Knock, Knock, Neo. The Matrix Has You...

            Performance reviews are never really enjoyable; in the teaching biz they can be downright harrowing. Normally, someone in a position of authority sits in on your class. You give them a lesson plan ahead of time and then they judge you based upon what you do in one class on one day. Moreover, as one of my colleagues like to say, teaching an English class is kinda like playing jazz: it involves a lot of improvisation, a lot of riffing off the vibe thrown out by your class mates. Some days, the students and I, we’re groovin’ to same vibe; other days…well, we’re havin’ creative differences. So how can one person really judge what I do by sitting in one day, watching us, messin’ up our dynamic? Well…they can’t. 

I had some really bad experiences with performance reviews when I taught high school. The administrators saw what they wanted to see, and they wanted to see that I was bad at my job. Why? Simply put: I didn’t fit in. Was I bad? Well, I wasn’t good: I was a first year teacher. While I’m still no “master teacher,” I’m a lot better and I think I’ll continue to improve.

Observations and performance reviews at my current job have been an entirely positive experience. Still, I will never quite get over the trauma of a politicized version of the process that surpassed the paranoid fantasies of my most nightmarish visions of “observation.” —They! Are! Watching!— So, even as I accept that we need some quality control, at some level I will always consider the corporate performance review as just another manifestation of post-modern bullshit, another example of what Jean Baudrillard calls “simulacra.”

Who is Jean Baudrillard?  What are simulacra? Funny you should ask that, because Baudrillard’s work was at the center of a class that I taught just last week, a lesson that was the subject of…an observation!

You Haven’t Seen The Graduate?!

            One of my coworkers likes to tease me about my reaction when she has not seen a film I deem iconic. You haven't seen Miller's Crossing?! But these days I use one of her favs, The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman’s first notable appearance in our mass culture, as the central text of my pre-collegiate, developmental writing course. I ask students to complete a number of descriptive exercises leading to a descriptive essay. I used to ask the students to compose an analysis of the role of one image in the film, but I’m scaling back, allowing them to be a bit more general. I’ve learned that developmental writers just need to put sentences together, and yet I can’t help wonder whether my students are able to identify with Ben.

Young people today are just so…odd. You wonder how they achieve any complex psychological understanding given that they’re perpetually hooked into their newfangled texty machines. I know, I know: every generation finds a certain, sick comfort in denigrate the next. Kids these days! But, seriously, do these ‘Millennials’ ever even cease enjoying commodities long enough to realize that they’re unsatisfied by them? I wonder. And, yet, they still seem to identify with Ben...at least for the moments during class when I make them put away their goddamn phones. Don't make me take that phone away!

But who am I to judge? I hate to admit it, but I didn't see Mike Nichols’ classic until serving as a graduate teaching assistant for film courses at Washington University. In my defense, our access to media was far more limited in the dark ages of the late 20^th century.  Back in my day, when you subscribed to HBO, you got exactly one (1) channel. Streaming? Nope. Netflix? Nope. Blockbuster had some older films, but if they weren’t in stock, you were S.O.L. Of course, some ghetto theatres that played older films (remember? they used to charge a buck). In the good ol’e days you had to actively seek out media, and I guess The Graduate never made it to the top of my list.

Hal B, AP, & CT

Then I went to college: my roomie, Hal B., and I didn’t even have a television in our dorm room freshman year. And cable wasn’t even available in the on-campus apartments that we lived in sophomore year. That year Hal B. and G-Regulator, J-Money, CT, and I got our hands on a VCR and amassed enough tapes to establish a satisfying rotation. We self-medicated, ate microwave burritos or mac-and-cheese out-of-the-box, and watched Coming to America, Star Wars, Up in Smoke, Dazed and Confused, and Fasttimes at Ridgemont High over and over and over again. 

Hal B, AP, CT, G-Regulator, J-Muny

I know that I remember those times as happier for me than they were…but that’s how I remember them through the lens of nostalgia. We smoked and drank home-brewed beer and listened to new grunge albums and went to parties and concerts.  I don’t know…maybe I wasn’t happy, but I felt alive and young. That’s for sure. Or maybe I was happy and I just didn’t know it. And then junior and senior year went pretty much the same way and then I graduated…with ‘high honors’ and rather vague plans about going to graduate school….

