‘Back to School’ and the Anti-Communist Film Festival

    Since I announced the Anti-Communist Film Festival recently, readers and friends have been sending me suggestions of movies to add to the list. Unsurprisingly, several people have nominated Back to School, the 1986 comedy starring Rodney Dangerfield. They primarily do so for the Professor Terguson scene. This is where a history professor, played by the volcanic Sam Kinison, erupts on a student who gives an anti-American and politically correct reason for why America lost in Vietnam. She cites the media narrative about Vietnam being “immoral and illegal.” What she doesn’t know is that Terguson is a Vietnam veteran. He says he would understand her haughty analysis because while people like her were home “listening to the Beatles albums,” he was up to his ass in firefights and rice patties.

    It’s a hilarious, legendary scene, and I understand why people think it would be appropriate for the Anti-Communist Film Festival. I would also add the scene where Rodney schools a snobbish professor teaching a course on business how the real world works.

    Furthermore, the overall story arc of Back to School has a profound lesson about freedom. The film’s story revolves around a man named Thornton Melon (Dangerfield), a wealthy New York men’s clothing store owner. Melon is a multi-millionaire, but he never went to college, something that has always bothered him. So in his 60s, he goes “back to school” to earn a degree. Melon thinks he can buy his way to graduation, hiring teams to do his history papers, NASA to do his science homework, and the real writer Kurt Vonnegut to write a paper on … Vonnegut. (Yes, the real Kurt Vonnegut makes a cameo in Back to School, and it’s a great gag that the paper he writes about his own work gets a D from the professor).

    When Melon is accused of cheating, it’s decided that a two-hour oral exam will determine if he will graduate. One of Melon’s allies is Dr. Diane Turner (Sally Kellerman), a professor of English literature. Turner is introduced in the film when she enters a class and proceeds to read a particularly sensual scene from James Joyce’s Ulysses. Melon gets so seduced by the words that he pops out of his seat and hollers, “Yes! Yes!”

    What Dr. Turner represents is the freedom that the mind can achieve through reading great literature – literature that is banned in communist countries and even challenged in free ones. Ulysses is a great example. Published in 1922, the book was declared indecent and put on trial in England and in the United States, and banned in communist countries like Romania. These days, Ulysses is often challenged as being “sexist, ableist, and racist” by woke critics. As a recent course description at Georgetown University put it: “Published one hundred years ago…the book has delighted and infuriated readers, as well as become a magnet for literary critics, from feminists to marxists, and ecocritics to disability studies scholars.”

    Turner also encourages Melon to read works by Shakespeare, Dylan Thomas, and Tennessee Williams – to “enter the thoughts and dreams of mankind” in order to “know what it feels like to be alive.” It’s worth noting that the works recommended by Professor Turner all have a particularly strong male energy to them, something that teachers would avoid in 2025 as more and more men are driven out of literary lives. Melon has not read A Streetcar Named Desire, but he’s seen the movie – and “pound for pound, Marlon Brando is America’s finest actor.”

    Turner also recommends Macbeth, a story about a corrupt king and his evil, scheming wife. Tyrants throughout history have tried to ban or censor Shakespeare – including Joseph Stalin, who banned Hamlet because he did not like the depiction of a weak and vacillating leader. The writer and actor Simon Callow put it well in an article for Index on Censorship:  

After Shakespeare’s death, his plays were subjected to a different, internal, sort of censorship: on moral grounds, or those of taste. Happy endings were imposed, filth extirpated, difficult characters, like the fool in Lear, excised. But by the end of the 19th century, theatrical reformers had begun to establish the wildly controversial idea that Shakespeare might have known what he was doing…the plays have been keenly probed for political endorsement, or denounced for its absence. In 1941, Joseph Stalin banned Hamlet. The historian Arthur Mendel wrote: “The very idea of showing on the stage a thoughtful, reflective hero who took nothing on faith, who intently scrutinized the life around him in an effort to discover for himself, without outside ‘prompting,’ the reasons for its defects, separating truth from falsehood, the very idea seemed almost ‘criminal.’

    Callow concludes with this: “As with The Bible, you can prove almost anything from Shakespeare. His job was to capture life, not to judge it, and he succeeded triumphantly, but what must it have cost him? He endured enormous pressure from the censors, which seems to be reflected in a line from the great Sonnet 66 of which the first line is: ‘Tired with all these, for restful death I cry.’ In it, among the oppressions Shakespeare lists, he speaks in a great resonant line of: ‘art, made tongue-tied by authority.’”

    In the penultimate scene of Back to School, Melon passes his final exam by reciting “Do not go gentle into that good night,” the poetic masterpiece by Dylan Thomas. Melon has been transformed by reading all the classic literature. He does not stumble or stutter during the recitation, but rather grows in stature and power. When asked by his academic interrogators what the poem means to him, he replies: “It means I don’t take shit from no one.” Melon has become an independent, critical thinker. He can no longer be coerced by kings, politicians, or anyone.

Note: You can contribute support for the festival by donating at the GoFundMe page for the project.

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