A plucky young drummer heads to the big time and cracks under the pressure of a dictatorial band director, pushing him to come back to greater heights. As a sports movie, Whiplash is very effective. Unfortunately, it doesn't really have anything to do with music (or reality), and its vision of artistic achievement comes with some very unsavory undertones.
Let's consider for a second the ludicrousness of its melodrama. No music director would slap his players, use abusive language, or trash instruments in the way portrayed in the film. The film falls apart if you question its equation of jazz and big band, or question whether becoming a player with Jazz at Lincoln Center is the pinnacle of achievement. The film also never addresses the racial context of jazz, which is a nearly unforgivable sin.
But it's the whole mythos that holds that art is effort and effort is abuse and therefore any abuse is justified in the pursuit of greatness that is the most offensive to me. Anybody that's ever tried to get good at anything has met teachers like Fletcher, and they suck. If the movie stopped at being a portrait of toxic masculinity and the danger that comes from bad boundaries, then it would have done its job well. But it seems like the filmmakers and many of the people that are praising this movie fundamentally admire Nieman for enduring through his trials, and that's very disheartening to me
Let's consider for a second the ludicrousness of its melodrama. No music director would slap his players, use abusive language, or trash instruments in the way portrayed in the film. The film falls apart if you question its equation of jazz and big band, or question whether becoming a player with Jazz at Lincoln Center is the pinnacle of achievement. The film also never addresses the racial context of jazz, which is a nearly unforgivable sin.
But it's the whole mythos that holds that art is effort and effort is abuse and therefore any abuse is justified in the pursuit of greatness that is the most offensive to me. Anybody that's ever tried to get good at anything has met teachers like Fletcher, and they suck. If the movie stopped at being a portrait of toxic masculinity and the danger that comes from bad boundaries, then it would have done its job well. But it seems like the filmmakers and many of the people that are praising this movie fundamentally admire Nieman for enduring through his trials, and that's very disheartening to me