What's the Safe Word?

When I look back at what I've written here, I wonder how I did it, especially the long discursive posts.  It feels like it takes me longer to write than it used to.  I hope I'm wrong.  At any rate, I'm writing this post partly because I'm stalled in the middle of a post I began while stalled in the middle of yet another.  I've also been busy with some non-writing tasks that kept me from simply sitting down and pushing on through.

Yesterday I saw most of a 2014 movie called Whiplash, which I seem to remember some of my musician friends mentioning and liking.  I hated it, perhaps even more than I might have before I wrote the previous two posts about talent, achievement, and status.  I may get some details wrong here, because I don't intend to watch it again, though if readers point out anything important I'll try to correct it.  Also, bear in mind that there will be spoilers in what follows.

Whiplash is about Andrew, a young guy who wants to be a great jazz drummer.  His father is a failed novelist, and is presented as ineffectual but loving.  The kid, played by Miles Teller, wins admission to an elite conservatory, where he becomes the student of Fletcher, a famous musician, composer and bandleader, played by J. K. Simmons.  Fletcher is what I'd call an old-school kind of teacher and conductor, who bullies his students maniacally, playing them off against one another, screaming obscene and homophobic/misogynistic abuse at them.  The character has been compared to the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket, and it's a fair comparison except that Fletcher never actually hits them.  (He does throw a folding chair at Andrew at one point, but Andrew ducks.  Shades of another abusive prick of a teacher.)  Why that should be I don't know -- is it to make him less unsympathetic in some strange way?

There are numerous segments where Andrew practices maniacally at home until his hands bleed; now I know why I see drummers with bandages on their hands.  Some of this is reminiscent of the training sequence in Rocky, except that there's no exultation in it.  It's just pain, more pain; abuse, more abuse.  The class rehearsal scenes are excruciatingly long, intense, and infuriating, culminating in one where Fletcher makes three drummers switch off, screaming at them, until one of them shows that he can play a passage the way Fletcher wants him to; it takes them hours, though not, blessedly, in screen time.  Andrew wins out, and gets to play at an upcoming competition, though Fletcher warns him that if he is a millisecond late, if he makes an infinitesimal mistake, he'll be out.  So, of course, Andrew's bus gets a flat tire; he manages to rent a car, and arrives at the competition with a few minutes to spare, but without his drum sticks, which he forgot at the rental place.  Fletcher screams that he has to have his own drumsticks, so Andrew drives back, gets his sticks, speeds back, is hit by another car as he runs a stop sign, crawls out and runs bleeding to the competition, arriving just in time.  But one of his hands is hurt so that he can barely hold the stick, and Fletcher kicks him out with contempt.  (In another context this could read as slapstick comedy, but not here.)  Andrew finally breaks and attacks Fletcher, for which he's expelled from the conservatory.  But then he's called back in for a meeting because other parents have complained about Fletcher; one of his former students hanged himself, and they need someone living who can testify -- anonymously -- about Fletcher's mistreatment of his students.  Andrew agrees, but he also gives up music.

Now, we've already been informed about the dead student.  In one of the rehearsals, a subdued, tearful Fletcher plays the class a CD featuring the dead boy, who he says had just died in a car accident.  (Andrew's accident is surely meant to echo this.)  The boy had won a spot playing with Wynton Marsalis, and Fletcher saw him as one of his great successes.  But the parents tell Andrew that the boy had been anxious and miserable for a long time.

This is important, because the film isn't over yet.  Andrew passes a jazz club and sees that Fletcher will be featured that night.  He goes to hear him play, Fletcher sees him, they have a drink together.  Fletcher says that he resigned from the conservatory.  He invites Andrew to join an orchestra he's putting together for a jazz festival at Carnegie Hall; he hasn't been able to find a drummer who knows the charts, and he knows that Andrew memorized them long before.  Andrew gets his drums out of the closet, and goes to the festival to play.  Fletcher tells the assembled musicians that this is their big chance, there are people in the audience who will notice if they do well, and who will never forget if they make even a tiny mistake.  They go on stage, Andrew at the drum kit, and Fletcher announces to the audience that they will begin with a new piece, his composition, never played before.  Panicked but controlled, Andrew looks at the chart before him.  No one told him about this, no one gave him the chart.  The other musicians have the music in front of them; they look unruffled.  Andrew miserably tries to fake his way through the piece, without success.  I wondered if this scene was supposed to be Andrew's nightmare, and if he would wake up from it.  As far as I could tell, it's not.  (The reviews I've looked at don't mention it.)  At this point there was some distraction and I couldn't follow the film closely, but I could tell that Fletcher didn't eject Andrew from the band, the show went on, and Andrew triumphed as Fletcher beamed at him proudly.  Finis. Credits.

