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“Not quite my tempo. There we go. One, two, three, four, one — not my fucking tempo!” This infamous line from Damien Chazelle’s 2014 psychological drama “Whiplash” encapsulates the film’s main themes of success and abuse, as well as my general feelings on the film itself trying to tackle those themes.
The film’s premise is rather simple: up-and-coming drummer Andrew Neiman wants to excel in the world of jazz drumming, motivated by both his desire to be like Buddy Rich and to escape his family’s mediocrity. Neiman studies at the fictional Shaffer Conservatory, where one day he meets the infamous Terence Fletcher. Neiman finds himself in Fletcher’s class, but the excitement of being under such a legendary teacher is immediately burned away; Terence Fletcher is less the jazz teacher most would love to have and more a terrifying parody of Sergeant Hartmann from “Full Metal Jacket,” physically and verbally abusive, dropping any and every kind of spoken bomb imaginable on his students whenever there is a slight slip-up from his inhuman standards. In this environment, the class becomes less a jazz ensemble of innovation, improvisation and deviance from the script and more of a machine of rigid conformity where the members compete to toss out whoever is next to them so they can “shine.”
Despite this, Fletcher’s methods seem to deliver that “shine” for the judges, as he is a constant award winner. Neiman begins to draw himself into an insane cycle as he degrades himself more and more into becoming Fletcher’s “perfect” drummer, a machine that only follows what the book says, without any spirit or soul of jazz. Some midway drama does throw this twisted arrangement off, but in the end, the two reunite as Fletcher unleashes his jazz machine — a thoroughly obsessed, rigid, soulless automaton that plays “Whiplash” and “Caravan” perfectly.
Is “Whiplash” a good film? In aesthetics, writing and pacing, the movie is highly engaging. Is it a good movie for what it strives to do? Definitely not. There are several glaring problems with its representation of jazz and its tolerance of abuse if it leads to high performance.
Firstly, this is revolving around jazz. No jazz band is ever going to win raving awards because everyone played note by note to the book. The whole point of jazz is to improvise and innovate on the fly. I am not a jazz expert, but watching a conductor lead a band to play like absolute drones and then watching the ensuing praise as if it was the most masterful Miles Davis concert on the planet made me feel as if Chazelle forgot that jazz laughs at rigidity, that the Fletcher-style perfectionism is at best bland, at worst a parody. The film’s focus on perfection and abuse has tunneled itself so far that when it did meet the genuine roadblock of what jazz was versus what the message was trying to achieve, Chazelle bulldozed right through it as if Fletcher himself wrote the script and said, “eat it.” I can watch a film about those themes, but I feel that the choice to go with jazz as the backdrop for the story and message hurt it more than helped it.
Though I am partial to open-ended thematic questions in films, such as the morality of war and peace, I feel as if the question of whether or not one can achieve great success without burning themself out does not work in the same way, especially in a film where they show the success having been channeled out through abuse, self-harm and total mental degradation. Fletcher’s methods are technically proven right, as in the end, Neiman becomes the “perfect” drummer.
His methods are justified in a rather bizarre monologue while he’s at a bar and talks about how the push must continue to reach that perfection. In comparison to Fletcher’s group, the other classes depicted in “Whiplash” are bumbling, incompetent and lazy, a practical insinuation by the film that those who don’t push like Fletcher are doomed to mediocrity. If Chazelle wasn’t pushing the fallacy of artistic Darwinism, perhaps it would be better to show some parts of the music world that succeed yet don’t break their people. Or perhaps, is the film answering the rather cynical question, “what is the price of pushing for success?” There are so many cases of people achieving success without having to destroy themselves, and certainly without having to accept the abuse of others, so whatever post-modernist tripe being promoted by Chazelle on mediocrity versus success holds a rather mean-spirited, anti-humanist streak.
“Whiplash is” a good premise. It’s a good lesson on the evils of abuse and the risk of total self-degradation and spiritual annihilation for some perceived goal, but it answers its own fundamental question incorrectly. In music and other areas, working to the point of torture isn’t a requirement for success; it’s abuse, and movies should treat it as such. The open-endedness of such serious topics leaves quite some serious implications: should people just slump back into mediocrity, or push to the total snapping point of their beings just to achieve “perfection”?
This narrative that Chazelle seems to be pushing might work in a sports film, but certainly not in the sphere of imperfect music lifted by improvisation. Small variations in time do not entail mediocrity, they’re what makes jazz what it is. If you’re slapping sticks on drums until your fingers bleed, that’s not “grinding to perfection,” that’s called self-harm. It’s counterproductive, wasteful and unnecessary. Getting everyone into a Darwinist mindset with each other in a band is also silly, as demonstrated in the film – the band spends less of its time improving upon each other’s flaws to lift the band itself and more on trying to throw others under the bus so they can get an ego stroke from Fletcher. Again, this kind of mindset doesn’t lead to perfection, nor does it improve upon anyone’s spirit or character, two aspects that fuel artists and musicians.
I can see where Chazelle was trying to put his open-ended message into “Whiplash,” but I think his tunnel vision on what that message would be and the setting he put it in greatly detracts from what he was aiming for.