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My wife and I watched Willow last night. It was not the first time either of us had seen the movie, certainly, and as we watched, we both remarked on how well the film holds up. It remains a cheesy knock-off of Tolkien, of course, and is intertwined with it even more deeply than a focus on small folk fighting abominable dark powers with the help of bigger folk suggests; some of the scenes were filmed in Middle-earth New Zealand. But as I watched, I found my mind filling with ideas for papers that I could write, not just about the specific movie, but about the genre of fantasy film in general, working from, say, the 1978 animated Lord of the Rings through Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films.

The last few words point towards a common problem in academic work: determining the limits of a study. It is not possible, of course, to look at all things that are or have been, so any examination must limit itself to looking in specific places. That specificity matters, however; there are concerns of representativeness of examples to address, and even if the examples within a give frame are representative of that frame, the frame may not be positioned such that it takes in an adequate view. Windows offer a useful metaphor; a window of 100 square units in area easily can measure 1x100, 2x50, 4x25, 5x20, 10x10, 20x5, 25x4, 50x2, or 100x1,* and the view from each will be different from any of the others, although the window is in at least one sense the same size in each case. For fantasy films examined by someone who often treats fantasy literature, the invocation of Tolkien makes sense, and so bracketing the field of study with film versions of the Prince of Fantasists suggests itself. Then again, animated film and live-action film operate under different constraints (even if the increasing prevalence of CGI and motion-capture tend to blur them), so mixing the two may not make for the most reliable frame.

Such are the kind of thoughts that occupy me, even when I do kick back with family just to watch a movie. The Work is omnipresent in a way that other jobs I have had have not been and in a way that the words of others tell me their work is not. It suffuses most of what I do; most of what I see and hear is filtered through it. When I am therefore asked why I "can't just enjoy it," I know that those who ask do not understand. I am a worker on The Work. It is from working on The Work that I find my joy (other than in my family, but my wife is a scholar; she understands). Finding ideas in things and working through them is fulfilling. Why should I not then do it? Why, then, should I not have such thoughts as I did while watching Willow with my wife last night? And why should I not act upon them in days to come?

*I am aware that I ought to identify which unit I mean. That I do not is deliberate; I do not want to get into an argument about which system of measure to use. I am also aware that the measurements are mathematically equivalent. The rephrasing is also deliberate--and those who have built things know that 1 wide and 100 high is not the same thing as 100 wide and 1 high, which is the kind of difference indicated. Not all students of English are ignorant of such concerns.