I had seen clips from it over the years, and it reminded me a lot of a made-for-TV movie that came out the year before, The Undergrads, with Art Carney, who goes to college with his grandson.
Both films feature a conflict with one professor, a romance with another professor, and initial difficulty where many people help the mature student with cramming. It works out, though a little more dramatically in the cinema version.
The thing that really made me want to compare had to do with the professorial conflict. For Art Carney it was with the history professor who saw the New Deal as positive and helpful. Art Carney was the contrarian who argued about the harm of FDR's policies (though not the ways in which that harm was calculatedly racist to try and appease the South, even though this was not ultimately enough to keep the Dixiecrats from breaking off, a topic for another day). The evil professor gave Art Carney his only C, threatening the B average he needed to maintain his academic standing. Fortunately, the English professor whose advances he had rejected gave him an A, and got her rejection rescinded.
For Rodney Dangerfield (who also got an A from his English professor/love interest), the conflict was with a business professor. It started with an interruption in class about how you wouldn't build a factory, you would be better off renting one, and how you will need to grease union palms and things like that. While a successful businessman (Dangerfield's entry into academia is facilitated by him donating a new school of business) would know a lot about business, and the example makes sense, there are things to know about building a factory that it would be reasonable to go over in a business class. A student can disagree and still learn.
Mainly, watching the broader comedy that was made for the big screen, I remember wondering if anyone involved with the film had actually gone to college. Also, I saw that mindset of academia being impractical and elitist and liberal. So Hollywood making fun of it isn't that liberal, really.
I would have had these thoughts on the movies anyway, but they would normally come up on the weekday blog. I am blogging about this on Sunday because of a couple of articles from the October 2007 Liahona (I first read the items in my Italian study) about the fourth World Congress of Families, and an address given there by Bruce C. Hafen.
In their defense of the family, there were a lot of assumptions made about what would help families and what would hurt them. Some of them were questionable, if not obviously wrong. A lot of the conference seemed to focus on how wicked Hollywood was, and what a bad influence it was on soceity, with notable exceptions.
It has been popular for a long time to view Hollywood as both liberal and wicked. I remember Michael Medved writing think pieces about it from maybe a few years after those movies were made. His book Hollywood vs America: Popular Culture and the War on Traditional Values is from 1992.
I want to re-examine that perception.
First of all - with notable exceptions - we know Hollywood has made it very hard for women and people of color to get ahead. That is certainly not as liberal as it should be, but is less surprising as we have learned recently how many powerful people in the film industry have been serial sexual abusers. Hollywood has been very good at shoring up power.
In that way it reflects society at large, and reinforces the existing power structure. You could find evil in that, but that doesn't seem to be what is happening.
I think what we are generally seeing with movies is that they reflect society. If people use profanity regularly, it will appear in movies. Some movies will try and use it in unusually clever ways, which could spawn some imitation. I am not saying that the movies have no influence, but I don't see any signs that Hollywood is in general trying to change the course of society.
(When there is one white guy who is able to be accepted by another culture and quickly learns all their ways - maybe a chosen one kind of thing - or the rank beginner is wiser than the experienced person, there is ego there, but it is an ego that reflects society.)
It felt like the biggest corruptions feared from Hollywood were liberal values that included sex outside of marriage (which conservatives do a lot of) and granting humanity to gay people. Certainly, Hollywood could be better about that, but that felt like the main concern. Conspiracy theories about the gay agenda aside, I think that is more of people in movies accepting what society in general accepts.
If entertainment is reflecting society, and there are things that are bad about that, it seems reasonable to look at improving society. That might be a better use of time.
Beyond that, we need to be better at looking beyond the assumption.
Assuming Hollywood is evil in a liberal way gives conservatives a great target, and that's convenient for their fundraising. It does not...
- cause Hollywood to lose money
- result in better entertainment (yes, you have pro-religious films - Fireproof came out in 2008 - but I stand by that not resulting in better entertainment)
- does not improve society
- cannot improve society because the assumption stops further consideration of what problems really exist and how they work.
I feel like I should give some practical suggestions for improving entertainment options, but if I go down that rabbit hole it will probably be on the main blog.
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