Whiplash is a film about whether cruelty makes greatness, and it is honest enough to leave you unsure. What is not unsure is the research, which has a fairly clear answer, and it is not Fletcher’s.
Written and directed by Damien Chazelle, 2014. Miles Teller as Andrew Neiman, J.K. Simmons as Terence Fletcher, at the fictional Shaffer Conservatory in New York. Three Academy Awards: Simmons for Supporting Actor, plus Film Editing and Sound Mixing.
Where it came from
Chazelle played drums in what he has called a very competitive high-school studio band, and Fletcher is built on a band instructor he had there, a man who died in 2003. Then he pushed it further and folded in elements of Buddy Rich and other bandleaders with reputations for savagery.
The feature exists because of a short. Chazelle could not get the film financed, so in 2013 he made eighteen minutes of it, took it to Sundance, won the jury award, and the investors arrived. That is a useful fact about the film: its own production is a small version of its plot — the thing got made because someone refused to accept no.
The story Fletcher tells
The engine of the film is an anecdote. Fletcher says that when Charlie Parker was a teenager, the drummer Jo Jones threw a cymbal at his head, and that the humiliation is what made him Bird. It is his entire justification, and he repeats it. The next Charlie Parker, he says, would never be discouraged.
The story exists. The version Fletcher tells does not.
What the jazz tradition holds is that at a jam session at the Reno Club in Kansas City, a young Parker lost his place mid-solo, and Jo Jones took a cymbal off its stand and let it fall to the floor at Parker’s feet. That was a Kansas City convention — gonging a player off the stand. A ritual humiliation, in front of a room, and everybody knew what it meant. It was not an assault, and nothing was thrown at anyone’s head.
It is worth knowing how thin the story is even in its true form. The only firsthand account comes from one man, the bassist Gene Ramey. Jo Jones gave many interviews about his life and never mentioned it. The date is given as 1936 or 1937, the tune as “Honeysuckle Rose” or “I Got Rhythm” or “Body and Soul”, and there is reason to think Jones may not have been in Kansas City when it is supposed to have happened. Even the nickname is unrelated — “Bird” is short for yardbird, and comes from a chicken on a road trip to Nebraska.
I am not raising this to catch the film out. Chazelle changed a symbol into a weapon, and that is a decision, not an error. It tells you what he needed the scene to carry. But it does mean Fletcher’s argument rests on an appeal to an authority that is not there.
What the research actually says
This is the part that surprised me, because I expected the evidence to be murkier than it is.
Benjamin Bloom’s Developing Talent in Young People (1985) went back through the lives of 120 world-class performers — concert pianists, sculptors, Olympic swimmers, research mathematicians, neurologists — and interviewed them and their parents and teachers about how they were actually taught. The finding is a sequence. In the early years the teacher is warm, gives a great deal of approval, rewards effort rather than achievement, and criticism is rare; what matters most is that the child comes to love the thing. Only in the middle and later years does the teacher become the demanding technician, and by then the pupil has chosen the life.
Andrew Neiman is a first-year student. On Bloom’s evidence, Fletcher is running the late-stage pedagogy years too early, on someone who has not yet decided anything.
The second finding relocates the argument entirely. Deci, Koestner and Ryan’s 1999 meta-analysis pulled together 128 experiments on rewards and motivation and found that positive verbal feedback increases intrinsic motivation — but only when it is informational rather than controlling. The same praise, delivered as “here is what worked” or as “you have pleased me,” does opposite things. So the axis is not praise against criticism, which is how the film frames it. It is autonomy-supporting against controlling. Fletcher could be brutal about the work and still be on the right side of that line. He is not, because his subject is never the tempo. It is obedience.
And the honest complication, which I think is the most interesting thing in this whole area: Ashley Stirling and Gretchen Kerr, interviewing retired elite swimmers about emotionally abusive coaching, catalogued exactly what you would expect — shame, collapsed self-esteem, anxiety, depression, disordered eating, athletes leaving the sport. But the athletes reported mixed effects on performance. Sometimes it appeared to work. That is precisely why the practice survives: it is not uniformly useless, it is a coin-flip sold as a method, and the people who happen to come out the other side become the evidence for doing it to the next one.
Why it belongs in this project
Because the final nine minutes are genuinely transcendent and you cannot argue your way out of that. The drumming is extraordinary. Something was unlocked. The film puts you in the uncomfortable position of having watched a person be damaged and having enjoyed the result, and it declines to resolve it for you.
There is a reading, and I think it is right, that the whole thing is a horror film about two men destroying each other, and that taking the ending as vindication is the viewer’s mistake rather than the film’s claim. Watch Fletcher’s face in the last shot and decide for yourself.
Where this comes from
- Whiplash (2014) — Wikipedia — credits, the short, the awards
- Whiplash, Charlie Parker, and the cymbal — Forrest Wickman, Slate — the clearest account of what the anecdote actually says
- Chuck Haddix, Bird: The Life and Music of Charlie Parker (2013) — the sober treatment, and flags Gene Ramey as the sole source
- Stanley Crouch, Kansas City Lightning (2013) — the maximalist treatment, seven pages on the same incident
- Benjamin Bloom (ed.), Developing Talent in Young People (1985)
- Deci, Koestner & Ryan, meta-analysis of rewards and intrinsic motivation, Psychological Bulletin (1999)
- Stirling & Kerr on emotional abuse in the coach–athlete relationship (2013)
- Whiplash is a horror film — The Conversation
One thing I could not verify and will not repeat: it is often said that Anders Ericsson, whose deliberate-practice research underpins all of this, criticised Whiplash directly. I could not find him saying anything about the film. What he did say, repeatedly and with some irritation, is that the 10,000-hour rule was Malcolm Gladwell’s invention and not his.