For years academia the movie version of academia was trees and deep intellectual discussions. It was the bright city on the hill, the happy paradise where the young and talented bloom to greatness (after first convincing their well-meaning, buddy-duddy teachers), or where the oppressed middle-ager goes returns to, to complete their journey of self -discovery. But there is a new mood in town, one where academia is a darker, more dangerous place, both for the body and for the soul. The last few years have seen movies and books that follow a talented person without any particular view or direction. The person arrives, looking to make friends or looking to become special. This literature of “Dark Academia”, the students end up damaged or killed, and the friendships they get are fairly sinister, and often exploitive.
An early dark academia movie was Hitchcock’s “Rope,” based on the Leopold Loeb case of the 1920s. Several students get excited by ideas of Nietzsche and kill one of their fellows because they feel special, and come to decide that he isn’t, quite. Another early version was Frankenstein, a book whose early chapters are filled with imagery of crazed collegians pushing the limits in a dark laboratory and library settings. Still, in these earlier versions, the crushing pressure was from inside the student, not so much from ill intent of the the institution, the faculty, or the classmates, and there is no discussion of drugs, sex, architecture, or fashion.
The modern versions begin, in my opinion, with Harry Potter, the books and the movies. From the beginning, the main character finds that the school itself is both helpful and hurtful. The building tries to trip you, but provides slave labor, several professors are sadists, and a few turn out to be murderers or “death eaters.” There are friends too, and fire-whiskey, or butter-beer, and an intense desire to excel at ones craft, in this case magic. Harry Potter’s round glasses and the school neckties became classics too, but Potter is still pretty chaste where sex is concerned.
In the most recent examples alcohol and sex play a more central role, along with murder and clothes. A popular book, “The Secret History” by Donna Tartt has a cultish professor, named morrow, and students who dress in tweeds, for the most part. All of them wear round glasses, like Harry Potter’s, but in this case with metal rims. All are rich. As in rope, they conspire to murder the least special of the group in the goal of understanding the ancient Greeks. Unlike in Rope, they get away with it.
Another recent example is “Kill your darlings”. It takes place in Columbia University in 1943-46 and stars Daniel Radcliffe who played Harry Potter of the movies. He plays the young Alan Ginsberg. He enters school not quite knowing what sort of poetry he’d like to write, or if he’ll write poetry. In the movie, as in real life, he meets Jack Kerouac, William Burrows and a few others who introduce him into gay sex, wanton destruction Benzedrine and Heroin (no bad effects). He tries suicide and one of his group goes on to murder another — the one who is least special. and he gets away with it. The end is that the others become special. Ginsberg writes a great “absurdist” essay that even his professors admire and goes on to become.a great poet.
The mood of dark academia is a mix of repressed anger and innocence. People stare into space like Oscar Wilde with heartburn, or a longshoreman on break. The architecture includes vast dining halls, gothic bell towers and forbidding libraries (see picture at top). The devoted student searches here for hidden light but finds only darkness. Murder follows.
The clothes of Dark Academic novels are important. Browns, black or grays mostly. Clothes are casual and active, but clean. The look says, “I’m sexually active and criminally active; I do drugs and don’t do my homework, and I might perhaps murder, but I plan to submit a killer final project. Murder is a sign of really getting into it. “Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.” It’s a line from “The secret History,” but the same line, nearly, appears in Hitchcock’s “Rope.” It’s part of the tremendous desire to be special, great, and in the race for greatness there must be a destruction of the ordinary. That’s the dark academic mood: an aesthetic where murder is a creative act.
Robert Buxbaum, April 2-5, 2021.
