Whiplash (2014) - A Striver Class Psychodrama (with some jazz in it)
Or; Two Jazz Movies On Motivation and Greatness, part 1 of 2 (Warning: spoilers)
I.
In this two-part review series, I want to discuss two jazz movies from the 21st century, both completely different in message and style. More pointedly, both have very different things to say about the subject of inner motivation. This is an essential subject for any 21st century jazz film to address because the music requires an immense amount of technical skill, yet at the same time, it’s unfashionable and sadly unprofitable for the most part. So what is it, exactly, that inspires musicians to try and become great at a music style that will afford them few opportunities to have an impact on the broader culture and whose time has passed long ago? And between the two films, which answers that question better?
The first one we’ll discuss is Whiplash (2014). Whiplash, I will say right at the outset, approaches jazz as something made within the institutions. It’s a good example of a film that encapsulates the mentality of today’s American hyper-achieving portion of the upper-middle-class, or what I’m calling the striver class. I’m talking about the people whose parents put them into elite kindergartens with $40,000 tuitions just to have a slight advantage when they apply to an Ivy League college one day. Those kinds of people. Immediately after I saw Whiplash, I thought to myself, “The guy who made this grew up in a well-off neighborhood and attended an Ivy League university.” So I looked it up, and sure enough, writer/director Damien Chazelle is the son of a Princeton University professor, both of his parents have their own Wikipedia pages, he went to Princeton High (one of the best public secondary schools in the entire country), and he attended Harvard University. I wasn’t just right, I was really right.
The reason I suspected this, however, has little to do with the themes and elements of the film that people have given the most attention, like its main antagonist, Terence Fletcher (J.K Simmons). If you were to look up an analysis of Whiplash on a YouTube video essay, the film would seem to be about him most of all. Fletcher is a lean, physically fit, and highly abusive teacher who mercilessly bullies, psychologically denigrates, cruelly tricks, physically assaults, and even at one point attempts to hospitalize Nieman, an aspiring drum student in whom he sees great potential. Fletcher is an interesting cinematic invention, but for reasons I’ll make clear, I think he is best taken as an elaborate symbol rather than a lifelike person. The reason I see Whiplash as a striver class movie has more to do instead with the protagonist, Andrew Nieman (Miles Teller), who exhibits all the traits of the most neurotic kids from this class and whose emotional experience is recreated well throughout the film. He’s the one who makes for the more interesting case study.
II.
The plotline of Whiplash is simple enough, so I’ll summarize it right here. Nieman attends the Shaffer Music Conservatory in New York City where he grew up, and he’s hoping to become like his hero, big band drumming legend Buddy Rich (more on that strange choice later). He encounters Terence Fletcher, who is a total asshole right from the beginning, and Nieman dutifully works as hard as possible to gain his approval. Eventually, he is worked to his last nerve, has an emotional breakdown on stage during a concert, and assaults Fletcher. That’s the first two thirds of the movie.
Then things take an interesting turn. After being expelled, Nieman meets with a lawyer who wants to get Fletcher fired and the lawyer offers him the opportunity to snitch on Fletcher, so he does. Later on, he meets a recently-fired Fletcher playing piano at a jazz club, Fletcher offers him the opportunity to play drums for an ensemble he’s conducting, and he jumps at it. At the big show, Fletcher whispers to Nieman that he knows that he (Nieman) was responsible for getting him (Fletcher) fired and then conducts a song that Nieman is unprepared to play, effectively sabotaging his own concert. After playing the song poorly and being humiliated, Nieman sulks off the stage, sees his somewhat wimpy father (Paul Reiser) and hugs him, but then decides that he wants to prove himself as a drummer — not to his father, but to Fletcher. He walks back on stage and starts playing Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” while Fletcher is in the middle of talking to the crowd. The band joins in, he plays a really good solo, and Fletcher and Nieman both smile at each other. Fin.
III.
