There Are No Futures, or My Complicated Relationship with Film Studies

Every two weeks, I participate in a writing group with some colleagues in the Media School. We are all doing humanistic, cultural studies inflected approaches to media studies, and we share our work to get feedback and support to become better scholars. On Saturday, I had shared a draft of a dissertation chapter, and during the feedback I found myself more flustered than usual. This should have been expected: I was trying to display the new platform in addition to the written elements, but the features were messy and filled with bugs. But there was a second problem, too.

I was flustered because of the sloppy work, but also because at one point my colleagues called me out for a problem that has pervaded my research: that I nonchalantly will trash film studies when I give feedback and I will vehemently diss the field in my own scholarship.

They are right, especially because when I belittle the field I am belittling their work. My colleagues are all excellent scholars and brilliant people, and my gripes with the field are implicit attacks on a discipline that they value. When I do this, I am not respecting their work, nor the excellent scholarship that I routinely draw upon in my research.

The issue, apart from me being a contrarian blowhard, is that so much of my scholarly position comes from a desire to not do film studies, to not do media studies. This desire is at odds because I am in a media studies PhD program. I am a media scholar, trained originally as a film scholar. As I reflected on this comment, I found something that permeates my very relationship to academic learning: I found myself reacting to a set of open wounds, wounds that I have unable to speak about or directly address.

What I want to write about is not about the problems of film studies, but so much as my own personal relationship to the field: it is something that I had once loved, but which now I view with disdain. And while I should get over this problem, while I should grow and change and let my anger subside, I find this knot in my chest useful as a scholar and educator.

The problem isn’t film studies. It never was.

…

I finished my undergrad in May 2013. I did not walk at my graduation, nor did I have too much interest in following the direct path that my degree afforded. I was an English major, who had learned about my love of film early on in my studies. I pursued extra curriculars—-making films, running the school’s film club, and leading the school’s student film festival. I loved film, and film studies in particular, because it afforded a relationship to art: to make, to critique, to expand my (at the time) overly pretentious engagement with what it meant to be a creative. I was happily moving on to a graduate degree, which offered a gleaming promise: the ability to become a professional filmmaker.

It is no surprise to anyone in any creative industry what happened next: I went to school, accrued debt, started having panic attacks, did an internship, made a few films, and finished my degree. Two years into this program, I had a breakdown, where I just could not imagine myself as a filmmaker: I did not want to create films, I could not wrap my head around the heavily logistic requirements for making narrative film, I could not get anyone in the program to take seriously any of my experimental work, I could not stand being on film set, and I welled up an increasing disdain for myself, my colleagues, and the school. By the end of this three year MFA I had no interest in continuing in the film industry. I left the program wounded, filled with resentment, without any wish to work on any creative project again. I went back home, having developed a plethora of skills that seemed useless.

I’m now pursuing another pipe-dream degree. I am working on a PhD in media arts and sciences at Indiana University’s Media School. I had come to this degree with an interest in film studies; although, in retrospect it might be that it was the only kind of degree which I would be qualified to get without completing another masters. In the six years since I started, I found myself (consciously or unconsciously) stepping away from film, and the way I framed my own history (in my plan of study, in my bios, in how I introduce myself as a former filmmaker) it was always in relation to this film studies/film production past. One of my committee mentioned that I shouldn’t be framing it as something I’m moving away from and that I should instead be positing my narrative by declaring to where I am headed.

I tell this story to try to articulate a cycle in which I was caught: in lieu of professional success, I kept returning to school. The university system could promise me so many things–to be a filmmaker, to be an academic, to be an artist–it could shelter me, it could help me grow, and then once the program completed, it would leave me unprepared once again for a life beyond that environment.

I think there is something pernicious about this. Schools like Indiana University bring on too many PhDs and other graduate students, partly because of the requirements to be an R1 institution. They also bring us on to fill their graduate classes.¹ Acceptance to a program has nothing to do with the utter lack of tenure track positions in America’s colleges and universities, and the universities themselves are, at best, ambivalent toward the surplus created by lax graduate enrollment.

There is a similar problem at every degree level: we are promised a kind of career path, but one that is increasingly difficult to attain, and one which our studies seem ambivalent toward. If we fail, then that failure is marked as a personal failure.

At Loyola Marymount I was told at my first orientation session that I would only succeed in the film industry if I really wanted it: if I worked on sets, and gave it my all. In retrospect this comment was also a means to deflect the school’s haphazard approach to teaching film production: any failures weren’t the school’s fault; it was the student’s themselves who did not work hard enough to succeed.

I am critiquing humanistic and arts degrees, because they are the ones that I have attained, but my target is not these softer fields. They are as to blame as film studies is. The problem is a structural one: the university system cannot sell itself as a means to a career. Any successes the university system has had in bouying the livelihoods of its graduates has more to do with its modes of exclusion than its ability to onboard students to particular career paths. In the twentieth century, it was a gateway to a middle class life because it excluded anyone else from being qualified to be a nurse, teacher, journalist, accountant, lawyer, or other professional position. This exclusion is why the price of degrees can continue to inflate: because the benefit of pursuing this degree (“as long as it’s useful”) outweighs the cost. (So long as we ignore the crushing debt which will sink my generation and the next.)

