The New Yorker:

The life of an academic lacks natural narrative momentum. Cue cancel culture.

By Lauren Michele Jackson

An academic’s life is none too cinematic. Those employed in the fields of law, medicine, or finance may grumble at onscreen depictions of their trades—while, I imagine, privately preening at the attention—but their jobs are at least worth dramatizing. Who can find narrative momentum in the minutiae of peer review?

One way to make academics seem interesting is to thrust them from the ivory tower and into the world, as seen in films from the European art house to Hollywood. In Ingmar Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries,” a professor of medicine (Victor Sjöström) steps out of his office and into a series of surreal encounters with memory and death. In “Arrival,” the linguist Louise Banks (Amy Adams) has only begun her lecture before class is dismissed on account of extraterrestrial activity. Various onscreen “ologists” have their fun out there in the field: the paleontologist couple from “Jurassic Park”; the Harvard professor of religious symbology from “The Da Vinci Code”; and the blockbuster archeologist Indiana Jones, who began his movie run as a drool-worthy vision in tweed. The latest film in the franchise, released earlier this year, finds the old prof heading into retirement, his most unorthodox maneuver yet.

Go to link