Courtesy of the Yale Film Archive
We’ve all seen it — in passing, in pieces, flickering across a tiny airplane screen somewhere over Florida. Maybe it glowed drowsily from a TV on a Sunday afternoon, half-watched, half-forgotten. A sweatshirt. A pennant. At the mall with YALE stitched in bold white letters on a flag in Brandy Melville. Or maybe it was a name-drop, casual and sharp: Yale Law. Yale Med. Yale, of course.
It happens everywhere once you start looking. In living rooms, in bedrooms, in courtrooms and in libraries that only exist on soundstages. Somewhere in the background, somewhere in the script, someone’s always going to Yale.
But for Brian Meacham, the Managing Archivist of the Yale Film Archive, those flashes of recognition weren’t just trivia. They became a project twelve years in the making.
“I’ve been working on it probably for almost as long as I’ve been at Yale, which is 12 years, just trying to find as many references to Yale in film as possible,” Meacham told me.
That obsession recently became “That Whole Yale Thing,” Meacham’s sprawling, loving, occasionally absurd compilation of every conceivable on-screen Yale reference drawn from over 200 films, from indie and Hollywood blockbusters alike, from blink-and-you’ll-miss-it name-drops to entire plots revolving around our hallowed New Haven home.
In one moment, Phil Hartman and Nora Dunn set down their phones, dial clicking; in the next, the footage cuts to Tina Fey picking up hers. Indiana Jones struts through Sterling Memorial Library. Robert Downey Jr. shelves books there. Across a hundred fragmented moments, Yale becomes a story people tell over and over again.
And fittingly, for a project about cinematic ephemera, it began not in a movie theater but online.
“There was once a website that was a searchable database of subtitle files,” Meacham explained. “And so you could do a keyword search for any word you wanted.” Naturally, he searched for Yale. “That’s where a lot of these started popping up,” he recalled. What started as a casual hunt for Easter eggs soon turned into something else entirely: a cinematic obsession, a digital scrapbook, a wildly specific labor of love — stitched together over late nights, odd hours and the rare quiet moments of an archivist’s life.
The film — which Meacham produced independently but connected to his work through the Yale Film Archive — wasn’t even fully assembled until last month. For years, the clips sat dormant, scattered in folders, waiting. Finally, the long-running project found its moment among the festivities of the University president’s inauguration weekend.
What struck me most, watching the montage of film clips in the lecture hall of Sterling library, was how the image of Yale — its cultural meaning — has shifted subtly over time. In the old black-and-white films, Yale feels almost mythic, wrapped in this air of untouchable prestige and effortless belonging. It’s less a place you get into than a place you simply arrive at — if you’re the right kind of person.
But in more recent films, that illusion begins to break down. The idea of Yale still carries weight, but it’s tinged now with distance, with improbability, even with exclusion. Movies like “Lady Bird” or “Do Revenge” capture that — Yale becomes not just a symbol of success but of longing, of something barely out of reach. It’s no longer assumed; it’s aspirational. It’s not just a place people go — it’s a dream people chase and often lose.
Meacham noticed this evolution, too. Early black-and-white films, he pointed out, regarded Yale with a certain “reverence” — a place that served as a finishing school for American boyhood where, in his words, “you send boys to turn them into men.” But as cinema crawled into the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Yale’s meaning warped.
“It maybe has become more unattainable or more of a kind of lofty goal as opposed to just sort of the next step in the stages of your life,” Meacham reflected.
In other words: Yale, in the old movies, was inevitable. In the new ones, it’s impossible.
There’s also something strange — even disorienting — about watching Yale exist outside of itself.
That tension — between inevitability and impossibility — thrums at the heart of “That Whole Yale Thing.” The film revels in absurd contrasts: a scene of a lovestruck high schooler dreaming of attending college on the East Coast, a shot of Matt Damon looking forlorn inside the tomb of Skull & Bones, wide-eyed freshmen in black-and-white musicals singing “Boola Boola” and drunken alumni stumbling through reunions praising the Elis. Yale appears everywhere and nowhere, both a real university and a Hollywood mirage.
On campus, for students, the University is bricks and bodies and dining hall rushes; on screen, it becomes something else entirely: a symbol, an aesthetic, a punchline.
Sometimes, Yale is not just an image but a sound.
“There’s a whole section with the Boola Boolas,” Meacham said. “It’s hard to imagine a world where this was the case, but it certainly was, I think, in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s, that those were internationally known songs.” “Boola Boola” and “The Whiffenpoof Song,” he explained, weren’t just campus traditions — they were mainstream pop culture, musical shorthand for college itself, and Yale in particular.
