Detachment

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Movie review of the world premiere of "Detachment" at the TriBeCa Film Festival.

The truth about high school is that it's worse than you remember it.

Watching Tony Kaye's enthralling “Detachment,” you can't help comparing your high school to the one on screen. You remember the terrible teachers you had, the sterile hallways, the asinine classmates, and the absurd assignments. You can remember the “weight that presses on everyone” as Mr. Henry Barthes, played by Adrien Brody, tells his class.

“If you can just hang on, everything will be alright.” Mr. Barthes is that hero teacher that we love tell stories about. He's the Christ, the Buddha. He's meant to save us from ourselves.

The problem? Mr. Barthes is a great teacher because he has no life outside of teaching. Like countless other mythologized teachers, Barthes is a detached island to himself, without spouse, children, or personal life.  He's a lonely dude.

As a public school teacher sitting in the audience at the world premiere last night in Tribeca, I have mixed feelings about telling you that Tony Kaye has masterfully succeeded in capturing public school in a macabre and beautiful chalkboard sketch. His lush, mannerist portrait brings a gorgeous but searing light to the lonely reality of the teaching profession. Mr. Kaye's “Detachment” presents school the way so many of us on the inside see it: a windswept wasteland scourged of its humanity by a culture that burdens its underfunded and unfairly censured teachers with rearing, policing, and institutionalizing our children.

I hate to say it: public school really is this bad. The few great teachers that our system manages to attract are barely hanging on from year to year, knocked senseless by a society that demands way too much from them.

Adrien Brody is riveting as a seemingly serene but deeply damaged substitute teacher.  His sloping eyebrows, sometimes treacly or overwrought in other performances, here convey an-inch-from-the-cliff hopelessness without ever becoming a mask.  Mr. Brody's Henry Barthes is sweetly but searingly honest with his students as he sadly skulks the halls of his school.  Barthes is also furious enough to throw desks in his classroom and scream at a late night nurse at his grandfather's assisted care facility. In close-up, documentary-style interviews, Mr. Brody's eyes flash like lightning one moment and then become as dull as concrete the next, daring us to try to understand how one can care so much and so little. It's a career performance.

Barthes' determination to be disconnected keeps him the perennial substitute-- in the classroom and in his personal life. Barthes tends to his grandfather but finds more than enough time to help out two lost girls, a young prostitute and an overweight loner. Despite his earnest efforts, almost none of it works out well. The complicating plot lines, all involving family surrogacy around Barthes, serve the notion that teachers must be dispassionate and alone in order to perform their jobs. The story survives its few yet regrettable school cliches by sticking to this thesis.

Despite the fact that the number of big names threatens to make the movie look like a cameo-fest (Lucy Liu?  Christina Hendricks?  Marcia Gay Harden? Blythe Danner?  James Caan?  Really?), the ensemble gels together surprisingly well.  After all, weren't your teachers an impossible cast of characters?  The performances are just fine, largely, but two are particularly successful. While Mr. Caan's grinning jester provides a refreshingly necessary gallows' humor in some of the film's darkest moments, it's Ms. Liu's imploding truth-teller that lends undeniable heft to the story. As a guidance counselor faced with yet another unreachable know-it-all teen, Ms. Liu's character finally breaks down, berating the student with a bleak prophecy of the child's future. “You will NOT be a model! You will forever be on a carousel, competing with 80% of the country for a minimum wage job for the rest of your life!” the guidance counselor screams uselessly at the apathetic teen.

It's grim stuff, made more grave by the undeniable ring of truth.

The ancient Greeks tell us "we suffer our way to wisdom."  By the end of the film, you'll hope that is true for most of these characters.  Somewhere on screen, between a silent hug and the opening lines to Poe's “Fall of the House of Usher,” you will find a glimmer of hope. But you have to work for it.

School, as the film has drawn it, is a Munch-esque desert where the best anyone (teachers and students) can do is survive. But the fact that Barthes, and teachers like him, won't give up-- and the fact that Mr. Kaye made this movie-- tells us that hope is alive, if not well.

This hope rests almost entirely in our lonely, detached teachers.

Locking Up the Future

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I get in trouble at my high school every once in a while. I admit it. Every few weeks, one of my many supervising administrators reminds me that I'm doing something wrong.

Hey, I'm like you. Unless you work for yourself, we have bosses who do this to us. It's the nature of management: telling people how to do things “right.” Even people who work for themselves have bosses who tell them how to do things right. These people are called “customers.”

Anyway, I get in trouble because I don't lock my door to my office. Students can go into my office without supervision, which is bad, I am told. So, I listen to my bosses. I lock my door. Locking my door is good, I am told.

I must admit something else: I'm not sure locking my door is good.

To a Hammer, Everything Is a Nail

What's the purpose of a locked door? What is the effect of a locked door?

Locking things up makes sense. You have something valuable and you want to protect it. Locking it up is brilliant-- you alone (or those you share the key with) have control, along with the security that you know your stuff is safe.

In this way, a lock is simply a barrier or a boundary that one can control- and we love them in our schools.

This should be the end of the conversation: locks and limits make sense. But it isn't because people learn how to neutralize the lock. There are a number of ways to get around a lock, and there is no shortage of time spent on this problem.

Let's consider ways in which we get around locks outside of school. While doing your taxes in the last month, you (or your accountant) spent some time finding ways to neutralize the lock of taxation with “deductibles.” Isn't that what a deductible is-- a lock pick? Any loophole is a lock neutralizer.

