Hot air
City-hopping columnist Boyd Farrow on all that’s wrong with the world
illustrations by Nils Davey / www.jawabrand.co.uk
The scariest thing about the long-running TV show Who Wants to be a Millionaire is not how dumb the contestants are but how dumb the contestants who claim to be teachers are. Frankly, parents worried about guns in classrooms should be far more concerned about the folks standing at the lecterns.
This is frightening when one considers the lasting impression teachers can have upon susceptible young minds. Take Richard Branson. The Virgin founder’s world domination began when, fed up with his teachers’ inability to spot his dyslexia, he created Student Magazine and employed higher-achieving classmates to make him rich. Or take one-time Virgin recording star Robbie Williams. The sensitive singer was so affected by a teacher’s taunts that he would amount to nothing that a whole eight years later, he ended his otherwise breezy album Life Thru a Lens with a borderline-psychotic rant to “Sir”.
Speaking of life through a lens, consider screenwriter Kevin Williamson, who made so much cash from Dawson’s Creek and Scream, he could afford to travel first class and smuggle cheerleaders into the Skybar for the rest of his life. Except, he couldn’t enjoy his success. Gnawing away in his mind was the teacher who called an essay he’d written “lousy” and suggested writing wasn’t the smartest career move. Williamson used $20m to direct his first film, Teaching Mrs Tingle, in which high-school kids kidnap and torture a tutor, played by Helen Mirren. Sadly, in the wake of Columbine, the movie withered at cinemas and Williamson has not directed a film since.
One way or another, all film-makers are obsessed with their teachers. Count the acres of newsprint Woody Allen and Wim Wenders used this summer to lament the passing of their respective maestros Bergman and Antonioni. And when film-makers are not explaining why they’ve followed higher cinematic laws, they’re defiantly breaking every rule in the book – a bad move, looking at this year’s Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez collaborative flop Grindhouse. Film-makers, it seems, either want gold stars or they want to write rude words on the blackboard so other cool film-makers will like them.
This fixation with rules reached crisis point with Dogme 95 spearheaded by Lars von Trier, the Prince of Denmark’s boho community. Since the unpolished, heavily-regulated Festen and Idioterne were unveiled at 1998’s Cannes film festival, new commandments have regularly been handed down to von Trier’s followers. Von Trier’s last film The Boss of it All employed automavision technique, in which volume and focus alter at random to coax even more naturalism. Last month the auteur resurfaced with a new project: Erik Nietzsche – The Early Years. This project was based on his own film-school days in the late 1970s, a period during which he added the pretentious “von” to his name. Von Trier now recalls: “I wanted to know about the techniques of film but the teachers taught a lot of nonsense.” Whether these teachers unwittingly bear responsibility for some of von Trier’s more indulgent output is circumspect, but von Trier has certainly wreaked havoc on impressionable minds. Dogme was either meant to encourage film-makers to concentrate on their stories without resorting to cheap tricks or it was an elaborate joke.
Either way, von Trier has become slave to a never-ending array of gimmicks. And, unfortunately, an endless supply of students continue to ape his tedious methods as long as it keeps their budgets down and maximises their chances of publicity. After all, who doesn’t want to be a millionaire?
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