Public Pedagogy. (Review).

Breaking in to the Movies: Film and the Culture of Politics

by Henry A. Giroux

Maiden, MA: Blackwell, 2002

297 pp./$59.95 (hb), $24.95 (sb)

In the available literature on film studies, dabblers and dilettantes abound. Literature professors, history professors, art historians, sociologists, even psychiatrists have taken on film as if seeing lots of films (and who doesn't these days) makes one expert enough to publish a book on the subject. Film studies scholars have become insular, protective, even paranoid and I don't blame them... I don't blame us.

Henry Giroux, we happily discover, has his reasons for writing on film, and his work is well worth considering. His recent collection Breaking in to the Movies: Film and the Culture of Politics compliments and intersects with his better-known work on critical pedagogy. Breaking in to the Movies is about how films teach us and, maybe more importantly for the film studies crowd, how we might teach films to our students.

A basic intellectual assumption governs the process: that film has become a form of public, pedagogy. In his writing on education--for example, Schooling and the Struggle for Public Life: Critical Pedagogy in the Modern Age (1988) and Pedagogy and the Politics of Hope: Theory. Culture and Schooling (1997)-Giroux insists that teachers need to understand and appreciate what kids know and not simply lament what they don't know and don't seem to care about. In the [2 essays in 'Breaking in to the Movies, Giroux views film as a complex public phenomenon that "enables a space of dialogue, criticism and solidarity" (p. 6). Films enter into a sort of competition (with print culture, for example) hawking a sort of knowledge 'not entirely contaminated by the logic of formal schooling" (p. 8).

Giroux is an educational formalist. He is in favor of giving students lots of information and leaving them to think through contexts, to make appropriate and inappropriate connections with their daily, public life. This classroom model finds its way into virtually all of the film-crit pieces collected here. Giroux affirms that his "interpretations are meant to be strategic and positional"--that "any type of closure is endemic" to critical thinking (p. 13). He doesn't care if he's right, so long as he's got you thinking.

In an essay on Dead Poets Society (1989, by Peter: Weir), for example, Giroux offers a primer on teaching a "relevant" film to students.

Rather than reducing such a text to the reified terrain of relevance and teaching the conflicts, it should be posited as a site of struggle over how representations mean differently and what the consequences of such differences might be if they are to matter as part of a wider, theoretical, ethical, and political discourse. (pp. 79-80)

What Giroux proposes for the classroom teacher is a pedagogy that reads against the Hollywood paradigm. In the classroom the very political discourse that is routinely confused or subverted by pat liberal Hollywood formula becomes a context for discussion. We come to teach films by reading them closely and examining in detail what they're not saying and why.

Dead Poets Society is on its surface a formulaic teen picture. It uses familiar tropes to re-present teen anguish, suicide and powerlessness. In doing so, the film risks making such serious issues the stuff of a Hollywood formula in which conflicts, however profound, are resolved neatly and magically. Giroux nonetheless shows how the film might be "used" as a context for a meaningful discussion of "critical agency, ethical accountability, and the obligations of democratic public life" (p. 83).

Giroux reads past, or through, Dead Poets Society's neat closure and insists that the film's ending reworks and reconciles the students' "resistance" in terms of a discourse of politeness and inaction. Nothing changes, order is maintained and the kids who betray their teacher rehearse later public life--elite culture (to which the students belong) is built on such guilty moments of acquiescence. The hero of the film gets his moment in the sun all right, but a smarter reading has him depart into obscurity as the rich kids stay on track.

Giroux is predictably interested in films about teaching. His newly expanded piece on Dangerous Minds (1995, by John N. Smith) does well to place the film in context of heated debates over multiculturalism, political correctness, identity politics and race as a cultural formation of interest in the classroom and as a political and cultural fact of public life. Dangero us Minds is on its surface a contemporary primer for teaching slum kids. But as Giroux argues, it does little to deviate from a model first set half a century ago by Blackboard Jungle (1995, by Richard Brooks). Dangerous Minds is a well-intentioned film that resolves racial conflict "through a colonial model in which white paternalism and missionary zeal provide the inspiration for kids from deprived backgrounds to improve their. character and sense of responsibility" (p. 151). He's right, of course. The film oversimplifies the problem at hand by offering up a tough-love teacher, LouAnn Johnson, who cares a lot about "her kids," and who, by the way, looks fabulous in Jeans and a leather jacket.

