Notes on George Seaton's Teacher's Pet (1958)

As of late I have been writing a great deal about centrism, and especially the ways in which centrist politics have been manifest in the character of the news media's coverage of current events (and this as anything but an even-handedness in its coverage).

Where the news is concerned one significant factor in the view of many has been the way journalism has changed, not least in its "professionalization."

Thinking about that I find myself recalling George Seaton's 1958 romantic comedy Teacher's Pet.

I cannot remember a single reference to it in the film history and criticism I have read, in spite of its having apparently been well thought of at the time (scoring a number of prestigious award nominations, among them a Writer's Guild award, a pair of Golden Globes, and Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actor Gig Young and Best Screenplay for Michael and Fay Kanin), and being notable in assorted other minor ways (not least its place in the careers of its leads--as one of Doris Day's last before Pillow Talk permanently redefined her image, one of Mamie Van Doren's few appearances in a movie that was not an "exploitation film," one of Clark Gable's absolute last).

Still, the result strikes me as worth mentioning here is its relevance to this specific issue. In the movie Doris Day plays a journalism professor into whose class Clark Gable's veteran reporter, following an initial (non-face-to-face) contact that rubbed him the wrong ways, comes posing as a student to "show her up"-- this rather light comedy compound of petty resentment and petty deception having roots in social changes and social tensions within a changing world, in this case representative of that older generation of journalists who came in from the street, started at the bottom, and worked their way up learning their craft through hard experience, and the college-educated younger folk.

Fairly typical of the era's mainstream as Peter Biskind has described it, the story ends with a reconciliation between Gable and Day's characters, and their perspectives, with Day's holding Gable's experience and accomplishments in some respect, and Gable's coming to appreciate what higher education can do for a journalist, enough so that he advises a young copy boy who looks up to him as a role model to go and get that education.

Of course, today we live in a very different world--a more complicated one where earlier adherence to pieties like the value of formal education can seem to have at the least come to seem a much more complicated thing in the eyes of all but the credulous. Where in the '50s access to higher education was broadening immensely, now, even as colleges graduate ever-larger numbers of students, it seems that access is ever more difficult, while enjoyment of the rewards it is supposed to yield become elusive (as the intensifying obsession not with merely going to college but specifically getting into an elite college, getting graduate degrees, mountains of students debt, etc., etc., all testify). This seems to especially be the case in the news business, where professionalization has played its part in making journalism a more socially exclusive, socioeconomically elite occupation with regard to the background, aspirations, status and attitude of its members, especially those at the top (who count all the more amid the decline of local news in favor of national, the concentration of ownership, the exploding rewards enjoyed by the most "successful," and the way it most definitely turns their heads), with all that implies for how they go about their jobs, reducing them ever more to courtiers of the powerful. Such influences apart there is plenty of room to question whether all the extra years of education (and the fortunes spent paying for it) is making our journalists any better at their jobs than they used to be even to the extent that are prepared to do them--whether the issue is their ability to grasp complex issues and explain them lucidly to the public, or simply produce readable prose. (I, personally, am ever horrified and disgusted by the quality of the result.) The result is that, while Teacher's Pet--a work made by people more engaged with an issue of the day more connected with and more interested in reality than anything we are likely to see these days--it is also a reminder that much of what could be plausibly and sincerely said at mid-century offers little help as we struggle with the problems of today.