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"Half Nelson"
Directed by Ryan Fleck
Written by Anna Boden and Ryan
Fleck
ThinkFilm
R
2006
http://www.halfnelsonthefilm.com/
October 2, 2006
Reviewed by someone in IRTR circles
This is one of those openly philosophical movies with art-house appeal, and I'm not just saying that because "Half Nelson" may set the record for the most times "dialectics" is said in a single movie. "Half Nelson" articulates a certain concept of dialectics, one that turns dialectics into something so depraved that it could justify yet another movie about a white teacher saving urban Black youths, and the idea that oppressed-nation youth are no less a part of "the system" than the white people in their lives who have authority over them.
There are countless movies in which white or European teachers are shown as saviors of so-called "difficult" "inner-city" students, and almost as many of these movies, almost inevitably, have lines criticizing paternalistic whites who teach oppressed-nation youth. We see this in "Music of the Heart" (1999) and more recently "Take the Lead" (2006), for example. Predictably, the white savior movie will have a student or some another persyn dismissing a teacher because s/he is white, only to portray that as self-defeating prejudice. The Liberal premise of the movie is thereby set up. The color-blind or hip (or "culturally relevant") teacher sets her/his critics straight and puts them in their place.
"Half Nelson's" twist on this theme is to have the teacher have a drug addiction problem. So now the teacher also has a problem, not just students. Middle school history teacher Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling) does cocaine. Because of his addiction, he sometimes neglects his teaching. He even tries to force himself on a womyn. But he's not all bad, the movie suggests; he teaches his students about "dialectics." And this itself is "dialectical," as is Dunne's relationship with student Drey (Shareeka Epps). They help each other, and they change each other. He says his "kids" give him stability, and they get something from him: one of his Black female students whom he doesn't even remember went to college and became a history major, presumably taking Dunne's "dialectical" teachings with her. It isn't just that Drey who is saved from a life of crime; "Half Nelson" is just as much a movie about redemption for Dunne, though it is less-than-perfect redemption. The Black student and the white teacher can't do without each other; they are "yin and yang," as the movie strains to point out in a series of self-referential lines. This is all very dialectical according to the movie's concept of dialectics, and it's all very obvious. What's less obvious is how "Half Nelson" totally misrepresents historical materialism and materialist dialectics.
One thing that the makers of "Half Nelson" don't seem to understand is that we could imagine Meryl Streep's character in "Music of the Heart" as having a cocaine addiction. So how exactly "Half Nelson" says something new about the white inner-city savior idea isn't clear. Shedding light on the lifestyles of school teachers and what they do outside school does not change anything substantially about the white savior story because imperialist decadence is something we could have assumed all along. It's not suddenly dialectics or a sign of progress just because we see idealistic liberal school teachers doing drugs at home. Alternatively, one could say any depiction of reality is a depiction of dialectics, but even most documentaries leave out part of the picture of interconnected reality.
How teaching about dialectics is the dialectical opposite of drug addiction isn't clear either. One is a lifestyle with various causes; the other is ideology. Much of white people's recreational substance use represents imperialist decadence, but the real opposite of cocaine addiction is doing something else as a lifestyle, doing less leisure activity or having less leisure time in general, or dying from an overdose or something else. Dunne asks Drey not to focus on his cocaine use; don't think you know anything about me, etc. The movie's message comes off as "nobody is perfect" or "we are all sinners." It's bourgeois story of persynal struggle by an imperfect persyn -- nothing new here, but the movie goes to great lengths to portray this as an example of dialectics, or dialectical change at the margin, and use this to teach a lesson about dialectics.
In the best light, "Half Nelson" is a movie about opposing the sort of identity politics related to lifestyle. Were Dunne actually teaching Marxist history, his drug addiction wouldn't matter, and it wouldn't matter anyway because what's important in the school context is his role in indoctrinating and controlling youth and how he does those things. Dunne could have even been an axe-murderer or stolen money for health care from oppressed nationalities or committed genocide some other way, but the truth is the truth, and falsehood is falsehood.
