One of the cruel truths about grad school is that it ruins your reading life. There’s so much to read for courses and research and comprehensive exams that no one has the time, much less the energy, to read for fun.
I had a bit of this problem when I was studying medieval literature. But at least then, when I did summon a few spare evenings to read a David Mitchell or Ursula Le Guin novel, it felt like a genuine escape from the world of courtly romances and Boethian music theory.
Now that I spend my time studying American religious and cultural history, that bit of separation is harder to come by. Everything I’m drawn to reading (not to mention watching and listening to) is something I could write a paper about if I just gave it enough time and thought. Everything I consume without analyzing is an opportunity wasted.
I know that’s not true, but it’s true in that grad-school way: that mirrorverse that convinces us that the only way to love something is to dissect it. No, that’s not quite right. It convinces us that the only way to love something is to dissect it and then have something brilliant and original and groundbreaking to say about it, preferably in public. The only way to love something is to sprinkle it all over your CV.
Which is why I’m not going to tell you what I think of High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, which I finally started watching for the first time last night.
Not going to show how its use of metatheatrical performance constructs the original HSM films as a kind of collective mythology—
Whoops.
Not going to see my own emotional reaction to the first season as an effect of Disney’s continued project of producing, rather than simply manipulating, a kind of branded nostalgia—
Hmm, there I go again.
Not going to think about the role of entertainment media in constructing generational identities by portraying the Gen-Z stars of the show as the (often literal!) inheritors of the original millennial actors’ legacies—
Not another word, no, not another sound…
Nope, I’m just going to start watching season two after I finish (well, start) my class reading tonight, and then I’ll beg the future editors of the post calvin to delete this post in a few years when I submit my dissertation about the messianic role of Lucas Grabeel in the eighth episode’s dream sequence. Problem solved.
Josh Parks graduated from Calvin in 2018 with majors in English and music, and he is currently a PhD student in religious studies at the University of Virginia. When not writing, he can be found learning the alto recorder, watching obscure Disney movies, and making excruciating puns.
