Movies and tweed

I once fit a stereotype: the bearded, somewhat absent-minded philosophy major. I even had a tweed jacket with leather arm patches. I was attending Swarthmore, which, at the time, had more philosophy graduates with Ph.d.'s than any other college or university (and that was absolute numbers, not relative to student body size). I had every intention of becoming a philosophy professor.

I'm not that stereotype any more. I still have the beard, but the tweed went long ago, and I haven't read more than an occasional bit of philosophy for a long time. But my parents' pastor still calls me "Professor."

Dennis Quaid recently starred in the movie "Smart People," playing a variation on this character type: bearded, a little socially awkward, in need of redemption, possibly some beer, and a good woman, given to extravagant pronunciations. I was thinking of seeing it but didn't get around to it; it somehow didn't strike me as a necessary movie. Now the LA Times (publishing an article from the WaPo) explains part of what might have been bothering me:

It's a cinematic archetype as reliable as the fish out of water and the blond in distress: the disheveled, misanthropic college professor, in the throes of writer's block (or some other form of publish-or-perish anxiety), living in book-lined solitude as a result of divorce, death or free-floating disgust with humanity.

That's why I didn't get a Ph.d. in philosophy! I didn't want to spend the rest of my life depressed and dressed in earth tones!

Another part of the problem might have been that movies with characters that fit a stereotype this perfectly somehow don't suggest a strong sense of creativity on the part of the filmmakers.