Comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.

kirkcaldy:

Dear everyone who has ever called film studies, media studies or anything of the like a “doss degree”, something that you might as well not do, something that is a waste of money and a waste of time. I want to call you out.

Literary and film studies (as well as other degree schemes) review what I will call for the sake of this ‘primary sources’. Not primary in the way that would be meant by an academic historian, but in the way that they were created/written by an artist living in their present. Their work will always reflect their current situation, for example, the way that a film about Thatcher presented now could offer reflections on the government of today. As John Green has often said, whether or not these reflections are the intent of the creator/artist is besides the point. It is our job as readers/audiences to analyse this content, to take it apart, salvage what we want for ourselves or what is useful, what will help us when living our own lives, and then put it back together again as a piece of art for others to do the same, for us to offer critique on it, to talk about it with others and compare our contexts to theirs. We can see something about ourselves through the art of someone else.

When you say that ‘film studies’ for example is a useless degree, you are nullifying everything that filmmakers have had to say for decades. There is a lot of trash in cinemas nowadays, but that isn’t what film studies is about. Film studies is about race and gender and history and politics just as much as a history or  politics degree is. They might not be as socially accepted, and as highly valued by the “job market” but you cannot say that film, or literature or any type of media is unimportant.

My boyfriend is quite a university snob and he has often inadvertently put me down for my own choice of degree and university. This is partly due to the way he was brought up, his class, his education, lots of factors, in the same way that my own opinions on these sorts of things have been shaped by my own experiences. And I kind of… I kind of feel sad for him that he can’t see this, that he doesn’t see how useful these things are to academics as well as the general public. That he can’t see the inherent value in studying these things deeply and engaging with them on a higher level. We cannot just write off art because it isn’t empirical fact written down in heavily bound volumes covered in dust, left in old old institutions, wrapped up in sexism and class division. We have to expand the boundaries of our knowledge if we truly want to engage as deeply as possible with the “miracle of human consciousness” to quote John Green again, and that really is, in the end, the point of life.