Film scholars are facing widespread pressures to desist from teaching modes of analytic and theoretical discourse that were once considered important to fostering critical understandings of moving-image culture, but which have since been denigrated as either too difficult (i.e., "elitist") or too controlling (i.e., "totalizing")--or both--in the wake of the Soviet bloc collapse and ensuing geopolitical realignments favoring the capitalist West. These pressures compel film scholars to "dumb down" their course syllabi by assigning fewer, often prepackaged readings, screening more popular, usually Hollywood entertainment films, and simplifying classroom discourse in a manner favoring description over analysis and interpretation, and fact-based lecture over explanatory dialogue and debate. In what is only an apparent irony, these pressures to "dumb down" issue come largely from within academic ranks, but also from populist perspectives on the nonacademic Right and center-Left. Both equally--although on differing political grounds--target contemporary theory for replacement by updated pluralisms and modernisms that reinscribe a relative transparency to interpretive and critical practice. The author's position elucidates the political and economic priorities of academic "dumbing down" in film studies and offers possible ways in which film pedagogues can resist them radically. It examines the general effects of global media deregulation on the institution of higher education and argues for organized labor negotiations with institutional leadership that can supersede temporary "holding patterns" which continue to brace the larger systemic forces structuring the containment and control of the film studies classroom. The author refrains, however, from recommending a return to postmodern articulations of deconstruction and poststructuralism, of which she is also critical for reasons she will elaborate in the course of positing a critical pedagogy that can, a propos of Paulo Freire, at once challenge and enlighten film studies students by "alienating" and repositioning them in relation to the products of their collective intellectual labor. (Contains 59 notes.)