An Open Letter to Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson

Tags

Abraham Lincoln, Ken Burns, Miscellaneous, Ron Johnson, Second Inaugural Address, St Balthild

Dear Senator Johnson,

In a recent interview, you complained about what you called the “higher education cartel” and called for abandoning the diploma process in favor of a certification process. You cited your past experience volunteering in the Catholic educational system in Oshkosh (the high school system, I assume). And then you said

One of the examples I always used ― if you want to teach the Civil War across the country, are you better off having, I don’t know, tens of thousands of history teachers that kind of know the subject, or would you be better off popping in 14 hours of Ken Burns Civil War tape and then have those teachers proctor based on that excellent video production already done? You keep duplicating that over all these different subject areas. 

I’ve been teaching in the University of Wisconsin system for about two decades, so I guess I’m part of that ‘higher education cartel’, but I think I know a few things about teaching, so let me explain why simply showing documentaries is a poor substitute for having a fully-trained scholar teaching students about history.

Your teaching model relies on a faulty notion of what history is. You assume that history is the study of the facts of the past. In a model like that, the goal of education is to have students memorize those facts so they will ‘know history’. This assumes that the past is just a set of knowable facts, a record of ‘what happened’.

The problem with this model is that historians don’t really study ‘what happened’, because we can’t. Until someone invents a time machine that allows us to travel back in time and directly observe events as they happen, historians are dependent for our knowledge of the past on the written records left behind by those who were involved in the events.

To use your example from the American Civil War, one of the important moments in the Civil War was President Lincoln’s famous Second Inaugural Address. We possess the text of the speech, so we know what Lincoln said, more or less, but no one alive today was present and there are no recordings of it, so we can’t be 100% sure that he actually said these exact words; perhaps he added something to the speech, or changed some of his words as he delivered it. We can’t know how he said the words, where he paused for effect or which words he gave particular emphasis. The comments that others made about the speech, for example in news stories or private correspondence, might get us a little closer to Lincoln’s delivery, but ultimately, we can’t study the event itself; we can only study the text of the speech as it has come down to us.

That means that historians don’t study ‘what happened’. Instead, we study the written record of what happened, the various surviving documents that can tell us about the events. To be sure, we make use of knowledge from archaeology, numismatics, anthropology, and so on, but what history is as an academic field is specifically the study of the written documents of the past. Historians don’t study the facts of the past; we assemble them from the written record as best we can, and two historians working on the same issue might assemble the facts in very different ways. For example, an historian who is interested in presidential politics might assemble the facts of the Second Inaugural Address in a different way than an historian interested in the history of American slavery would. By asking different questions or putting it alongside different documents, two different scholars could find two very different meanings in the same speech.History isn’t the study of ‘what happened’, it’s the study of how we interpret the documents that tell us what happened.

The problem with written documents is that they have a lot of limitations. Some authors write about things they know little about, while other authors actively lie. Some authors are trying to cover up or justify their own actions. Some authors’ understanding of events is sharply limited by their access to the event, or by the way their culture influences how they think about the event. Some authors are writing years later and may have forgotten things. So historians need to learn to read very carefully, looking for the clues to help us evaluate how reliable the document is, what it might be omitting or getting wrong, and what it can tell us about the intentions of the author who wrote it.

 

An Example

These skills are far more complex than they might sound. Freshmen college students have a strong tendency to read uncritically, because very few students enter college with highly-developed reading and thinking skills, and it’s my job to help them acquire the basics of those skills. 

For example, I teach Early Western Civilization quite frequently, and when I get to the early Middle Ages, I have my students read the Life of St. Balthild, a 7^th century Frankish saint. By this point in the course they’ve already read a little bit about early Christian saints, and had a discussion about the rising importance of virginity as a feminine virtue in Western society. Balthild had quite an eventful life; she started out as a noblewoman, but was taken as a slave and sold to a government official named Erchinoald. According to the author of her Life,

[Balthild] gained such a reputation that when the wife of Erchinoald died, he wished to marry Balthild, that faultless virgin. When she heard of this, she fled from his sight. When he called her into his chamber, she hid herself in a corner and covered herself with bundles of rags so no one might find her. Because she was humble, she attempted to flee from the honor that was to be hers. She had hoped not to get married but to have Jesus alone for her spouse.

