Whiplash: Move Over 50 Shades of Grey

Everything about the movie, “Whiplash,” including its title, suggests to me that its main supporting character, Terrence Fletcher (played by J.K. Simmons, who won Oscar for best supporting actor) should be dressed throughout the flick in black leather and chains, jackboots and crotch-less chaps. There’s a name for this genre, but it’s one that Hollywood doesn’t typically honor on Oscar night. 

The positive critical response to this appalling movie is bewildering. I have seen a lot of forgettable movies; this one is unforgettably bad. I mean that—the more I think about it, the more I dislike it, the more it arouses my hostility toward its pretense, toward the smug way it assumes to have achieved a statement—about what it takes to be excellent in a demanding field; about the value of being excellent, per se, above all other values associated with the effort to excel—that the story doesn’t support, a story that is dominated and obscured in any case by the repellent figure at its center. 

It is ostensibly a story about an aspiring jazz drummer (Andrew Neyman, played by Miles Teller) who is accepted into an elite music conservatory and falls under the tutelage of one of those mercilessly demanding mentors who pushes you beyond what you think you can do because of (we are supposed to assume) his great love and respect for the elite field you are entering. It’s a stereotype, but it’s one that repays revisiting for a lot of reasons—because the relationship between mentor and student is one that is, in some form, almost universally experienced; because the relationship is one that is almost always fraught, a power struggle very often invoking courage, determination and love; and because it is a vehicle for re-telling what is perhaps the most ennobling of human stories, the story of a character who achieves excellence. Consider a film, “Bull Durham,” very far removed in content and intent from Whiplash, but one that is also essentially about a mentor-student relationship; what makes it work—and what makes it, despite its antic humor, a serious movie—is the unashamed love the movie and its characters evince toward the art form that is the movie’s subject, the art of baseball.

It is just this—any real demonstrated love or passion for music, jazz, jazz musicians, jazz clubs, the history of jazz, the entire ethos of jazz that is for some people (I’m not one of them) a way of life —that is missing from Whiplash. On Andrew’s part his passion for the music is suggested in a few cut-away shots of him as a little boy at a drum set, and by gazing dreamily at his posters of Buddy Rich (I am no kind of aficionado of jazz—at all—but even I knew enough to doubt that Buddy Rich is any kind of real inspiration; I seem to recall he got famous briefly in the 60s or early 70s by appearing on the Ed Sullivan show as a guy who could hit the drums really fast). But Fletcher himself appears to be positively bored by the music; in the first scene where he appears to rehearse his elite band he walks to the conductor’s stand, reads a sheet of music to himself and mutters, “Cute.” He’s bored, it seems, by everything except his own cruelty, which really fires him up. Fletcher humiliates Andrew and his other student musicians with ethnic slurs, taunts about their sexual orientation, and aspersions on the size and functionality of their genitals.  

I wouldn’t begrudge J.K. Simmons his Oscar—it could be that the strength of his performance so outshines that of the others that it unbalances the entire story, drawing all the attention to Fletcher (and his wretchedness). But quite apart from Fletcher, the story is poorly told, weakly supported, or just plain not credible in so many places. The love interest: Andrew scuttles a relationship with a sweet, unpretentious girl before it has begun (yes, that’s the point, it’s supposed to demonstrate Andrew’s single-minded dedication to being the best drummer he can be—but the problem is that it’s scuttled before the viewer has seen enough to even care about the relationship). The girl’s intelligent, incredulous retort sounds like snarky subterfuge from a late-hired editor aimed at the director, or the primary screen writer, or whoever it was that was responsible for this silly, transparent set-up. “What’s wrong with you?” she hurls at him before stalking off.

There’s a curious scene somewhere in the middle of the movie of a dinner table conversation in which we are meant to see that Andrew’s talents are not appreciated by others than his father. But who are these people who show up with Andrew and Dad at the dinner table? Family? Friends? Neighbors? Oh, well, no matter, the scene is over quickly and they don’t show up again. 

Fletcher evinces no convincing feeling for the music, but he does care about winning competitions and about his reputation. There is a bar scene dialogue between Andrew and Fletcher after Andrew has testified to authorities about Fletcher’s abuse, resulting in the teacher being canned (we are supposed to believe that Fletcher isn’t aware that it is Andrew who betrayed him, and we are supposed to be surprised later when we learn that he was aware, but in fact this felt intuitively unbelievable when I watched it)—in this bar scene Fletcher announces his doctrine of Achievement Uber Alles. He bases it on a story about Charlie Parker being terrorized by a mentor. (This story is disputed by Richard Brody in his New Yorker review of Whiplash; Brody cites Stanley Crouch’s biography of Parker for a very different version). Whether the story is apocryphal or not, the doctrine (the greatest tragedy would be not to have pushed, by any means necessary, Charlie Parker to become Charlie Parker) is transparent bullshit; or, rather, what is bullshit is the tone of moral superiority in which it is announced and the implicit assumption that Fletcher’s notion is unassailable, unquestionable. In fact, it is I think a fairly serviceable definition of fascism. (Not at all incidentally, Bull Durham, mentioned above, manages to assert the dignity of not achieving elite status, of being a dedicated journeyman in the middle grades or minor leagues of a difficult meritocracy. Fletcher, I imagine, would have only contempt for this assertion, although I think Crash Davis could probably beat him up in a bar fight.)

This movie’s insistent awfulness makes me wonder what in the world its creator might have been thinking. And in fact there is a story buried in this movie, one that might have been meant to be told. For there is, I believe, an idea in the popular imagination (that is, in the minds of people like me who may like jazz when they hear it, but not really be wise in any sense to what it is about or how it gets made). This idea is a product, in part, of the art of improvisation, which I take to be a singular stroke of genius of jazz music; but it is probably also a result of some stories, apocryphal or not, that get told about how certain jazz greats seemed to take to their instruments without even trying. The idea is this—that jazz music does not require practice, diligence, hard work, sweat, tears or blood on their instruments; that jazz musicians just do their thing because they were born with that “jazz thing” that the rest of us were born without. 

It is an idea that certainly needs a well-made movie to kick to the curb, violently if necessary. But that story would have required the movie and its characters to really engage with the music, to show us—so, how do jazz musicians learn to do that magical thing they do? 

What’s left instead is a story not about Andrew Neyman, aspiring drummer, but about Terrence Fletcher, sadist and fascist with a personality disorder. As I say, there is a name for this genre, every major motif of which “Whiplash” manages to score—the waif-like hero who wanders into the lair of a cruel, dominating figure; the submission of the waif to punishment and humiliation; the effort by the waif to escape but his eventual return for more abuse; and the ultimate scene (this is supposed to offer catharsis) when the submissive waif upends the dominant figure. Aficionados will recognize this last move as “topping from the bottom” and the genre they love and adore as—move over Fifty Shades of Grey—S&M.