I teach a course that I think has an extremely interesting premise, and I always run into the same problem. The section I’ve designed of the course (the final requirement in composition in my university) is about a series of films based on 20th century historically based films (JFK, The Hurricane, etc.). After each film I assign readings based on the facts (newspaper accounts, biography selections, sometimes critiques of the films that expose distortions), and that’s basically what the students write about, the differences between the filmmaker’s agenda and the historical data he uses (or omits, or changes) to support that agenda.
With most students, this goes fine, and mostly I get a lot of raves: interesting material, good readings, “I always wanted to study the facts behind that film,” and so on. But every term, I get a few students who refuse to do any in-depth examination. Basically what they write is “So what? Movies are supposed to entertain, not to be some tight-assed professor’s idea of what really happened. Who cares? Not me. I plunk down my ten bucks to laugh, to be scared, and couldn’t care less what kind of car the real Ruben Carter was arrested in.”
Sometimes I get a variant on the above: “Movies are a business. The choices the director and the screenwriter made were made strictly for the bottom line. This film made millions and that’s what the director set out to do. If he had been more accurate, the film probably wouldn’t have made a profit Q.E.D., he was correct in doing what he did.”
The part that troubles me about both approaches is I think they’re both lazy. I take for granted that filmmakers don’t set out to lose money, and that they prefer being interesting to being boring, but that there is some artistry in film-making, and that most artistic choices are made to streamline the narrative. Real-life events are messy and complicated, and need to be distorted somewhat so that they can be synopsized in movie form—storylines need to be simplified, sometimes characters need to be eliminated from a narrative, sometimes the narrative has a backstory that isn’t essential to present on-screen, etc. What I ask for is an analysis of these elements, and a discussion of which ones actually distort history, and which ones present the events close to the way they happened, or equivalent to the way they happened, with minimal distortion.
But I’m finding it hard to convey what I DON’T want my students to do—no matter how carefully I explain this, a few students every term give me “It’s money” or “It’s just entertainment” instead of the nuanced discussion I want (and naturally complain that this is the stupidest course evah, and that I’m punishing them for speaking their minds.) Usually, I’ll actually grade such students on the same scale that I grade everyone else—this is, after all, a writing course, and I grade primarily on the quality of the writing, not whether I agree with each student’s opinions—but these two approaches to the subject tend to be very short, very repetitive, and pretty much content-free.
What might I do in future versions of this course to keep them on track? I’ve tried minimum word-counts, I’ve tried arguing in advance that each of these reductive arguments is flawed, but whatever I’ve tried I still get “I think movies are just for fun/commercial reasons” responses. Is this just human nature I’m struggling with? I think some students (who probably shouldn’t be studying liberal arts) simply resist thinking, and have found that this sort of approach has allowed them to pass their previous courses where they’re asked to think. Look at the nuanced discussion of history here and the objections Dopers find in filmed versions of that history—what can I do to encourage all my students to approach their writing with the same sort of rigor?
