College movies are weird. Well, they’re weird in the sense that, after coming to college, I’m not sure if I feel like I missed something or if I dodged a huge bullet.
College in the movies is either the wackiest, raunchiest, drug-fueled-est, Harold and Kumar-est orgy that would put Caligula to shame, or a bunch of nerdy dorks going on long, mildly homoerotic walks and solving unsolvable math problems.
Basically, college movies are either “Animal House” or “Dead Poets Society,” and I cannot for the life of me understand why we just get those two options. Yes, I know “Dead Poets Society” is a college prep school, shut up. It’s basically the same thing and I’m not referencing “Good Will Hunting” today.
They’re so disparate and yet they somehow occur at the same place. College is considered a place of learning and also the place where America lets loose.
Interestingly enough, that’s not a perspective many other places take. While there is a fair amount of that good ol’ collegiate spirit across the world, many places also treat college as, well, a part of your career. For every LSU adding a lazy river to their campus, there’s also some place that’s basically just there to get you the degree required to get promoted from some long-winded managerial position to some other long-winded managerial position. Regardless, it’s, well, complicated. College is fun for staying up late nights talking about nothing and everything, for dumb romps and stupid memories and the sort of stories you try to avoid telling people when you grow up. But college is also the place you’re going to become a young, consummate professional. You won’t end college the way you started it — last night might’ve “been a movie, bro,” but you have a report due by Monday and you better at least start on it.
What’s interesting, in that case, is the reverence for college amongst many films. “Good Will Hunting,” “The Man Who Knew Infinity,” and “A Beautiful Mind” extoll college and the environment as the place you are going to do something brilliant — at Carnegie Mellon, with so many students pursuing research, that becomes a lot more believable, and it sells college in the purest form. Education for education’s sake. Learning for the sake of nothing more than an intrinsic joy in your field.
Anyone who’s taken a gen ed course will know how much of a lie that is. At the same time, it’s also something that will happen somewhere down the line. You’ll find a class you enjoy, a set of courses you find interesting, something that brings you joy and entertainment in a way most things don’t. You’ll find your little educational niche, and you’ll find that niche in the most un-educational way possible — just ideally not on the trip to Guantanamo Bay.
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