I was ill all weekend and whenever I am sick, I like to watch Jennifer Anniston movies. I struggled through “The Break Up”—it’s always so hard for me to tell the characters apart. The Jennifer Anniston character, Brooke, was visually schizophrenic—somehow we were supposed to believe she was in a bowling league, loved beer and Chicago pizza, and dressed in cow costumes for parties while also working at a super trendy art gallery, wearing Prada and La Perla. At least I think both of these people were the same character. I get really confused watching movies.  I need someone next to me whispering, “That’s the jerky brother, that’s the boyfriend, that’s the friend.”

My favorite thing to do in class is Close Reading, where we go through a story or a poem line by line and Read In. Over interpret, I say. What does the horse with no head connect to elsewhere in the story? The parsnips cut into pieces, “like limbs”? “I see it now that you point out,” my students say. “But normally I would never see it.” When I read a story, or watch a movie, all I can see is these patterns of imagery. It’s like the volume on the background—what I call the Language of Objects—is turned up super high.

When I was talking to my students Tuesday (see Class Stayed Late) about the image track in the stories we were analyzing, I told them about watching the movie, “The Break Up.” How at the opening, the boyfriend is “on the bus” and in the last scene, he is “shipping out.” And that’s when it hit me. I have come to read the meanings in the background closely—with exquisite attention–because meaning the foreground is so often dependent on face recognition.

I can’t read faces. But I can read in. Because I can’t read faces?