Professor Bruce Michelson: A Short Rant

Maybe what we’re doing in the sadism of the spring semester on an American university campus is forcing you to develop a biological resistance to the existential crisis. We dish out Eliot, Sartre, Beckett, Camus. We seem to have a whole series of courses that we require you to take before we give you your baccalaureate degree and all of them are designed to bum you out. In this one small liberal arts college, they had a course on the films of Ingmar Bergman. In January. In Vermont. Naturally, all the students thought, “hey, a movie course,” and everybody tried to sign up for it. They watched 20 Bergman films in 25 days and, 5 days into it, 700 students at a school of 2000 were depressed as hell. The face of God as a spider, there are Swedes screaming at each other, and a guy is playing chess with Death. The school should have aerosoled the prozac and gassed the students like they did in at Berkeley in the sixties.