Whiplash. Whew!

J.K. Simmons is a gem of an actor. He deserved that Oscar, if only for turning his film, television and public image of "the nice guy" on its head. And, his intensity was, to me, attractively masculine, and hard for me not to admire.



But this movie just plain disturbed me. No, not exactly that, exactly this:  It put me in a two hour state of cognitive dissonance.  There is no way in  H-E-double sticks that this sort of so called teacher would be allowed to function anywhere in the twenty first century. Maybe he would have fit nicely, and even then it would have been a stretch, into the form of authoritarianism, a nice word for "abuse" that existed prior to the revolutions of the 1960s. He is not merely manipulative of his charges, young men who wish to be jazz musicians like the greats of days gone by, like Charlie Parker (aka "The Bird"), but he is verbally and physically beyond the pale. I mean, he is just one step away, and a very short step, from making these kids "assume the position" and using a cane. He slaps students. He calls them names that were schoolyard cruel even before the enlightenment of political correctness. He throws chairs (in emulation of an apocryphal story about Parker). Oh, he does get fired, but it takes a great long time and he remains a well regarded role model for the kids that were terrified of him.

I had heard only good things about the film and I wondered if what I was feeling had been the subject of any comments by internet reviewers.  It was. And, some pointed out that the ending, where the student finally conquers the wall of pain imposed from within and without to perform flawlessly, was simply ridiculous.

If this type of teacher is working anywhere in the United States in any kind of program for any kind of skill intellectual or manual, I want to know where he (or she) is.

Why does the character have to be so--vicious-to get the point across? Tour de force of acting for sure, but something in me winced throughout, alternating with the desire to punch the guy in the face. In the real world, this emotional terrorist wouldn't have one person in his class. Except a masochist.

Not that the student, who given his often bleeding hands from practice, was such a prize. He is the perfect masochist for his idol. I guess we have a movie of dueling narcissists, one of whom has the power, and the other of whom does not.

I suppose we could think of this movie as a kind of "Karate Kid" except without one ounce of heart.

The movie put me in mind of my brief music career, albeit hardly as overtly traumatic.  I had two teachers during it. The first was a nun, Mother Regina, herself a creditable pianist, who took me from age 9 to about age 14 through the basics of a baby grand, one each in about four rooms in the old convent portion of my Bronx girls' school. I liked her a lot. With her as my guide, though practice always came hard to me because of my perfectionistic impatience, I thought that maybe it would be a lifelong activity. Then she retired and I became the pupil of Mrs. Cullinan, who along with my mother, had plans of my becoming a virtuoso, whether that was my plan or not. Perhaps it is my imagination, but I seem to remember her mentioning Julliard as a possibility for me. By now, teenage angst had been added to all the childhood angst and practicing became even less attractive. Every year there was a recital and until I was 17 I managed to make a reasonable effort not to embarrass anybody. But that last year, I told Mrs. Cullinan and my mother that I did not wish to participate in the recital because I simply had not practiced enough and, since we had to play without the music in front of us, I was not satisfied I would remember the pieces well enough. My mother apparently deferred to Mrs. Cullinan and Mrs. Cullinan was not going to relieve me of the public appearance.

The Mount Auditorium was pretty well full.  It was probably the second or third of the pieces that it happened. I could not remember the next portion of the piece. Some poor little girl was tasked with bringing me my music so I could make the best of a now shameful moment. I remember to this day the click-click-click of her heels as she made her interminable journey to me. I never looked in her direction. Had I done so I would have run from the room.

The prim and proper Mrs. Cullinan, whose teaching talent I will admit today did not seem to match that of my prior nun-instructor, ended the proceedings by thanking the gathered and noting pointedly that it was clear who had practiced and who had not. I was defeated. There was the coup de grace. I might as well have gone in without telling her I hadn't practiced and asking to be relieved since I received the same level of remonstration. I don't know what my mother thought of the comment, but my father was outraged. One of Mrs. Cullinan's adult daughters apologized to him for her mother's action. That was the last time I played in public. A fear of making mistakes became a full blown phobia. Over the next years my finger memory faded on pieces I had known, and my desire to learn new ones became perfunctory at best.  I cannot imagine what I would have ended up doing had I a teacher like the one in Whiplash. Oh, I take it back, I can imagine. I'd be the student off stage that committed suicide, just like in the movie. 

The film posits the question of whether what J.K. Simmons character does is valuable, or efficient in weeding out the truly brilliant from the rest, the competent, the barely competent or the dilettantes? The truly gifted and driven will push through it all is one view. Another view is that a sensitive, though gifted, would simply stop doing what he or she loves because of the soul murder. The really sensitive, or psychologically disabled, will kill himself.