Divine providence intervened, and Erchinoald found a different wife. Thus it happened that Balthild, with God’s approval, escaped marriage with this prince, but eventually came to be espoused to Clovis, son of the former king Dagobert. By virtue of her humility, she was thus raised to a higher rank. She was wed to the king by divine dispensation, and honored in this station. She brought forth royal children. These events are known to all, for now her royal progeny rule the realm.

So after being Erchinoald’s slave and would-be wife, Balthild somehow wound up marrying the son of the Frankish king and eventually became queen herself. After her husband died, she ruled the kingdom on behalf of her young son for a while, until she joined the monastic house at Chelles and became a nun. After her death, the other nuns began to claim that she was saint, and the Life was written as part of an effort to establish her in popular imagination as a saint.

But when you read those two paragraphs I quoted, did you notice how the text contradicts itself? If not, go back and re-read it and see if you can find the contradiction. Don’t feel too bad if you miss it; my students never spot it until I point it out.

In the first paragraph, the author claims that Balthild wanted to be a virgin her whole life. In that, she fits into a standard model of female sanctity in that period, which champions virginity as superior to all other possible sexual and social statuses; according to this model, being a virgin is morally superior to being a wife or a widow. And, according to the author, God supports Balthild’s desire to be a permanent virgin by intervening and causing Erchinoald to get interested in some other woman. So Balthild is such a devout Christian that God gives her a small miracle to protect her virginity.

But not two sentences later, God arranges for Balthild to get married to Prince Clovis. Suddenly the text forgets Balthild’s desire for permanent virginity and never mentions it again. God and Balthild apparently change their minds when a prince comes along. So the author of the text makes one claim about Balthild as a way to demonstrate her sanctity, and then drops that claim when the known facts of her life prove inconsistent with that claim. It’s a clever piece of authorial sleight-of-hand; like I said my students never spot it until I point it out. And this isn’t the only time the text does this. The author repeatedly makes claims for Balthild’s intentions and then has to explain away behavior that contradicts those claims. Supposedly as queen, Balthild had a deep desire to become a nun, but then the author has to explain why she stayed on as queen after her husband died; supposedly her subjects loved her so much they refused to let her step down. Then the author has to explain why her subjects suddenly changed their mind and let her become a nun.

Once I get them to see the contradictions, I’m able to have a conversation with the students about what’s going on. That leads us to looking at what the author’s purpose in writing the Life is, namely that the author (possibly one of Balthild’s fellow nuns at Chelles) wants to persuade people to consider Balthild a saint, so she employs a series of standard motifs about female saints (the desire for permanent virginity, the threat to the saint’s virginity, the miracle that protects it, and so on). And she does this despite the fact that Balthild’s life stands in direct contradiction to those motifs; Balthild’s son became king, so she obviously wasn’t a virgin. And that leads into questions of why the nuns decided to promote Balthild as a saint if she wasn’t a good fit for traditional ideas about female saints, which brings up the fact that Chelles stands to benefit in a variety of ways from having a saint buried there. And all of this is just one of the many documents I use in this class.

I use the Life of St. Balthild precisely because it’s a perfect example of why critical reading skills are important to develop. But it’s not an easy lesson. The students are so accustomed to trusting what they read that they struggle to make the simple leap to the idea that the author isn’t being completely honest. Exploring this one document takes at least 20 minutes of class time, often a good deal longer. The better students carry that lesson into the rest of the documents they read, but many of the students seem to forget it the next time we look at a document, so I have to bring the issue up again to help them become more skeptical readers.

It takes a long time for students to acquire critical reading skills and the closely related critical thinking and critical writing skills. When my freshmen leave my Early Western Civilization class, most of them have started to develop those skills, but they are nowhere near finished. The ones who continue on by taking further history classes (and other classes in the Humanities) will graduate college with those skills highly developed. But it doesn’t happen in the course of a single class. It can’t. These are complex skills and they take years to develop, just like cooking, playing basketball, or engineering. They require constant practice, practice that history classes are designed to require.

And they’re not skills students can acquire through watching a documentary, any more than you could become a great basketball player by watching a documentary on the sport. Ken Burn’s documentary on the Civil War is a wonderful piece of work, and certainly has a place in the classroom. It’s engaging, does a good job of holding the viewer’s attention, and helps convey the idea that history happens to real human beings. But it cannot teach students how to read documents, even though it quotes many documents. It cannot ask them why the author of a letter expressed his or her sentiments in a particular way and then lead a discussion that explores students’ answers to that question. It cannot help students explore what the document doesn’t say and why it might be omitting certain facts or ideas. It cannot get students thinking about how the author’s race or gender or wealth might have shaped what the document says. These are things that are necessary for students to develop those critical skills, and they are things that can only be taught in a classroom with a highly-trained scholar leading the way.

