Always struck by how now film I have seen feels like it gets being a historian or even really an academic right. At minimum, the level of implied leisure is absurdly high and the temptation to indulge in ultra-elite settings always seems to have been overpowering.
Honestly, the early scene in LOTR maybe comes closest to capturing the tedium of research and the pause when you find something interesting!
And also the kind of source material we work with - he's pouring through diaries and letters and such.
Yes, I like that they have him delving through poorly curated archives, rather than just looking something up in a wizard library.
This scene blew my mind because, as many times as I'd read the Lord of the Rings, I never saw it like this. It's just a passing comment from Gandalf, I never expanded it in my head.
An instance where the movie presents background more artfully than the book. Tolkien has one massive info dump at the fireside to get you up to speed if I recall. Montage is also nice piece of character development for Gandalf as he powers through with some help from his pipe and a drink
his learning didn't help him much when he encountered the balrog did it tho
What do you mean - clearly some architecture history crossover work to correctly estimate how much added weight would risk bridge collapse.
Perhaps a civil engineer consultation
I mean, what do you think Gimli is on the committee for?
Dwarf on Retainer
The movies do this in a bunch of places, which I really enjoyed. Just making the world of Tolkien grungy enhanced some of the story.
I always imagined a lot of Gandalf's work collecting "lore" was sitting around talking with all sorts of people trying to sort through folk tales and oral histories and the like. Stuff that from the outside looks like Gandalf just chilling with the little people instead of the great and wise.
Will Hunting and the Skarsgard character are really the 2 mathematician characters you see in movies, and both are pretty much bullshit.
Even Crazy Rich Asians was based on the laughably false premise that an early career economist would have that much time off.
chidi from the good place is pretty good
Indiana Jones pretty much nails archaeology, though.
I think the obvious trouble is that academic work is visually very, very uninteresting. And in fact is all-around uninteresting unless it's your field. And usually pretty boring even if so.
My field - computer programming and IT - is likewise extremely uninteresting, which is why I like to make it seem more exciting by logging in to Gmail or whatever and then intoning, "We're in!"
'I know this, it's a Unix system!' (and despite appearances, it actually was, specifically Irix)
In Third Rock from the Sun, the anthropology department looked pretty close (by sitcom standards) to academic departments as I knew them in my first couple years of grad school. Of course, it's been a while...
In the new Indiana Jones game he loses his job because he ran off to punch Italians in the middle of the school year if that adds something to the leisure time lol
Have you seen the series "The Chair"? Different part of the humanities but I think it captures the culture reasonably well.
In a way, every conspiracy movie is technically about a historian.
I’d also offer that Arrival is what every academic wants to happen to them.
The historian in the Star Trek episode Space Seed who falls in love with Kahn closely reminds me of a historian I once knew in real life in that her colleagues don’t like her and she’s fired for an inappropriate romantic relationship.
She reminds me of historians because nobody takes her seriously. Is it because she's a humanities specialist in a setting dominated by STEM or is it because she's a woman in a setting dominated by men? Probably both.
They don't mention that part until you have borrowed to much money to change your mind.
As a failed English PHD I do have a soft spot for Dustin Hoffman’s character in Stranger Than Fiction.
Duh, obviously big bang theory… not a movie, but isn’t that everyone’s academic experience?
I did a meet a blonde in college....
As best I can tell, they basically show genteel Oxford dons that went out of fashion in the 1950s at the latest, and not the modern hardscrabble postdocs that are today's academia.
I kind of imagine it like how Indiana Jones is depicted when he's teaching. Juggling a million projects and papers, in too small an office, and handling too many students.
"Before you decide to leave Indy you should know that while it does technically involve some archaeology, this will mostly mean getting beaten up and thrown out of moving vehicles and doing hard manual labor, so you should ... hey... hey come back I didn't even say where it was!"
On the flip side has your entertaining pedantic obsessions led you to appreciate Tolkien’s published works even more?
Footnote perhaps?
