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This week's LA Times Magazine features a cover story critical of "film theory," the conceptual framework academics use for understanding film, and the UC Santa Barbara undergraduate film studies program, which emphasizes theory. I was a film studies major as an undergrad, and although I don't consider myself a film student, I'm a grad student in UT's department of Radio, Television, and Film, so I'm well-acquainted with film studies. The author, David Weddle, says his daughter chose the program since she wants a job in the film industry, which leads me to think, "Well, duh, you major in film studies if you want to study film; you major in film production if you want to make movies." Throughout the piece, Weddle is clearly unreceptive to the aims and ambitions of film theorists, mocking the discipline's jargon with faux-populist humor:

Oh please, I learned "synecdoche" at my small-town Oklahoma high school, and I find it hard to believe I would have had a better high-school education than a privileged Angelena. It seems Weddle's project with the piece is to attack the liberal and progressive positions common in the academy by ridiculing the technical language academics use in their work.

At some points in the piece Weddle is dead wrong. He describes semiotics as "a metaphysical inquiry into the nature of cinema." Semioticians use a materialist approach, assuming that processes exist within the physical or cultural world, rather than exist on a plane divorced from the real world, while metaphysics attempts to relate existence to an idealist realm. Moreover, he fails to acknowledge semiotics saw popularity in other disciplines like English, anthropology, and mathematics. He also doesn't distinguish between semioticians and neo-formalist critics like Kristin Thompson.

Weddle says his professors used Aristotle's Poetics in their approach to film. I've read bits and pieces from Poetics and a fair amount of Neo-Aristotelian film scholarship, and, in my opinion, its argot and theory is no less impenetrable than more contemporary frameworks.

In arguing contemporary film studies is worthless to students, Weddle presents a series of knee-jerk reactions, arguing that the ideas taught are useless in finding work, the product of "Fascist" elitists, and inferior to the ideas taught a generation ago. The piece is intellectually lazy and journalistically unbalanced, but will unfortunately resonate with a public that's increasingly conservative and hostile toward intellectuals.