This is a well-written piece as usual but saying the success of this film has to do with upper middle class striving is just not the full picture. That's where it comes from. But the film's success has to do with it being a treatment of the important, mostly-unspoken, pan-American principle of the last half-century or so that you won't be great until you push yourself past the breaking point. That everyone is great, potentially, but some of us have to have that greatness brought out of us, at cost. That's why the ending was excellent on its terms, because he still lets Nieman ascend to greatness in spite of all the perversity and outrageous behavior by Fletcher. It's easy to see this as the achievement of the American Dream itself. Same idea with him fleeing the car wreck — what an opportunity, it just proves nothing will ever stop him. I personally liked these flights of fancy because they made it clear this was about a deep mythic American thing and had not too much to do with jazz, which was at least something the director knew well and could expound on, despite your misgivings.
I'll add that while I took jazz in various levels of education and never experienced anyone abusive to that degree, that's an archetype that matches my experience. One jazz director actually, who was basically a good guy but he was a very dominating personality like Fletcher and could make people cry. And I have no doubt there are a lot of guys like him in the institutionalized jazz world. Military discipline in service of something as loose as jazz is just an ingrained irony available to those like Chazelle who want to use it, which is what I felt he was doing.
The funny thing is that I wouldn't say I'm a fan of this movie, but even determining whether I like it or not is a classbound question, which returns me to the original reason I responded: I don't think of the ethos of this movie as mid-upper class but more like lower class, like grind culture. So it's hard for me to say whether I actually like it because I don't want to sound like either a naive child or a crook. (Similar to you, I just found much of it too phony.) The part about greatness through maximum adversity is something that resonated with me and I think virtually every American up to about Zoomers.
Good points. I tried to be careful to say that the film's critical success comes from an UMC experience, but its popular success among the fans probably comes more from the willingness to "misinterpret" what the film is doing, willfully or otherwise. If I had to guess -- and bear in mind I've done like no real research, so it's possible I'm way off -- but I'd guess the UMCs got the filmmaker's point better overall, i.e. as a statement about the morally problematic nature of striving to absurd lengths, while middle class people were more likely to see it as a rather straightforward story about grinding and succeeding. Maybe Asians uniformly interpreted it the second way, I'm sure analyzing crowd reactions race by race would yield some interesting findings.
Beyond that, though, I think the film also came out at a time in which cultural elites really started re-appraising the idea of killing yourself for your art, your craft, etc. For instance, a year later, that movie Concussion came out, and that's all about how problematic football and all these other sports that cause head trauma are. Huge difference between that movie and like Any Given Sunday, let alone something like Rudy. You know?
Another example: I personally remember being a pro wrestling fan during the 2000s, and virtually everyone who traded tapes and posted on forums all bought into this romanticized idea that if you're a true wrestler you'll just wear your body down and slowly kill yourself because of your dedication to the craft, which was really not at all the point during wrestling's heyday in the territory system. But then the Chris Benoit situation happened, and people have slowly started re-assessing that decadent romantic mentality they once had, listening more to guys like Bret Hart who encourages safety and longevity.
So it looks to me like the timing of Whiplash was very good for interpreting the film however you want. Since then, one's attitude towards "grindset" has probably become more of a class marker than it was then, but I think the process was already underway. But I'm still standing behind my view that the film has a muddled message, relying on yesterday's bogeyman to communicate a kind of striver exhaustion that comes from another place entirely. I think Charles Murray's claim that wealthy elites "don't preach what they practice" is appropriate here, and this film is just one minor example of that broader problem.
And yes, I don't think it's a very good movie, which encourages me all the more to experiment with analyzing it this way.
This is a well-written piece as usual but saying the success of this film has to do with upper middle class striving is just not the full picture. That's where it comes from. But the film's success has to do with it being a treatment of the important, mostly-unspoken, pan-American principle of the last half-century or so that you won't be great until you push yourself past the breaking point. That everyone is great, potentially, but some of us have to have that greatness brought out of us, at cost. That's why the ending was excellent on its terms, because he still lets Nieman ascend to greatness in spite of all the perversity and outrageous behavior by Fletcher. It's easy to see this as the achievement of the American Dream itself. Same idea with him fleeing the car wreck — what an opportunity, it just proves nothing will ever stop him. I personally liked these flights of fancy because they made it clear this was about a deep mythic American thing and had not too much to do with jazz, which was at least something the director knew well and could expound on, despite your misgivings.
I'll add that while I took jazz in various levels of education and never experienced anyone abusive to that degree, that's an archetype that matches my experience. One jazz director actually, who was basically a good guy but he was a very dominating personality like Fletcher and could make people cry. And I have no doubt there are a lot of guys like him in the institutionalized jazz world. Military discipline in service of something as loose as jazz is just an ingrained irony available to those like Chazelle who want to use it, which is what I felt he was doing.
The funny thing is that I wouldn't say I'm a fan of this movie, but even determining whether I like it or not is a classbound question, which returns me to the original reason I responded: I don't think of the ethos of this movie as mid-upper class but more like lower class, like grind culture. So it's hard for me to say whether I actually like it because I don't want to sound like either a naive child or a crook. (Similar to you, I just found much of it too phony.) The part about greatness through maximum adversity is something that resonated with me and I think virtually every American up to about Zoomers.
Good points. I tried to be careful to say that the film's critical success comes from an UMC experience, but its popular success among the fans probably comes more from the willingness to "misinterpret" what the film is doing, willfully or otherwise. If I had to guess -- and bear in mind I've done like no real research, so it's possible I'm way off -- but I'd guess the UMCs got the filmmaker's point better overall, i.e. as a statement about the morally problematic nature of striving to absurd lengths, while middle class people were more likely to see it as a rather straightforward story about grinding and succeeding. Maybe Asians uniformly interpreted it the second way, I'm sure analyzing crowd reactions race by race would yield some interesting findings.
Beyond that, though, I think the film also came out at a time in which cultural elites really started re-appraising the idea of killing yourself for your art, your craft, etc. For instance, a year later, that movie Concussion came out, and that's all about how problematic football and all these other sports that cause head trauma are. Huge difference between that movie and like Any Given Sunday, let alone something like Rudy. You know?
Another example: I personally remember being a pro wrestling fan during the 2000s, and virtually everyone who traded tapes and posted on forums all bought into this romanticized idea that if you're a true wrestler you'll just wear your body down and slowly kill yourself because of your dedication to the craft, which was really not at all the point during wrestling's heyday in the territory system. But then the Chris Benoit situation happened, and people have slowly started re-assessing that decadent romantic mentality they once had, listening more to guys like Bret Hart who encourages safety and longevity.
So it looks to me like the timing of Whiplash was very good for interpreting the film however you want. Since then, one's attitude towards "grindset" has probably become more of a class marker than it was then, but I think the process was already underway. But I'm still standing behind my view that the film has a muddled message, relying on yesterday's bogeyman to communicate a kind of striver exhaustion that comes from another place entirely. I think Charles Murray's claim that wealthy elites "don't preach what they practice" is appropriate here, and this film is just one minor example of that broader problem.
And yes, I don't think it's a very good movie, which encourages me all the more to experiment with analyzing it this way.