The second time that movies and television became a subject of interest in my highschool English classes was in AP English class my senior year. But first, some background. I was an obedient child; I had not yet learned that teachers could be wrong. Or, rather, I had learned it, but not completely. I still wanted to think that my good teachers were perfect in every possible way. And initially, my AP English teacher fit the bill for a shining, glorious, perfect teacher.
On the first day, Mrs. O handed out copies of a poem. I wish I could remember the poet, or the title! I have never had a poem blow me away like that one did. The gist of the poem was something like this:
First I read for pleasure. The novels carried me away to fluffy-bunny-type places. I was the shining white knight rescuing the princesses. But as I got older, my tastes got darker. I read to be the vampire, to have my way with the women. I read for escape. But now I understand that my reading kept me from living life, and I am now a pathetic adult who gets no women at all. Don’t bother reading: get drunk instead.
That one poem in that one reading stunned me. Despite reading it from the perspective of a woman, it meshed exactly with my growing relationship with books. In an instant it transformed my reading habits, making me forever aware of how I had been using books for escape. That poem was one of the most powerful things I had ever read. And because my teacher had given naive me that transformative experience, she cemented in my mind her awesome absolute authority as a teacher.
Mrs. O went on, in that same very first class, to hand us a list of naughty Shakespeare words that we were told to take home and burn. She couldn’t have been more awesome.
And yet. . . that AP class slid predictably into the numb, dull routine of my previous English classes. We continued to grind out soulless essays in the creativity-crushing pyramid scheme. We continued to read books and poems that I could not connect with. Only worse: she presented us with the most difficult reading material she could find. Difficult and dull. I distinctly recall her presenting us with Faulkner’s the Sound and the Fury saying “if you can read this, you can read anything.” Trusting her, I rolled up my sleeves and read it. . . And felt betrayed. It was grueling. I was able to parrot back all of the expected details afterward. But I found nothing to love in the experience. To this day I would joyfully wade through the arcane writings of a lawyer before voluntarily opening another work by Faulkner.
My take-away from the experience was that I shouldn’t trust even an awesome teacher - even one who can hand me a poem that smashes my universe and rebuilds it. And I was highly overdue to learn that particular lesson of independent thinking. But it wasn’t the lesson she had been intending to teach, and it undermined everything else of value that she had for us.
Somewhere in all of this is a link to television and movies. And here it is: before that fateful reading of the Sound and the Fury, Mrs. O revealed to us her utter and complete disdain for the screen, She didn’t own a television. She hadn’t seen a movie in years. She found our screen habits to be contemptible. And I was in awe of this. It fueled my own mounting disdain for the screen. It turned me into a snob.
Thankfully, my respect for her unraveled over the course of the year. I continued to write those wooden essays, but my reasons for sticking to the format - maintaining good grades being at the top of the list - began to fall away. My habits clung until the day of that final AP test, when I had my pencil hovering over the page, and I decided to throw out the pyramid formula and write the words that I wanted to say. I had metaphors in me that I had been too afraid to use, and meandering prose that didn’t stick to an approved structure. I let this stuff out for the first time on that test. And I got a very high score. No thanks to Mrs. O.
I had one other act of rebellion in me that year. On my own, I read A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I hated it, but I did it anyway. Why? Because Mrs. O had mentioned that in previous years she had allowed her students to do an art project based on a classic book in place of the final exam. By this point I was accepted into an art school and aimed at a career in illustration. I turned up my nose at the final epic poem the class studied - which was a lousy translation of something French, and sounded, to me, like Doctor Seuss. Which, at the time, I was disdainful of. So, I painted an illustration of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and brought it with me to that final test. This was in spite of the fact that Mrs. O offered no art opt-out for the test to our class. I handed her the painting, sat at my desk, and wrote on my exam paper, “One fish two fish, red fish blue fish. Have a nice summer!” And, wouldn’t you know it: Dr. Seuss has since then been a more powerful influence on me than any of the adult classics that snobs are supposed to like.
My snobbishness about movies and television was longer-lived than it should have been, given the lesson Mrs. O taught me. It took into deep into art school to recognize the power that stories have when told through the medium of still or moving pictures. Ultimately, given my education in illustration, I came to see books and pictures and movies as being one continuum of story-telling. But this post has gone on long enough - I will leave that topic for later.
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