As I watched Whiplash I felt regret that Band of Thebes is no longer blogging, because I'd love to read what he'd have written about it, likely something in the vein of his mocking review of the historical Romans-in-Britain The Eagle, which cast it as an S&M romance between the two gorgeous young male leads.  Whiplash went much farther than The Eagle, stopping short only of overt beatings of the bottom by the abusive top daddy Fletcher.  I thought too of Anne Rice's Sleeping Beauty trilogy, an extended S&M fantasy, which struck me when I first read it by the role that "normal" schooling echoes standard S&M practice.  If you've read any S&M porn, from Rice to John Preston, the parallels are impossible to miss.  The use of homophobic epithets made it even harder to ignore the sadomasochistic text, though the critics I read managed to do so.  I gathered from the reviews that the writer-director has a background in jazz before he switched to film, and that Whiplash is in some degree his manifesto about Excellence.  I'm not sure, if so, what I'm supposed to make of the fact that he shows Fletcher lying to his students about the dead student, the student he effectively drove to suicide.  There's no hint that he feels any remorse, or doubt about his methods of producing what he considers excellence.  It's as if Andrew's triumph at Carnegie Hall also vindicates Fletcher.

None of the critics I read questioned his methods either; rather there was a certain amount of Whoa, dude, awesome, radical in their reactions.  As far as I could tell, Fletcher was maybe a bit extreme, but not excessive.  Several mentioned a story Fletcher tells to justify himself, involving a cymbal thrown at the head of a teenaged Charlie Parker by drummer Jo Jones on stage in 1937.  (According to this account, the cymbal was thrown at Parker's feet, not his head, and didn't connect as Fletcher claimed it did.  This writer dissects the claim further.)  As far as I'm concerned, Fletcher is a vicious sociopath.  His students aren't remotely consenting to the mistreatment he metes out, though they endure it: partly perhaps because they already were to some extent driven, prepped and self-selected by the time they entered conservatory, but mostly because he's the teacher, the authority figure, and everything they know encourages them to see him as their path to success as musicians.

I also thought of Starship Troopers -- the book, not the movie, which I haven't seen -- which Robert Heinlein wrote for what would now be called the Young Adult market.  It glamorizes military service, and includes a long account of Marine boot camp, which Fletcher's classroom resembles in its methods, though admittedly it isn't the same kind of total environment.  Heinlein had to tone things down a bit, since he couldn't include the screaming of obscenities and homophobic abuse in a romance written for teenagers, not in the 1950s anyhow.  And perhaps he chose to, to make his story more appealing or at least less off-putting to his readers.  (Similarly, one segment of War, the military historian Gwynne Dyer's miniseries which aired on PBS in the 1980s, depicts Marine boot camp at Parris Island.  I was amused to watch the drill instructors visibly biting back the fucks they obviously wanted to spit out.)  Prurient accounts of flogging, which Heinlein did include, could be included in an SF novel in the 1950s; verbal obscenities could not.  Heinlein also showed his drill sergeants as consciously, deliberately planning and calibrating the abuse of their trainees, making them older, sadder wiser fellows just doing a job; perhaps they were, just like Nazi SS goons.  Even so Scribner, his usual publisher for the "juveniles," turned Starship Troopers down and it was published by the nominally adult publisher Putnam.  That's the thing, though: Fletcher might be an outlier, though I'm not sure even of that.  He's certainly not an aberration.  As I said, he's old-school, if you studied with De Sade.

But, as I indicated before, I mainly connected Whiplash to Freddie deBoer's discussion of the scarcity of academic talent in the population, and to other discussions of elitism and meritocracy.  I'm not saying that either deBoer or Christopher Hayes would approve of Fletcher's methods -- I don't know one way or the other -- but it seems to me that they both make the same general mistake Whiplash makes, namely that "creativity [is[ just a matter of tallying up practice hours, musicianship [is] just athleticism, and it [takes] flinging deadly objects at someone to motivate them."  (I'm reversing what the writer at Slate, previously mentioned, said in denial of Fletcher's philosophy.)

