Film School
Transcript
[SONG UP AND UNDER FROM “TO SIR, WITH LOVE”]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Teachers come in all sizes, but they loom especially large on the big screen, able to raise up or tear down a child with a word. Sidney Poitier famously played the former in To Sir, With Love. So did Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society.
But the movies also run amok with pedagogical sadists and bullies. Mostly they are one or the other. The film may be in color but the teachers usually are depicted starkly in black or white, and we hardly ever see them teach. One exception is 1955’s Blackboard Jungle, starring Glenn Ford.
[CLIP]:
GLENN FORD AS RICHARD DADIER:
Now, all your lives you’re going to hear stories, what some guy tells you, what you see in books and magazines, on the television and radio, what - what you read in the newspapers. But if you can just examine the story, look for the real meaning. And most of all, fellas, if you'll just, just learn to think for yourself!
VIC MORROW AS ARTIE WEST:
Here it comes. Here comes the commercial.
[LAUGHTER, SOUND OF SCHOOL BELL]
[END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
We asked Mary Dalton, author of The Hollywood Curriculum: Teachers in the Movies, to outline the traits of the Hollywood pedagogue. She says Blackboard Jungle offers an unusually rich portrayal, but it also set the template for the stock characters that followed. These days, she says, the good teacher rarely deviates from form.
MARY DALTON:
This is something I refer to as “the Hollywood model,” because it’s amazing across time how this has been consistent. The good teacher is an outsider, either because this teacher wasn't trained to be a teacher and sort of fell into the profession or because they're a different race or from a different country. There are all kinds of different ways in which they're outsiders.
There’s also typically tension between the good teacher and administrators.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So how does this scenario play out in Blackboard Jungle?
MARY DALTON:
Well, in Blackboard Jungle, Glenn Ford plays Mr. Dadier, this teacher fresh out of teacher’s college who’s idealistic and wants to change the world. And, you know, he’s been in a sort of idyllic-looking public school in the suburbs, and he [LAUGHS] goes to the inner city, working with these students who've been deemed incorrigible.
And terrible things happen. I mean, you know, they threaten teachers, they steal things, they break things. And in the end, you think he’s going to leave the school, but there’s this one student, played, of course, by Sidney Poitier, who says [CLIP]:
SIDNEY POITIER AS GREGORY MILLER:
There’s talk you’re quitting this school, going someplace where there’s nice little obedient boys and girls.
GLENN FORD AS RICHARD DADIER:
Now, what do you think?
SIDNEY POITIER AS GREGORY MILLER:
Oh, I figure it’s just talk.
GLENN FORD AS RICHARD DADIER:
Why?
SIDNEY POITIER AS GREGORY MILLER:
Well, you know the ropes around here pretty good now. It’d be a shame to waste all that. [LAUGHS] I guess everybody learns something in school, even teachers.
GLENN FORD AS RICHARD DADIER:
Yes, I guess so.
[END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So if we skip ahead to the nineties and the Oughts, what do movies like 1995’s Dangerous Minds, starring Michelle Pfeiffer, and Freedom Writers, with Hillary Swank in 2007, have in common?
MARY DALTON:
They still fit the pattern. I mean, of course, Michelle Pfeiffer is an outsider. At the time she gets the job, she’s been in the Marines, but she’s not fully certified as a teacher yet. They also fit the profile for women teachers. There’s a double standard in that male teachers are able to have personal lives, intimate relationships, sustained marriages. Frequently their love interests are the B story. Women teachers are not.
In the case of Dangerous Minds, they actually cast and shot scenes with Andy Garcia as Michelle Pfeiffer’s love interest but cut those before the film was released. I mean, we can't have this mother-figure teacher having sex. That would just be horrible. [BROOKE LAUGHS]
And if they do, in the case of Freedom Writers, for example, the Erin Gruwell character is married, and then midway through the film, her husband says, you’re spending too much time with your students, I need more attention. I'm leaving you.
[CLIP]:
SCOTT GLENN AS STEVE GRUWELL:
I just want to live my life and not feel bad about it.