But on a less dramatic scales, even when Mrs. Cullinan upbraided me, purportedly anonymously, although I was the only student who forgot her piece, did she contribute to my final decision not to continue taking piano lessons?  From my utterly subjective point of view, she did indeed. Perhaps she saved the world from more mediocrity. But to me, whether it be a character or a real person, an adult took advantage, with good intention or ill it does not matter, of the fragility of a child's or young adult's still forming ego.

Maybe in the Marines, where the youngster is going to be going to war, that makes sense. There a life, many lives, will perhaps be saved by separating the worthy from the unworthy, but in matters of culture, or taste, or talent is discipline to be equated with carving up a psyche?

You might not believe it from this reverie, but a part of the cognitive dissonance in watching this movie is that I was also mesmerized. I was mesmerized by the couple of pieces that got played in part or in whole. I was in awe of the idea of such profound talent at young ages. I have always had this little attraction to the drums and I loved the manic riffs. I wondered why I don't listen to jazz more. I used to when I was younger.  I actually thought about buying an electronic 88 key piano. I am still thinking about it now. (As you know my childhood piano which I had brought from place to place without using it bit the dust).

This is a movie I will watch again. So something seemed good in it. Interesting in it. Something sparked in me. But kid, if you meet a teacher like the one in this movie, run. Or call the police.

Leonard Nimoy Defined Spock; How Spock Spoke to This Baby Boomer

I once told someone that the television fictional Star Trek crew, but in particular, the character created by Leonard Nimoy, Mr. Spock, were my "friends" when I was growing up an only child in the Bronx. So, when Mr. Nimoy died this week and I did not make an immediate acknowledgement of it on Facebook that same someone was surprised. And then tonight, he seemed to anticipate a blog entry about him. As I said to him, I hadn't planned on it. I hadn't because the memories are both pleasant and painful and there is much I am not yet prepared to reveal of the experience. I wrote about it all in the memoir draft I finished and then put aside. It still remains aside, but is almost back in the forefront of my mind and will require a major re-tooling but I am just not at the "let it all hang out" stage.

But as midnight passes and I can't find anything to watch on my 400 or so channels before I go to bed, I find myself reconsidering and beginning an entry. I am not sure how it will form itself.

Much of my sensibility no doubt will accord with that of many an erstwhile child of the sixties. Mr. Spock was an alien within and without, to himself and to those who tried to understand him, even to become close to him.  But I am getting ahead of myself, though I have no idea where I am going.

So, let me begin with my discovery of the show, and the character. A number of the 30 little girls of my seventh grade class had adopted as their alter egos as many of the characters of the Bridge crew of the Enterprise as were available. So, for example, though I don't remember most of who adopted whom, I do remember that Janice Mitchell was Spock. I hadn't seen the show, but this Spock seemed interesting. He was, as I understood it, a half human, half alien member of the crew. The honor of being one of the lesser appearing crewmen, Lieutenant DeSalle, a navigator, was bestowed upon me.

Well, now that I was a crewmember of sorts, one 1967 night I must have convinced my parents to watch it with me on our small-ish black and white television. We had not yet ventured into color having experienced the all too bright orange that seemed to merge into every other color on the screen of the one we sampled in my cousin's apartment, just over the roof from us (our buildings were connected). We came in half-way to the episode.

Here was my first view of Mr. Spock.

I was a bit confused because though he clearly had the face of the logical alien I had heard about, he was acting more like a human being, telling his commander that he should join this throwback 19th century like community on Omicron Ceti III that had been infected by spores that made everyone feel love and belonging and safety--and protected them from lethal radiation that was bombarding the planet.  Mr. Spock had been able to express his feeling of love, ("I love you; I can love you.") long suppressed along with all other feelings forbidden to him despite his half human side, for a young woman, named Leila, he had known six years before on earth. In this episode, he had been freed from the rigidity that usually defined his existence and he, along with the whole crew, were resisting their duties. They had no needs under the influence of the spores. The captain, up to here, had not been exposed to the spores and he was fighting to keep his ship. And he wasn't having any truck with this paradise manufactured by the spores. He went so far as to say that man wasn't made for paradise., but was meant to fight and claw for everything.  I was coming into the show seeing a Spock that usually didn't appear on screen..

The Captain was ever so briefly under the influence of the spores--which sprayed on him as he quietly lamented his fate on the bridge. They had been beamed up by the affected crew thus infecting the rest of the crew and leaving the ship with no one to man it. But, being the primary star of the show, the Captain had to throw off the effects without any outside aid, and becoming angry suddenly about giving up the ship he loved, he came back to himself. Strong negative emotion--that's what would defeat these benevolent marauders. Every time I watch the show, and I did today, a day after I began this entry to remind myself of what I first saw when I was just a little girl of 13, on the edge of puberty and already in the great struggles that transformation engenders, I feel a pang of deep sadness at what Captain Kirk does to his comrade and friend so he can get the help he needs to restore the Enterprise crew and to relocate the colonists. He lies to the Vulcan who waits with Leila on the planet surface. He says he needs help to bring a few things they might need on the planet. And when the peaceful Vulcan who has embraced his human side courtesy of a symbiotic relationship created by the spores beams to the ship, he says horrible things to him to goad him into an anger that will cause the spores to flee. He calls him a traitor from a race of traitors. He goes after the Vulcan's parents, a human mother, who was a teacher and an Ambassador whom we have not yet met born of the planet Vulcan. And then he pushes harder, calling him an overgrown elf with a hyperactive thyroid who has a nerve to make love to Leila. Spock is stronger than most humans because of his Vulcan side and he attacks in an anger he rarely ever expresses any more than love. And with the spores gone, he begins to help the Captain rig something that will cause the crew on the planet to come to their senses and leave a peaceful, calm, but ultimately, unproductive (in the larger sense) life aside.