But that could wait.  I was going to take a year off to travel.  I had already travelled quite a bit, but I wanted to hunker down in this great place in the Spanish Basque country, this little jet-setting jewel of a town the likes of which one only finds in Latinate regions: San Sebastian.  And it was more of the same there.  Parties and shenanigans and, for the first time really for me, girls. Parties and girls. That’s really all I was really interested in when I was 22 and 23. I lived to revel. Can you blame me? Hey, at least I read a lot during the day (on the beach…while drinking beer and smoking). Okay: so, admittedly, I had issues. And I had limited funds.  So, ultimate I had to cut my “year” of travel short…by eight months…and I did the one thing that was never in my post-collegiate playbook: I moved back in with my parents.

I spent weeks lying around depressed, just drinking beer.  And then I got a job…and stayed depressed…and kept drinking beer. I won’t bore you with the details, but moving back home is productive in only one capacity: it compels young people to move forward in life, to mature, to make some feeble steps toward adulthood.  Eventually I paid off my debts, earned a pretty sweet deal at Wash U, and moved into my very own apartment.

And little did I know that along the way I had imitated art, had spent a Benjamin Braddock-like summer coming to terms with my own lack of clarity for my own life, had (contrary to every thought running through my pea-brain) experienced the grand irony of joining with the mass of human experience in my abject post-adolescent feelings of isolation and alienation, of the absence of any option in life that seemed ‘mine.’ Imagine my amazement when, among my first teaching assignments, I first laid eyes on Nichols’ film.

Not only does The Graduate narrate the story of coming to terms with the end of one’s adolescence – I’ve done that well enough right here. Rather, the film perfectly figures – in extensive use of motif and metaphor – the fundamental alienation of integration with our adult world as well as the emptiness of maturation. That is, there really is no answer for the loss of one’s youth other than to accept that it’s just gone. From the opening credits to the closing shots of the film, The Graduate is a seamless and focused expression of the melancholy inherent in getting older. And, yet, it’s funny.  Really, really funny.

The film opens with a close-up of Ben’s characteristically catatonic gaze as he waits to deplane at LAX. And from that moment on, I could write a paragraph or two about nearly every shot in the film. The film is not ‘perfect’ in its artistry, but even its imperfections lend the film a charm and awkwardness characteristic of its protagonist, and, more importantly, of its viewer.  For I suppose that the very reason that this film is so important to myself and others is that each image of Benjamin is like an uncanny mirror into the past – Benjamin is the viewer.

As the credits roll, Simon & Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence” begins to play. Ben, wearing a dark suit, is pulled along on an airport people-mover. Framed to right of the screen, he does not walk forward, as do a handful of blurry figures in the foreground.  The credits appear in front of the white, cinder-block wall that forms the background on the left of the frame. 

Toward the end of the credits, the scene cuts to a piece of black luggage moving along a conveyor belt; of course the luggage is also framed to right of the screen and also in front of a white wall over which appear credits. And if the visual metaphor has not sufficiently impressed itself upon the viewer a sign reading “Do they match?” appears in the foreground.  Of course, Ben retrieves this piece of luggage at the end of the shot. So, before we’ve had a word of dialogue, Nichols has effectively established the fundamental reluctance and lack of agency with which Ben approaches his future.

As “Sounds of Silence” ends, a shot of Ben leaving the airport dissolves to a rather gloomy close-up of our protagonist, gloomy in both mood and outward appearance. The details of the shot set-up are important. The high-contrast lighting leaves pools of light along one side of Ben’s face.  His skin wears a sheen of perspiration, and his eyes gaze off into a nothingness below the plane of the shot. A large aquarium forms the entire background of the shot, lending the impression that Ben’s head is actually under water. A small harpoon-wielding scuba diver decorates the aquarium’s habitat. The only sound we hear is that of the aquarium’s filter bubbling. Ben himself sports neatly parted hair and a shirt and tie drawn to. Since he is lying back in bed, the tie further constricts his neck. Many other details of the ensuing shot work to underscore Ben’s general apprehension to live a life of expectations laid out for him by his parents, emblems of post-WWII parenthood.  But the most intriguing element of this opening shot is how perfectly it establishes the central motif of the film: water.  In what follows, I doubt very much that I’ll say anything new. In fact, let's just call my analysis plagiarism with a purpose: I just want to compel you to feel the value of this film, to watch it, or to watch it again, and to understand just how special a film it is. It would be a shame to let such a treasure drown in the over-abundance of media available to us in this age. So, go on and click "read more"...