No documentary could teach the Life of St. Balthild the way I teach it, because part of my teaching process is putting a puzzle in front of the students (why does the Life contradict itself?) and then letting them fumble with the possibilities until they start to figure it out. A crucial part of the educational process is letting them wrestle with that puzzle for a while, because it forces them to identify possible answers and then work through them to see whether they make sense or not. They learn more by having to work it out for themselves than if I simply tell them the answer, because simply giving them the answer doesn’t help them develop their critical reading and thinking skills very much.

Why does any of this matter? Why do we need people with highly developed critical reading and writing and thinking skills? I’ve already discussed in a different post the wide range of things that a history student can do with a history degree, but let me talk for a moment about where those skills come in handy. You’re a businessman; I’m sure at some point you must have received a business proposal that looked too good to be true. It’s the critical reading and thinking skills that helped you figure where the proposal wasn’t being honest. I’m sure in your time in politics you’ve learned that politicians often distort or fragment the truth when they give speeches; it’s those same critical thinking and reading skills that help you find the flaws in the arguments you’re being presented with. Or perhaps those aren’t skills you’re good at. Maybe you need to take a few history classes to brush up on them. I mean the kind of history class taught by a professional historian, not the kind taught by someone who just plays a documentary for students and calls it teaching.

 

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An Open Letter to Kentucky Lt. Gov. Jenean Hampton

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Jenean Hamptom, Miscellaneous

Dear Lt Gov. Hampton,

You probably don’t know me. I run a modest little blog where I talk about history and film. But I’m also a professional historian. I teach history at the college level. I’d like to think I know a few things about studying history.

So I was distressed when I read an interview you gave recently in which you said, in reference to university degree programs, “I would not be studying history. Unless, you have a job lined up. Unless there’s somebody looking for a history major. And there are some places that are looking for that sort of wide background, but…” Elsewhere in the interview, you compare studying French literature unfavorably to studying electrical engineering, and you seem to say that universities shouldn’t subsidize the study of the Humanities with tax dollars.

There are a lot of things in that interview I disagree with, but let me focus on just that quote and the assumptions underlining it. Your comment reveals that you, like a lot of people, don’t see much value in studying history, that it’s something one does purely for personal enjoyment. You seem to think that studying history doesn’t really have much value in terms of a career, unless one wants to be a history teacher.

But a lot of people would beg to differ. Those who have studied the past at a university understand that it has a great deal of value in a wide range of fields.

Just ask Supreme Court Justice John Roberts, or Sonia Sotomayor or Elena Kagan, or the late Antonin Scalia, all of whom earned a bachelor’s degree in history. I’m sure they think that the training in close reading of historical documents that their history degree gave them is enormously useful in doing a close reading of a legal brief. (Incidentally, Clarence Thomas studied English literature, and Stephen Breyer studied philosophy, two more Humanities fields. Interesting that 6 out of 9 member of the Supreme Court chose the Humanities for their entrance into law.)

Or just ask a few of our past presidents, such as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Richard Nixon, or George W. Bush. (Eisenhower and Kennedy didn’t study history academically, but they both wrote on the subject.) Or maybe ask a few other important politicians such as George McGovern, George Mitchell, Henry Kissinger, Newt Gingrich, Orrin Hatch, Eric Holder, Robert Gates, Porter Goss, Joe Biden, James Baker, Dianne Feinstein, Jerry Brown, and Cory Booker, all of whom studied history or classics. I’m sure they found a historical perspective on politics and international conflicts an asset while they were in office.

Or if you want an explanation of how a history degree might be useful in business, try asking Carly Fiorina, Lee Iacocca, Martha Stewart, Jeff Zucker at NBC, William Clay Ford, Jr. of Ford Motor Company, James Kilts of Gilette, Robert Johnson of BET, Patricia Russo of Lucent, Ted Turner (who did classics), or any one of a large number of other CEOs. I would imagine they find the broad perspective we take in history useful in a variety of business situations.

