Everyone knows Leo Tolstoy’s line about unhappy families, but few are familiar with his lesser known first draft: every insane PhD student goes insane in their own special way.
In my case, this involved watching about 15 different Hollywood action movies over and over again; by the final fortnight before submission, I had the same films playing in a separate tab while I wrote, like background music. A major aspect of my PhD (explaining my exact thesis would take longer than this particular mission briefing has time for) involved exploring the different ways in which Hollywood action films convey emotion through spectacle. Among the films I watched and rewatched were the Mission: Impossible films, which ended up being perhaps the key-est of my key works – for no other Hollywood franchise does action, or emotion, better.