Film studies is the path I followed. I swallowed the same promises, and what I have to show for it is a bezoar of all of my resentment, my failures, my hopes, and my desires. When I read my colleagues work, I am overwhelmed by a feeling of pessimism. It does not matter how good, or thoughtful, or productive their work is, all I can think of is that the field in which we work has been steadily salted for decades. All I can think is that there is no future here. That is baggage I’m bringing to my reading, which I am unfairly projecting onto their work. I do the same when reading published scholarship in my field: there is no future here. It is the implicit reason why I keep moving away from my home discipline, because I cannot see a future there. But even as I shift fields, I know there are no greener pastures, and that no matter where I go, there will be no future there either.

…

Returning to my gripes with my home field, I am beginning to realize that my critiques–dismissals of object (what good is studying Hitchcock when algorithms are entrenching a new generation of gilded barons), my displeasure in close reading (which is useful, but so dull to me), my handwringing about our goals (are we supposed to think that film analysis or history will better an understanding of the stratification of race and class? Can film studies help anyone outside the field?)–all stack onto a curricular crisis: what good does this do our students? What futures can our scholarship bring them?

All of this is bubbling to the surface now because I am teaching first year, exploratory students the ins and outs of college learning. I have seen many of them who are interested in arts-based careers, and my go-to guidance has been to encourage them to explore. Any time I say this, I feel like I am misleading them: I could tell them, as I was told, that these fields are difficult to break into. I could tell them, as I wished I had been told, that they should be prepared not for the best, but for the worst.

I always hold my tongue. I cannot break their hearts.

Some of the readings I assigned were about the value of college, and what an education means.² I used one of our sessions to try to express some of the implicit contradictions of the two authors’ arguments: we’re here to learn, to grow, to find ourselves, and even if it cost $100,000 it would be worth it. I was told that too, and now I avoid looking at my student loan balance. I was told that too, and now all I have from my past degrees is a pit of resentment in my stomach.

The problem is that this thinking, even if it is career oriented, is blind to the structural issues which weigh down my generation and the next: wages have been stagnat for a decade, creative fields are needlessly exploitative (that is not to mention how deeply racist and sexist some of them are as well), the fact that more college degrees universities print the less value they represent, and that following your dreams is all right and great until the student loans are due.

Working in the university system seems complicit in a series of mistruths–told because we don’t know any better, told because we want to believe this is true, told because our very jobs rely on maintaining and reifying these falsehoods. To be honest, I sometimes will try to justify to myself, that everywhere else is already horrible, why not make the university at least a bit brighter? But even that thought is just building a more convincing rug to hide the trap door that will open at the end of their studies.

…

I don’t have any good conclusions. In previous drafts, I found myself taking a polemical turn. While energizing, that genre feels equally dishonest, as any claims made tend to crack under any pressure.

Instead, more honesty may be warranted: I distrust film studies because I am still trying to mend the wounds from my dalliance as a filmmaker. I unfairly blame the field for this, and it manifests in the knee jerk reaction I have to the work of my colleagues, fellow scholars, and my view of the field. I need to continue to address this resentment, but I am still processing, reflecting, and trying to gauge the size of my cuts.

I am racked with guilt about my position in the university: it is my job to teach these students, and thus I am at least partially culpable with extending the mistruths of the university education. Of course, because of my training, I am suited to teaching certain classes, guiding students interested in film, and while I try to be honest with them I do not have the heart to be as brutally honest as I think I should be.

One of the reasons I have been drawn to the digital humanities (whose big tent enables filmic studies too) is that I find the tools that I am teaching to be more broadly applicable to a range of professions. I like the digital humanities, because at Indiana University, there is no department or central curriculum: it is scattered, adopted by a hodgepodge of interested faculty and students. I can seed these skills and technologies in a range of classes, which avoids the heavy time investment of film production degrees in teaching so many different skills, platforms, and cinematic techniques. During my undergrad and MFA, film studies and film production were always at odds (not to mention also the additional competition by communication science as well). I suspect specialists (especially undergraduate specialists) will do worse in America’s abominable labor market. I think too this specialization is one of the reasons I followed the trajectory I did: I know film, thus, I should follow film.

I think also, more importantly, I fit better in the digital humanities. I have found my people, and I feel like I can leave a good amount of my baggage behind. Of course, the spectre that hangs over my head is that my degree is in media arts and sciences, and that I cannot and should not abandon that field. There is a lot of really excellent scholarship, even if my biases tinge me against it.

…

The last note I want to end on is that much of these concerns are structural ones, which have been ingrained in me as epistemic ones. Capitalism devours everyone within it: it commodifies our dreams, our knowledge systems, and our professions, and the collegiate system is happy to turn those around to further entrench its own social, political, and ideological desires. My hope is that by voicing my own trauma, trying as best as I can to link it to my own views, comments, and scholarship, I can better articulate why our education system seems so ugly in the first place, and why some of us feel so dirty participating in it.