Blackboard jungle...you see the funny thing is at first I was totally bored by this movie, I mean yeah I understood that it was a huge deal back then to show the harsh realities of inner city schooling and that it kind of fits into the "classic" race civil rights genre along with to kill a mockingbird and others such as those. But there were just so many scenes that seemed super preachy or long and boring. Yeah I got that he was trying to teach these kids...its like Coach Carter or Hardball... but for me it's just boring after like the first two scenes, then it turns into a Disney Channel original made for TV movie. Cheesy basically, and thus im bored.
When I came into class earlier today I basically had no clue what I was going to talk about because I felt like I hadn't really come away from it with anything worth noting... other then that I thought that one rape scene was pretty ridiculous in that a white kid student tried to rape a teacher in the library, then fight with books, then jump out the window only to completely destroy his face with glass. That was awesome. So there I am sitting there and then I'm asked how I liked it... which I basically said in the first paragraph but I decided to go with my instinct and tell once again what annoyed or bothered me about the picture, which turns out to be some of the interesting components to the film. I really like that about the films we watch, at the surface they seem like typical movies that we either like or dislike, but when you actually sit down and analysis them in-de
pthy and compare them with the readings some really cool stuff ends up coming out that you didn't catch the first time.
So my issues with this film start with the female teacher and how she is over the top sexual throughout the picture in an all male school... of dangerous young hormone amped boys... and is being hit on by the rest of the male staff... what a dummy. But let's look past all that bologna, and look at the fac
t that she is nearly raped on her first day ion the school until she is saved by Dadier. Does she leave the school... nope. Does she stop dressing proactively... nope. Does she start hitting on Dadier who is happily married and trying to have a child? Heck yes she does. What?! That makes no sense. Annoyance number 1.
Annoyance 2: Dadier in general. His character is so cold it's stunning, not to mention that he is a walking oxymoron, he's a teacher who tries to preach equality and learning by non-violent means... yet he is openly racist and beats the crap out of several kids including slamming West into the blackboard over and over again. He is overly sexist to his wife, making her stay at home all day while he wor
ks, puts alot of pressure for her to have a kid after just losing a child at birth... which both himself and his wife are overly cool with... showing no signs of depression or abnormality which therefore scares me even more then if they did. When his wife thinks he is cheating on him he just shrugs it off and is like im not cheating on you so shut up, and then later on she's like I knew you were too in love with me for it to be true, and he's just like yeah whatever. I mean at one point he even comes home and talks about that female teacher and his wife asks him if he remembers what she was wearing when he got home, to which he responds with yeah, what was I wearing? To which she can't respond and then is like ok ok yeah I'm the dumb housewife good call honey I won't question you... I mean females should be outraged by this film... this film isn't so bad at being racist about inner school kids but more about unhealthy home life relationships between Dadio and his wifey. Another horribly disturbing por
tion of this film is when the wife allows for not one, not two but three notes about her husband cheating on her come to the house and then takes several phone calls from West on top of that. I kept waiting for her to burst into the school at the wrong moment of Dadier and the female teacher embracing and then freak out and leave him with is unborn child, thus making him hit rock bottom and freak out on Mills and the whole fiasco ending horribly and racistly ( I realize thats not a word but you get my point). But no, she never comes to check on her husband or the teacher, why? Because a good house wife never would do this, she should always trust her husband even if it makes her freak out and go into labor too early. On top of this he then gets all worked up about how he needs a kid to understand his students better, not nessicssarly to have a kid with the love of his life, no so it will help him his work... i mean damn thats cold.
The last topics I want to touch on real quick are Mills, West, and that Italian kid. Mills is a jerk at the beginning of the film and then soon we grow to like him, it's like we're unconsciously racist towa
rds him at the beginning and then soon realize that we are mistaken as time goes on along side with Dadier. But I mean in a way Mills was racist towards himself, when he states that a black man can never succeed in the world so he just kind of throws in the towel and gives into his aggressive no good stereotype that is placed upon him. I disargree with the reading in that this film is a buddy picture because for the most part of the movie Dadier and and Mills are at odds and it's not until the very end that they become somewhat friends and then it ends with them agreeing to stay at the school, I mean if you looked at it in warped way possibly. West is just a scum-bag. That kid was the biggest jerk in the whole film and the funny thing is I have met kids like him in real life and they're just as scummy. The fact that the reading tried to say he was a homosexual... I don't agree with that. I think Dadier would be more fitting for the classification of a homosexual then West honestly. And as a final note I just want to touch on that the Italian right hand man was randomly the other bad guy at the end even though all the kids turn good its the trashy racist white kid and the shifty and sneaky Italian kids that get kicked out. I mean that is so racist in and of its self that this movie is one big contradiction.
Until next week... keep on rockin'
I'm glad I'm not the only one that feels that way about Ms. Hammond.She's a very odd character. I think Dadier's wife never went to check up on him because she didn't feel she had to. She tried to ignore the letters and the phone calls from West. She even pleaded with him to stop. And even if she did go to check on her husband and the things he was doing I don't think she would have found anything. Sure they embrace and all but i think it was more one way. Dadier never really recieved Hammond's intentions. He really wanted nothing to do with her; so sad. I find it interesting how you stated that you think Dadier would be classified as more of the homosexual. I definitely found it in West's characters. His eyes were always on Dadier. It could have been that he was just studying him, but I don't know. The stares seemed to be a little bit more in depth than that. I'd be curious to hear how you think Dadier fits this stigma....
ReplyDeleteOh, and I made a comment to the comment you left on my blog if you'd like to read it!
ReplyDeleteThis is a really, really good entry. Glad you went with your instincts on this!!
ReplyDeleteI realized when I was reading somebody else's blog that I think that the odd elements you point out, the stuff that doesn't work or seems implausible or annoying, is supposed to make us uncomfortable. I think that even though this is a feelgood dedicated teacher learns a valuable lesson from inner-city kids cliche movie (the original one), it's really about the failure of a certain sort of liberalism. Dadier's good intentions go really wrong--he takes the wrong approach with the kids, and his inner racist comes crawling out, even though he's obviously not a racist person. He's just a well-meaning white guy who really does care about reaching kids.
The scenes with him and his wife are what made me most uncomfortable--she's so petulant and weak for so much of the movie. It's like--they really weren't a very good couple, ultimately. The reading mentioned the fragility of the white middle-class nuclear family in the face of all that urban ethnicity, and that didn't make sense to me at first, but now that I think about it, it sort of does.