After being on my watch list since a very long time, I finally got a chance to watch Whiplash, the critically acclaimed 2014 film about a young drummer and his intoxicating relation with both his cruel mentor and jazz drumming. The ending of Whiplash is still to this day considered one of the most well done endings to a film and it leaves the viewer in one of two states. Some people might see the hard mentor finally smiling on our protagonist as a good ending, a feel good film about perseverance and how you can achieve anything you dream of with just the right amount of luck and a ton and ton of hard work. Hell Andrew, our protagonist literally has bleeding calluses every time he performs brilliantly. The success of his drumming finally comes down to the literal blood, sweat and tears that rise from the sounds coming from his drum kit.
However, a sinister yet plausibly a deeper way to look at the ending of the film is of the evil man, finally winning and everything he stood for, that excellence does indeed require a person to sell his soul is true. At the very end of the film, Andrew has alienated and looks down on his loving father, lost the chance with a girl he loved, constantly in self doubt, fear and to top it all of, in a toxic love hate relation with a man who caused a guy to literally hang himself. Make no mistake, Andrew has literally sold his soul, everything that was ever good in his life except his drumming in the pursuit of greatness.
There were many moments through out the film that led me to question if what Andrew did is indeed necessary for success. If success does indeed require giving up everything that you ever held dear.
Before I do that however, I want to make it clear that while I do understand that success is subjective, we pretty much all have a common root to what success means. I won’t be entertaining the idea that if you define success to be alive, then you already are. Success in our context will mean the same thing it most likely did in Andrew’s mind:
Name, Fame and being the top of the field in what you do
So with that out of the way, I had some ideas floating around in my head regarding this film and these ideas helped me define what success meant for me. I won’t be sharing what success means to me, but I will be sharing the ideas that you can use to build your own definition of it.
Slow and Fast
It is no coincidence that some of the best musicians of the time, including some of the legends in the field of jazz that Andrew looks up to, reached their zenith after years of playing. While there are many young CEO’s, it is no accident that most of the companies are managed by older people who have been in the field for years.
Time indeed gives perspective, as Andrew’s father says in the film.
There’s a version where Andrew’s natural talents could have easily shined, without having to give up basically anything he did. Yes it would have been arguably harder, he would have had to be the struggling artist for quite a few years before finally being great and recognized, but he would have something that the hurried version of Andrew could possibly never make time for: himself.
This is where I believe perseverance would have been the key. Not the kind of perseverance that led Andrew to continue drumming even after taking insults and literally bleeding (while that is still important), but the kind of perseverance what you allow him to have a kind of unnatural belief in himself that he is indeed going to be a great in the field of drumming. I do believe that there are two kinds of perseverance, a slow one and a fast one.
The fast one is adrenaline fueled. It is the kind that gets you to lift that final weight and not put it down till you do, it is the one that lets you run that last minute on the thread mill just so that you can complete the full exercise. The fast one is indeed important. It is what gets you to actually complete what you were doing.
The slow one however is arguably cooler and it is something that I am trying to cultivate more and more of. The slow one is what gets you to hit the gym regularly in the first place. You cannot always depend on something to go to the gym. You need an internal factor, a compass that allows you to do so in the first place.
Terence, the mentor describes his method to be effective because it constantly puts pressure to be better. He never tries to internally motivate his pupils. I believe that is because Terence relies on this fast kind of perseverance from his students that he has to put up acts of cruelty. Regardless of if he enjoys it, his teaching method needs him to create almost an atmosphere of self preservation in his class which is perfect for the fast kind of perseverance to kick in, the kind that literally is meant to protect one self.
The act of isolating the drummers until they perfect the tune was the perfect example of this philosophy in action. Andrew literally had to be taken to his breaking point, to a point where he was genuinely scared, isolated and weak to be able to pull off the perfect solo.
