Movie Master: For this professor, analysis is a way of life
In Brian McCuskey’s classroom, perfect attendance is barely adequate.
And in the life of this Scottish film buff, Herald Journal movie critic, and Victorian era specialist, perfection is only the beginning.
Having taught in the USU English department for over nine years, returning this fall after a year long sabbatical, Dr. McCuskey has a flare for life and literature that gets his students excited and has gained the admiration of his colleagues.
“He’s an outstanding teacher,” said Jeffrey Smitten, head of the English department. “He’s creative, he’s enthusiastic, and he demands the very best from his students and gets it. I would rank him right at the very top of our faculty in terms of his classroom teaching ability.
Born in California and educated on the collegiate level in North Carolina and Michigan, McCuskey has always been gripped by reading.
“As a kid, I read to avoid chores. I read hard enough that I couldn’t hear my parents asking me to set the table,” he said. “I’m sure part of this was deliberate, but part of it was that when I read I just forgot about everything else, and I didn’t hear anything. I loved as a kid the experience of looking up and not knowing what time it was.”
This love of getting lost in literature led him in high school to read William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury”, a novel which McCuskey says directly influenced his decision to be an English major.
“I didn’t know there were books like that. It was so challenging, hypnotizing,” he said.
Doing his graduate work at the University of Michigan, McCuskey originally planned on continuing his focus on southern American fiction. That is, until he read “Bleak House”, a novel by Victorian writer Charles Dickens.
“Even though it was 900 pages long, I was completely hooked,” he said.
After this preparation, the decision to teach English became simply a matter of finding the right place.
“If somebody wanted to hire me to be that absorbed in reading, and then to emerge and talk about the reverie, talk about what I had found there, and then to help other people to have that kind of feeling, then I couldn’t imagine anything more rewarding,” he said.
This semester, McCuskey is teaching two courses, one dealing with the writings of Charles Dickens, and the other an honors course entitled, “Hollywood Through History,” which focuses on four film genre’s: westerns, romantic comedies, film noir, and Alfred Hitchcock.
“I grew up in Los Angeles, seeing every movie I could and sneaking into movies I wasn’t supposed to see.,” McCuskey said, “so talking about movies has always been something I’ve done. I do enjoy bringing film analysis to the classroom.
Possessing what is sometimes an unusual trait among college professors, McCuskey doesn’t like to lecture. Instead, he prefers asking questions and helping his students to develop their own ideas.
“I know what I think and it would bore me if I were only to hear and say what I think,” he said, “I’m much more interested in hearing what other people have to say.”
This desire to help students express their opinions and really take part in every class discussion is one of the traits McCuskey’s students have found most endearing.
“He makes you be involved,” said Marisa Feinstein, a senior majoring in English literature. “You can’t just sit there and be a passive listener. He wants you to be discussing it, he actually wants to hear what you think and it makes you excited to go to class because you feel like your opinion actually has some importance in class.
Susan Biddulph, a senior majoring in English literature, found that McCuskey possessed the rare ability to both teach and entertain.
“He is so fun to listen to, his lectures are so good. You’re entertained and you’re taught at the same time,” she said while adding that “his tests are freakishly hard.”
Finding a good balance between teaching and providing much needed scholarship in his particular field of Victorian fiction has also been a challenge for McCuskey.
“You work forty hours a day,” he said.
But despite the challenge he has finding enough time, McCuskey commented on how much he was looking forward to this next step in his career.
“I’m looking forward to this stage of my career in which I can fall back on material I’m very comfortable with, introducing new material when I wish, but having more time to devote to research without worrying so much about the classroom.”
McCuskey’s current scholarship focuses on servants in Victorian fiction and he is working on gathering his articles together to publish in book form.
Though it has led to a very fulfilling life for him, McCuskey readily admits that being an English major isn’t for everyone.
“If you’re an English major because you enjoy reading, that’s great, but that’s not enough, you also have to enjoy talking about and writing about and thinking about what you’re reading,” he said. “An English major who says, ‘I don’t want to study a book, I just want to enjoy reading it,’ is like an Economics major saying, ‘I don’t want to study economics, I just want to go out and spend money’ or a biology major saying, ‘I don’t want to study the digestive system, I just want to go out and eat good food.'”
“You have to love the reading,” he said, “but you also have to be a person for whom the pleasure of reading is also the pleasure of taking it apart and talking about it and not everyone’s built that way.”