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A simple matter of not letting schooling interfere with your education, as Mark Twain would have it. Factory on the outside, cinder-block labyrinth on the inside, Philadelphia's Northeast High. The molding (or draining) of personality, teacher and student locked in the assembly-line process, one assuring the other that "it's nice to be individualistic, but..." A tracking camera alongside the hall monitor (cp. Van Sant's Elephant), Sartre at the Spanish class, "existentialista" as can be. With tie, rolled-up sleeves and crewcut, the dean reigns in his office, the teenager arguing against detention doesn't stand a chance. Thick specs are an insistent element in Frederick Wiseman's composition of institutional myopia, zooms during parent-faculty conferences register restless fingers and minds. Girls get "Simon Says" during gym exercises, plus a veritable geisha workshop in the demonstration of feminine poise. (For their part, the boys applaud the vaudevillian gynecologist who quips that "virginity is a state of mind.") Youngsters tune out as an instructor drains "Casey at the Bat" of its vitality, then perk up when another digs for poetry in Simon & Garfunkel's "The Dangling Conversation." Grousing in the cafeteria, the push-pull of bully and nerd, faulty connections all around. "Cloistered, secluded, completely sheltered from everything that's going on in the world," still the Vietnam War hovers inescapably in the margins—good pupils into good soldiers is the ultimate product of indoctrination, a letter from a stationed infantryman receives the principal's misty-eyed beau travail at the close. ("A body doing a job," thus the follow-up to the discarded bodies in Titicut Follies.) The getting of wisdom, the Wiseman stance. "Remember, there is no right or wrong answer, I'm just trying to determine what attitudes are." In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |