Whiplash: Does using pressure really push students to excellence?

Whiplash, which took home three Oscars last week including an acting nod for JK Simmons, is perhaps the best film of 2014, Birdman and Boyhood notwithstanding. That's because the movie raises so many questions about art and the artist's responsibility to better his talent.

The curious thing about the movie is that it reaches for its aim without a hint of romance. Every moment is leached of any extraneous information so that what we get is a bare-bones version of the artistic apocalypse. The movie was especially disturbing to me because I am a test prep trainer and I could not help putting myself in Fletcher's shoes. Fletcher, played by Simmons, is the music teacher who takes the tyro drummer Andrew (Miles Teller) to hell and back. Andrew, in the movie's last scene which is burnt into every viewer's mind, seems happy to make the journey through systematic abuse.

My relationship with my students is absolutely opposite to what Fletcher shares with Andrew in Whiplash. I have no compunction in declaring that I do not believe in the slightest coercion. This can, to be sure, lead to situations where the students are tempted to get the better of me in class, but that is an eventuality I am ok with handling. The last thing I want is for the students to feel pressure or fear when they enter my classroom.

However, I would be simplifying matters if I did not concede that the trainer-student relationship is by its nature malleable so that there is always a steady difference between what one is trying to achieve and what ultimately transpires in the classroom. Whiplash director Damien Chazelle is attuned to such sleights of the teaching process, which is why even the supposedly evil Fletcher is shown justifying his methods to himself.

I fall decidedly at the other end of the spectrum. I share a great rapport with my students - at least I think I do. My classes are - I am fairly certain of this - conversation jamborees where students and teacher are in remarkable affinity. This, I believe, is not limited to the English prep I dish out for CAT, SAT, GRE or GMAT but encompasses a steady determination on my part to share a real connection with my students. 

I had always thought of the jazz ecosystem as harbouring a special beauty that is in consonant with the power of music. Whiplash disabused me of such notions. Thank God the film was not about the teaching of English, else I would not know what to make of its sheer force. I look upon my work in the classroom as an art form that should improve the lives of my students. When I discuss, say, a reading comprehension passage culled from Charles Dickens' wonderful essay, Night Walks ("I wonder that the great master who knew everything, when he called sleep the death of each day's life, did not call dreams the insanity of each day's sanity") I believe I am receiving blessed communion along with my students. The class gets into a huddle as teacher and student become one precious entity partaking of the riches of the written word. 

To then see a movie set in the art ecosystem yet one so completely stripped of transcendence was akin to a slap in the face. Maybe the transcendence Whiplash aimed for was one of success. (Andrew tells his girlfriend on the day he dumps her that he wants to be one of the greats.) But to me greatness achieved at the expense of humanity is no greatness at all. I know that is a rather controversial, not to mention naïve, assertion since a number of great artists have been monsters in their private lives. But who is to say that a devotion to art is more important than anything else? If art emerges from a rotten part of us, is it still art?

I wish Chazelle made a sequel and offered us a bird's eye view of Andrew's success. The poor boy deserves it. But I also want to see Fletcher crushed, a wish that was not granted in the film. I want to tell myself that Andrew's success would be Fletcher's ultimate defeat but I know that the film does not tell us so in certain terms. This lack of closure makes me bloody angry.

Meanwhile, I happily belong to a system where the kind of abuse Fletcher subjects Andrew to seems otherworldly. One time, I was rather tough on a student when she came late to the class. She complained and I was told not to mind the latecomers because "we are not a school, we provide a service and they are our customers". Where I come from, it is the teacher who is emasculated.