HILLARY SWANK AS ERIN GRUWELL:
You’re my husband. Why can’t you stand by me and be a part of it, the way wives support husbands?
SCOTT GLENN AS STEVE GRUWELL:
Because I can’t be your wife.
[END CLIP]
MARY DALTON:
And I think it goes back to the fact that we have this image of the schoolmarm. We're just not comfortable with women teachers on screen as being sexual beings.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Let's talk about the bad teachers now. In the case of women, you have Teaching Mrs. Tingle, with Helen Mirren. And, you know, she’s just a classic in the genre of the sort of fascistic, power-corrupted monster.
[CLIP]:
HELEN MIRREN AS MRS. TINGLE:
Your work, Mr. Turner, is very reminiscent of a young man who sat in that same chair some 20 years ago. He too had the words “No Future” printed on his forehead. Give your father my best.
[END CLIP]
MARY DALTON:
She really is - it’s an over-the-top sort of depiction. But, like all of the bad teachers in the movies, what it’s really about is her desire to control students.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And you say that when it comes to absolute power corrupting absolutely, gym teachers are in a filmic league of their own. Have we made no progress?
MARY DALTON:
[LAUGHS] The stereotypes are in greatest proportion with these gym teacher characters. I almost hesitate to mention the film Porky’s.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
[LAUGHS] Please do. [LAUGHING]
MARY DALTON:
Will people think less of me if I mention Beulah Balbricker -
[LAUGHTER]
- who’s just iconic? But I think the one people think about a lot is the film Carrie, where you have the Miss Collins character who at first appears to want to help Carrie, but she just cannot get out of that mode of wanting to exert control.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
What I said at the top of this interview is that mostly teachers are depicted starkly in terms of black and white, but in recent years there have been a few signs of more complex characters - neither all good or all bad. The crack-addicted teacher in Half Nelson is a complete mess.
MARY DALTON:
Well, he is a complete mess as a person, but I have never before or since seen such a wonderful example of critical pedagogy working in the classroom.
[CLIP]:
RYAN GOSLING AS DAN DUNNE:
History is the study of change over time. And what’s change? It’s this. It’s opposites. It’s two things that push against each other in opposite directions. So the civil rights movement, okay? It’s essentially - it’s two opposing mentalities. In the South, the majority believes all men are not created equal, and there’s a minority who believes that they are. So that minority struggles and it fights and it pushes ‘til eventually it becomes the majority.
[END CLIP]
MARY DALTON:
You can't reduce him to a good teacher or a bad teacher.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And then, of course, there’s that other character, played by [LAUGHS] Matthew Broderick in Election. I mean, this, unlike the character in Half Nelson, is a fundamentally unlikable character, in my view. Was he a good teacher or a bad teacher?
MARY DALTON:
Well, I find him fundamentally [LAUGHS] likeable [BROOKE LAUGHS] because I feel so sorry for him. He has been the exemplar teacher for years, winning the teaching award. I mean, clearly he’s into this. And then he makes a terrible mistake, by trying to fix the student government elections. [BROOKE LAUGHS]
But the thing that I find so interesting about this film is that he really doesn’t deviate much from this pattern of the good teacher, but he’s a much more nuanced character.
[CLIP]:
[SOUND TRACK PLAYS]
MATTHEW BRODERICK AS JIM McALLISTER:
It’s hard to remember how the whole thing started, the whole election mess. What I do remember is that I loved my job. I was a teacher, an educator, and I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. And I can’t.
[CHEERING/CROWD SOUNDS]
MATTHEW BRODERICK AS JIM McALLIS [SHOUTING]:
Come on, Wolverines! Defense! Let’s go!
MATTHEW BRODERICK AS JIM McALLISTER:
And I think I made a difference. I knew I touched the students’ lives during their difficult young adult years, and I took that responsibility seriously.
[END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
You've been writing most recently about the portrayals of teachers on TV, which you say has outpaced film long, long ago. What we can find on TV that we can't find in cinema?