Whiplash inadvertently raises questions that go beyond the acceptability of abuse and humiliation of students by their teachers, into areas where Chris Hayes, for one, screwed up.  The viewer has to take it on faith that Andrew is all that good, let alone that he'll become the "great" musician he wants to be.  The world is big, much bigger than the hermetically sealed conservatory classroom he and his rivals are trying to claw their way to the top of.  Even a major jazz festival is a microcosm.  The standards of excellence in jazz are different from those in other arts, even if we stay within the bounds of European art music.  What would, say, an Indian classical tabla player think of Andrew, or of Fletcher?  And, as always, even if you could claim to be the fastest drummer in the West, you would have to go on defending your title against upstart newcomers.  Is "greatness" in the arts (or anywhere else) solely a matter of technical proficiency, playing more beats per minute than anyone has ever played before until someone else comes along and plays a tiny fraction faster than you did?  I recall reading that the composer Maurice Ravel lacked the chops to play the piano concerto he wrote for someone else; was he therefore a total loser, a mediocrity, a fuckup who should have had a grand piano thrown at his head?  To return to deBoer, is academic ability a matter of scoring a wee bit higher on a multiple-choice test than the next kid?  Of course not, and deBoer knows it; so why does he write as if he didn't know it?

If a consenting adult chooses to work with a maniacally demanding, abusive teacher in the belief that he can achieve greatness or merely better-ness thereby, that's up to him.  (I forgot to mention before that the musicians in Fletcher's classroom are all male.  No doubt in Fletcher's mind, and in his creator Damien Chazelle's mind, greatness can't be cultivated in women.)  Maybe they can both get off on it.  There are stories of famous, possibly great conductors who browbeat performers, bringing them to tears.  Toscanini comes to mind.  But Toscanini wasn't the only great conductor, just as Bob Knight wasn't the only great coach.  Both of them, and other authoritarian scum like them, might have achieved their results without debasing and humiliating their charges -- who knows?  It's certain that others achieved great results by other methods.  And students can't really consent, especially outside of elite institutions; or even inside them.  Do the students attending Whiplash's conservatory know in advance what they were signing up for?  Were they given a safe word?  Responsible sadomasochistic practice demands one.

Chazelle has said: "There is a moral question in the movie that I wanted to pose which is: 'If we accept that sometimes terrible means lead to good ends, do we accept that the ends justify the means?'" It would seem that he thinks that the answer is "Yes."  I don't.  Even the way he poses the question is fallacious, since in order to say that the ends justify the means, one would have to be able to show that the terrible means led to the good end.  In general, they obviously don't, or they would always (or mostly) lead to good ends.  If all of Fletcher's students became great musicians, he could argue that his methods produce greatness; most likely, as in the real world, most do not.  So his means can't be justified by their ends.  It appears to be purely accidental that some of the survivors become great.  In much the same way, some people have tried to connect substance abuse and other problems causally with artistic achievement; but even if all great artists were junkies, not all junkies are great artists.

There's an old fable about a young violinist who plays for a famous older violinist to get his advice whether to continue with music.  The Maestro says, "You lack the fire," so Junior gives up music and becomes a bank clerk or a life coach or something.  Years later, they happen to meet again, and the Maestro says that he tells everybody they lack the fire; if they give up, that proves him right.  Those who stick with it prove him wrong, though, and he can't take credit for their success since he did nothing to help it or bring it about.  In fact, it can be argued that neither he nor anyone else can tell in advance whether someone will be great.  The same is true of Fletcher.  Do those of his students who succeed do so because of his abuse, or despite it?  The burden of proof lies on him.

Even if one could establish a causal link between Fletcher's methods and the few students who achieve greatness, it could and should be questioned whether the means are justified.  Does the success of a few balance the misery he inflicted on them, or on the many who fail?  Is becoming a great jazz musician even that important an end?  There are clearly people who believe so, but are they right, and how do we decide?  Since we don't know, I think I may reasonably suspect that Fletcher's means are for him, and perhaps for the few who seek him out, the end in themselves.  Making a great musician, which rarely is the result anyway, is at best an accident.

That so many reviewers praised Whiplash so lavishly is to me a symptom of what Adrienne Rich called the deadly masochism of normative masculinity.  Apparently a good many men secretly long for an abusive daddy who'll whip them into line.  Something like that longing draws many into the military, for example.  Which is fine -- everyone has a right to their kinks -- but we should not confuse ourselves about what is really going on.

AMERICANS UNITED IN JOY

I glanced over at the newspaper someone was reading at the next table in the library, and saw this:

From the point of view of a Cowboys fan, I imagine, the word would be "victory" or "success," not "disaster."  Which is why I keep laughing, albeit bitterly, at sports fans.  One fan's disaster is cause for another's celebration, so why should I take either side seriously?  I had a vague impression that one trait of an adult is the recognition that the world doesn't revolve around one's own provincial or personal associations.  If my beloved dumps me, I can reasonably be very upset, even take to my bed for days of weeping.  But if I think that the rain outside shows that the universe is weeping with me, I'm childish at best, delusional at worst.  Yet the sports fans I know have no such perspective.

