The first trailer for Damien Chazelle’s latest, the party-hopping silent film era sendoff Babylon, is out. But don’t let the optical promise of Wolf of Wall Street glamor and debauchery fool you into thinking it’s his opus. Neither is La La Land, the love letter to romantic musicals that won enough Oscars to be briefly crowned one accidentally.
Chazelle’s true masterpiece came out swinging into the zeitgeist in 2014. Despite being about the cutthroat relationship between a college student jazz drummer and his demeaning band leader, Whiplash is less a music movie as it is the defining sports movie of a generation.
For ages, “man up” meant to bottle it all in – harkening the plight of the athlete conditioned to be beaten down for the sake of either the team’s pursuit of victory or their shot at individual prestige. Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) in Whiplash is someone who would be brought down even harder by today’s “cancel culture” standards. In many ways, he is like Jon Voight’s antagonistic football coach, Bud Kilmer in Varsity Blues – with even less winning-based justifications.
In fact, Chazelle, then just 29, directed the eventual Best Supporting Actor Academy Award winner to positively turn off his humanity for his performance.
Turn it off, he did. Fletcher humiliates Andrew Nieman (Miles Teller) until his knuckles are bloodied and his peripheral vision is equally compromised. Yet not even a head-on intersection collision can stop Nieman from being magnetically drawn to show for the man who robbed him of his innocence, knowing full well he will repeatedly storm into an ambush until the cycle is halted.
Therapeutically tackling the project to work through similar experiences he collected as a jazz drummer at Princeton, Chazelle proved his artistic staying power out the gate by crafting the story as a P.S.A. for the manipulated population. It resonates with the first-rate athletes who sit at every family gathering deeply internalizing their struggle- because all those around them know is how proud they are of the family’s most talented member for “killing it” in their desired field. Who is the “big man on campus” to take away his strongest supporters’ joy with their sad story if one should exist?
“You feel sorry for this young drummer Miles Teller played, because it’s all he’s ever known, and though he may become a great, he’ll never know what else he could be besides a drummer after what this guy [Fletcher] has done to him mentally,” said Paul Bisono, 27, a musician and former wrestler and swimmer at Hauppauge High School.
Per his highest musical ambitions, Nieman is like the impressionable athlete who will jump through a hula hoop on fire for his fiercest foe – because that’s what society has raised him to do in the pursuit of becoming “one of the greats.” Even if the likelihood is nil, there are monstrous coaches out there who will build you up just to crush you at every next stopgap while keeping you hooked, lined, and sinking.
For every dream scenario role model in the world, there are just as many Fletcher’s – so-called “experts” in their field. When, in reality, the only thing they’ve mastered is how to take advantage of the parental responsibilities they circumstantially assume by flaunting the hold they can have on those obligated to surrender the moment they walk in the door.
Even without laying a finger on them, the quote-unquote villain coach can reappear through that person’s life, as that looming presence of malevolence called self-doubt personified. To convince them they are not, and will never be good enough, because the early indications they possessed any type of talent predicated on chasing that Kool-Aid with an unhealthy heap of shame and embarrassment. Supposedly, this “builds character,” but show me anyone who benefited from being full-blown converted to nihilism by the time they are old enough to vote, and I’ll show you a bridge I’ve been looking to sell.
Around the same time Whiplash was released, The Players Tribune launched for high-profile athletes to cut out the media middleman and allow them to unwind with unadulterated vigor. Taboos discussing mental health have since waned, but more still needs to be done from the top down. This way, entertainers and fictional characters who spread the virtue of seeking help to the masses can drive up the number of traumatized everyday citizens who become active participants, and advocates, too.
Like Bisono intimated in his interview with The Messenger, from beginning to end, the airborne intensity emitting from this, the requiem of a too-young-to-die-old-drummer, mimics that of every boxing movie that’s ever grasped your undivided attention.
“Whiplash is like a sports movie in that you know this guy is going to win in the end – but does he really? He killed himself for a villain, then defeated him,” Bisono noted. “But then there’s a sense of maybe mutual respect for each other in the end, like Rocky and Apollo beyond Rocky I. Only this one you cringe at.”
No matter how much destruction this showman on a mission brings upon himself, you know what you’re rooting for, and you know how it will end. But you can’t help but wonder if it all could be handled differently by those who connect to Nieman, who had a Fletcher in their life – or have one still.
Don’t let someone have this kind of power over your life, especially beyond the time they’ve left it. Past self-doubt belongs in the past. That’s what builds character.
You are much more than what someone claimed you were to turn you into something that served their own ego best. You are everything that led to you being put in the first chair, and everything you’ve accomplished since you had that chair pulled out from underneath you by a mentor turned tormenter. With someone else setting the example of how not to behave as a leader, you break the chain by doing the opposite when someone comes under your wing, hat in hand, trust wielded and ready to perform.
Don’t take that, or them, for granted.
No one should sacrifice their peace of mind to satiate anyone else’s. Make your music. Play your sport. Sing your song and take swings. Nobody has a perfect life. Tranquility comes from recognizing even the greats lived in their head—some of them, maybe a little too much.
Don’t live in yours- talk it out and live your life loud.
Not in defeat. That is the Message. You can’t kill The Messenger.
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Whiplash is currently streaming on HBO Max.