MARY DALTON:
Well, we found a complex, sympathetic portrayal of a gay teacher in television, remarkably, before in film, in My So-Called Life. We also see women teachers have sex.
[LAUGHTER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Hallelujah!
MARY DALTON:
And that came after [LAUGHS] the gay teacher. That was with Boston Public. No negative repercussions, the world did not end.
But my favorite representation of a teacher on television is Roland Pryzbylewski, “Prez,” on Season 4 of The Wire.
[CLIP]:
JIM TRUE-FROST AS ROLAND PRYZBYLEWSKI:
I still have a lot of kids who can barely handle whole numbers.
[VOICE IN BACKGROUND]
ACTRESS:
You don't teach math. You teach the test. North Avenue’s all about the leave-no-child-behind stuff, getting spoon-fed.
JIM TRUE-FROST AS ROLAND PRYZBYLEWSKI:
And what do they learn?
[END CLIP]
MARY DALTON:
The way this series takes a white teacher in an inner city Baltimore school, without privileging his experience over the kids or any of the things that happen so often in the films like Freedom Writers and Dangerous Minds, is really incredible. And then, plus, the systemic critique of educational policies and the system at every level is unlike anything I've, I’ve ever imagined.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So what you’re saying is, is that it’s such a complicated business depicting teachers, that it’s very hard to do in the length of an ordinary film. You need hour-long segments in a 13-hour season.
MARY DALTON:
If you’re really going to look at educational policy issues, and if you’re going to look at the things that students deal with in their daily lives, and then the pressures on teachers, you’re right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Mary Dalton is an associate professor of communication at Wake Forest University, and the author of The Hollywood Curriculum: Teachers in the Movies. Thank you so much.
MARY DALTON:
Thank you.
[CLIP]:
ALAN RUCK AS CAMERON FRYE:
In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the – anyone, anyone? – the Great Depression - passed the – anyone, anyone? – the Holly-Smoot Tariff Act, which – anyone? – raised or lowered – anyone, anyone? Anyone?
[END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Teachers come in all sizes, but they loom especially large on the big screen, able to raise up or tear down a child with a word. Sidney Poitier famously played the former in To Sir, With Love. So did Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society.
But the movies also run amok with pedagogical sadists and bullies. Mostly they are one or the other. The film may be in color but the teachers usually are depicted starkly in black or white, and we hardly ever see them teach. One exception is 1955’s Blackboard Jungle, starring Glenn Ford.
[CLIP]:
GLENN FORD AS RICHARD DADIER:
Now, all your lives you’re going to hear stories, what some guy tells you, what you see in books and magazines, on the television and radio, what - what you read in the newspapers. But if you can just examine the story, look for the real meaning. And most of all, fellas, if you'll just, just learn to think for yourself!
VIC MORROW AS ARTIE WEST:
Here it comes. Here comes the commercial.
[LAUGHTER, SOUND OF SCHOOL BELL]
[END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
We asked Mary Dalton, author of The Hollywood Curriculum: Teachers in the Movies, to outline the traits of the Hollywood pedagogue. She says Blackboard Jungle offers an unusually rich portrayal, but it also set the template for the stock characters that followed. These days, she says, the good teacher rarely deviates from form.
MARY DALTON:
This is something I refer to as “the Hollywood model,” because it’s amazing across time how this has been consistent. The good teacher is an outsider, either because this teacher wasn't trained to be a teacher and sort of fell into the profession or because they're a different race or from a different country. There are all kinds of different ways in which they're outsiders.
There’s also typically tension between the good teacher and administrators.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So how does this scenario play out in Blackboard Jungle?
MARY DALTON:
Well, in Blackboard Jungle, Glenn Ford plays Mr. Dadier, this teacher fresh out of teacher’s college who’s idealistic and wants to change the world. And, you know, he’s been in a sort of idyllic-looking public school in the suburbs, and he [LAUGHS] goes to the inner city, working with these students who've been deemed incorrigible.
