A novel pedagogical idea: watch the movie before you decide to show it your students

In the same vein as Pigeon, I have been absent from ALPS because … work, grading, life admin, and an upcoming move to start a new position. You know the drill: summer can be either quiet or ridiculously busy. But as I am leaving my position at Colgate University, I wanted to share a brief anecdote from my teaching life and rolling with the punches when things don’t go exactly as planned. It was such a strange student event that I had to share it for the archives. Hopefully, you’ll get at least a chuckle out of it.

In Fall 2024 I taught two sections of a new class: International Relations & Popular Culture. Although excited, my little passion project class also put me in a spot where anything “extra” or “experimental” did not come by easily. The combination of small town joys and big world pop culture events don’t mix quite too well. But! In October of that year a new movie hit the screen: Rumours (2024).

Rumours is a small indie movie with a stellar cast, including Cate Blanchett and Papa Lannister. The premise – on its surface – is pretty neat. Something goes horribly wrong at a G7 meeting, and the seven heads of states must find their way to safety. If you bothered to look at the trailer linked above, you’ll see that it is not entirely clear what goes wrong, but it involves bog men, giant brains, and something else unspecified. The movie clearly is a horror-comedy that gives a behind-the-scenes look at the private conversations of elite leaders and how they conduct themselves during high profile meetings. I thought, nonetheless, that this would be a good opportunity to show via a new movie how socio-political realities can be shaped and understood via a filmmaker’s vision and narrative.

Credit: MSN/ScreenRant

I organized at our local theater a movie screening with department buy-in and funding, as it served a clear educational (and slightly experiential) pedagogy purpose. Not only my classes were invited, but I opened the event up to all IR majors to show the different facets that our field can be about. The cherry on top was that some of my colleagues agreed to participate in a panel discussion after the screening (at the theater) to discuss the G7, the depiction of elite leaders, and the use of popular culture to dissect political realities.

A sizeable number of my students and others had signed up to join, and I was genuinely excited for it, as this was my first big event I had every hosted in academia. My excitement as an individual never waned because it’s a fantastic movie (bought it even on DVD), but as the movie progressed as an educator I questioned whether I had lost my mind, screening a movie I had never seen before. Rumours is not everybody’s cup of tea: it is funny and campy but incredibly graphic in violent and sexual matters (yes, a G7 meeting has apparently sexual matters). My colleagues and I could not stop laughing, as the movie – albeit with a poignant message about the political system at the end – drifted further and further into absurdities. I am not talented enough to give you a play by play of the movie: you can either believe me or watch it and then believe me. Throughout the screening I kept thinking, how do you make this pedagogically sound? With these visuals, what serious scholarly conversation can emerge in the panel afterwards?

Luckily, I did not have to worry about hosting and managing a professional event panel: ALL students disappeared rapidly once the movie was done! To their credit – they stayed for the entire movie. I was later told by a student that that is a massive compliment because apparently students just walk out of credit and extra credit stuff when they don’t care. So yay me! But that night, they HURRIED out of the theater like it was on fire. Those who had to walk passed our professor row scurried by with eyes wide open and forced a “bye professor” out, avoiding directly looking at us. No one stayed for credits; I would not have been surprised if a small stampede had begun at the doors out of the theater just to escape the madness.

I give my chair and section chair credit for attending the event, supporting a fellow IR faculty person and enjoying the movie thoroughly (tears of laughter may have even rolled down some cheeks). But there were questions, including “Had you seen this movie before?” and “Huh?”. A denial of the former puts me in an interesting spot. It is certainly the truth. I based the event on a movie trailer and many hours of interview footage (audio/video) with the cast and the makers of the movie. I was impressed by their thorough research of the G7 archives, and I saw in the way they portrayed the characters in the trailer a valuable addition to our class curriculum. I should have probably paused just a second longer, when the filmmakers said that the initial plot line of the movie was a short vignette in another movie where one of the characters has a fever dream about the G7 being invaded by bogmen.

But the question also carries weight, as it acknowledges limits to preparation with new and unknown events/locations/contents for us as faculty, who are trying to spruce up our teaching with out-of-classroom opportunities. And once in the experience, you just have to relent control and see what happens – regardless of how much planning took place.

Although the panel was off, I acknowledged to my colleagues in the room and to myself that I had to force a debrief with the students in the classroom. I couldn’t just let it hang there, having a strange experience and then moving on to business as usual. While most of my students had come to the screening, I showed the trailer again in the first class after the screening, and I opened the room up for responses and thoughts. Funnily, many of them had written response papers right after the event (for extra credit), and I was astonished how polite and academic they were, trying to neatly fit in the plot line of the movie with our academic discussions prior in the semester – devoid of an real responses to what they had just witnessed. After I told them in person that I had no idea it would be this strange (and I need to reiterate again how weird it was!) and that I did not know how to initially make this scholarly for them, the floodgates opened for comments and responses that were less polite and more genuine. Somehow through that, we were still able to fit Rumours into our learning environment.

I appreciate everybody being a good sport and not casting me out from society for showing them knowingly not just an R movie – but a hard R (cue Jason Mantzoukas’ voice – for those in the know) that can cause probably some confusing nightmares. Go watch Rumours!

Anybody else deal with an event that either went off the rails or not as planned?