Or ask J.K. Rowling, whose love of Latin and Classics shows itself every time one of her characters calls out “Expelliarmus’ or “Expecto Patronum!” She’s not the only famous author with a degree focused on the past; others include Annie Proulx, Rita Mae Brown, Willa Cather, C.S. Lewis, Ayn Rand, Salman Rushdie, and P.G. Wodehouse (although he dropped out for financial reasons before finishing his degree).

Think it’s only intellectual types who study history? Think again. Successful athletes like Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Grant Hill, Leo Lett (three-time Superbowl champion), and Troy Polamalu (another Superbowl champion) are all history degree holders; Vince Lombardi studied classics.

How about some successful entertainers, like Katherine Hepburn, Larry David, Sasha Baron Cohen, Jimmy Buffett, Jeanane Garofalo, Michael Palin of Monty Python fame, Chris Martin of Coldplay, Conan O’Brien, Tom Hiddleston, Lauryn Hill (although she never finished her degree), John Lithgow, Edward Norton, and Steve Carell, to name just a few.

Do I need to go on?

My point here is that history degrees don’t just prepare you to teach high school. They prepare you for a wide variety of careers. A history degree can prepare people for nearly any field that involves reading, writing, and thinking critically, and what fields DON’T require those skills?

But you’re skeptical. I get that. You have a sense that there really aren’t a lot of jobs of history majors. So let’s look at the numbers, and compare history majors against your favored example, electrical engineers. According to this study of employment rates in 2010-11, history majors fresh out of college have an unemployment rate of 10.2%, compared to an electrical engineering major’s 7.3% That looks bad, until you take into consideration that an engineering degree is closely aligned with a specific career, and a history degree isn’t. So the history major takes a bit of time to find his or her career path. But once history majors gain some work experience and find a career direction, their unemployment rate drops to 5.8%, just slightly above the electrical engineer’s 5.2%. This is hardly evidence that history majors don’t have careers to look forward to.

And look at the poor architecture majors. Their unemployment rate is 13.9%, and only drops to 9.2% with some experience. And yet, somehow, you don’t seem to have a sense that architecture is a useless major.

Furthermore, what happens to the electrical engineers who don’t find work in their field or who decide that the field isn’t for them? They’ve trained for a very specific sort of work, and are likely to have a substantial retraining period ahead of them. In contrast, history majors who decide not to pursue, for example, teaching or working in an archive can easily transition to business, or law, or a host of other fields. History degrees don’t prepare you for a specific field; they prepare you for a wide range of fields, which means that a shortage of jobs in one specific field doesn’t hurt history majors the way it would hurt engineering majors. In a complex business world, where job needs are unpredictable and workers are likely to switch careers several times, history and other Humanities degrees are in many ways a safer bet than many single-track fields.

There’s also the fact that Humanities degrees train students in creative thinking and clear communication, which might be why Silicon Valley has been hiring so many non-tech people lately.

And I haven’t even raised the personal benefits of studying something you love rather than something you think is employable. I haven’t brought up the fact that the Humanities are about quality of life, not just quantity of income. I haven’t gotten around to pointing out that life has more value than just the one you can measure with dollars. I haven’t looked at the way that studying history changes and enriches the way you understand the world around you, the news, and maybe your own life. As I tell my students, history is the most interesting thing there is to study, because everything you’re interested in has a history.

Don’t just take my word for it. Try studying it a little. I guarantee you’ll learn something worthwhile.

Things I Have Learned from This Blog

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Miscellaneous

This week is the 1-year anniversary of my blog. Huzzah for the blog!

I figured that in a spirit of reflection, I would talk about a few things I’ve learned from blogging about medieval movies. WordPress gives me a variety of statistics about the traffic on my blog, including the search terms that get people here, where they’re from, and which posts they look at. And that gives me food for thought.

My top five most popular posts, by number of views:

300: Beautiful Straight White Guys vs. Everyone Else                           6,089

Disney’s Robin Hood: A Bit More Medieval Than You Might Think            5,649

Dracula Untold: Don’t Go See This Movie                                             1,908

Braveheart: Why Braveheart is Actually a Porn Film                              1,537

Braveheart: How Not to Dress Like a Medieval Scotsman                       1,418

Clearly, there is interest in analysis of big-budget historical action films. Maybe all those bro-dudes secretly care about history after all.

On the other hand, my 5 least popular posts that are about specific films:

Vision: The Difference between Historians and Film-makers                    55

Amistad: What It Gets Right                                                                 65

Amistad: Joseph Cinqué and All the Other Nameless Blacks                     67

The Imitation Game: Thoughts on Its Oscar Win                                     76

The Duchess: What We Don’t See                                                          80

Apparently films about 12^th century German nuns don’t have a large constituency.

Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea, Somalia, and Greenland apparently really don’t like analysis of historical films, because they’re some of the only countries that I haven’t gotten any traffic from. Also, there’s a place called Mayotte that has internet access. Who knew?

Search terms reveal some rather interesting things about what gets people to my blog. The most important search terms that get people to my blog are mostly variations on “300”, “300 Spartans” and “300 movie”, apart from “Reign”. They’re all in the top 10.

It turns out there’s quite a bit of interest in Commodus’ political skills (all search terms reported exactly as phrased and spelled):

“Why was Commodus a bad emperor”

“5 reasons commodus was a bad emperor” (at least three people got to my blog with this one, so apparently some high school teacher gave an assignment on this topic)

“Emperor commodus good or bad” (as well as “ commodus good or bad”, “was commodus good or bad”, and “was commodus a good or bad emperor”)

“Why was commodus bad”

“emperor commodus bad things” (as well as “commodus good points”)

Some people have really good questions:

“An historian or a historian” (at least 45 times!)

“What was Commodus problems”

“Was king Philip of France gay”

“Did babington actually shoot Elizabeth 1^st”

“guy de lusignan in Jerusalem same in ironclad?”

“Where did the jannisaries go”

“What if commodus does not become emperor”

“Russian ark movie explain”

“Was William Wallace speech real”

“Why is Hercules year 358 BC” (I really don’t know the answer to this one)

“Who is Joseph Cinque and what did he accomplish during the middle passage”

“What might have happened if Columbus crew had convinced him to turn around?”

“What is a magistra of nuns”

“Did the Normans use forks”

“Did Scotsmen were leggings under their kilts qhen it was cold”

“What was the purpose of christopher columbus voyage”

“Did gladiators wear groin protection”

“In the movie 300 did the spartans queen really stab the one guy that had all the coins”

“marriage as apolitical tool in lion in the winter”

Was sir francis drake a hero or a villain?”

And some people are a little confused:

“Why didn’t hildegarde von bingen ever marry?” (Because she was a nun sworn to celibacy?)

“Robin hood movie name of fox in animation version” (Ummm…robin hood?)

“impact of winter on lions”

“13th century film actors”

Some people have a little trouble distinguishing fact from fantasy:

“Dracula untold inaccurate” and “Dracula untold historical accuracy” (this is a film about a 500 year old vampire, people!)

“Gladiator did it really become a republic after the death of commodus”

“Why did Commodus declare marriage illegal”

“Why did artemesia hate greece”

“Did the endless pit in the movie 300 actually exist”

“Where is Ragnar Lothbrok buried”

There’s definitely interest in film stars’ physical attributes:

“Sullivan stapleton penis size” (and also “Sullivan stapleton panis”)

“Allen Leech butt”

“mel gibson penis porno free”

“gibson cock kilt”

Also, it turns out that there is some untapped interest in historical porn films:

“Braveheart porn” and a couple misspellings thereof

“historical scottish adult movies”

“Hot guys in 300”

“Porn gladiator” (as well as “gladiator porn emperor” and “gladiator porno film”)

“porn film” (as well as “film porn” and “pornfilm”)

“darakula.rape.sax.movy” (at least, I think that’s expressing interest in porn…)

“monk and nun in love in films”

“did antonio banderas have sex on the 13^th warrior”

“Actually a porn”

“film porno on faithful”

“historian porno film”

“prima film sex”

“up a scotsmans kilt porn”

“artemizja sex”

“place they had sex in a film called ironclad”

“alex kingston porn”

“xxx pic in the movie brave heart”

“Movies,wilyame,walas,sex”

“history porn full movie.medieval”

“movie 300-2 sex part” and “300-2 sex and fuck”

“braveheart penis scene”

“plot in details of the porn movie ‘conquest’ (please tell me there isn’t a porn film about Christopher Columbus…)

“a film called ironclad any sex”

“300 roman soldier porn”

“inquisition torture methods porn”

“greek warrior women porn hd movie”

“historical princes porn”

“avenge him 300 rise of an empire porn hot”

“Themistocles throwing his dick into artemesia” (twice!)

“how to look up porn using hoplites” (is there supposed to be a hyphen after ‘porn’?)