Whiplash is not a realistic film, nor is it meant to be. The story is told from Andrew Nieman’s perspective, and its images and dialogue are embellished — even cartoonishly so at times — to reflect Nieman’s subjective emotional experiences. This is apparent right off the bat. The Shaffer Conservatory Studio Band, which Fletcher leads, almost entirely comprises handsome studs who are either tall black men or purebred Aryans, and everyone has lean, athletic physiques with angular jawlines. They look like people who would be playing football or pledging a fraternity, not playing in a jazz orchestra. There are two exceptions, however. One is a pudgy, nebbish trombonist named “Metz,” whom Fletcher screams at early on for playing out of tune and kicks out of the band while he weeps pathetically. Fletcher then reveals that Metz wasn’t actually out of tune; he just felt like humiliating and discarding him for some reason. So that leaves us with the only other exception: Nieman, a socially awkward Jew (Fletcher later calls him “hymie” during one of his many outbursts) who is younger and greener than everyone.
Already, we’re in a dramatically overwrought situation. It’s Nieman taking on Fletcher and his army of handsome studs, and the handsome studs never make an effort to talk to him other than to scream at him or make smarmy comments. Interestingly, no black person really tries to talk to him once — I can only suppose because black men are maximally intimidating, and so according to the logic of the film, they must remain mysterious and distant. The point is that this is a psychodrama that relies on “outsider” clichés to reinforce Nieman’s feelings of inadequacy and alienation. At no point should the discerning viewer ever feel like we’re watching a story about a real jazz ensemble. There’s never any convincing sense of social camaraderie between band members, and although the drummers do compete a little with each other to be in the core ensemble, none of the other musicians show similar anxieties or tensions; they’re just there to be intimidating, handsome, and completely unfazed by Fletcher’s lunacy. Beyond that, no one even seems to have an organic appreciation of jazz, Nieman included. Nieman never goes to any clubs while he’s enrolled at the conservatory, he never sits in on any jam sessions, and we never actually get a sense of what the New York jazz scene is like in the year 2014. All we know is the school, and the school only.
IV.
Nieman’s relationship with jazz, to put it succinctly, is strange. But it would be a mistake to dismiss this as an oversight. On the contrary, it says something about the kind of person Nieman is and what makes him tick. Nieman is an excellent drummer, but he gives us no reason to believe he’s any kind of jazz expert. He only ever shows awareness of the sort of jazz you’d typically learn about and play in a school setting. On his first date with a girl (Melissa Benoist), the restaurant plays a song that he recognizes, so he tells her that it’s from the 1930s, a ballad called “When I Wake.” That’s actually an original song composed for the film, but the script said it should be like an Artie Shaw number. Nieman is apparently well-versed in big band jazz. The kind of jazz that your grandmother would like. Moreover, his idol is Buddy Rich, the big band drummer who skyrocketed to fame in the 1950s and 60s by regularly appearing on the Steve Allen Show and the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Nieman has Buddy Rich memorabilia scattered all over his room — he’s got posters of him, CDs, DVDs, everything — so we can assume that he’s some kind of superfan. Buddy Rich is who Nieman wants to be.
Now, knowing a thing or two about jazz and jazz listeners, I have an innocent question: what kind of weirdo is this Nieman kid, anyway? I don’t want to lecture you, the reader, about how few aspiring young jazz drummers really care about Buddy Rich. So instead, I’ll just pose this question: of all the people you’ve personally met who claim to like jazz, how many of them enjoy big band swing like Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and Buddy Rich the most? It’s great music, don’t get me wrong, but it’s also highly unusual for a 19-year-old boy to prefer this style unless his whole purpose in life is to succeed not necessarily in jazz, but rather in the jazz orchestra for an educational institution. Buddy Rich is a drummer that your high school music teacher tells you to listen to, not someone you’d realistically discover or enjoy on your own.
In the world of Whiplash, drummers such as Elvin Jones, Max Roach, Art Blakey, Tony Williams, Roy Haynes, Milford Graves, Ed Blackwell, Paul Motian, Han Bennink, or Andrew Cyrille simply do not exist, let alone any newer guys. Fusion doesn’t exist, modal jazz doesn’t exist, free jazz, ethnic jazz, spiritual jazz, jazz-funk, jazz influenced by hip hop or drum’n’bass, that murky-sounding drumless ECM jazz, whatever the hell “post-bop” is supposed to mean… none of it exists, and the only bebop musician who ever lived is Charlie Parker, who comes up a few times in the dialogue yet is never heard. The reason for all this is that Whiplash isn’t a jazz film, or even a music film. It’s a school film. It’s about the pressure that comes from trying to succeed at school.
V.