A slow kind would have been intrinsic. The art of perfection would have to be slowly but surely taken in by Andrew. All Terence could have done was to show Andrew what perfection was and wait for his intrinsic love for music to catch up. This could have taken years, but years that Andrew was happy, healthy and in a good mental state.
Those who can’t, teach.
Now I don’t want this to be all encompassing. I know that there are people that genuinely love to teach and are top of their fields and yet choose to teach. The very act of teaching is essential to the preservation of the human race. The very definition of biological survival is to pass down our knowledge to our offsprings.
However, in the context of the film, I sometimes question Terence himself. There was never a moment in the film where Terence’s natural abilities showed. Why was the tempo off? Notice he never said that the tempo was wrong, he said that it didn’t match his tempo.
Now I have no idea about Music, but why did Andrew’s idea of perfection, the approval of this man? It was clear in the film that Andrew’s idea of perfection was pretty flawed. While shown as a foolish jock in the film, Andrew’s cousin at the dining table bring up a very valid point that Andrew himself seems to have forgotten. Music is subjective.
If Terence didn’t have authoritative advantages over Andrew, would he really have had that much influence on him? Now I know that the very fact that Terence has a job at the Music school is a nod at his skill, but it seems to me that through out the film, Terence’s idea of success was to be the mentor of a great musician, not a great musician himself.
He is literally offloading his ambitions onto his students. That’s the very embodiment of those who can’t, teach, or in this case abuse till they get out a good reaction.
Perhaps if Andrew had not stumbled onto Terence back at the club after quitting, he might have found better mentors. Because Terence was never a mentor, he was a teacher, a pusher. What Andrew needed at his skill level was a mentor, someone to guide him, not mould him with abuse.
Notice through out the film, all Terence ever did was abuse and discipline. There was never something Andrew actually learnt from him.
Where’s the Audience?
Art is only valuable if someone holds it to be. Andrew was shown to be great at the end, but where was the audience to validate this? Through out the film, we were never shown the audience at all.
I think this was a subtle hint from the director that the nods to the fact that it indeed was a misplaced sense of meaning that Andrew got from Terence that made him place himself as a great.
I don’t want to elaborate too much on this, but sometimes we are better than we think we are and if Andrew had paid more attention to the audience then his cruel mentor, he would have actually seen that he indeed is very good at drumming.
The Push
While all these points that I’ve been making might seem as me piling on top of Terence, I do understand why people like him produce results. One of the most popular quotes in the movie is when Terence says “There are no two words in the English language more harmful than ‘good job”
What he was so passionately putting forth to Andrew was how easily we as humans grow complacent. All the truly evil acts of Terence through out the film was him essentially not letting Andrew grow complacent: Replacing him with another drummer, constantly showing him how replaceable he is, not validating him in the ending scene which arguably is his magnum opus in the film
Terence hates complacency and it shows in every action he makes.
Complacency is bad yes. However there is a fine line between stability and complacency. Complacency is a reaction of over confidence. It is no one can ever be better than me. Stability on the other hand is simply put, confidence. It is the belief that I am good.
In ensuring that his students never become complacent, Terence was not only destroying their confidence, but also their sense of self.
That being said however, we could all always use a push. Something that jolts us awake and sets us back on the right path. This push is very important when following the slow perseverance route.
Breathe
Leave room for yourself to breathe. Everything in whiplash is so damn fast.
Ultimately the story of Whiplash in my view is someone who is rushing to success, leaving only chaos and misery on the path. However, that being said, success does indeed demand sacrifice. I’m not criticizing the fact that Andrew made sacrifices, I’m just asking myself if the curve of sacrifices and success is a diminishing returns curve.
Perhaps success can indeed go hand in hand with life with the right amount of sacrifices or perhaps I’m wrong and success indeed does demand the kind of sacrifices Andrew did. Maybe the reason so many people line up to see their favorite artists, the reason why they are perceived as larger than life is because they are just that. Someone who literally overcame life, in order to perfect their craft and whether that’s worth it is a deeply personal question.