Spine 391: If....

I’m sure that Lindsay Anderson’s if…. was a completely different film in a pre-Columbine world. Obviously there were other school shootings before Columbine, but Pat and I came of age in a time where school shootings are a norm, at least in the US, and the psychology (and pseudo-psychology) that’s popped up to explain them has bombarded us for over half our lives. We generally reject the view that a film needs to be judged in it’s own time, but this time around it’s clear that our times are the more broken ones, much more in this case than Anderson’s, and we hope to make an attempt to read if…. outside of our own issues. That is not true of our response to Anderson’s short Thursday’s Children that is also included in the Criterion release. An Oscar-winning documentary short on a School for the Death, Thursday’s Children shows us a world that Pat and I, both trained in how to teach, react incredibly negatively to.