of the quandaries with which this blog will wrestle.
~Roaring Girl
