The last thing any undergraduate wants to do during his or her weekend – or during any day of the week, really – is the "suggested reading" professors seem rather keen on assigning. Indeed, a lot of the students I know just don't bother doing it at all.
Well, I'm here to tell you that you should do that reading. Not just because doing the suggested reading will help you out a tad bit more during your psychology midterms or history papers – no, my rationale is a little bit broader and more general than that.
To put it in extremely technical terms, you often need to know about stuff to understand other stuff.
This goes without saying (or, at least, should go without saying) in an academic context: you need a working knowledge of the King James Bible and Ovid's Metamorphoses to understand John Milton, for instance, and you can't even begin to grasp Thomas Pynchon without an extensive background in pretty much everything.
What many fail to realize, though, is that this same basic principle applies to things outside of school.
Quentin Tarantino – the idol of every dorm-dwelling poster-buying TV-referencing male college student on the continent – is an absolutely perfect example.
Tarantino's younger "fans" laud the director for his funny, banter-strewn dialogue and propensity for postmodern violence. Many of these same "fans," however, don't actually understand the first thing about Tarantino's work (their ability to recite verbatim the "Royale with cheese" conversation from Pulp Fiction notwithstanding).
Actually "getting" Tarantino's oeuvre requires a ton of cinematic "suggested reading" (or, rather, "suggested viewing"). Ever wonder why 25 minutes of Pulp Fiction's runtime is spent watching Bruce Willis and his ambiguously European girlfriend pillow talk? Well, you should probably pick up Jean Luc Godard's À bout de soufflé. While we're at it, you should also at least rent Bande à part,Pierrot le fou, Alphaville,La dolce vita, 8½, and about every '70s exploitation film every made.
And all that's just to understand the major allusions Tarantino makes in one movie – don't even get me started on the actual themes the director explores (and his "fans" fail to grasp), because I could explain the importance of identity signifiers in Inglourious Basterds or morality and subjectivity in Pulp Fiction for hours if you want me to (which you probably don't), with any one of these topics requiring at least a basic knowledge of theoretical literary stuff.
Doing the "suggested reading" proves useful in things other than nerd debates, too. If the Bush administration had familiarized itself with the history of Afghanistan at some point before barging into the country, guns a-blazin', Afghanistan probably wouldn't have been invaded at all.
History's greatest military powers – from the Mongols to the British to the Soviets – have all had trouble maintaining armies for long periods of time in the unforgiving mountains of Afghanistan, to say nothing of the historic difficulty said powers have had winning over the country's fragmented and ethnically diverse populace.
And yet, here we are, still occupying Afghanistan after a decade. (This is especially disheartening when you consider that George W. and company all lived through the Vietnam War, and, evidently, ignored all of its lessons – neglecting the "suggested reading" is one thing, ignoring the seminal events of one's own lifetime is something else entirely.)
To relate this column to a totally random third thing, the 1 percent of hyper-wealthy Americans ignoring the growing clamor and outrage of the 99 percent evidently didn't do their "suggested reading" either. In the words of Daniel Handler (better known by his pen name, Lemony Snicket):
"Historically, a story about people inside impressive buildings ignoring or even taunting people standing outside shouting at them turns out to be a story with an unhappy ending."
If there's a moral to this poorly-organized and somewhat disjointed column, it's that anyone and everyone – whether you're a Tarantino fanboy or the leader of the free world – should probably spend a good time investigating any pertinent background information before dealing with any sort of analytically complex issue.
Or, to put it even more technically, you often need to know about stuff to understand other stuff.
Email: eabenoit@buffalo.edu
