I can hardly wait for Friday’s release of Bad Teacher, and not just because I’ve been called the “poor man’s Cameron Diaz.” If they do it right, watching Diaz’s teacher be horrible to students could rival watching Billy Bob Thornton’s Santa be horrible to children. Here’s hoping.
(On a related note, I had an interesting conversation with one class about the humor of Bad Santa. To a man, they told me they “just didn’t get it.”
“Just wait, kids, just wait.” I said. “You have to know what it’s like to be at…a certain place in life.”)
Serious scholarly types get stuck on breaking rules as the basis of funniness. Most laypeople think the truth is what’s funniest. Both are right. It’s not just that you enjoy watching Dr. House be horrible to other people, or Patsy or Edina or Ferris Bueller ignore the rules of grownup society. It’s that, at some primal level, you really want to do these things. As Aristotle (who’s still a bastard, by the way) once said, comedy reveals the ugly truth about human nature.
It’s pretty obvious that the audience is in on the game too, vicariously living a lifestyle that isn’t acceptable in the real world. If the viewers didn’t identify with the rule-breaking they wouldn’t have any investment in the characters, and probably wouldn’t find it funny. Identification is exactly why Go The Fuck To Sleep is such a phenomenal hit with parents, for example.
I hope Bad Teacher is a phenomenal hit with educators. Hey teachers, aren’t you sick of being told how to dress? Don’t you kind of want to kill the next person who tells you what you’re doing is a vocation? And yeah, maybe you felt like kicking that kid in the teeth yesterday, and you don’t want any guff because (s)he totally deserved it — wouldn’t it feel sooooo good to give someone the middle finger on these counts, or at least tell people how you really feel?
Speaking of which, I can’t help but remember that student evals compared many real-life male profs I knew — favorably — to Dr. House. I’ve seen no such love for female curmudgeons. Hey, where’s the House-like adoration for being a smart and cranky chick? Oh, right, there is none; we’re supposed to find it attractive in men, and express our own worth with encouraging smiles in the mating game.
Screw that, I’m going to the movies. And if I were still teaching, I’d be blowing off class to do it.
Who’s with me?
I mean, I don’t actually know what the plot is about, but why not? As long as she doesn’t go all Dead Poets Society at the end of it. (God, Robin Williams, the introduction to Walt Whitman is almost always better than Walt Whitman, although I will ‘fess up to liking Aristotle if for no other reason than without him there’d be no medieval scholastics) I hate touchy-feely movies about school. Inevitably, they end with a bunch of students who’ve never learned grammar or the Chicago Manual of Style, but, hey, that doesn’t matter because they’re passionate about the subject and passion takes care of everything else! So if Cameron Diaz makes her kids do worksheets and diagram sentences until they can construct grammatical ones of her own, then this is my porn.
I know, I know. This is why Bad Santa is brilliant, it managed redemption without sentimentality — but it’s so rare, I scarcely dare to dream it will happen for this movie.
My HS band director used to tell us “Don’t believe Mr. Holland’s Opus. You won’t get any better if you don’t practice.”
But I guess movies about people practicing don’t sell well.
I hated that movie if for no other reason than that Understanding Poetry was actually a book that made me want to know and love poetry. This is also the main reason why the great poet Richard Wilbur rather disliked the film: it took real scholarship and trashed it in the name of passion. However, it’s a myth of pseudo-intellectuals that every mistake is great so long as you can do it with passion and a sense of heroism.
Also, as one who deals with depression, if one more flick treats suicide as a viable option I will personally go on a shin-kicking crusade in Hollywood. Ok, I’ll end my rant there.
I finally just saw Bad Teacher. My first thought after it ended was, “Fuck YES!” This is why I got into the professorate after some-teen years working in the corporate landscape. Sometimes I get a little tired of teachers (but especially professors) bitching about their jobs. Yeah? It’s that bad? Go work for American Express or Arch Coal or Wal-Mart. Then you have something to bitch about, when you face hateful customers all day, unreasonable managers, and assholes around every corner. Is being a teacher or a professor a PITA? You bet you ass it is. Guess what? Its no better or worse than any other job.
You go, you work, people suck, you get paid. Welcome to life.
The bad is what makes Bad Teacher funny.
(And kudos to the Bad Santa reference.)
I have to disagree about teaching being equivalent to any other job — having switched into tech, I can say that there is quantitatively less work to do. Which is honestly great. And not being in charge of 50 people is just plain easier than being in charge of them. Granted, this is a skilled, white-collar profession; obviously, I agree that working in a coal mine or on an assembly line or at Walmart is going to be worse than teaching. But I think that teaching IS a form of management, and needs to recognized as such.
Also, Bad Santa is the only movie that competes with The Producers for me.