Hollywood’s new message: old-fashioned endurance
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Version 0 of 1. Whiplash is a new movie, out in January, about an inspirational teacher. But this teacher is not like Robin Williams in Dead Poets’ Society or Jack Black in School of Rock. Nor Yoda or Mary Poppins. The wisdom he imparts does not include: be yourself, rock out, feed the birds, feel the force. Yes, he says “do your best”. But there’s an agency to the encouragement. You may not want to be around if he finds your best is not good enough. This teacher throws chairs at his pupils’ heads and cymbals at their feet, and laughs at their tears. This teacher offers no wriggle room, no second chances, no compassion, no mercy. He pits students against each other with easy glee. This teacher never smiles, never praises. This teacher thinks the most harmful words in the English language are “good job”. And this teacher is vindicated. In Whiplash, he is both grand baddie and superhero. His methods are upheld, the soundness of his approach tried, tested and proved. In order to achieve excellence in jazz drumming, he demonstrates that rather than going freeform, you must bend yourself to the system, be as disciplined as an Olympic athlete two weeks before the Games, as well-drilled as a squadron pilot in a dogfight. Your bleeding hands and sweat-soaked shirt will not trouble you. This is art as endurance test, not self-expression. And this bracing message – that you need to be prepared to work yourself into the ground, maybe 6ft deep, if you want to have a shot at anything better than mediocrity – is echoed across cinemas this season. Whiplash’s instructor is a quasi-headmaster to a fleet of teachers in Oscar-contender films who all sing from the same hymn sheet. Steve Carell’s wrestling benefactor in Foxcatcher has confused ideas about the limits of the role of a coach, but the take-no-prisoners philosophy he instils in Channing Tatum is clearly the correct one. Likewise Boyhood. It may look like a loose-limbed meditation on a young Texan’s coming-of-age, but it does feature a strikingly hard-ass pep-talk for its hero, whose ambitions lie in photography. Natural aptitude, he’s told in the dark room, is not enough. His teacher says he’s known a lot of talented aspirant snappers, none of whom succeeded professionally without “discipline, commitment and a really good work ethic”. In fact, it’s talent that’s most negotiable, for there’s also “a bus-load of morons more than willing to surpass you”. This they’ll manage by buckling down to their homework, rather than fannying about with a filter. All three films deliver a smack in the face for our prize-for-participation society, a world in which you get a slap on the back simply for showing up. In Foxcatcher, it’s not so smarting: we expect sportsmen to cripple themselves, just as we expect interns at merchant banks to work all hours by hoovering coke in the loo. But photographers or musicians? Yes to the odd all-nighter montage, fag butts and wine bottles littering the floorboards, a new masterpiece freshly inked. Yet artistic endeavour is not something we tend to associate with a stopwatch and a big stick. Traditional Hollywood narrative, as well as real-world folklore, has it that the creation of art is shrouded in mystery. Its essence bursts magically from the ether, rather than being cranked out like so many sausages. These films betray the fact that even the movies, whose stock-in-trade has long been the perpetuation of such a myth, can no longer stomach it any more than the rest of us. Giving children limitless opportunity for creativity and boundless praise for the results does not work. It is not good for anyone. So just as schools increasingly seek to ramp up discipline to prewar grammar school levels, so movies are staging their own backlash to the progressive liberalism of the 60s and 70s (itself, of course, a reaction to the tyrannies of Victorian paternalism). And while Whiplash and Boyhood parachute these old-fashioned values into the modern day, other awards movies this year go the whole hog and look back fondly on a time when young people were forced to buckle down and shape up. In Testament of Youth, also out in January, Vera Brittan and pals must forget any literary or academic ambitions and instead toil all hours in the trenches and field hospitals. Stephen Hawking and Alan Turing are not shown to be exactly slackers in The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything. Think your work placement is tough? Go watch Fury, in which 17-year-old Logan Lerman’s first job onboard Brad Pitt’s tank in 1945 Germany is to clean the remains of the face of his predecessor off the dashboard. But the most full-throttle expression of this new nostalgic stoicism is Unbroken, Angelina Jolie’s admiring biopic of Louis Zamperini, the Olympic sprinter who survived 47 days on a life-raft in the Pacific after his plane was shot down, then an especially gruelling three years in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp. Zamperini has a couple of catchphrases which help haul him through, both learned from his running instructor brother: “If you can take it, you can make it,” and “A lifetime of glory is worth a moment of pain”. One can see why they might chime so deeply with Jolie, who, whatever else she may or may not be, is a tough, conservative mother of six. Most crucially, she’s a film director, which, like few other creative professions, requires a military temperament and the authority to command and marshall hundreds. Films, more even than most art, are group-grafted, not suddenly conjured. Richard Linklater, the director of Boyhood, works 18-hour days and shot the whole of his film, which spans 12 years, in just over a month. Damien Chazelle filmed Whiplash in 19 days. He is 28-years-old and this is his second feature. “Any dipshit can take pictures,” says the teacher in Boyhood. “Art? That’s special.” That film, like increasing numbers of others, strives hard to prove its truth. |