Again, I don’t bring any of this up to accuse the film of incompetence. Damien Chazelle wasn’t really trying to create a “jazz movie.” Chazelle has instead constructed a closed, insular world in which jazz is merely the vehicle through which Nieman’s high-strung personality can express itself. Think about the movie this way. Have you ever had an anxiety nightmare about school? Some common scenarios might include: you show up to class and realize there’s a life-changing exam that you haven’t studied for at all. Another might be that you think you’ve graduated, but then the administration calls you to say that there was a required math class you never attended, so you have to spend another year there. Well, the entire second half of Whiplash is pretty much exactly like these dreams, with one anxiety scenario playing out after another. The turning point occurs when Nieman breaks up with his attractive girlfriend (the one he has a date with earlier on) because he doesn’t want her to hold him back from greatness. And after that, it’s all downhill for our boy Nieman.
Although the film presents the story from Nieman’s own subjective perspective right at the beginning, much of its second half is about immersing the viewer further and further into it. A montage occurs in which he practices angrily and violently, losing the tempo, frustrating himself, and then playing even more violently until he’s inadvertently doing death metal blast beats. His hand starts bleeding (I guess it’s from practicing so hard he chafes it against the drumsticks, or something, though this doesn’t actually happen in real life), so he plunges it into a bucket of ice water, bandages himself up, and continues to practice. He even destroys his own equipment in fits of rage. He’s hardcore. The soundtrack, around this point of the movie, is often reduced to just one metallic droning note to create tension and unease.
There’s one scene that’s particularly hallucinatory. Nieman is rushing to go to the big band competition in another town. Fletcher, following a five-hour rehearsal-session-from-hell, has just chosen him to be the main drummer for the core ensemble, so it’s his chance to show that he belongs there with the big boys. But unfortunately, Nieman’s bus gets a flat tire, so he runs to the car rental agency mere minutes from its closing time, and he rents a car. When he shows up to the auditorium, covered in sweat, he realizes he forgot his drumsticks at the rental office and must go back to retrieve them. (Why on earth would they not have a fresh pair there?) On the way back, Nieman gets injured in a side collision from a truck that smacks him so badly his car rolls over, and then when the truck driver tries to make sure he’s OK, Nieman just runs off, covered in blood and apparently suffering from head trauma, to go perform some jazz music. Then, when he gets there, everyone just lets him play. Like, “Oh, OK, there’s that Andrew Nieman fellow, covered in blood — what a weird guy! Quite the eccentric! Ah, well…” It’s not so different from a dream in which you’re about to give a presentation for school or work but then realize you’re fully nude.
VI.
The film’s immersive portrayal of Nieman’s emotional experience is why, when the tension fully resolves itself at the end with Nieman kicking ass at the drums and smiling at his evil teacher, most first-time viewers will feel that Nieman has done something truly great. They’ll take the film unambiguously. It is only later on when they might realize that Nieman, by proving himself to Fletcher, has essentially justified Fletcher’s teaching methods, which makes the whole situation “problematic,” if I can trot out that overused college word. And ever since Damien Chazelle has gone on record in saying that the film’s ending is supposed to be dark and that he sees Nieman as headed for a life of drug-addled misery and an early grave, everyone on the internet has been acting as though this interpretation is just perfectly obvious, and anyone who doesn’t share it is a fool. (Unfailing loyalty to authorial intent is part of that whole “media literacy” thing I’ve been writing about).
For instance, here’s a recent post on Twitter:
The user is almost certainly baiting everyone into arguing with him and getting some engagement, and it’s working. He got over 2,500 Twitter users quote-tweeting him to accuse him of being a bozo who doesn’t know how to interpret movies.
But some people agreed, as seen here:
I think that this guy is being facetious but honest. The reason he’s wording his post so aggressively is because he understands “the proper” way to watch the film but doesn’t care for it, so he’s putting his critics on the defensive with some comic exaggeration.
Here’s another post from a YouTube comment section by a guy who was motivated by the film but can now no longer watch it:
Admittedly, people tend to make things up on YouTube comments sections. But if we accept the story as truthful, this guy took the film as a tale of unambiguous triumph, saw it as an inspiration, pushed himself like Nieman did, suffered a breakdown, and then learned the film’s intended meaning the hard way. If only people could have explained to him that he had bad media literacy before it was too late!
