Stop Sharing That Whiplash Scene

“Were you pushing or were you dragging?”

It’s one hell of a moment. Even if you’d had it spoiled (like I had) before seeing the movie, it’s a masterful bit of tension building. We’ve all been yelled at and we all know the situation — to greater or lesser degrees — and that scene in Whiplash captures the discomfort and fear perfectly. It comes maybe a third into the movie too and is a fascinating development on what could have been another Karate Kid-styled tale of master and mentor. Instead it reveals the grotesque power dynamic normally hidden in these stories, how that is exploited by this egomaniac and how we are going to be forced to watch the warping of the protagonist to the teacher’s demented standards of perfection. It also helps clarify the ending where, Kool-aid duly drunk, the protagonist totally submits to his master’s will and garners the merest crumb of approval from his chosen despot. It’s a brutal movie and the first scene of JK Simmons’ rage encapsulates the story well. But not entirely. And that’s the problem.

On various social media sites I see film/movie accounts share favourite or classic scenes from popular movies (and let us be clear, it is only ever popular movies because these accounts are driven by the need for online traffic, the quality of the movie rarely matters, only that it is popular) and one of them is that scene from Whiplash. Another one I see a lot is the McConaughey scene from Wolf of Wall Street, in fact I see a few from that movie. Tom Cruise’s (excellent) ‘motivational’ speech in Magnolia is another one, same as Nicholson’s discussion of ‘the Rat’ in The Departed or the argument in Revolutionary Road (now being over taken by ostensibly the same scene from Marriage Story) see also Tobey Maguire’s violent outburst in Brothers. I get the impression these scenes are shared, minus their context, because they are so impactful within their narratives. Those scenes jump out because they are the emotional height of the story and, if the movie has succeeded in engaging the audience, it should have the same effect on the viewer. The key part here though is “minus their context”. The scenes are couched in their narrative so that they show the depths of human experience. Someone once told me when writing a story to ask “why are you telling this story”? The story you tell should be the most important part of these…