Today's been a very busy day. In fact, the whole weekend has been. When I got home this afternoon, along with starting to make dinner, I turned on the tv to find "Mona Lisa Smile." Seen it already. I have no problems admitting I adore Julia Roberts. Julia's up there with tennis and Alice Munro. So obviously I had to watch it.
When it was first released, it was sold as a couple of things. Set in Wellesley in the 1950s, the movies's about young women learning to make their own choices in a sexist world. But the context of the movie is always more interesting than the subject. Julia Roberts, the most bankable actress in movie history and America's unofficial sweetheart, was finally rewarded with an Oscar for Best Actress two years prior for playing Erin Brockovich. With Hollywood's biggest prize competing for space in her pocket with the $25 million she gets for movies, and recently married, there were lots of talk about her taking a break. The movie was also sold as her passing the torch to a new generation of actresses (Kirsten Dunst, Maggie Gyllenhall and Julia Stiles who play her students) who could assume, though never completely replicate, her role as Hollywood's biggest female star, the prettiest woman with the million dollar smile.
This is all good and fine but watching the movie again and of course, probably influenced, definitely influenced by where Im at in my professional life, I think this movie is about the dangers of sessional instructors. Katherine Watson, the art historian Julia Roberts plays, is hired for one academic year. She's a sessional, a hired gun with a salary but no perks like a research budget or course release to write a book. Along with taking the girls to some Greenwich Village warehouse to look at a Jackson Pollock and getting all Walter Benjamin on her students by talking about "Van-Gogh-In-A-Box" as an example of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, she tells her students they can *both* get married *and* have a career.
Big mistake. There's a big uproar on campus. Parental and administrative feathers are ruffled. Wellesley coulda saved all that trouble (though it would have deprived us of seeing the great Marian Seldes) if they just hired Katherine in a tenure track position. After all the uproar, she's offered another year-long contract provided she teach from an approved syllabus and only advise her students on academic matters (rather than taking them to New York City or telling them that a husband and a washer and dryer are *not* the equivalent of a Yale law degree. Real points of contention in the movie.) They coulda gotten those conditions from the get-go if if they hired her as an Assistant Professor and dangled the golden carrot of tenure and lifetime employment in front of her face in exchange for towing the line. It wouldve ensured her class was more like Art Appreciation 101 rather than some information session for the National Organization of Women.
And, when they squeezed their 5 or 6 years from Katherine, when Katherine had published refereed journal articles and a book that was an original contribution to the discipline and given glory to Yale, er, I mean, Wellesley's name, when she had given a top notch liberal arts education to America's future leaders, they could just deny her tenure and sent her off to try her luck at another (most likely less prestigious) college.
Now, I got a whole lot more to say about this but my husband's coming home in about a hour and this place is a mess. A mess! And dinner's not even done yet. I gotta get on it. I guess my dissertation can wait. I wish I had a Katherine Watson in my life who would tell me I had more choices. (Sigh.)
No comments:
Post a Comment