“Helen Mirren in bondage”

and my personal favorite (although it has serious competition): “300 part1 the king is fighting for spartan but queen gorgo was having sex with theron so sad for the king leonidas”

And then there are the searches that baffle me, both in what they want and why they got to my blog:

“torture a robust woman soldier porn”

“queen fuck gradians tent in jungle movie”

“bow babe sexy”

“mother you were wrong”

“Make sissy boys screen porn”

“filad your filam.pron”

“enlightenment propaganda middle ages babies died nero’s shadow”  (Perhaps the best word salad ever!)

“isabella loves to get completely” (Completely what? I need to know! Is this another porn search, or is it something else?)

And then there’s this little gem, which makes me wish I could give a prize to the person who searched for it.

“british principle of prima gentalia in Scotland”

To get serious for a moment, what some of these search terms (and others I haven’t mentioned) indicate to me is that there really is interest among the general public in knowing how accurate the historical films they watch are. It’s common for historians to lament that people aren’t really interested in knowing the truth behind an action film like 300, but I don’t think that’s the case. A search like “historical accuracy of Braveheart vs the real world” demonstrates that people understand that Hollywood films aren’t reliable and want some help separating the fact from the fiction. It’s a big part of what I do on this blog, and it’s gratifying to see that so many people think it’s worthwhile enough to read. Thanks for a good year, everyone!

Why There Is No Such Thing As “Just a Movie”

Tags

Miscellaneous, Movies, TV Shows

Periodically, people disagree with my analyses of various films and respond that “it’s just a movie.” My post here about Dracula Unbound has gotten a couple comments of that nature, and sometimes my students have said that about my views on Braveheart and 300.

IJAM isn’t really an argument on its own; it’s merely an assertion. But it’s shorthand for an implicit argument that if something is “just” a movie, then it can’t actually have any deeper level of meaning. Put differently, the assumption seems to be that if a movie is entertainment, it must have no other meaning or function.

As a historian, I’m skeptical of IJAM in part because my training makes clear that anything that plays a prominent feature in a society must in some way have meaning for that society. And it’s pretty obvious to us that movies play a major role in American (not to mention Western or world) society. On a basic level, the movie industry is a huge factor in the economy; when a film studio decides to make a major film, it sinks an enormous amount of money into the film and that money goes to pay thousands of people for their contribution to the film as directors, actors, camera-men, caterers, prop-makers, costumers, and so on. Where these films get made is such a big deal economically that states compete with each other to see who can offer the biggest incentives in the form of tax-breaks and other goodies. The film is then marketed in theaters and sold in DVD or streaming form in shops and online through Amazon, Netflix, and so on. Americans shell out an estimated $20 billion on movies each year. That’s a lot of money to spend on Just A Movie.

Beyond the immediate economics, consider how much of our culture revolves around film and television. Our media provides substantial coverage of new films, their making, and how they do at the box office. An enormous portion of our media is devoted to coverage of actors and their sex lives, public appearances, social and political views, and the award shows they attend. The 2015 Oscar Awards ceremony was watched by 36.6 million viewers, down from 2014’s 43.7 million viewers. That means that around 10% of the entire US population watched the Oscars; in an age of fractured media consumption and narrowcasting, very few events can claim that many eyes simultaneously. And that’s not even factoring in the international viewership.

And we argue about our favorite and most hated shows and films. We care when a movie we like does well, and many people will passionately defend shows and movies they like and passionately attack shows and movies they dislike. Sean Hannity tweeted his anger over American Sniper failing to win Best Picture, and many other conservatives agreed with him, taking it as a sign of the Academy’s liberalism and lack of patriotism, while many liberals were angry that Selma failed to earn even a nomination for its director Ava DuVernay, viewing it as a sign of racism and sexism in the Academy. And those are just two of the most recent film controversies; Twitter recently exploded with outrage and counter-outrage over a gay kiss on The Walking Dead.

IJAM is often raised by people who are clearly angry or upset about a critique they disagree with. But the fact that they are angry is itself proof that IJAM is false. If it’s just a movie, then why get upset when someone sees something to criticize in it? If 300 is just a movie, why does a discussion of its hostility toward physically deformed people matter?