American Exceptionalism

(Showing the spirit in Myeongdong, Seoul, 17 June 2010)

Korea's in the throes of World Cup fever, of course. The night their team played Greece, thousands of people went out in the rain to watch the game on a giant screen TV downtown. I stayed in and watched with my host and his family, who were much more excited than I was. Another friend told me he'd watched with his son and some other kids -- all boys, except for one girl who didn't know anything about soccer, and said she was sad for the Greeks when they lost. (A person after my own heart.)

Thursday, the night before I returned to the US, the weather was clear, if hot and humid. I'd seen lots of people swarming around the center of Seoul, getting ready for the outdoor gatherings. I was heading back to my host's when the game with Argentina started, and even at that hour the subway was only about half full of people. Several were watching on those small handheld TVs, and the whole car cheered when Korea scored its only point of the game.

My host's thirty-story highrise is on the outskirts of Seoul, in one of the New Cities (also called bedroom cities because too often the salarymen only go home to sleep, and to see their families on the weekend), so the towers stand in groups of three separated by some distance. As I approached the building I could hear cheering from a nearby highrise, and then cheering, yelling and screaming erupted from every building around me, in eerie multichannel surround sound. I thought the Red Devils must have scored another point.

As the whole world knows by now, they didn't, and the Argentinians won, 4 to 1. I felt most sorry for the Korean goalie, who is new to the team and probably felt the stress more than the other players did. When the same Argentinian player scored a second goal just a few minutes after his first, the Korean goalie flopped miserably on his face and covered his head with his hands for a few seconds -- just before getting back up to play again. It wasn't really his fault; the Argentinians really ganged up on the goal, and the Korean defense was so weak even I could see it. But not too sorry. Did any Koreans feel for the Greek goalie who saw two Korean goals go past him the week before? Only that little girl, that I know of.

I can enjoy watching soccer and some other sports, but only when I'm watching with friends who care about it. Otherwise there's no reason to, because I don't care who wins. Whoever wins, someone else must lose. (There was a lot of displeasure when the World Cup's opener, between the Ivory Coast and Brazil, ended in a tie.) I see the pain in players and fans on all sides, and I don't see any good reason to inflict it.

That's not why some other Americans are reacting to the World Cup with disdain, of course. Roy Edroso at alicublog linked to the legacy blogger Jonah Goldberg sneering at soccer, not because he's a racist but because it's like, foreign.

That being said, Goldberg has a tiny point in that latter post. Racism is a problem among soccer fans. But I don't idealize soccer or soccer fans, or sport generally; and admittedly sports fans tend to do both things with the sports they like. Is Goldberg claiming that racism isn't a problem in American sport, or is he simply asserting what he laughingly calls "balance"? (Yeah, we're racists, but you're racists too!) And just because the worldwide spread of soccer has something to do with British and other European imperialism doesn't mean that American imperialism doesn't have something to do with American lack of interest in soccer; if anything, it suggests that it does. Goldberg also protests that "First, the charge of racism as a motivator behind anti-soccer feelings is pretty bizarre given that the sports the rightwing trogs do champion – baseball, basketball and football – are dominated by nonwhites. And yet conservatives still champion them." Conservatives like this guy, right? In general it looks like conservatives "champion" those sports without abandoning their racism, complaining that the colored have taken over and are getting special treatment because it's PC. Though what matters is not the sport but the racism.

While it's probably not fair to pick on student journalists, except that so many of them will grow up to work for the corporate media without getting much smarter, I must cite this opinion piece from the student paper here.

What about soccer is even remotely interesting? I guess you could say it’s a funny game to watch when grown men try their hardest to hit a ball with their faces. But other than those few NASCAR moments, it’s a low-scoring, boring game. But once every four years, Americans have to care about it.

... But let’s be real. There are only two sports in this world that are worth following: basketball and football.

Erm, sonny, "football" in most of the world means "soccer." Of course you meant "American football." Everyone's entitled to their own tastes of course, but I can't see how soccer is any more boring than American football or basketball or baseball. I personally would sooner watch paint dry than an American football game, but that could be because I like the look of soccer players more; and I don't even watch soccer unless my Korean friends sit me down in front of a TV set during World Cup. And if soccer is so boring, why is it so popular in most of the world? The writer seems to explain this in terms of "the weight of the rivalries countries have with each other, like the England-Germany rivalry and that of Brazil and Argentina", but you could do the same with the rivalries in the Big Ten, the Ivy League, Notre Dame versus Navy, and so on.

