Living Souls, have been inform'd, By Magic Numbers and persuasive Sound *

When I was in high school, Mr. McCadden was a very good history teacher. He also rose to the position of principal after being removed as varsity basketball coach. A small-town “you can’t coach the children, but you can oversee them” reshuffling. The man was a bully; he had bullied and got physical with the wrong kid on the basketball team, during a game, and the retribution was quick. But he had intimidated for years and as teachers who fell under his purview told me, he just moved on to trying to bully them. As a lecturer he was exceptional, history was alive and relevant. But his steel blue eyes always had a hint of maliciousness as he looked across a room.

That sort of cold gaze is what Terence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) wields in the movie Whiplash. He is a maestro of a bully who understands two languages: music and perfection. He is fluent and wonderful as a musician. There is talent that other musicians appreciate and value. His music is a simple enough elegance, but his perfection has its own very obscure dialect. To achieve his goal, perfect music, he will abuse, slur, punish, taunt, slap and intimidate. He finds a crack in a music student and pours acid into it. He is an equal-opportunity bigot. He will talk badly about your playing, your parents, your religion, your skin tone, gender, and your weight. First-year student Andrew Neiman (Miles Teller) steps into this world only knowing that Mr. Fletcher is the teacher everyone wants. His Big Band Jazz studio is coveted at the Schaeffer Conservatory.

Simmons was nominated for and won many awards including a Best-supporting Actor Oscar for his portrayal of Terence Fletcher (he was nominated for Best Villain by the MTV Movie Awards). The film editor, Tom Cross, also won an Oscar for editing the film, and the editing is integral to the story. The editing holds the music as a character with all the nuances a character would bring. The opening is just a dark screen when drumming starts, and then a light crashes down a dark hallway as the music stops. The two main characters are introduced, an immediate tension is realized, and the story begins.

As Linton Davies wrote on his blog, Words, in 2015, “…the force and violence of the foregrounded drumming, followed by the startling smash cut to silence. This is such an engaging way to open a film, not just on a visceral level, the edit giving you whiplash from the off, but also in terms of how much story is being told here. This is a film about drumming. It will be an exciting, intense, edge of your seat thriller. And the key to the story will be found through contrast.”

Neiman’s drum sequences alone are dizzying. But quick closeups of instruments as Fletcher conducts, the parts of the drum kit, the hands or headshots of the various musicians, the bits and pieces of sax or trumpet or trombone, the slow draining of a spit valve keep the tempo of the movie and the music in each scene. Flecther’s command is drill sergeant-like if a drill sergeant was dressed in black and wanted to press you on tempo or time. The fearsomeness of Fletcher is epic, his arrogance supreme. And it is this push for perfection that makes his students want to be perfect. There will be no coddling, there will be no passing over a wrong note, as he says, “There are no two words in the English language more harmful than "good job".” And this is how he gets the best musicians, and that resulting perfection, through tactics of fear and intimidation.

Andrew lets that arrogance and meanness rub off. He is aggressively dismissive of his cousins when it appears they dis him. He cuts his girlfriend loose not as a discussion but as an “I won’t have time for you in my quest for being the best”. He speaks the language of music, but he hasn’t gotten the dialect of perfection quite right. So, when he crashes (literally), and Fletcher tells him he is done all he has is anger. Enough anger to attack Fletcher. Enough anger to share how Fletcher’s students have been treated, and that this is enough connection to a former student who died by his own hand probably due to the pressure Fletcher brought down on him. Fletcher is let go. So, too, Andrew is dismissed, he leaves the school and drums.

This losing everything is a wonderful literary trope. We journey into the underworld, and we hope to rise back out. With Whiplash, we witness Andrew’s journey to another way of thinking about what his life will be, without drums, without music perhaps. While he is on the outside, he finds Fletcher playing as a special guest in a small club. The now-former teacher tells him he has a need for a drummer for an upcoming performance, and Andrew’s ego is still strong enough to say, yeah, he needs me. It’s really the culmination of the malice Fletcher holds though. Because he reveals at the performance that he knows Andrew helped get him fired from the conservatory.

And this is where we see a new level of Terence Fletcher's cruelty, he will allow an entire band a bad performance as he hasn’t given Andrew the music. This is where he believes he will rid himself of Andrew, where he will punish and humiliate him. Perhaps it is because Andrew knows that he can really play, that after this humiliation, as he goes to leave, he encounters his father (Paul Reiser). This is someone who has always been there for him and with just that moment of support -- a father hugging his son -- he can go back and take over the stage. He plays like a possessed person, he doesn’t look at the music, he just plays. He can’t be stopped, he won’t be stopped, and when Fletcher asks him “What are you doing, man?” Andrew says, “I’ll cue you.” Fletcher realizes what he is hearing. This young man got here in spite of him, not because of him. At that moment, they speak the same language. Their dialects match. The music is perfect. 

* Congreve, William, The Mourning Bride