I immediately understood what the director was aiming for on first viewing because I grew up in an upper-middle class environment probably not too different from the one the director grew up in, and I was surrounded by these kinds of strivers and hyper-achievers who resemble Andrew Nieman. I found most of them ridiculous. But remembering them made it clear to me that the emotional experience that the film tries to instill in the viewer resembles the same experience they’ve undergone throughout their schoolwork. The film portrays the feeling of sacrificing so much of one’s own life in order to submit fully to the demands of an institution. If you’re one of those kids who leapt up to grasp every single brass ring that the school system dangled above your head, you might eventually come to ask yourself, “Wow, I sure did achieve a lot, but at what cost? When I was young, I used to feel things… did I lose my ability to feel?” and, in fact, these are the questions you may be asking as a middle-aged adult to your costly therapist whose services you can easily afford. The film’s job is to ask essentially the same sorts of questions.
The reason Whiplash did so well with critics is largely due to these class-specific tensions and experiences. The critics who write for big newspapers and magazines also attended the same sorts of high schools that Chazelle did, graduated from the same elite colleges, and understand Nieman very well because his story is relatable to them. The film is compatible with a central tenet of therapy culture (a striver class pastime) which maintains that if we analyze a bunch of great people, we’ll actually find that they’re warped in some way. “Napoleon did all that stuff because he was short.” You get the picture. This kind of reflection resonates with them because they have done everything they’ve been told to do for their entire lives, and so it can function as an emotional release valve — a reassuring “there, there” for those who got close to the top but still failed to meet their own expectations, or perhaps succeeded yet feel empty all the same. When they first saw Nieman “winning” in the end, they immediately recognized the darkness of the situation because their expectations had been calibrated that way.
VII.
The most interesting thing about the striver class experience, however, is that there is no guy like Terence Fletcher. He doesn’t exist. And this is the whole issue with the movie. Today’s young people, particularly in the wealthiest stratum of society, are not aggressively disciplined but rather managed into submission. From birth onward, they don’t go outside on their own accord to play with friends. Instead, their parents put them on “play dates.” As they grow, their social behavior is mediated heavily by school administrators, and the threat of forced isolation is often used to elicit the results those administrators want. Kids are placed into meaningless “extracurricular activities” that slowly disfigure their ability to autonomously organize themselves and discover their own interests. Doctors enter into the picture and prescribe medications designed to massage them into being perfect production machines. Young people are inculcated into a lifestyle of self-monitoring and self-curation. The managerial apparatus has created a system so efficient that it simply doesn’t need external forms of discipline. A guy like Terence Fletcher has become obsolete. Outside of the military and maybe some rural sports teams, he has disappeared from the picture pretty much entirely.
Now, for full disclosure, Chazelle claims that Fletcher was loosely based on a real jazz drumming instructor from his personal life, but I’ll be honest: I simply don’t believe that there’s much resemblance. Fletcher is the most cartoonish character in the entire film — he’s a guy who sabotages his own band’s performance at the end of the movie, something even the meanest little league coach of all time would never do during a game. Fletcher is a grotesque exaggeration of a bygone masculine pedagogy that once thrived in schools but died decades ago. This pedagogy aims to teach the pupil humility in order to build him back up eventually, ultimately making him more confident than he was before, fully aware that he can best the teacher if he so chooses. In 1981, Walter Ong gave such an “agonistic” teaching approach a fair hearing in this book, but even back then he was aware that its days were numbered.
Fletcher, therefore, is best understood not as a real person but instead as the personification of the inner-voice of today’s strivers and high-achievers — the little man who lives in their heads and makes them feel like the slightest imperfection is tantamount to the destruction of the universe. He’s a symbol of the managerial practice of personality-crafting, filtered through a familiar but exaggerated stereotype. In the scene near the end where Nieman tackles Fletcher and wrestles him to the ground, it seems like Nieman’s about to knock him out cold, but he doesn’t even allow himself to get in one good shot. This is appropriate, because you really can’t punch an abstraction in the face. From a filmmaking perspective, Fletcher is a simple and convenient way to create a recognizable source of pressure for Nieman. After all, if he didn’t exist, you’d be wondering where Nieman’s motivation is even coming from. But Fletcher himself doesn’t actually tell us anything about why someone like Nieman would feel such pressure to succeed in the first place. As far as that question goes, the film comes nowhere near close to answering it.
