The Screening of America

by Tom O'Brien

This is an original investigation of how movies have reflected and helped to shape the values of a generation. From All the President's Men to Wall Street, US films of the 1970s and 80s were a kaleidoscope of shifting values and contrasting moral viewpoints. Knowing that movies mirror the way we think we are - or would like to be - O'Brien focuses on the key values (or their absence) found in films from this period in order to see more...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1474287972
• ISBN13: 9781474287975
• Release Date: October 2016
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 1.09 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Learning How to See: Tom O'Brien, A Tutored Eye

When Tom O'Brien, the brilliant and complicated movie critic, died in 2007, few if any noted his passing. That he was a key leadership team member at the National Endowment for the Humanities, a former Dean of Manhattan College, a Rhodes Scholar and a Danforth Fellow and a Watson Fellow: these facts were recorded in his public obitituary. But there may be, somewhere along the uncharted reader's road ahead, someone searching for a book about how to look at movies who might want to know something about Tom's remarkable, if in the end self-shattered life. I'm posting here the memorial I wrote about Tom, published in "The American Oxonian": Thomas W. O'Brien Colgate University, BA summa cum laude Oxford University, MA (Rhodes Scholar, New York & Jesus) Columbia University, Ph.D. with distinction (Danforth Fellow) Watson Traveling Fellow & Mellon Aspen Fellow February 27th 2007 When I first met Tom O'Brien, he was holding court --- animated, brilliant, self-deprecating --- from the closet of a flat in Oxford. Tall and brilliantly earnest, full of mischief and confident opinions; Tom stood out. If one were too quick to judge, it would have been possible to suppose that Tom was like those he most, and perhaps rightly, deplored. Years later in a letter recollecting those early days, Tom wrote: "None of us were anointed, but some of us sure acted as if we were". From the first, he recognized that Oxford was a gift to all of us; even though it easily encouraged, in some, the conduct of a preening rookery of show-birds. Not Tom. He believed and acted otherwise. He felt that the gods had thrown open a protected gate, and that he had somehow undeservedly crossed through and landed in a version of Paradise. New Yorker and Irish to the bone: energetic gratitude is what Tom felt. He would take Oxford for what its glories might provide. He loved every day: plunging into books and high teas, meandering through Wales and (with his dear friend and Jesus College fellow Scholar Darryl Banks) taking voluble sprints to Paris and beyond; returning often to his beloved Wordsworth's home precincts. And sometimes plunging into the River Cherwell, too. Given the upsetting facts of his death --- its long-coming, its haunted predictions --- those of us who knew and cared so much for Tom are especially aware that his life's journey after Oxford earned its hard mileage but left its worthy mark. There is much to salute. His hundreds and hundreds of students at Fordham and Manhattan School of Music and the University of Maryland, for example, surely know. His questions and stories and high standards will always be inscribed in their lives to their advantage. "Every question is a story", Tom would say. "Let the question teach". When I was invited to create an interdisciplinary honors program at Montana State University, I invited Tom to set us an example. And example he gave. His spirited talk about "Aristotle Goes to the Movies" held an over-packed auditorium in