Link Farming

Leave It To The Film Students

While a proper snowstorm finally sacks Boston indoors, leaving Dunkin Donuts shuttered & vacant, streets deserted, collective life in the dorms reduced to furtive scrabblings in campus stores for hot chocolate, bottled water, and condoms, it's worth noting that out in the wider world Emerson's made the news for - what else? - Brokeback Mountain.

The Globe, Salon.com, and NPR - respectable mainstreams all, excepting perhaps the staff-hemorrhaging Globe - have all cottoned on to the new spate of inverted trailers hitting the link-happy internet (see The Shining recut as a feel-good family film a few posts back). And while this isn't anything particularly new, I hadn't realized that gay cowboys, already reduced to Leno staples, were the new hatstands for the movement. This could be because my television comes exclusively now from DVDs. I haven't even seen The Daily Show in weeks, which means that world news is passing me by and fast.

The gist of all this is that now, for every J-horror retouch of Sleepless in Seattle or West Side Story zombie flick, there's a Top Gun montage of significant glances and lazy intertitles pasted underneath that damned lilting guitar theme. Literally dozens. And then, just when it was starting to get old - and I wouldn't even have heard of this were it not for fellow transcendentalist collegiate Matthew William Stenovec, 3,000 miles at Whitman, who roused himself from byzantine Jordanian fantasy to tell me my own school was getting press - Emerson kids pulled out Brokeback to the Future. Just move down to the bottom of the videos section to watch. Puts the others to shame. It's not new news, but I'm not exactly paid to keep up with the cutting edge of link forwarding.

Strictly speaking, actually, I'm paid to sell cakes to Valentine's Day couples and give the middle finger to love in the kitchen while I and the rest of the staff swill champagne post-shift.

Anyway, that's my Emerson spirit bender. Go Lions and long live Truth & Beauty. It was a good storm, folks. I'm off to watch John Ford's The Searchers, made in an era when Western male sexual tension was only consummated offscreen. Say what you will about the prejudices of the time - they didn't have link farming, and I think they were probably the better for it.