So when Clark Gable casually riffs “Boola Boola” while recounting his days as a silent movie pianist, or when Humphrey Bogart’s character belts it out because he canonically went to Yale, it’s not a coincidence: it’s recognition. In one rather jarring scene, a character in a “Tarzan” film sings about “the Elis” for no discernible plot reason. “I can’t for the life of me figure out why she would be singing that,” Meacham laughed. “But she is. It’s actually ‘Boola Boola’ — I checked.
This commitment to detail extends even to the structure of the film itself. Some clips featured quotes, like “The greatest battlefield is the Yale Bowl” — taken directly from a silent-era title card. The movie it belongs to, “Hold ‘Em Yale,” holds special significance for Meacham.
“It was the first film ever shot at the Yale Bowl,” he said. “A sort of goofy romantic comedy” about an Argentine kid who comes to play football for Yale — and one of Meacham’s rediscoveries. “I helped bring that back from New Zealand,” he explained. “It was a somewhat lost film — no copies of it existed in America.” The Yale Film Archive now holds a print, which it screened during the Bowl’s 100th anniversary.
In moments like that, Yale becomes more than a backdrop — it becomes the story.
This was, in part, Meacham’s intent: not to create a perfect portrait, but a sprawling mosaic. “I will say, there are a few things I left out that were perhaps a little bit less than flattering,” Meacham admitted with a laugh. “I didn’t want this to… I didn’t, you know… it’s for a celebratory moment.”
Still, he hinted that an uncut, more irreverent version might exist one day — complete with “a little bit more warts and all,” and, crucially, “a little bit more swearing.”
Hollywood’s Yale is also notably a fantasy world governed by its own tropes: future presidents, tortured geniuses, bad-boy legacy kids, tweedy professors and gothic libraries that beckon like cathedrals. Watching Meacham’s compilation feels like peering into a national subconscious; the stories people like to tell about Yale say as much about America as they do about the University itself.
“It wasn’t until last month that I actually started working on putting the film together,” Meacham said. But when he did, patterns started to emerge almost naturally. Characters dream of getting into Yale. They triumph, they fail, they cheat their way in. They sit in its courtyards, linger in entryways and fall in love and sometimes — inevitably — commit crimes in its libraries.
What “That Whole Yale Thing” captures so vividly is Yale’s peculiar position in the cultural imagination: always a little larger-than-life, always caught somewhere between nostalgia and satire, status and absurdity. It’s not Harvard, but it’s always paired with Harvard. “There’s a whole section where it’s just like, Harvard, Yale, Yale, Harvard,” Meacham joked.
Part of the fun is also how wrong it all is. Movie Yale is impossibly glamorous. It looks like it was filmed at Harvard or Oxford half the time. Nobody mentions the Bow Wow lines or the wind slapping your cheeks raw as you walk up Science Hill or the cursed vending machines in Bass Library. And yet, against all reason, it still tugs at something emotional, even vulnerable, in the viewer who has been lucky enough to get to know Yale.
There’s a certain pride in seeing your school live rent-free in society’s consciousness for decades. But there’s also a deeper melancholy, the realization that Yale on screen is not your Yale, but someone else’s dream — or nightmare.
Maybe that’s the strangest part of it all: watching a place you know intimately get turned into a symbol for things far bigger, far messier, and far more universal than your own four-year experience. Yale, according to the movies, isn’t really about Yale at all. It’s about ambition. Nostalgia. Status. Romance. Escape. Everything people want and fear when they think about elite institutions.
Perhaps the most poignant moment in the film comes from the 1946 Cole Porter biopic “Night and Day,” which closes on a monologue about Yale’s timelessness: how the University “has gone unchanged,” how the buildings might grow differently, but “the feeling of Yale” endures. Of course, the character says “men” — the college was all-male at the time — but the sentiment lingers: What does it mean to belong to a place whose image has endured for centuries, even as its reality shifts?
Today’s Yale is more diverse, more complicated and more public-facing than its cinematic mythology. But that mythology still haunts us — in the navy blue merch, in the movie scenes, in the YALE crewneck worn by a villain or a dreamer or a side character in love.
To watch “That Whole Yale Thing” is to feel this double-vision acutely. Yale is the dining hall you eat at every day, the morning alarm set for your 8 a.m. library shift, the lingering conversations on the couch in your common room. And then, of course — in a hundred scattered movie scenes — someone knocks on a bedroom door. Someone walks in, wearing a sweatshirt. YALE.
And for a second, just a second — you feel it too.
The dream. The ache. That whole Yale thing.