Shared madness: thoughts on Whiplash as a brilliant non-inspirational film

As longtime readers will know, I often make shrieky noises about the tendency to watch films in conditions that are not optimal for film-watching: on small laptops or cellphone screens – and worse, in lighted settings with distractions all around. Of course, some types of viewing experiences are more easily ruined than others. As the long, hypnotic final sequence of Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash (a concert performance that begins with deep-rooted antagonism between two men but then turns into a manic collaboration, even a jugalbandi) unfolded, I was thinking: the ONLY way to watch this scene is in a darkened hall, with eyes and ears fixed on the screen from start to finish.

Okay, I’ll amend that a bit: it doesn’t have to be in a theatre, on a very large screen; it can be on a good-sized TV at home. But the room should be dark, cellphone off, no idiot whispering into your ear or tossing popcorn at your head from the seat behind, etc. Failing this, you lose most of the scene’s power, and all of the film’s point. **

“Keep quiet and pay attention,” this movie seems to be telling its viewers anyway, from the very opening scene where a young jazz student practicing on drums alone at night has his first encounter with an overbearing conductor-teacher. Whiplash’s most intense scenes – set in music rooms where training sessions turn into a battle for the soul, with the abusive Fletcher as a version of Mephistopheles, offering 19-year-old Andrew a glimpse of immortality (defined here as the opportunity to be an all-time great like Charlie Parker) – are claustrophobia-inducing in ways that make even Birdman seem like it was shot in a sunny lawn.

But this is what I thought most intriguing about Chazelle’s film: though its story and narrative arc resembles that of the inspirational, will-to-win, triumph-of-the-underdog tale (a category that is crowded with sports movies as well as other subgenres, such as stories about people overcoming physical disabilities – even the Stephen Hawking biopic The Theory of Everything could fit here), I don’t think Whiplash is essentially any of those things. I didn’t see this as a film that offers generalised lessons about life or art or talent or hard work. I saw it as a razor-focused story about two very specific people in a very specific situation, one of whom serves as a sort of distorting mirror for the other (and eventually pulls him across to the mirror’s other side); a one-point study of obsession, with no larger “message” about whether such obsession is Good or Bad.

So I was surprised to hear that there has been criticism based on the idea that the film endorses violent, cruel teaching as a way of getting students to realise their potential. I didn’t see it that way (and I think I’m in a fair position to judge: I wouldn’t myself have lasted more than an hour in any sort of class with a Fletcher-like teacher, and I would be hyper-sensitive to any film that appeared to be celebrating his methods. My fingers ached so much just from watching Andrew’s labours that I thought I wouldn’t be able to type for a week. Ringo Starr’s “Ah gaat blisters ahn mah fingers!” sounds like a toddler’s wail compared to some of the stuff this young man goes through).

Yes, there is some seemingly inspirational-philosophical dialogue about Charlie Parker’s transformation into “Bird” – with Parker being used as a symbol of someone who was pushed into legend terrain by a teacher who could smell the real potential in him. But the person telling that story is a man with a ferocious need to be a legend-maker himself. And the argument that the film approves of Fletcher’s methods falls through pretty quickly if you consider the key plot point that one of his earlier students (someone whom he himself tearfully describes as a real achiever) killed himself because of the strain, and that Fletcher – quite reasonably – ends up losing his job because of the physical and emotional violence he directs at students. (When the film was over, I joked that this might well hasten the demise of classical jazz – how many youngsters would voluntarily pursue it as a career after watching this?)

So what is this film really? Maybe it's just a love-hate-love story between two people who are surprisingly alike in many ways, despite the power equations that encourage us to see one as the bully and the other as the victim. The camera, often standing in for Andrew and the other students, regards Fletcher with dread from the start. Physically distinctive to begin with, and photographed to seem even more imposing, he is so often its centre of awed attention, easily picked out even when he is doing nothing more than gently playing the piano in a corner of a dimly lit nightclub. The comparisons with Svengali are obvious, and more than once I was reminded of the Powell-Pressburger classic The Red Shoes (the scene where Fletcher apparently shows a vulnerable side while talking about his recently deceased student reminded me of the barely controlled hysteria of Lermontov while making his announcement at the end of The Red Shoes). That Fletcher is the one in control, a puppetmaster, is also emphasised by his conducting gestures; you can almost see the strings reaching from his hands to the arms and fingers of his students.

Given the overwhelming personality of this man, it’s easy to miss that Andrew himself is much more than just a victim or a foil. Sure, he’s a likably awkward and vulnerable young man in some obvious ways (at age 19 he still watches films with his dad, he finds it hard to sustain eye contact with people, he has chosen an artistic calling), but he also has a hard edge that we see glimpses of quite early in the film; in the smug little smiles that briefly spread across his face when someone else’s misfortune allows things to go his way, or the swiftness with which he converts defence into offence during a dinnertime altercation with acquaintances who are doing well in more glamorous, “macho” fields like football. As the story progresses, his almost frightening competitive streak comes into clearer relief. And maybe this is being presented as something to admire; but the context also makes it clear that there are very, very few people like that – which in turn means that this film can hardly serve as an inspiration-manual for most people.

Inspirational movies aren’t usually this dark and soaked in despair anyway; they don’t make triumph seem SO hard and ugly that you can’t be sure whether it counts as any sort of triumph at all. And even when they unflinchingly chronicle a very tough struggle, they tend to finish on a clear-cut note of affirmation, with cheering audiences and friends, and a sense that having negotiated the worst of Mordor, the story can now return to where it began, to the warmth of the Shire. They don’t close with a shot where a man who has been a sadistic villain through most of the film smiles approvingly at the hero, and the hero smiles back, and we see that he has found self-worth and affirmation in that moment, and that the two men are now of one mind and one heart, united by a shared obsession. (A Frodo does temporarily become a Sauron, but the moment passes and he is saved. Not here.)

In other words, that last sequence is one of the most exhilarating things I have seen in a movie hall in a long time – but it is not exhilarating in the particular way that a cheerier movie in this genre would be. Instead it is spellbinding because we see a world and everything in it being reduced to an echo chamber; everything else has been stripped away, and in the end there are only these two people performing this madman’s duet for themselves. (We don’t even get any reaction shots of the audience applauding – a standard trope of this kind of scene – or the other musicians giving so much as an approving nod. There is a passage near the end where the camera swish-pans back and forth between Andrew and Fletcher with such speed that what lies between them – the rest of the orchestra – is completely blurred out.)

Basically, this is a magnificent Folie à deux. At the end Andrew finally matches Fletcher’s “tempo”, but the effect is a little similar to that of the Grim Reaper’s followers falling in line behind him for the Dance of Death in the last shot of The Seventh Seal. I wouldn’t be surprised if both Fletcher and Andrew, having reached this grand culmination, went and stuck sharpened drumsticks through their throats in their respective homes later that night. Where else is there to go?

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** Speaking of distractions: DT Cinemas in Saket really must do something about their acoustics. For a while – a short while, mercifully – during the early scenes in Whiplash, we could hear a song sequence from Badlapur, playing in a nearby hall. This sort of thing has happened before at the same venue