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November
27, 2002, 8:30 a.m. By Thomas Hibbs |
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merican
film has never been very good at depicting the life of the intellect or
the world of education. Hollywood loves dysfunctional intellectuals or
artists, the sort on display in Amadeus
and Tom
and Viv. The best it has done recently in the way of portraying
the nobility of teaching is Dead
Poets Society, a film that celebrates the romantic and tragic
isolation of the poet from bourgeois society. Although it has drawn comparisons
to Dead Poets, the new film, The
Emperor's Club, starring Kevin Kline as prep-school classics teacher
Arthur Hundert, is in crucial respects the antithesis of Dead Poets.
Instead of Shelley and Byron, Emperor gives us Aristotle and Cicero.
It desperately wants to demonstrate the relevance of classical education
to the molding of boys in the modern world.
It also wants to raise all sorts of big and interesting questions, about the nature of teaching, about the continued value of a classical education, and especially about whether the goal of education is something intrinsic or extrinsic to learning itself. Too bad it's such a dud of a movie, with a weak plot, caricatures instead of characters, and weighty issues that dissolve into the void that one suspects exists between the ears of the filmmakers.
St. Benedict's School for Boys, where Hundert teaches, justifies its classical education as creating civic leaders. Hundert's line is that "Greatness and ambition without contribution are nothing," while the school's Latin motto is "non sibi," not for oneself. There are some potential problems with Hundert's conception of education as a means of civic virtue, but the problem with the film has much to do with Kline's performance as Hundert. He comes off as a prissy, platitudinous, and naively idealistic devotee of the classics who spouts ideals, or, to be more precise, quotations from the classics.
For nearly the first half of the film, Hundert's students are the docile mirror image of their eager instructor. Into this tranquil setting enters Sedgewick Bell (Emile Hirsch), a snotty, cocky son of the senior senator from West Virginia. Only in this fantasy world of prep-school education — the classroom has the feel of the 1870s rather than the 1970s — could the mildly sarcastic Sedgewick be seen as a threat to order and truth. (Sedgewick would be eaten alive by that 80s' icon of high-school rebellion, Judd Nelson's character in The Breakfast Club. For that matter, Molly Ringwald's character could probably take him.)
Frustrated by his inability to reach Sedgewick, Hundert arranges to meet with the boy's powerful father, who asks pointedly, "What's the good in what you're trying to teach my son?" Hundert's defense of the values of classical education fails to move the senator, who takes umbrage at Hundert's assertion that his job is to mold Sedgewick's character. "Your job is not to mold character but to teach," counters Senator Bell. Undaunted, Hundert returns to the school resolved to try to mold Sedgewick.
Perhaps justifiably bored by the surface action of the film, some critics have detected a homoerotic subtext in Hundert's affection for Sedgewick. Beyond a few obligatory jokes about all male schools, this is a real stretch, reflecting a cultural bias that reduces male friendship to corporate power relations or the drunken camaraderie of frat boys. Hundert's goal is a noble one, to win Sedgewick's soul, to make him a man of liberal learning. Hundert appeals to the ambition of his young student, challenging him to compete in the annual Julius Caesar competition, in which students vie to demonstrate their knowledge of antiquity. In the process, Sedgewick moves from a C- to an A- student. But Hundert is so eager to have Sedgewick be the student he wants him to be that he fails him as a teacher in a series of events that have repercussions far into the future of both lives.
As the film points out, an excessive desire to win at all costs, to succeed without possessing the virtues upon which success is predicated, excludes one from an appreciation of the virtues appropriate to, and the goods inherent in, a particular pursuit. (A film that captures this issue more effectively than Emperor's Club is Searching for Bobby Fischer.) The classical view of education, the position the film almost states but never comes close to reflecting, is that knowledge is an end in itself. The intrinsic desirability of inquiry about the most important questions led Aristotle to praise philosophy for its uselessness.
Emperor's Club focuses on the occasional, if dramatic, failure of the classical model of education to inculcate civic virtue; it never entertains the possibility of a real tension between education and the civic order itself. And yet the image of Socrates — put to death for practicing philosophy — haunts the film. A large copy of Jacques Louis David's "Death of Socrates" hangs in front of Hundert's classroom and is on screen throughout most of the movie.
Of course, education
can be pursued and offered both as an end in itself and as a means to
other, socially beneficial goods. But before education can be for others,
it must be for oneself, for the good of knowing. The film occasionally
touches on this issue. One of the ancient aphorisms the students learn
is "Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain forever
a child." One of the tasks of liberal education is to render students
ill-suited to the ways of a utilitarian society. Contrary to the platitudes
of nearly every liberal-arts college in the country, this may mean that
the best students will not turn out to be leaders in anything like the
conventional sense of that term.
Once utilitarianism, however noble its initial ends, takes hold in education,
it is remarkable how rapid is the decline from Socrates to Dewey (the
pragmatist and influential American educational theorist) to the educational
world of Boston
Public, where the increasingly rare aspiration for real learning
cannot compete with the requirements of teachers to act as extensions
of the local Department of Social Services. Emperor's Club is not
so much an inspiring alternative vision of education as it is a sappy
evasion of these issues. But its failures as a film are closer to hand,
in poor writing, simplistic storytelling, and weak roles. Emperor Club
never beats Sedgewick's C- performance.
— Thomas Hibbs, professor of philosophy at Boston College, is the author of Shows About Nothing: Nihilism in Popular Culture from The Exorcist to Seinfeld.