The film’s basic inability to do so is such a pronounced shortcoming that it verges on hypocrisy. When the ending arrives and Nieman finally impresses Fletcher, the critics who caught the ethical paradox will lavish praise on the film, saying things like, “This film will make you feel uncomfortable, but it sure is powerful!” because they’ve personally felt Nieman’s pain and anxiety but don’t truly want to confront what has caused it. They’d prefer to offload it onto a phantasmal archaism like Fletcher — a convenient enemy whose convenience comes from the current-day irrelevance of what he represents. Just like Nieman pulling his punches, the film refrains from saying anything that will create real discomfort. And although I cannot speak for anyone else, I can at least share the thought that disturbs me the most, and it is this: Andrew Nieman is an obsessive, self-abusive, atomized workaholic hell-bent on status for the sake of status, with no taste in the artistic field he’s trying to enter, no interests outside of school, no appreciation for anything that isn’t establishment-approved, no creativity, no ingenuity, no profundity, not even any insights… and a Terence Fletcher isn’t necessary to make him the way he is.
VIII.
Reflecting on Whiplash ten years after its release, it doesn’t surprise me that so many people on the internet have opted to misinterpret it deliberately. I think it is actually more successful as a film if you do that. Literature teachers used to call this sort of interpretation “reading against the grain,” though it’s now frowned upon by their obedient former students who currently populate social media. But I find the urge to misinterpret Whiplash entirely understandable. For plenty of the people who weren’t reared in elite metropolitan areas, Nieman’s obsessiveness might be just as unrecognizable as Fletcher’s pedagogy, and so it’s easy to see them as two equally cartoonish guys in an unrealistic film who found each other and made some magic happen.
Perhaps this interpretation irks so many people because in intellectual life nowadays, the ability to spot a paradox is taken as a form of currency, and there’s something unsettling about someone who’d willingly pass it up. But at what point does paradox serve as a crutch to obscure muddled thinking? At least there’s a kind of consistency to the fairy tale interpretation of the movie. If you don’t think about it too hard, it’s salvageable. Additionally, the commonness of that “wrong” interpretation betrays a profound absence of true mentorship in the educational lives of most young men, which only underscores the misdirection of the film’s choice of antagonist. One guy on Twitter who chose to watch the film against the grain said something like, “I don’t care what the film was trying to say, I always wanted a teacher like Fletcher — someone who could kick my ass into shape, you know?” Instead of getting that, such young men have only been met with the tenth rate version of a system that apparently creates today’s workforce of elite white collar drones in high-real-estate areas yet lacks the means to do so elsewhere — and, let’s face it, fails abysmally at fostering real creativity everywhere.
IX.
One quick final observation. Part of me wishes that Whiplash had shown a bit more knowledge about jazz than it did, because some of its best moments occur in the form of dramatic irony, with its music-related choices functioning as interesting comments on the characters. I’ll give three examples.
I’ve already discussed how strange it is that Andrew Nieman idolizes Buddy Rich, but another interesting tidbit is that Rich was notorious for being an uncommonly abusive asshole to the players in his band. Was this choice of inspiration a comment on Nieman’s attraction to controlling and abusive authority figures, or even a sign of what Nieman might himself become if he succeeded in his career?
Terence Fletcher cites a story about how Charlie Parker was motivated to become great because early in his career, the drummer Jo Jones once thought he was playing badly and threw a cymbal at his head. For Fletcher, it’s a good reason to be a deranged lunatic. But the story is not true. Jones took his cymbal and dropped it on the ground right where Parker was standing to make a “gong” noise, thus cueing him off stage, which caused everyone in the club to laugh at Parker. Did Fletcher misremember the story due to his uniquely deranged disposition?
When Nieman finally sees Fletcher playing at a club, what he’s actually playing is terrible. Bland, insipid, soulless “dinner jazz” with nothing remotely interesting, creative, or even technically sophisticated about it. Was this Chazelle’s way of commenting on how the institutionalized approach to music performance can only result in mediocrity?
The answer to all three questions is: I have no idea. In order for me to trust that these choices were deliberate, the film would have needed to do more to show me that Chazelle understands jazz, and I’m just not confident that he does. However, we can still treat them perhaps as happy accidents. Just like how the film, both happily and accidentally, lends itself so well to resistant readings.
Check out Whiplash, but only if you feel like watching it wrong.
Should make joker 3 with these same casts I won’t see it I won’t know haha
Never seen this one never will