As was mentioned in this thread, My Cousin Vinny is sometimes used in law school classrooms due to its accuracy about courtroom procedure.
A few years back I told a psychology professor friend about how Fight Club so accurately portrayed dissociation. She watched it, and has since made it required viewing in one of her classes.
Any other examples?
Twelve O’Clock High has been used in ROTC leadership classes.
We watched a clip of Burn After Reading in my public management class last year, and we had a movie night to watch Charlie Wilson’s War.
Not fictional, but to my class’ amusement, my foreign policy professor led off a discussion on NGOs by showing us a youtube video of the Play. Apparently, NGOs = the Stanford marching band.
I was so sure this was going to be a anti-drug PSA a la Reefer Madness… Imagine my disappointment.
My sister, when teaching freshman English, used to show Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Specifically, the trial of the witch. She used it as a launching point for talking about logic and argument for one of their papers.
In my first-year Property Law class, we saw The Castle.
And in my Professional Responsibility class at law school, we saw To Kill a Mockingbird and The Verdict.
Perhaps oddly, we never saw My Cousin Vinny, although both my Criminal Procedure professor and my Evidence professor mentioned it often.
You’re dreamin’.
But … it’s the vibe!
I show the movie Tucker to the Operations Management class I teach to give them an idea of the dangers of ignoring the competitive environment.
My wife shows the “Do-Re-Me” song from The Sound of Music in her medieval music history course because it’s a really excellent illustration of how solfegeworks.
High School health class had us watch The Blue Lagoon and The Breakfast Club.
College moral reasoning class had us watch Sophie’s Choice and Crimes and Misdemeanors.
I have a hard time seeing Fight Club as all that realistic. Isn’t real life dissociation pretty different than the film?
I would have thought this one to be nearly as applicable for property law. (And you can watch The Trial for the other law classes).
I just remembered: we didn’t see the whole film, but (again, in Property Law), we got an interesting take on the Rule Against Perpetuities from watching an excerpt from Body Heat.
Not in college, but at work, I attended a safety class that used an excerpt from Alien to demonstrate the importance of following procedures.
I had a class called history at the movies as an undergraduate and we watched documentaries as well as dramas.
We played The Harder They Come for a class I TA’d on language in the West Indies.
We never watched it but we did discuss the errors in Armageddon during my Drilling Engineering course.
We watched Little Miss Sunshine in Small Group Communication.
We watched Contact in my low-level uhm…shit, what class do you learn about the different types of arguments and falsehoods and stuff? I am having a brain fart.
I think the thing we were to be learning was Occam’s Razor.
We also read The Name Of The Rose, which is also a movie, but we didn’t watch the movie because the book was so incredibly long that the movie obviously left out some of the finer points.