adventures in scholarship

I have found that, for the most part, scholarship is pretty dull. I’m writing a thesis about some things related to film noir. The only thing enjoyable is that I get to watch a lot of movies. The secondary literature is tiresome and makes me depressed because I have to look at so much of it. What really gets me is when some scholar starts to think that he or she is clever, and writes in the first person and invokes more than necessary people like Derrida or some other shit like that. I just looked at this article by David Wills about Breathless and its remake. (I googled the guy: he got his doctorate from the Sorbonne Nouvelle, where I can only imagine that they’re jerking off to critical theory).
He begins the article: “I am not, it seems, in the cinema. Not even in the video. This all comes at a complicated series of removes. At some point I could have said ‘I am in the cinema’ and left the ambiguity at play between the theater room and the film on the screen.” I don’t know what he’s talking about, but I know it’s annoying. Later he says, talking about the subtitles that appear in the English version: “they show the film ‘in process,’ in production if you will: in the process of being exported the film explicitly reveals its supplementary structure, its iterability, its (de)recontextualization.” It is times like these that I’m ashamed to be a student, and I just want to go to the bar and shoot billiards.