In Defense of Professor Fleeber

Fleeber, the college professor in The Freshman, is obviously narcissistic and insensitive, but he also seems like a rather wise Shakespearean character.

Fleeber reminds me of Polonius, the babbling father in “Hamlet.” Both Fleeber and Polonius are self-absorbed, older male characters in father-son dramas—and both provide surprising insight.

Polonius (right), King and Queen (left), Flckr ThemeFund

Although Polonius was a windbag, he uttered some of Shakespeare’s wisest, most enduring phrases, including “Brevity is the soul of wit,” “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” and most famously, “To thine own self be true.” It’s not a coincidence that these pearls of wisdom came from Polonius, an apparent fool. When audiences get disarmed and distracted by comic antics, the fool can slip in some fine insights.

Likewise, after Professor Fleeber shows his class the Godfather II scene where Michael Corleone confronts his brother Fredo for betraying him, Fleeber astutely says: “A moment of epiphany. Michael Corleone kisses his brother full on the lips. An astonishing image, at once suggestive of love, inversion, power.” Professor Fleeber offers a great point here. That kiss is, as Fleeber intriguingly suggests, an "inversion," a strange paradox: an embrace that both repels and pulls inward at the same time, a mixture of sex and death, a certain sort of creative power based on the violation of taboo, like the transgressions of kings, twins, and other founding figures in creation myths around the world. I feel like Fleeber was really onto something here.

Fleeber( Paul Benedict), mimicking Michael Corleone on screen grabbing Fredo, saying, "You broke my heart."

My feeling partly comes from knowing that the screenwriter, Andrew Bergman, knows a lot about film scholars and professors. Bergman wrote a PhD dissertation on 1930s American society and Hollywood films, which he later published as a book before going on to write Hollywood comedies. I wouldn't try to say what Bergman had in mind, but I can't help wondering if he was slipping in some of his own film insights in the midst of this parody.

... Uh, oh, I'm pulling a Fleeber again. I just realized that comparing The Freshman to “Hamlet” and PhD dissertations might be as outrageous as the Fleeber treatise, Guns and Provolone, in which Fleeber compares Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, and the Lake Tahoe scene from Godfather, II. The only justification for my outlandish, Fleeberesque comparison is that Shakespeare’s plays were the pop culture of his day, and "Hamlet" was his most popular play. The line between high and low culture—like the line between the fool and the wise one—is sometimes blurrier than we imagine.

Don't worry: I still think it's funny to compare Kant and the Lake Tahoe scene, and I still dislike Professor Fleeber’s autocratic teaching style. I’m just saying that if you appreciate Polonius, you should give it up for Fleeber, too.