The void of moving, and a footnote on “Footnote” (2011)

Considering that moving house has demanded so much of my attention during the last 20 days, it really ought to be more interesting. It’s not. Nor has it left me any energy to watch and/or think about film, especially because the Olympics sucked up what tiny portions of my brain space were left over from those daily visits to hardware stores. (A former student of mine won two gold medals!)

In short: moving necessitates that you enter a mental void. And now writing the syllabus has likewise become engrossing yet utterly, impossibly, boring.

Worse, it’s hard to get back on the blogging horse. My RSS feed contains so many hundreds of unread posts such that I’m considering just marking them all as “read” and starting afresh. My thoughts on the wonderful Beasts of the Southern Wild haven’t cohered yet; and I’m so late to seeing Public Speaking, the terrific documentary about Fran Liebowitz (truly the modern-day Dorothy Parker; she makes me scream with delight at some of her statements) … do I really have anything to add?

Last night despite my exhaustion I actually made it through all 103 wonderful minutes of Footnote, the Israeli black comedy about a father and son, both Talmudic scholars in the same department at Hebrew University. The son’s success and popularity as an intellectual — and his father’s deep-seated competitiveness and rage at being overlooked for prizes and academic rewards — were perfectly captured and utterly cringe-making. Anyone who wants to enter a Ph.D. program should see this film and consider themselves warned.

The film shows not only the supposed philosophical debates that often undergird animosities between academics, but also the ways those debates lead scholars to exact revenge on one another in the meanest, most petty of ways. The film’s director, Joseph Cedar, captures that awfulness with such precision that I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out whether he’s an academic himself — only to learn that his father was a biochemist at Hebrew University.

Which makes me think: considering how many wonderful satirical academic novels there are (James Hynes’ Publish and Perish, Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution, David Lodge’s Small World, Richard Russo’s Straight Man, Jane Smiley’s Moo, Francine Prose’s Blue Angel: A Novel (P.S.), Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe, and so many others) — why aren’t there any satirically academic films about the horrors of professorial life? Footnote is the only one I can think of.

Okay, back to moving boxes. And taking some trips to the very cool LGBT thrift store to drop off boxes of stuff we shouldn’t have brought with us. And resisting the impulse to buy things at this very nicely stocked thrift store.