Davidson's Wholesale Retraction

            Today at school one of my Students came by my Office, which is pretty darn Odd considering that it’s only Week Three. The young Woman strutted in like she owned the Place: “So, word on the street is that you love Mitt Romney.” Turns out that she’s pretty Sharp and knows how to use Google and read my previous Blog entry.  Well, at least she’s reading some high quality Prose in her spare Time. 

Anyhow, the whole Experience got me thinking. Should I, as a molder of youngish Minds, publically express political Opinions?  Maybe not.  I do like Students to work through their Ideas for themselves, and Lord knows I held some knuckleheaded Beliefs in my early 20s, beliefs that I would still hold had some Adult tried to convince me that I was Wrong.

In addition, I began to think that I might be hurting some of my Conservative Friend’s feelings.  Yeah, crazy: I have some conservative Friends, a fact more shocking than that I have conservative Family…coz you know what they say about picking Friends and Family.  And, of course, my Intention had been anything but to Offend.  I merely wanted to promote the Notion that ultimately a Liberal could consider Mitt Romney just as undesirable a President as Newt Gingrich.  I was attempting to lend Peace to the Fringe of the GOP base. Still, in comparing the later to Satan and the former to Jeffrey Dahmer, I may have jumped the shark so to speak.  As a result, I offer the following Retraction:

Firstly, Newt Gingrich is not Satan; he is clearly a Mortal Man no better than the Least among us.  I mean one would have to be quite Mortal in order to pursue Impeachment of President Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky Affair whilst as the same time cheating on one’s second Wife with one’s third Wife.  But of course, the prosecution of President Clinton had nothing at all to do with sexual mores or appealing to values voters: Gingrich came after Clinton because he lied to a Federal Investigator, Kenneth Starr. Does anyone know why Starr was Investigating the President's personal Life?  Hmm...  Anyway, lying to a Special Prosecutor is pretty bad.  Clinton had said that he didn’t have Sex with Lewinsky.  But he kinda didn't have sex with Lewinsky; I mean, Sex involves placing one’s…  Well you get the point.  But still, that Impeachment had Nothing at all to do with Sex.  Just like calling Barack Obama the "Entertainer in Chief" or the "Food Stamp President" and offering to visit the NAACP to offer them Jobs instead of Food Stamps has nothing to do with Race.  Nothing at all…

Secondly, Mitt Romney is not only NOT a serial Killer: he’s not even a more mundane form of Sociopath.  He believes in Stuff.  You know, like stuff with Values and Principles and stuff.  In fact, he’s so wrapped up in Values that he donated more Money to his Religion – the Mormon Church – than he paid in Taxes last year…and that’s not a joke about Mitt not paying his fair share.  Mitt Romney gave more than one million dollars to the Mormon Church last year. You see: he has Values.  Good old fashion Christian Values.  You know, like believing the Second Coming has already happened…here in America.  You see Joseph Smith found these gold tablets and...well…never mind.  Anyhow, the Mormons believe in good old fashion values, Paternalistic Values, a Father centered family…if you know what I mean.  And some of those Fathers – most of which have only one Wife despite what you’ve heard – get to become Church Elders.  And they even allowed African Americans to serve as Elders as far back as the Dawn of the Civil Rights Movement…way back in 1978. And these Elders are great men: some of them have even heard of Feminism. And then they’ve some really core American beliefs involving Missionary work and Alcohol and Caffeine and...Underwear….  So, Mitt is clearly no Sociopath: he’s a Man of good old fashioned American Mormon Values.

In sum, I apologize to my Students, my Friends of all Parties and Factions, my Family, and, most of all, the Candidates themselves.  I should not have besmirched your Honor nor descended into Name-Calling.  I’m very sorry. I only wish the Candidates could be so Contrite.  Did you hear that Newt did not concede Florida? did not call Mitt to congratulate him on his Victory? in fact that he did just about everything he could to aver that he was in the Race until the Bitter End?  Can you say third party bid, Newt?  This is gonna be great!