You Have Nothing to Lose But Your Chains...And About 8 Minutes of Your Time

All of my years of higher education have, at this point, congealed into one large clump of vaguely-recalled factual information. If you want to save a few tens of thousands of dollars, I recommend you go online and research the definition for as many words ending with -ism as you can find. This is basically a substitute for a graduate-level degree.

You can get through any conversation and sound intelligent if you can throw a few -isms in there. Want to get even more fancy? Throw in an additional adjective modifying the -ism, then follow up by citing an obscure author by only his or her last name. Make up an author if you can't really think of one, but if you're ever in doubt, feel free to use any of the following: Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, Zinn or Barthes.

Here's a handy little guide.

BAD: "I didn't like Eyes Wide Shut. I mean, what's with them playing that one piano note for, like, an hour or something? I can't believe I was bored by a movie with this many boobs in it, but there you go."

MEDIOCRE: "I didn't like Eyes Wide Shut, even though I'm usually a fan of Kubrick's films. I found Burgess' tribute to the late director particularly moving."

GOOD: "A fine example of the problems with nihilistic postmodernism, Eyes Wide Shut shows us a side of Kubrick that's both pragmatic and dialectical, giving the film the aesthetic exuberance evident in the work of the early Fauvists."

MULTIPLE PH.D.'S: "Recontextualizing the positivist, authoritarian, antidisestablishmanterian impulse running through his prior work, as well as the writings of Schlondorffenfurffner, Kubrick exterminates any notion of the Real in the Hegelian sense to push the cinema in a bold new direction, what Metz might refer to as the fableux du rigeur collectionneuse blanche."

It's just that simple.

This next YouTube video represents one of the few elements of my USC education I have retained to this day. (That and several tens of thousands of dollars in student loans). A short film called Manifestoon, I watched this little slice of brilliance in a film class and it has stuck with me ever since.

Some genius has his friend read Marx and Engel's Communist Manifesto while running textually-appropriate clips from old cartoons. The effect is mesmerizing, mainly because they find such perfect examples of the concepts being discussed in the essay. I'm not sure exactly was it illustrates - perhaps that, even though we pretend that Communism was defeated and the world has moved on, these ideas were in the air back when these cartoons were being made and remain pertinent to this day. Or maybe it's just funny to see Disney cartoons used against themselves, as visual aids describing the exploitation of workers by mega-corporations like the Walt Disney Company.

Here it is. Enjoy.