Movies/Careers Fantasies

Even though I’m well into a career path that should eventually land me a job in academia, I sometimes like to imagine what other careers I’d enjoy.  The funny thing is that I derive most of my information about prospective jobs from the movies. 

 

One of the best examples of this phenomenon is my consideration of the Foreign Service.  For a long time working for the Foreign Service has seemed like a cool job: living in different countries, doing things that affect world issues, etc.  The problem is that I’ve never really been sure what the Foreign Service does.  If I try to visualize a day in the life of a professor, for example, or a journalist, doctor, lawyer, salesperson, etc., I can easily come up with something that, in most cases, comes from the movies.  With the Foreign Service, on the other hand, I can’t think of anything.  The closest I can come is Julia Stiles’ character in the Bourne movies.  I realize her character doesn’t work for the Foreign Service, but she is a young, government-employed professional working overseas and there aren’t many other films that have anything close to that.  (I know there are many spy movies, but when I try to think of movies depicting U.S. overseas employees with desk jobs almost nothing comes to mind.)

 

The point here isn’t that I want to do what Julia Stiles’ does in the movies, but that the ability to consider jobs (or any activities for that matter) is based almost entirely on a basic understanding of what those jobs are like.  Because I can’t live a day in the life of every career out there, the media actually provides a “service” by preparing me for certain careers.  Even if a movie like All the President’s Men glamorizes journalism, for example, I still get a general sense of what reporters do when I watch it.  Ultimately I might not be doing exactly what Robert Redford does, but watching it might either interest me in the profession or let me know its not something I’d enjoy. 

 

If saying that movies (and the media) socialize us and prepare us for future careers is nothing new, what seems even more interesting is the fact that movies also direct our attention away from certain activities.  The Foreign Service seems like a good example; despite the fact that it might be an easily glamorize-able job there’s really not that many films out there about it.  Thus, despite increased popularity in recent years, its still not on a lot of people’s list of things to do.  On the other hand, there are a number of films about professors (Stranger Than Fiction, A Beautiful Mind, Indiana Jones, etc.)  Coincidentally or not, that's the profession that I’ve chosen to go into. 

 

Besides simply influencing the choices people make, there are a number of consequences of this situation.  For example, we could see movies as either rightly preparing people for productive lives, or as teaching them to subjugate themselves to individuals and systems that already have power.  We could also see films as structuring our lives into “genres.”  (Romantic comedies would be a sufficient example of this, though other genres would work as well.)  If these aren’t exactly new observations, they’ve at least taken on greater immediacy in my own life as I’ve considered my career options.  I also don’t know what the long term consequences of this issue are, but for now I wish someone would make a movie about a person who just finished their master’s thesis and blogs all day.  Then maybe I’d know what I’m doing right now.