The movie version of academia is typically a leafy campus, with great libraries, bright minds, and deep intellectual discussions. It’s a happy grove where the young and talented go to bloom to superiority, eclipsing their parents and their well-meaning, but fuddy-duddy teachers. It’s also where oppressed middle-agers go to complete a journey of self -discovery. To the extent that professors are there in older movies, it’s to confer degrees and, eventually praise.
But there is a new mood in literature and movies where professors are sinister, and competition is darker and more dangerous place, both for the body and the soul. It’s called “Dark Academia.” Consider the recent hit movie and book, “The Secret History,” by Danna Tartt. It follows a talented person without any particular view or direction. The person arrives, looking to make friends and to become special, and through misguided efforts, students end up damaged or killed. Any friendships that result are sinister, and often exploitive.
An early version was Hitchcock’s “Rope,” where two students get excited by a professor expounding the ideas of Nietzsche. They go on to kill one of their fellows who they come to decide isn’t, quite as enlighten as they. Secret History is similar, except that the professor teaches Greek. Another early version was Frankenstein, whose early chapters are of crazed collegians pushing the limits of science in a dark laboratory and similarly dark library settings. For Dr. Frankenstein, the crushing pressure is from inside the student, and not so much from his professors or classmates. University is still a place of refuge, without the pressure of drugs, sex, or fashion.
The evil professor trope of Dark Academia first appears in Harry Potter, I think. The school is both helpful and hurtful, both refuge and enemy. It’s education in a building that tries to trip you, with sadistic professors, plus slave labor, and some murderers or “death eaters.” There are friends too, with the friendship bound by fire-whiskey, or butter-beer, and an intense desire to excel over each other at ones craft, in this case magic. Fashion becomes important in dark academia. Harry Potter’s round glasses, robes, and school neckties, but the alcohol isn’t excessive in HP and the books are pretty chaste where sex is concerned.
Alcohol abuse, fashion, and sex are more central in “The Secret History”. There is a cultish professor, Morrow, and students fashions are described in detail. Most dress in tweeds, and all of them wear round glasses, like Harry Potter’s– in this case with metal rims. All are rich. And as in Hitchcock’s “Rope,” they conspire to murder the least special of their group in the goal of understanding the ancient Greeks. Unlike in Rope, they get away with it.
A yet more recent example is “Kill your darlings” — the main character is played by Daniel Radclift, the same actor who was Harry in the HP movies. It takes place in Columbia University in 1943-46 and portrays the young Alan Ginsberg. As in “Secret History” there is a cultish leader and a murder. Alan enters school not knowing what sort of poetry he’d like to write, or if he’ll write poetry. In the movie, Jack Kerouac, William Burrows and a few others who introduce him to drugs, including heroin, gay sex, wanton destruction, and benzedrine. As in Secret History, there are no bad effects from the drugs, though he tries suicide and one of his group murders another — the least special one as in other dark academia. He gets away with it, as in Secret History, the cult leader is rejected, and the others become special — a happy ending of sorts. Ginsberg writes a great “absurdist” essay and goes on to become a great poet.
The mood of dark academia is a mix of repressed anger and innocence that takes place on a campus, but might as easily taken place in bohemian Paris. The movie architecture includes vast dining halls, gothic bell towers and forbidding libraries. The devoted student searches here for hidden light but finds only darkness. Murder follows. Students stare into space like Oscar Wilde with a heartburn, smoking like well-dressed longshoremen on break. See Danna Tartt at left.
The main contributions of Dark Academia is the fashion: Shades of brown, black and gray mostly, casual and active, but clean. The look says, “I’m both sexually active and criminally active; I do drugs think great thoughts, but don’t do homework. I might do murder too, but it’s OK since I plan to submit a killer final project. Morality is for losers, and “Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.” It’s a line from “The secret History,” appears, slightly altered, in Hitchcock’s “Rope.” The tremendous desire to be pure and special; great in a word, and that involves a destruction of the ordinary: an academic aesthetic where murder is the crowning creative act.
Robert Buxbaum, April 2-5, 2021.