Dr. John's Journal

If you read my little profile, you know that I am interested in the relationship between popular culture and politics. I often use popular films in my classes as representations of certain social-political attitudes of a particular time period (for example, the way screwball comedies of the 1930s served to minimize class divisions during the Great Depression). The trickiest part of this is often getting the students to engage in even a mild degree of visual interpretation-- that is, looking for messages that are embedded in set design, costume, camera placement and movement, etc., in addition to the more explicit ideas expressed through dialog. They really struggle with that. But here's what I find interesting-- the day after the presidential debates, they are all talking about things like the candidates facial expressions, eye contact, and other elements of body language like old pros. No doubt some of this is just parroting what they heard the pundits commenting on post-debate, but some of it seems to be at least somewhat original. I remember years ago a student telling me that he noticed every time Tom Brokaw said George W. Bush's name, his eyebrow went up. The student took this as a clear signal of Brokaw's disdain for Bush. Maybe this too was something he read or heard about somewhere else, but it was certainly news to me. I guess what I'm getting at is this: we often think that young people are keenly attuned to the visual world that dominates so much of our public discourse, and are receptive to the non-verbal signals that comprise much of our public communications. But for some reason, they don't adapt that skill effectively to academic topics. I wish I knew why that was.