A few months back I reviewed a British college comedy called Starter For Ten. It's the kind of plucky, lovable sleeper you can't help but root for. I very much wanted it to do well but its box-office tally suggests that no one outside the Chicago screening room bothered to see it.
Around the same time I finally caught up with The Paper Chase, James Bridges' hit adaptation of John Jay Osborn Jr's semi-autobiographical novel about life as a first-year grad student at Harvard law school. The two projects are wildly dissimilar in tone and content. Starter For 10 is a bittersweet romantic comedy that favorably recalls Say Anything while The Paper Chase is the kind of earnest, well-crafted, sociologically astute drama that flourished in the seventies but is exceedingly rare today.
But the two films share an unabashed reverence for the noble pursuit of knowledge or at least knowledge's downscale cousin, the wholesale accumulation of random facts. I know that one of the things I found most exciting about going away to college was having ideas and philosophies and dogmas thrown at me in every direction. These films capture the giddy infatuation of stumbling across books and scholars and philosophies and professors who help make a complex, unknowable world seem comprehensible and sane.
The Paper Chase opens with a hushed, reverent static shot that elevates the lecture hall of prickly, towering professor John Houseman to a holy cathedral of learning. The film's answer to a typical college film's panty-raid is a sequence where hungry, ambitious law student Timothy Bottom breaks into the school library so he can steal a verboten glimpse of the notes Houseman took as a student.
After emerging as a movie star in the early seventies Bottoms found a curious second career as a George W. Bush surrogate in That's My Bush and that dreadful-sounding TV movie about 9/11. The Paper Chase consequently suggests an alternate universe where Bush, or at least one of his most famous doppelgangers, spent his time diligently studying and soaking in knowledge rather than cheerleading and doing jello shots at Senor Frog's.
Here's my question for you, dear reader: why do so few college comedies (or dramas for that matter) acknowledge the riveting swirl of ideas and conflicting philosophies that make the college experience so intoxicating? Are we as a culture so infatuated with the slobs vs. snobs dichotomy that the only role for a homegrown intellectual-in-training is to get thrown into the pool during party sequences? Didn't Real Genius teach us that brainiacs could be slobs too?