'Whiplash'

Movies About Music Are Hard

...Especially when it's about drummers. The fine technicality of drumming is visually dramatic but it's the subtle things that make a drummer's performance stand out or fail or be whatever it is. Whether it's Buddy Rich or Art Blakey, or Omar Hakim or (or for that matter Keith Moon or John Bonham or Stewart Copeland), it's actually the little things they do that make all the difference - how they lean into the beat or pull the beat, how they accent the counter, how they bring contrast to the dynamic and underline the melody. So it is with great trepidation one watches a film like 'Whiplash' as it tries to encapsulate jazz drumming.

Drumming is hard. Just ask Terry Bozzio who makes it look easy but works like hell to get his sound. It goes without saying that you wonder if a film is up to capturing the intricacies of the difficulties themselves. This film comes awfully close.

What's Good About It

The songs 'Whiplash' and 'Caravan' get a working out, but otherwise the film mercifully goes through tiny fragments of music, almost vivisecting the elements of playing these songs. J.K Simmons plays a formidable scary instructor/conductor and the moments when the music flows is great. But more interestingly the director restrains from letting the music flow, and this creates amazing tension because watching and hearing the snippets makes you want to hear the whole damn thing played out - something that gets served up in the last section.

The world contained in the movie is surprisingly small. There's a conservatory of music, there's a band, there's a hall of faceless people, there's a cinema with one employee, a girl who is a brief love interest. And this creates an interesting effect where loneliness is played out as something claustrophobic.

What's Bad About It

As tough as J.K. Sommons' character Fletcher might be, there's something unrealistic about his vision of music having great value. The point of course is that his band is expertly attuned in such a way s to win competitions and sustain his reputation, but it becomes rather unbelievable that such a joyless bunch of musicians can be so good as to win so many competitions. The more bullying he becomes, and ratchets up the drama, the more bizarre the vision of his music seems to the audience. There's a certain limit to the kind perfection and precision he is conveying, especially in the context of jazz music.

If he wants machine-like precision, he can programme a drum track on cubase or Garageband and be done with it. It would never make a mistake, it would always play on tempo, and never complain or wilt or tire. But would that be jazz? If a human being couldn't do it, is that still jazz? I tend to think the answer is in the negative so this Fletcher character seems like a tremendous phoney and not sufficiently authoritative at all.

What's Interesting About It

It's interesting that it got made. And I don't mean that with my usual sarcasm-fuelled insult for something like a movie directed by Dolph Lundgren; rather, that it is interesting that a film that is so much about the musical experience could have been conveyed so well on paper that it got investment. The world of cinema is a lot more interesting than I gave it credit. You could have fooled me with the rush of comic book superhero movies being churned out, but no, something like this can still get up.

If You Can't Get Your Technique Down...

At one point there is a headline on an article cut out, stuck up on the wall that reads "If you can't get your technique down, you wind up playing in a rock band". It might even be true. But it's nothing to be ashamed of if you do.

Drumming And Human Consciousness

Just coincidentally, I stumbled upon this page after watching the film. Here's a lengthy excerpt which is of great interest:

But even though a steady drummer may be more intelligent than his or her bandmates, the drummer's gifts can be shared: a tight beat can actually transfer that natural intelligence to others. In studies on the effects of rhythm on brains, researchers showed that experiencing a steady rhythm actually improves cognitive function. One psychology professor at the University of Washington used rhythmic light and sound therapy on his students and discovered that their grades improved. Similarly, one researcher at the University of Texas Medical Branch used that method on a group of elementary and middle school boys with ADD. The therapies had a similar effect to Ritalin, eventually making lasting increases to the boys' IQ scores. 

Granted, these studies focused more on the effects of rhythm on the mind rather than on the mind behind the rhythm. Still, drummers' consistent rhythmic focus has positive effects on them and those around them. When drummers bring a steady rhythm (and their corresponding problem-solving abilities) to a group setting, they actually create a "drummer's high" for everyone around them. University of Oxford researchers discovered that when drummers play together, both their happiness levels and pain tolerance increase, similar to Olympic runners. Observing that high led researchers to hypothesize that drumming was integral to community-building and that sharing rhythms could be the sort of behavior necessary for the evolution of human society. 

Drumming is a fundamentally human thing. A lot of modern music has shifted towards drum machines over humans to create ultra-precise electronic rhythms. But it turns out that what we typically perceive as error is really just a uniquely human sense of time: Researchers at Harvard found that drummers harness a different sort of internal clock that moves in waves, rather than linearly as a real clock does. They match an innate rhythm that has been found in human brainwaves, heart rates during sleep and even the auditory nerve firings in cats. When a human drummer plays, he or she finds a human rhythm.

So on some fundamental level drumming is a window into our own brains concerning time. Even the precision demanded by Fletcher is in some ways entirely bogus given the way we are wired to sense rhythm as well as participate in rhythm.

The machine beat problem goes back further in rock and pop because they (we) have aggressively adopted machine beats to eliminate the messy problem of recording drumming, drummers and the sheer emotional commitment to go with hanging out with drummers. But a machine beat is always known to be a machine beat by its precision. A genuine, well-played groove becomes elusive with the machine beat. Thomas Dolby's solution was to throw a good bass player against the machine beat to let the bass player generate the groove against the machine beat, but even then it's not the same thing as playing with a real, live drummer. What a human drummer provides is human-ness itself.