“You're not allowed to park here” Ok. I'll just throw on my hazard lights and run in and out of the store before a cop can bust me. Lock picked!

“The game is sold out” Sure it is. I'll just call my uncle Larry, the VP of marketing at the stadium, and I'll get seats. Lock picked!

“It's buy one taco, get one free-- limit one coupon per visit” No worries. I'll buy my taco, get one free, then get back in line and do it again as many times as I like. Lock picked!

A locked door doesn't just protect things. A locked door creates an arena, a playing field in which people are incentivized to neutralize the lock.

A locked door makes people into lock pickers.

You Are Not Invited

Locked doors protect kids and school property, we say. But locked doors discourage engagement and undermine self-responsibility. “You're not supposed to be here,” locked doors tell kids. “You are an untrusted guest with limited access.” Kids don't need to take care of anything because they aren't in charge of anything. Locking things up limits participation in the maintenance of a community. A place that locks things up is more interested in safety and control than in engendering responsibility and rational risk-taking.

Get Rid of Locked Doors?

Heck, no. It's not unreasonable to imagine that kids could do real damage to property or themselves if we didn't lock things up. The chemicals in the chemistry lab actually COULD hurt someone. The computer lab, filled with equipment, would likely be robbed or ruined if left unlocked.

Some locked doors are good-- but we must be extremely careful what we lock up. We must bravely attempt to leave as many doors unlocked as possible. We must replace our culture of locked doors with a culture of stewardship. An overwhelming number of teenagers long to be in charge of things. Let's make our schools places of stewardship and involvment.

Paraphrasing Adam Smith, chief apologist for laissez-faire government, I say: the fewer the locked doors, the more robust the growth. Let's lean towards “hands off” regulation in schools. As it is, we're just locking up the children.

Doors and curiosity have a special relationship. A locked door only promotes curiosity about how to break in to a room. An unlocked door facilitates curiosity of all kinds, welcomes people in and becomes a portal for wonder, discovery, and community.

Sigh. Looks like I might get in trouble again.

Cupcakes For Japan

We are what we do.

Last week at school, I talked to some kids who were selling cupcakes at a table in the cafeteria. A sign, taped to the wall behind them read “Save Japan.” I asked the kids how my buying a cupcake would save Japan.

Kid: “The money is going to help the earthquake..”

Me: “You don't mean the 'earthquake.' You mean 'victims of the earthquake.'”

Kid (a little irritated): “Obviously.”

Me: “Ok. So where's the money going to?”

Kid: “Japan.”

Me: “I mean, who in Japan? How will it help them?”

Kid (exasperated): “Why do you have to make it a big deal? They need help. Don't you want to help?”

We are what we do.

Quick question: how do people know what you value? You, personally. What would your friends say? Your family? Your coworkers?

Look first at your workspace. Perhaps you have pictures of your kids tacked to your cubicle wall. Some shots from a skiing/fishing/beaching trip. A little sign that says “no whining” next to a bobble head of your favorite baseball player. Postcards from Rome or Tierra del Fuego. A pricey paperweight. An autographed snap of a you and someone successful.

How about your method of transport? What do you drive? What's in your CD player/mp3 player? What do you read everyday? Do you workout? Do you have a routine that you follow everyday? Almost everyday? Do you switch it up, go on a granola/fruit streak for a while then switch to egg sandwiches?

What do you do consciously everyday? What are you deliberate about? Do you brush your teeth with the same hand everyday? Do you ever choose to be uncomfortable? Do try to do things differently for the sake of doing them? What have you stopped improving because it is merely “good enough?”

This is not an article about how we judge each other or ourselves. It's not about class or style. It's not about self-improvement. This is an article about value: what you value through your choices. You are an economy unto yourself; an enormous market study waiting to observed. What you can learn isn't limited to how you can improve yourself by changing your spending habits or how you eat.

You can learn what it is you actually value-- as opposed to what you SAY you value.

Walking In Circles

“Know Thyself”
-inscribed in the wall of the Ancient Temple of Apollo at Delphi.

My idea is simple-- and it's not even mine: many of us barely know ourselves. Our arguments, our reactions, our “beliefs” often do not line up with what we claim are our personal values. It's not a moral , religious, or ethical point I am making. I am merely talking about the effect of our actions.

I know vegetarians who wear leather. Pro-lifers who are for the death penalty. People who are for lower taxes but complain about bad roads. Anti-war protesters who want to punch hawks. People against Mexican immigrants but for cheap labor. And that's just the political stuff. 

What about bosses who encourage self-motivation but punish those who don't follow the rules?  How about people who are against "unfairness" but take advantage of others any time they can?  People who ignore strangers but have a war against impoliteness?

My favorite:  people who think kids are lazy and listless while they, themselves, read nothing, explore nothing, and challenge themselves on nothing.

When we act against what we believe, we subvert progress.  We make our conversations ridiculous. It's a freakin' waste of time and energy.

The cost of believing one thing and doing another isn't that we become hypocrites. The cost is that we can't really improve anything. We make things worse while we're not looking. We walk around in circles while thinking we are traveling somewhere.  We break the things we say we are trying to fix. It sounds a bit silly but:  we can't grow.

How much energy are you spending to try and bridge the gap between what you believe and what you do? How much energy are we wasting as a culture because we don't see what we are actually doing?

We can't help Japan by selling cupcakes. So why are we teaching kids that we can?