So, after my last rant about "Whiplash" I had the most humbling and amazing experience. Somehow the Executive Producer, Gary M. Walters, found it and we briefly had a "conversation" via Twitter. No, I'm not pretending that he and I are friends, or anything like that, but here's someone who is very successful, very good at what he does, and he took the time to incredibly kindly acknowledge my opinion. Why? I have no idea. Sure, I've gotten a bit of attention recently for my work in Music Education, but let's not kid ourselves, Mr. Walters does not need to worry in the least about what some oddball music teacher in Phoenix has to say about his work. And yet, he made a point to tell me that he respected my passion for both music and my comments about his movie. It was kinda of startling. Moving. Inspiring.
I learned a lot in those couple of very simple tweets he sent me. The most important was something I shared with my own students afterwards: The truly Creative person understands that not everyone will want what they create. Simple enough to state, really tough to actually live. It's clear to me that Mr. Walters does.
And so, I kinda felt that I needed to take another look at Whiplash. He's been incredibly gracious to me, when he had no need to - I'm wondering if it's just in his nature - and so I felt I should take another look. Why not?
The truth is that I am a fan of movies. I love them. But outside the elements of scoring a soundtrack or Foley work, I have no real sense of their production process, beyond the very cursory basic. My point is that I am no expert by anyone's standard. But I do admit that when I have any real block of "free time" - particularly on "date night" with my quite lovely and exquisite Michele - we are pretty much guaranteed to go see a movie. We just really enjoy them. Anyway....
After my first review, along with the tweets with Mr. Walters, I also talked a bit about the film with my friend Eric L. Eric, to be fair, is what I would call an expert on movies. And he said something to me that truly got me thinking that I had missed something critical. He said that one of the things that he loved in Whiplash was the element that the student was just as flawed in many ways as the teacher. And suddenly a light came on in my head.
I had made the assumption that the student was "good." I don't actually know why, but in retrospect, I clearly did. I am guessing now in hindsight that it was to balance the clear "bad" of the teacher, but the truth is that there is no obligation as such for the student to be good. And maybe that was the whole point. Maybe the ending wasn't a battle of good versus bad but more of a comparison of two takes on bad. If that is the case, which I am rather inclined to believe now - at least for myself - it is, then I totally missed the point of the film the first time.
And here's the thing, in the end, that's on me. Not the film makers. Maybe Whiplash isn't really about Music at all. Maybe it's about how people approach life, with music simply as a creative vehicle to tell the story. As I thought more about it, it started to make sense to me. In the same way the words "Feel" and "Groove" are never part of the script, there is also nothing that ever tells us that the student was ever actually any good. Yeah, he got into the school, but the way he listens to music is all wrong. Every scene I can recall is of him listening to a lot of flashy playing but never anything of finesse. Never looking for the pure musicality. I assumed he was "good" and deserved to be there, but perhaps he wasn't and didn't. After all, just one example, he treats the girl like crap for the most awful and selfish and arrogant of reasons. True, he later, kinda figures it out, but you almost get the sense that he got to that point from desperation, not from a new sense of self after a journey. Maybe, as Eric says, he's just as bad as the teacher. In a different way, but bad none the less. And if that is the case, then the ending wasn't about the "Victory," it was about the casualties of bad people and their actions. Sure, the student played a song, and played it well I suppose, but that doesn't make him a musician in the true sense of the word. Whatever they were at the start, his goals by the end were not really about the music, or "making it." They were really about proving himself to the teacher. And like I said a teacher that he should have known by then did not deserve to matter. Certainly not with regard to what defines him as a musician. On my second viewing it seemed like there was nothing that pointed to the student even wanting to get truly inside the Music. Absolutely nothing. This kid is no more a musician than the teacher.
And so the more I watched again the more I got convinced that the movie is not about Music at all. I was so caught up in the superficial elements of the script that I missed the bigger picture. (Pun intended). As I said in my first review, it was all about arrogance. I just missed the possibility that that was the film's whole point. I guess my own arrogance got in the way a bit.
I don't know. Maybe I'm just trying to find a way to rationalize my newfound respect for Mr. Walters. Or I'm "fan boying" or whatever. I have no idea. What I do know is that when I watched Whiplash again and did not think of it as a movie about Music as such, it seemed to make a lot more sense. It's a tragedy on all sides. And all this got me to think. To take another look at something. To go beyond my own expectations and my own bias. Ironically, that is something I work with my own students on all the time. It seems I am not always a very good student myself. I need to work on that.
And all this just from a few kind tweets from someone who clearly does see a bigger creative picture. Will Mr. Walters read this? I have no idea. Will he care? Again, no idea. Is my new theory on the film correct? I don't know. I deliberately have not researched it in order to not color or bias my new thoughts about it. What I do know for certain is that while I've been very lucky in the recent past to have been acknowledged on a very large scale for my innovations in Music Education - I'm not gonna say the specifics here, Google it if you really wanna know - I was absolutely "schooled" about Creativity by Mr. Walters. And though part of me is a good bit embarrassed, especially given my supposed "expertise," honestly, pretty much all of me is grateful for it and completely thrilled.
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