The Hollywood Curriculum: Teachers and Teaching in the Movies
Greetings,
Today for class we read a selection from Dalton’s The Hollywood Curriculum: Teachers and Teaching in the movies. In this, I thought it was most telling when Dalton was discussing the teacher as an outsider. This idea that a lone teacher, rebelling against the system and refusing to adhere to the status quo. From the author’s analysis, she claims that this trend in the movies is a direct result from the history and the millions that Hollywood has made from the “Rugged Individual,” for example the lone cowboy who rides into a town and single-handedly defeats the marauding outlaws, or the army sergeant who prepares and then leads his men in combat, achieving some great task. Dalton comments, in no positive terms, that this may be (more or less) accurate with the cowboys, but less so with the army sergeant, and even less so with the teachers.
To me, however, this is not some flaw or fault of the Hollywood elite, but rather with film making in general. The movies are 60 to 90 minutes long and there isn’t enough time to establish a relationship between the audience and the actors on the screen. If there is no connection between the audience and the actors, then the movie will flop and be useless. Therefore the lone, rugged individual becomes a viable, and necessary, tool in the film making industry.
Work Cited:
Dalton, Mary. The Hollywood Curriculum: Teachers and Teaching in the Movies. Peter Lang Publishing. New York. 1999.