Much of the hippie movement was obsessed with not appearing hypocritical. So supporting communism meant trying to practice lifestyles associated with "communism" right away. This inevitably petered out because of the social basis of this movement, and economic and political conditions. As if in response to hippies, "Half Nelson" says lifestyle doesn't matter or can be balanced out by politics, and opposes treating Dunne as a hypocrite when he gives Drey advice. "He is a hypocrite, but so what?" is the attitude, and it would be correct in other contexts. Unfortunately, "Half Nelson" ends up in sub-reformism by contrasting Dunne's lifestyle (coke orgies, etc.) with "better" lifestyles or those more fit for polite conversation. Despite the movie's ambiguous ending, what liberation means for Dunne is ending his addiction and maybe resolving his petty-bourgeois angst. And Dunne's advice to Drey is not to get involved with drug dealers -- which could be correct advice regardless of Drey's own lifestyle, but Dunne's own approach to drug dealing inevitably reinforces the system and is more about making himself feel better than doing anything to end the political and economic conditions behind children's exposure to drug dealing. The movie also confuses opposing sub-reformism with a notion of dialectics as recognizing imperfections in such a way as to make dialectics meaningless for changing society.
Dialectics does not mean "nobody is perfect," with the practical connotation that implies. Nobody is perfect, but investigation of class forces and tactics don't end there. There are far-sighted bourgeois people, and individual proletarians who are counterrevolutionaries. This a result of class struggle, a specific contradiction, not some abstract dialectics of imperfection.
With such a large number of people using cocaine in the United $tates, a handful could very well be communists. Anybody could be a communist is the idea in the movie, and for most lifestyles that aren't too debilitating and don't take too much time, this is almost a dialectical truism. But this is not the only thing dialectics is about, otherwise it would just be a form of individualism or postmodernism. Anybody could be a communist, but communism crops up in some areas more than others. Dialectics involves making comparisons between different contexts and to larger contexts. If Dunne's history lessons do have an effect, the source of the change is oppressed people's struggles and the effects they have on the superstructure even impacting the bourgeoisie. It does not arise primarily from the contradiction between idealistic school teachers and the government, much less from doing drugs, or from Dunne's just being an individual. No doubt there are pot-smoking "Marxist" idealistic public school teachers in Brooklyn, where the movie is set, but what's going on there may be a conflict between lifestyle Liberalism and other imperialist ideologies, and here lifestyle does play a role because much pseudo-Marxism in the First World is connected to alienation arising from disapproved lifestyles, and the politics does not go beyond Liberalism. People take up "Marxism" because they feel it is a way to deal with anxiety about the world or this or that situation in persynal life. If this hardens, it hardens into either revisionism or Marxism, usually revisionism in the First World where revisionism is so powerful with so-called leftist movements claiming to be Marxist.
An illustration of dialectics is someone having reactionaries as social studies teachers but then becoming a revolutionary. Dialectics is someone taking up a MIM-like line after they had an apolitical education all throughout school but was good at math and didn't have a dislike for math. At the individual level, dialectical change appears as an accident. What dialectics is not, is coming up with reasons for why progressive teachers in the First World trying to impress students is a uniquely effective method of change after experience has shown this to be untrue. This much more often results in training future oppressors in progressive rhetoric than inspiring students to develop actual progressive politics. As a tactic, this is ineffective. There are alternatives, and so tactics must change. The rare history student will become a revolutionary, but so will the rare math student. Even by Dunne's one-student- at-a-time standards, there is no reason why injecting progressive politics into the approved history curriculum is the best tactic, and such a fantasy often exists merely to make teachers feel better about the career they have chosen.
Peel away Dunne's "dialectical" language, and there is little about Dunne's teachings that is progressive. When everyone from Village Voice to even rogerebert.com praises Dunne as some kind of heroic teacher because he lectures about dialectics and drops some bits of history about the CIA, that is a clue that there is something wrong about the way Dunne teaches dialectics. If the idea of change happening in spirals is something neo-conservatives could appropriate and use to deny the principal contradiction and support imperialist attacks on Third World nations, then the understanding of dialectics needs to be corrected or refined, or applied correctly. This reviewer is not denying Dunne's "idealism" and his "good intentions," but p re-scientific communism is also idealistic, and pre-scientific communism can turn into its opposite: revisionism or Marxism. In Dunne's case, the change that happened was clearly in the revisionist direction, and this is the politics that the movie itself espouses.
Dunne presents dialectics in the form of catch phrases like "opposites struggle" and "everything is always changing," without any guide to identifying opposites and contradictions correctly. Forces overpower each other, and the minority becomes the majority. As an example of a minority becoming the majority, Dunne talks about racial equality ideas as becoming mainstream after the Civil Rights movement. One might as well go with Jay Leno's explanation of change in the United $tates, which he related to Bill O'Reilly a while ago on the "Tonight Show": changes come about through the battles of "extremists," and Amerika settles somewhere in the middle. What Jeno didn't mention is that this middle represents a deflection of degradation of social justice movements for imperialist purposes. The minority did not become the majority. Rather, the minority turned into its opposite as the liberal and comprador-bourgeois leadership of the Civil Rights movement united with the imperialists, and racist beliefs persist in modified form. What changed was the outward rhetoric.
