BFI Film Classics: Rushmore

Despite its titular call for haste and excess (rush/more), this film challenges a capitalistic drive toward perfectionism—one that perpetually defers attainment—and celebrates the quiet connections, the earnest gestures of tenderness, that defy such passion and haste. A revision to Max’s “secret” (doing what you love for the rest of your life) and Cousteau’s exceptionalism, Rushmore celebrates not the doing but the loving, not the solitary genius but the polyvocal collective. In transforming perfectionism into attention, Rushmore models a way of loving and being that measures achievement not in acquisition of capital but in community-enriching acts of making. Drawing out Rushmore’s subtleties that soften, temper, ease, expand, and equalize the film’s haste and zeal, this book—built of ecocritical, phenomenological, and feminist ways of reading—models a generous attention learned from the film itself. In this regard, Rushmore moves from desperate efforts to force meaning toward the gentle emergence of small miracles, an ephemerality at the heart of cinematic experience.

• Kristi McKim

• Literary and Cultural Studies
• Media Studies

• British Film Institute/Bloomsbury Press

• School of Literature, Media, and Communication