Of course Dangerous Minds reductively regards race and class--that's hardly news. But, as Giroux .argues, there are moments in the film the Hollywood formula cannot easily close down. After breaking up a fight--Johnson is a karate expert, who like Sidney Poitier's character in To Sir With Love (1966, by James Clavell), gains her students' respect by displaying an ability to kick their asses--Johnson tells Emillo, one of her Latino students, that she wants to help him. He dismisses her efforts and tells her that he comes from a broken home (of course), that he's poor (ditto) and in a curious imaginative leap, that he "sees the same fucking movies" she does. He tells her what she already knows--that she will never be able to get him off the streets (where he will live and soon die--yet another racist assumption). "How the fuck are you going to save me from my life?" he asks and she has no ready answer. While the film may be silly and reductive and wonderfully miscast, it still can be used to examine racial ste reotyping and white colonialism (masked here as white liberal civic-mindedness). As a form of public pedagogy, Dangerous Minds gets viewers thinking and could get students talking about race.

Teenagers in teenpics are invariably depicted as a problem to solve, or, in some films, a problem that cannot be solved, at least not easily or neatly. Giroux uses two films he dislikes--Larry Clark's self-consciously shocking Kids (1995) and James Toback's "realist" study of urban white kids taken in by the black hip-hop scene, Black and White (2000)--to make this point. Both Clark and Toback, Giroux points out, are fascinated with "the aesthetics of teen sexuality." Both films are exploitative--an exploitation premised upon stylistic markers of a documentary, art and/or alternative cinema.

"Teen sexuality in [Larry] Clark's discourse," Giroux writes, "becomes a metaphor for insincerity, crudeness, violence and death." The primary identification of kids with their bodies and sexual drives in both of these films offers up, in the guise of serious art for the art-house crowd, the usual conservative teen-pic template. Giroux concludes:

Stripped of any critical capacities, youth are defined primarily by a sexuality that is viewed as unmanageable and in need of control, surveillance, legal constraint, and other forms of disciplinary power... This reductionist rendering of sexually active youth is a short step from stereotypical portrayals of black sexuality in which sexuality becomes a metaphor for disease, promiscuity, and social decadence. (p. 184)

The most entertaining piece in the collection focuses on Fight Club (1999, by David Fincher). Working again from a model that identifies Hollywood films as "teaching machines," Giroux laments how Fight Club "uses violence as both a form of voyeuristic identification and a pedagogical tool" (p. 272). The film, he contends, gives violence a cathartic effect and a "glamorous and fascist edge." it offers a look at the politics of male authority but in the end supports a particularly hideous formulation of male authoritarianism.

Giroux's discussion of the film makes for interesting reading in part because he uses the film--and "uses the film" is the operative phrase again here-to discuss misogyny, male violence and consumer capitalism. In doing so he by necessity does not talk much about visual style. He blasts (mostly liberal female) critics who, because they find the filmmaking so dazzling, like the film despite its violence. He holds up for ridicule the director's claim that he was "just trying to make a good funny movie," because he sees it as way to excuse away content (p. 278).

Here Giroux's hard-headedness works to another (good) effect. He insists that the film should be contextualized with regard to its hideous violence-a violence that simply can't or shouldn't be "appreciated" in any way. Doing so damns the film despite its visual style and a first hour that is, from where I sit, Just as Fincher hopedit would be--funny. I find the .satire of self-help appropriately mean-spirited and smart. The first hour of the film is so stylistically interesting that it is at least original. For me, the film falls apart in its last hour. because Fincher tries to pay off the various political arguments and abandons the randomness of comedy and sensation in favor of plot, theme and message.

I offer this counterpoint not to challenge Giroux's take on the film. We disagree, but so what. In getting me to articulate an argument (in opposition to his in this case) Giroux achieves his goal-to get his readers thinking critically about films and to get them talking about how films intersect with important cultural concerns of the day.

In the retrospective introduction, Giroux reminds us that kids learn a lot from the movies and television shows they watch. He's a parent and that clearly has had an effect on how he reads films and television. For kids, content is malleable, subject to debate, rumination and fascination. Media literacy is something lots of our kids already have. A case in point: my 11-year-old has become a devotee of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Last season there was an attempted rape, a bout of wild sex and an episode on addiction (to magic, but my son got the point that it was "like drugs"). What he has made of these scenes is not so simple as one might expect and this speaks to Giroux's argument that teachers need to tap into what students .know, to encourage them to think and talk about what they see on screen.

In an episode last year, Willow's addiction to magic leads to a break-up with her girlfriend Tara. My son recapped the episode to his mother who doesn't watch the show. She asked, "Is Willow a boy?" He looked at her in amazement and then, nearly spelling out the word for her: "No, she's a les-bi-an--and it's OK." The show focuses on subject matter that hasn't come up quite yet at his public school, at least not in the classroom. In the meantime, he's formulated an argument on his own, drawn, as Giroux contends, from a television show that participates in a public form of pedagogy that speaks profoundly to his and our daily, public lives.

JON LEWIS is Professor of English at Oregon State University. His two most recent books are Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle Over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry and, as editor, The End of Cinema as We Know It... American Film in the Nineties.