are you rushing or are you dragging?
whiplash (2014) is one of my most formative pieces of media. i still remember watching it as an 18-year-old college student with crippling social anxiety, my insides writhing with that sinking sense of familiarity you feel when you see someone you think you know, but you're not sure enough to say hi. the texture is different. but the contours are there.
it seems like people take a lot of different lessons from whiplash. i've never been a believer that art is about lessons, but people seem determined to find them anyway. some see it as a motivational flick about the importance of perseverance and the value of tough love. others see it as a cautionary tragedy about the dangers of ambition and the abusive people who exploit it. i've never been able to fully commit to either of these myths.
whiplash, to me, is just true. it's frighteningly honest, and artfully directed, with its brassy oranges and sickly greens. it's embarrassing. it's thrilling.
i think a lot of whiplash is about being young and at the precipice of the rest of your life. andrew neiman sees his father — gentle, unassuming, passive. in a way, that future scares him. textually, he would rather die than live a passive, unassuming life. fletcher is seductive because he represents an escape — someone who might take him, like a blob of unfired clay, and shape him into something worth remembering. so, in a way, whiplash, for me, arrived at just the right time.
my real-life fletcher wasn't really anything like him. i met him in college a year later. nineteen, the same age as neiman. i went to his office hours and asked him, in a lot more words, if i should go to law school. one meeting became ten. it became him answering my questions about assignments on the way to his office so he could show me music when we got there. i rarely talk to him nowadays, but we still meet up for coffee. he is one of the best people i've ever met. the only thing, or the most important thing, that makes him fletcher is that he believed in me, and that changed me.
he said something like this to me once about how, in loving someone, not necessarily in a romantic way, you see their potential, and you want to draw it out. you see the good things in them. i'm the one speaking now when i say that love, or whatever you may call it, is the beginning of them seeing good things in themselves.
something that characterizes early adulthood for myself and a lot of other people right now can be summarized by this line from whiplash: "are you rushing, or are you dragging?" divorced of context, this becomes the uneasy feeling that permeates my entire life. maybe i'm moving too fast, not thinking carefully enough, committing too quickly. maybe i'm not moving fast enough, and i should be doing more. stop waiting, stop thinking, and just get out there. the answer is never simple.
life is both blisteringly fast and torturously slow. it just is. but i'm trying to keep showing up, take little sensible risks, and trust that it's leading somewhere. there's no finale with swelling music and euphoric close-ups. the sun will rise, and we'll do it all again.