And terrible things happen. I mean, you know, they threaten teachers, they steal things, they break things. And in the end, you think he’s going to leave the school, but there’s this one student, played, of course, by Sidney Poitier, who says [CLIP]:
SIDNEY POITIER AS GREGORY MILLER:
There’s talk you’re quitting this school, going someplace where there’s nice little obedient boys and girls.
GLENN FORD AS RICHARD DADIER:
Now, what do you think?
SIDNEY POITIER AS GREGORY MILLER:
Oh, I figure it’s just talk.
GLENN FORD AS RICHARD DADIER:
Why?
SIDNEY POITIER AS GREGORY MILLER:
Well, you know the ropes around here pretty good now. It’d be a shame to waste all that. [LAUGHS] I guess everybody learns something in school, even teachers.
GLENN FORD AS RICHARD DADIER:
Yes, I guess so.
[END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So if we skip ahead to the nineties and the Oughts, what do movies like 1995’s Dangerous Minds, starring Michelle Pfeiffer, and Freedom Writers, with Hillary Swank in 2007, have in common?
MARY DALTON:
They still fit the pattern. I mean, of course, Michelle Pfeiffer is an outsider. At the time she gets the job, she’s been in the Marines, but she’s not fully certified as a teacher yet. They also fit the profile for women teachers. There’s a double standard in that male teachers are able to have personal lives, intimate relationships, sustained marriages. Frequently their love interests are the B story. Women teachers are not.
In the case of Dangerous Minds, they actually cast and shot scenes with Andy Garcia as Michelle Pfeiffer’s love interest but cut those before the film was released. I mean, we can't have this mother-figure teacher having sex. That would just be horrible. [BROOKE LAUGHS]
And if they do, in the case of Freedom Writers, for example, the Erin Gruwell character is married, and then midway through the film, her husband says, you’re spending too much time with your students, I need more attention. I'm leaving you.
[CLIP]:
SCOTT GLENN AS STEVE GRUWELL:
I just want to live my life and not feel bad about it.
HILLARY SWANK AS ERIN GRUWELL:
You’re my husband. Why can’t you stand by me and be a part of it, the way wives support husbands?
SCOTT GLENN AS STEVE GRUWELL:
Because I can’t be your wife.
[END CLIP]
MARY DALTON:
And I think it goes back to the fact that we have this image of the schoolmarm. We're just not comfortable with women teachers on screen as being sexual beings.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Let's talk about the bad teachers now. In the case of women, you have Teaching Mrs. Tingle, with Helen Mirren. And, you know, she’s just a classic in the genre of the sort of fascistic, power-corrupted monster.
[CLIP]:
HELEN MIRREN AS MRS. TINGLE:
Your work, Mr. Turner, is very reminiscent of a young man who sat in that same chair some 20 years ago. He too had the words “No Future” printed on his forehead. Give your father my best.
[END CLIP]
MARY DALTON:
She really is - it’s an over-the-top sort of depiction. But, like all of the bad teachers in the movies, what it’s really about is her desire to control students.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And you say that when it comes to absolute power corrupting absolutely, gym teachers are in a filmic league of their own. Have we made no progress?
MARY DALTON:
[LAUGHS] The stereotypes are in greatest proportion with these gym teacher characters. I almost hesitate to mention the film Porky’s.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
[LAUGHS] Please do. [LAUGHING]
MARY DALTON:
Will people think less of me if I mention Beulah Balbricker -
[LAUGHTER]
- who’s just iconic? But I think the one people think about a lot is the film Carrie, where you have the Miss Collins character who at first appears to want to help Carrie, but she just cannot get out of that mode of wanting to exert control.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
What I said at the top of this interview is that mostly teachers are depicted starkly in terms of black and white, but in recent years there have been a few signs of more complex characters - neither all good or all bad. The crack-addicted teacher in Half Nelson is a complete mess.
MARY DALTON:
Well, he is a complete mess as a person, but I have never before or since seen such a wonderful example of critical pedagogy working in the classroom.