Leila senses something wrong and Spock knows he cannot protect her from reality, that they will never be together. She comes off the transporter platform and puts her arms around him, and as many years before, he does not respond. He explains how the spores are defeated.

"And this is for my good?" she says rhetorically. She begs him to come back. They couldn't be happy on earth, they couldn't be happy anywhere except here.  What he says to her in what I have always felt was among the best underplayed but intense depth is this, "I am what I am Leila, and if there are any self made purgatories, mine can be no worse than someone else's.". She asks if it is all right that she still loves him. She asks for a first name that he has never given her. He wipes a tear from her eye, with a slight smile he allows without the influence of the spores, and notes, "You couldn't pronounce it.".

The status quo is restored. The Enterprise is out there again exploring the universe. Whatever brokenness within any of the crew, within Mr. Spock himself, is also restored. Asked by the Captain why he has said so little about the adventure, he admits something we all regret he has lost, ", , ,for the first time in my life, I was happy.".

And so introduced to Mr. Spock, I was hooked.  There had also been a peek at the good old country doctor, McCoy, that I would come to love as only second to Spock. The cowboy Captain Kirk played by the now single surviving major star of the series, William Shatner, was a necessary bridge (no pun intended) between the two characters I loved most, Spock and McCoy, although as the series and the movies developed what has been called the "bromance" between Spock and Kirk tended to be the focus (those of you who are Trekkers or Trekkers, or whatever you are as fans will remember the line quoted all this week, "I have been and always will be, your friend." )

And yes, they were my friends too. I was entranced and even a little motivated by their integrity, their passions, their sense of mission. I felt connected to them when the kids at school "pretended" to be part of the crew. I felt a sense of belonging that I did not feel at home. There was a time that I looked to others to explain that feeling. These days it no longer matters. It is only a fact that I felt, probably as many kids feel at that age, as I had always felt that some part of me was forbidden to be expressed to the world. Those of you who know me well know that for years I believed that my mother did not much like me, let alone love me. I always had the sense that, after nine years of marriage, my sudden arrival after my parents took a rare trip--to Montreal--was an accident, and for my mother, not a happy one. My dad, always the master of ambiguity once said to the only direct questioning I ever offered on the subject said, "You weren't not wanted in that sense." I came to understand that she was a deeply disappointed soul, who probably married too young and wanted an entirely different life than the one she had. I also realized she did love me, but like Spock himself, she could not express it, except by providing for me and demanding of me. Oh, there were lots of psychological tides and eddies and I spent a lot of time in my room escaping--again not unlike many other kids--but a little too wrapped up with my "friends" of television.

As Spock wanted to be without the mask,  largely of his own creation, but couldn't do it, so did I want to be without my mask, ultimately largely of my own creation and I couldn't do it. Where closeness and intimacy were problems for him, they were problems for me.  My very name refers to a creature that is not human, that is often a changeling, left in place of a human child. I hated the name as a child, and yet it was entirely apt.  When I got into my teens I wasn't part of the thrills of the Woodstock generation, though I was nominally one of them. I wasn't making love which I was told was de rigueur now that we had thrown off the fifties and were in the enlightened sixties and seventies. I wasn't even managing dates.

Leonard Nimoy's Spock would appear from time to time, either reminiscing about his days on the too quickly cancelled series, or as the late seventies arrived, reprising the role that in the recesses of my being I probably felt sustained me at some level. Let's say, stabilized me. I would find some very real people who did that for me, and I would engage in a lengthy period of therapy that allowed me to accept myself, but Mr. Spock and Leonard Nimoy's understanding of him and portrayal of him, development of him--to moments of his own self acceptance--were pivotal to this baby boomer.

My guess is many baby boomers have their versions of Spock's influence on their lives as developing adults. This is a bit of mine.

The actor and the character he created had an indelible effect on the culture, on the planet. Look at all the NASA tweets, all the men and women who wanted to become astronauts, or engineers, because of Star Trek, because of Mister Spock, the outsider with whom they identified.

The phrase "Live Long and Prosper" is a perfect greeting and perfect farewell. For after all that is the thing we try to do, and in the guise of our better selves, wish for others.