Every now and then a movie comes along that irritates the crap out of me before I’ve actually seen it. This week it’s Smart People.
Why is it interesting or useful to imagine that all English professors are narcissists? Does the trend to do so somehow connect to William Deresiewicz’s recent chicken-little act about the decline of the profession?
How is Sarah Jessica Parker, playing her standard self-absorbed navel-gazer, less a narcissist than someone who at least reads? The clip from the movie played on NPR during an interview/feature has her character indignantly remarking (something like) “I’ve been in this room for 45 minutes. When are you going to ask about me, my family, how I’m feeling.”
Reading is not a form of narcissism. Understanding reading as narcissism, however, is a (currently wide-spread) form of idiocy. I think it comes from the old American anti-intellectual prejudice against English professors (etc) as mere readers and not “doers.” And maybe it’s also some kind of defensive Hollywood self-image of the movies and TV as more public and more democratic than books. Being “smart” is snobby, reading is snobby, etc.
I base this more on the NPR interview with SJP than on the (celebratory) NYT review.…
Well, also, I’m not sure exactly how this would be put in psychological terms, but narcissistic students will have a strong transference with their profs and will project their own narcissism onto them. That’s a real course-wrecker: the self-important student who w0n’t listen to her classmates, instead trying to engage the prof directly, and then takes the prof’s disinterest in turning the course into a tutorial (with a lame tutee to boot) as proof of his (the prof’s) narcissism, about which she will continue complaining ad nauseam until she gets her revenge by writing a screenplay.
Sorry for the gendering, that’s just how it happened to me most recently.
I know what you mean, but I also think that professors CAN have a special kind of toxic narcissism, sometimes I think of it as ‘professoritis,’ that comes from a job where you routinely blather on to a captive, disempowered audience for hours at a time. It also, though, probably has something to do with the contempt with which many view the profession; so maybe it’s all kind of circular and bound up with these pop-culture representations.
Don’t give in to the self hatred, guys! Thanks for the comments, though. I guess I should have gone farther in my rant. It’s not just reading that’s often marked as shamefully narcissistic, but maybe just thinking. IE, “Smart People” strikes me as intended to be wonderfully ironic…