Dunne's "dialectics" is undialectical and unmaterialist. Things simply exist, and they oppose each other until one wins, the other subsides, and the system is taken to the next step. Through fits and zigzags, America progresses forward inexorably. What role conditions with the rest of the world play in transforming social movements in the United $tates and bourgeoisifying them is left out of the picture. And Dunne, if he believes that national oppression exists at all within U.$., which is not at all clear in the movie, would have us believe that ending it is a matter of something becoming the "majority." This is a formula for liberalism, which in this context is the idea that national oppression can be ended without oppressed nationalities winning self-determination, and by oppressed nationalities completely assimilating into Euro-Amerika.
The majority of the world is oppressed, and the oppressors are the minority. Globally, the oppressed can win the numbers game. Dunne's idea that the minority (the demands of the oppressed) can become the majority in Amerika is on the surface opposed to pessimism about low numbers, but is subjectivist wishful thinking. Individual prison reforms, for example, are winnable, but each of these reforms is not necessarily a qualitative change, and nor does it represent widespread consensus in society about anything, even that one reform. The reason why such reforms are still desirable is because of their effect at the margin in supporting revolution by opposing political repression and uniting the oppressed. Dunne's idea that the minority will become the majority in Amerika is based on a fantasy of cultural change without a material basis.
Dunne tries to convince fellow teacher Isabel (Monique Curnen) that owning a copy of the "Communist Manifesto" doesn't make him a communist. He compares himself to someone who owns Mein Kampf and isn't a Nazi. Dunne should have just gone with that intuition and admitted to being a Liberal who dabbles in Marxism for petty-bourgeois reasons. Dunne's "dialectical" repackaging of individualism and liberalism only leads him to obscure actual possibilities for change, which he would have discerned had he applied materialist dialectics. Instead, Dunne at the beginning of the movie is reluctant to concede one student's opinion that he himself is part of the system, and suggests it is mainly because he is working for the "government." He even ignorantly suggests his students are part of the system because, after all, they are attending school, as if they weren't forced to. At the same time, Drey's mother works security at anti-Iraq War demonstrations; Drey's friend, Frank (Anthony Mackie), who is a drug dealer is portrayed as a bad influence on Drey; and the school principal tells Dunne to stick to the book and not teach dialectics. In other words, all the Black people who oppose Dunne's liberalism are supposedly part of the system (gee, where have we seen this before?), and Dunne for some "dialectical" reason isn't. There are valid criticisms of identity politics, and many oppressed nationalities are in fact part of the system as lackeys or bribed with imperialist wealth, but "Half Nelson" raises this issue only to reinforce Dunne's paternalistic white savior anti-nationalist liberalism.
Closely related to "Half Nelson's" emphasis on the idea that anybody can be a communist is its idea that anything can happen, and if anything can happen, then there is no need to study what will likely happen. Frank laughably calls Dunne's teachings "dianetics," and ironically this is not that far from the truth, because Dunne's "dialectics" is incapable of comparing practices and their effectiveness in order to better effect change. Dunne sees a movement and that is proof enough of a struggle of opposites that has only to play out -- like constantly flipping a coin ten times and trying to get heads all of them. It will eventually happen. Probability and accident play a role in change, but the dialectical method also involves the comparison of probabilities. By such comparison, it is possible to identify which strategies are most likely to lead to communism.
Dunne's attitude is typical. The pseudo-Marxist who doesn't look outside U.$. borders or opposes actually existing united fronts against imperialism comes to believe that the U.$. population just isn't ready for revolution. Trying to inspire students one by one, or "waiting around" or even supporting the Demokrats, seems natural. People like Dunne imagine that because there is some communist movement in the United $tates, it will eventually become stronger and overpower other forces. There is no need for this kind of "dialectics" in the First World, already swamped with revisionism as it is. The petty-bourgeoisie will just as quickly take up postmodernism instead of "dialectics." There is something despondent about the ending, which leaves things unresolved. One thinks, if there is no room for dialectics in approved curricula, then nothing is possible. This is an attitude of the short-sighted.