But on to a more serious thinker. The most attention Noam Chomsky has ever gotten in the US corporate media was for speaking lightly of sports.

[PHIL] DONAHUE: There's a part of the documentary [Manufacturing Consent] which has you on the podium, reliving the experience of going to a high school football game when you were in high school. And you sat there and you said, "Why do I care about this team? I don't even know anybody on the team." Here, Professor Chomsky, you go too far. You are cranky, you're anti-fun. We wonder if you ever knew the experience of a hot dog with mustard and a cold beer. And it is much easier, then, to dismiss you as the Ebenezer Scrooge of social commentary. Go away. You're not a happy man. You're scolding us for rooting for the high school football team.

CHOMSKY: I should say, I continued to go root for the high school football team -- the reason I bring it up is, it's a case of how we can somehow live with this strange dissonance. I mean, you conform to the society around you, and you're part of it, and you have the hot dog and you cheer for the football team. And in another corner of your mind you notice, "This is insane. What do I care whether this ..."

DONAHUE: What is insane?

CHOMSKY: What do I care whether this group of professional athletes wins or that group of professional athletes wins? None of them have anything to do with me.

DONAHUE: I don't know. I grew up with the Indians [baseball team], I was a kid in Cleveland ... it was a social experience, it was the smell, this huge Cleveland stadium. ... Those are memories. What's wrong with this? Why wouldn't you want to celebrate this?

CHOMSKY: I did the same thing. I can remember the first baseball game I saw when I was 10 years old, I can tell you what happened at it -- fine. But that's not my point. See, if you want to enjoy a football game, that's great. You want to enjoy a baseball game, that's great. Why do you care who wins? Why do you care who wins? Why do you have to associate yourself with a particular group of professionals, who you are told are your representatives, and they better win or else you're going to commit suicide, when they're perfectly interchangeable with the other group of professionals. ...

DONAHUE: You had a relative in New York City who had a kiosk which wasn't quite on the main street, it was behind the train station. And God knows what kind of radical literature he was selling. And you're there, this little kid listening in -- no wonder you grew up to be such a radical who doesn't like high school football.

CHOMSKY: Unfortunately, I did like it. I'm sorry for that.

It's always been hard for me to tell whether Donahue means half of what he says; often it seems that he's playing devil's advocate, or dumbing himself down to speak for what he imagines his audience to think, and that might be the case here. (His audiences often seem to be more thoughtful than he is, judging from their questions.) Chomsky's response is interesting to me, though. When I first read this exchange, I mainly noticed that Chomsky'd had the same adolescent revelation I did, at about the same age -- that it was crazy to root for one team rather than the other, though I was reacting not to professionals but to my school's team. It's not their status as professionals that is the problem for me, it's the pretense that the enthusiasm of the opposing team and their fans doesn't matter. But rereading it tonight I noticed that Chomsky seemed to be reassuring Donahue and his audience that he was really normal, he did enjoy the game. I never did, and I don't care if I'm normal, so I don't feel any need to prove it.

As so often, Donahue misses the point: "it was a social experience, it was the smell, this huge Cleveland stadium. ... Those are memories. What's wrong with this? Why wouldn't you want to celebrate this?" Neither I nor Chomsky denigrate the social experience or the smell or the memories. It's the artificial structure of dividing people against each other on no real basis -- Cleveland fans versus St. Louis fans, Arsenal fans versus Manchester, Mexico versus Greece -- and the belief that it matters on some objective level who wins. Why would you want to celebrate one of the worst human tendencies, the tendency to believe that your group is better than another group because of trivial and often imaginary differences? The difference between a fan of one team and a fan of another -- to say nothing of the teams themselves -- is just that: imaginary.

Contrary to one popular apologetic argument, the obsession with sports is not about encouraging and celebrating excellence, nor is it about sportsmanship. If it were, the crowds would cheer the team that is playing well at the moment, regardless of its name, place of origin, team colors or mascot. (The association of teams with locations has long seemed funny to me, since the players are recruited from all over the place. And if I were to move to another city or university, I'd be expected to transfer my loyalty to the team there. This is one reason why I recognized sports enthusiasm as Orwellian doublethink.) There are other ways to celebrate excellence than competition. In non-team sports especially, competition isn't necessary for achievement, though it is imposed on the players and the situation.

If we want to encourage communal enjoyment, which is fine with me, there are other ways to do it. It is pleasurable to lose oneself briefly in the crowd, singing or chanting with many other people, and so on -- my preferred way of doing so was the dance floor -- and it is possible to do that without hating (even ritually) the crowd in the next town. That's what we need to do, but organized sport as it's now constituted does the opposite.