If It’s Just a Movie, why do people care enough about these characters that they want to see more of their story? Why would a housewife somewhere want to see Buffy Summers in action one more time badly enough to sit down and write a new story about her? Why do comic book geeks argue about whether Batman could defeat Superman in a fight? Why is there talk about resurrecting Ripley for yet another unnecessary sequel? Why do so many people insist that Han shot first? Why did Star Trek Into Darkness irritate so many fans with its shitty re-imaging of the conflict between the Enterprise crew and Khan Noonien Singh? Why do we debate about which actress can be Wonder Woman the way she’s supposed to be? Because we care about these characters and what happens to them. They may not be real, but they still matter to us, and we want to see their stories told right.

All of this demonstrates that IJAM is simply untrue; people think that movies and tvs are about much more than simple entertainment. We perceive film and tv as moral statements that certain things are ok or not ok; when a film reflects our values we take it as confirmation and when they contradict our values we take it as evidence of moral decay or regressive values.

IJAM asserts, as I said, that if something has entertainment value, it does not have any other meaning. If it’s just a movie, it can’t be a statement about politics or race or women or whatever else it might be seen as. But that’s a rather shallow argument. Just because a film might be a political statement doesn’t mean it can’t also be a thriller or a comedy. One of the things that makes Captain America: the Winter Soldier a cut above many other action films is the way that it examines the political risks of data-mining. Joss Whedon’s films and shows often actively seek to deconstruct cinematic clichés; The Cabin in the Woods is a very smart critique of horror films (and horror film fans) and their interest in mindless violence. And films often unintentionally explore issues because they can be read as metaphors; the various Aliens movies all seem to explore the fear of reproduction in different ways, even though it’s unlikely that there was a conscious choice to make that a theme of the series.

IJAM is a way to reflexively deny the possibility of meaning. Years ago, when I was just starting out as a teacher, I wound up teaching a freshman writing course. One of the assignments was to analyze a film that said something about family or gender. To get the students ready for this, we spent a little time talking about soap operas and what they might say about the women who watch them. Partway through the discussion, one of my students, a typical freshman, suddenly put her hands over her ears and said loudly, “Stop! I don’t want my soap operas to mean anything!” Apparently, the idea that a simple soap opera might have deeper significance was disturbing to this student, perhaps because it implied that the world was a lot more complex than she had assumed; if her soap opera might have meaning, anything could have meaning, and therefore she didn’t understand the world as well as she thought she did. I often think of that moment when someone brings up IJAM. If 300 or Dracula Untold has meaning, maybe that lands the viewer in a far more complicated world than he lived in before.

To me, that world is exciting and fascinating, a playground of ideas that I can romp through. But to some people, that playground of ideas must look more like a dark and menacing circus where terrible things are lurking just around the corner. It’s easier for these people to cover their ears and shout “It’s just a movie! It can’t mean anything!” But to me, the idea that a movie doesn’t mean anything robs it of all interest. I’d rather spend my life watching films and shows that mean something, even if I don’t always like the meaning I find in them. Why would I spent $10 on a film and almost as much on the popcorn if for two hours my life won’t mean anything? When a film has meaning, I leave it chewing over all sorts of issues, fighting with it like a Rubik’s Cube, trying to make sense of what I’ve just seen and figure out the patterns in it. So one movie can give me hours of interest, like a dog gnawing on a bone. That’s a major reason I write this blog; it gives me a chance to watch movies and spend some time trying to understand what I think about what I just saw and then putting those thoughts into words to share and see what other people think. And I think most of my fellow academics are a lot like me. We love to play with ideas and see where they take us.

And perhaps that’s my real objection to IJAM. It’s not just false; it’s boring. I’d rather play in my playground of ideas, because I never run of things to play with. So come on, IJAMers; put down your IJAM and come play with me. I promise you things are way more interesting over here.

My Pick for Best Movie of 2014

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Gabriel Valdez of Basilmarinerchase.wordpress.com kindly asked me to contribute a short essay about what I thought the best movie of the year was. After some thought on the matter, I finally settled on what most of you will probably think is a rather odd choice. Jump over to “The Movies We Loved in 2014–By Friends of the Blog” to see how I and a number of other bloggers answered that question.

And if you don’t know Basilmarinerchase, by all means spend some time looking around. There are a lot of interesting posts about a range of intriguing topics, like the regular feature on Best Fight Scenes, and Best Movies Never Made (it seems the world suffered a loss when the Marx Brothers didn’t get to make Giraffes on Horseback Salads with Salvador Dali). If you’re a fan of film, I guarantee you’ll find something to like about this blog.