Lucky Lecteur

While David Lynch was not my favorite director, he's one I've always respected and felt grateful for -- a director whose work was always worth studying and learning from even when it was hard (if not nearly impossible) to watch. There are still several gaps in my personal Lynch-ology, but I did focus one of my first scholarly efforts in film studies on what remains probably his most notorious movie -- and one of the most important of the 1980s, it seems quite safe to say. RIP, Mr. Director. (Click on the thumbnails to expand.)

Back in the early 90s, when I first began teaching writing courses as a graduate student in Washington University's English Department, I used to try to stay connected to the popular culture world that my students inhabited. It was always useful to be able to refer to movies they had seen or music they liked when we were discussing books like Twain's Life on the Mississippi  or Welty's One Writer's Beginnings  or Nabokov's Speak, Memory . I was less than a decade removed from high school myself, but it already required some concerted effort to bridge the growing distance between us. That's how I became, rather improbably, a fan of the MTV cartoon Beavis and Butthead . One of my students would wear a B & B t-shirt to class sometimes, and a couple of them could mimic their heh-hehs. (Not exactly endearing themselves to their fellow students, it seemed.) I expected to watch no more than an episode or two before dismissing the show as hopelessly stupid (as vario...

The images are horrifying. Children playing in the rubble of blasted-out buildings. Children under the threat of sniper fire trying to retrieve water in plastic containers to take back to their families. Children showing their scars and their amputations to the camera but saying they were lucky, because they could have been killed outright. These images are from Alan and Susan Raymond’s gentle but outraged 1999 documentary,  Children in War . Focusing on then-recent conflicts in four different regions – the former Yugoslavia, Gaza and Israel, Rwanda, and Northern Ireland – the film examines the rise of warfare that targets not only civilian populations, but specifically children.    If innocence used to be the first casualty of war, it is now actual innocents who are the primary casualties of war. The consequences of this brazen shift have only grown more unspeakable in the quarter-century since the filmmakers called attention to it.   What makes a viewing of this fi...