New Doc Film Series: Dean Boyer’s Home Movies

By Kyle Oleksiuk

Nov. 2, 2018

Fridays – Filmes de la Deane

           Since the first day he appeared on campus, a total ingénue, his mustache just budding on a downy and raisèd lip, John W. Boyer has proven himself to be the dean we’d dreamed of. A true dean is rare in the halls of academia, but every few centuries, the leather chair atop Harper Tower is depressed by the buttocks of an administrator as firm as Boyer.

            In this new series, we hope to shed light on the life of a remarkable campus figure, and to celebrate his reappointment to a sixth term as Dean of the College. We stole these films from his office. The first halves will be shown on odd numbered weeks, the second halves on even numbered weeks.

1)    A Dean is Born.

The first visually recorded human birth. Dean Boyer emerges, not unlike Christ Jesus, in a barn in backwoods Kentucky. He has a caul over his face. It is the beginning of a folk hero.

2)    A Dean’s First Word.

The Dean, fifteen years old, says the first word worthy of his respect. “Vienna.” The film also covers the Dean’s first sentence (“I’d like a small black coffee.”) and his first filibuster-length convocation speech.

3)    A Dean’s First Bike.

The most traditional of the Boyer home movies. A quest narrative that begins in Chicago, and ends on a resort beach in France. The plot centers on a secret unicycle stolen from the French biking master, Peéweé Hermàn, which Boyer recovers using his astute powers of historical reasoning.

4)    A Dean In Love.

She is beautiful. She is radiant. Her legs shine in the sun like the barrel on an 1867 Austro-Hungarian Field Howitzer. He tells her this when they first meet. She cannot decide whether to kiss him on the spot, or slap him in the face. She does both, while they ride away on his custom 1975 Hot Wheels tricycle. All six hours technically classified as pornography.

5)    A Dean is Made.

It’s Zimmer on the phone: “I’m making a team.”

Boyer deliberates. He’s not sure about getting back into that old racket, University Administration. But what the hell… he says yes!

He says yes yes to life, yes to love, yes to yes bikes and yes mustaches and stupid yes articles in the yes yes campus comedy magazine, yes he says yes I will, Yes! Boyer now! Boyer tomorrow! Boyer forever!