[CLIP]:
RYAN GOSLING AS DAN DUNNE:
History is the study of change over time. And what’s change? It’s this. It’s opposites. It’s two things that push against each other in opposite directions. So the civil rights movement, okay? It’s essentially - it’s two opposing mentalities. In the South, the majority believes all men are not created equal, and there’s a minority who believes that they are. So that minority struggles and it fights and it pushes ‘til eventually it becomes the majority.
[END CLIP]
MARY DALTON:
You can't reduce him to a good teacher or a bad teacher.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And then, of course, there’s that other character, played by [LAUGHS] Matthew Broderick in Election. I mean, this, unlike the character in Half Nelson, is a fundamentally unlikable character, in my view. Was he a good teacher or a bad teacher?
MARY DALTON:
Well, I find him fundamentally [LAUGHS] likeable [BROOKE LAUGHS] because I feel so sorry for him. He has been the exemplar teacher for years, winning the teaching award. I mean, clearly he’s into this. And then he makes a terrible mistake, by trying to fix the student government elections. [BROOKE LAUGHS]
But the thing that I find so interesting about this film is that he really doesn’t deviate much from this pattern of the good teacher, but he’s a much more nuanced character.
[CLIP]:
[SOUND TRACK PLAYS]
MATTHEW BRODERICK AS JIM McALLISTER:
It’s hard to remember how the whole thing started, the whole election mess. What I do remember is that I loved my job. I was a teacher, an educator, and I couldn’t imagine doing anything else. And I can’t.
[CHEERING/CROWD SOUNDS]
MATTHEW BRODERICK AS JIM McALLIS [SHOUTING]:
Come on, Wolverines! Defense! Let’s go!
MATTHEW BRODERICK AS JIM McALLISTER:
And I think I made a difference. I knew I touched the students’ lives during their difficult young adult years, and I took that responsibility seriously.
[END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
You've been writing most recently about the portrayals of teachers on TV, which you say has outpaced film long, long ago. What we can find on TV that we can't find in cinema?
MARY DALTON:
Well, we found a complex, sympathetic portrayal of a gay teacher in television, remarkably, before in film, in My So-Called Life. We also see women teachers have sex.
[LAUGHTER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Hallelujah!
MARY DALTON:
And that came after [LAUGHS] the gay teacher. That was with Boston Public. No negative repercussions, the world did not end.
But my favorite representation of a teacher on television is Roland Pryzbylewski, “Prez,” on Season 4 of The Wire.
[CLIP]:
JIM TRUE-FROST AS ROLAND PRYZBYLEWSKI:
I still have a lot of kids who can barely handle whole numbers.
[VOICE IN BACKGROUND]
ACTRESS:
You don't teach math. You teach the test. North Avenue’s all about the leave-no-child-behind stuff, getting spoon-fed.
JIM TRUE-FROST AS ROLAND PRYZBYLEWSKI:
And what do they learn?
[END CLIP]
MARY DALTON:
The way this series takes a white teacher in an inner city Baltimore school, without privileging his experience over the kids or any of the things that happen so often in the films like Freedom Writers and Dangerous Minds, is really incredible. And then, plus, the systemic critique of educational policies and the system at every level is unlike anything I've, I’ve ever imagined.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So what you’re saying is, is that it’s such a complicated business depicting teachers, that it’s very hard to do in the length of an ordinary film. You need hour-long segments in a 13-hour season.
MARY DALTON:
If you’re really going to look at educational policy issues, and if you’re going to look at the things that students deal with in their daily lives, and then the pressures on teachers, you’re right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Mary Dalton is an associate professor of communication at Wake Forest University, and the author of The Hollywood Curriculum: Teachers in the Movies. Thank you so much.
MARY DALTON:
Thank you.
[CLIP]:
ALAN RUCK AS CAMERON FRYE:
In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the – anyone, anyone? – the Great Depression - passed the – anyone, anyone? – the Holly-Smoot Tariff Act, which – anyone? – raised or lowered – anyone, anyone? Anyone?
[END CLIP]
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