'Whiplash'

Saw the movie 'Whiplash' along the road on my iPad last night. My son put it in there, as I needed something to tide me by my upcoming trip to Cebu. Delayed flights are now a norm in this country, one does not even become annoyed anymore at schedules moved three hours from the booked time. I was curious about the JK Rowlings Oscars win, so I watched prematurely. That's one movie down out of three in the tablet. No regrets, however.

It is a movie about a heartless, cruel, driven conductor of a jazz band in one of the best  music schools in the world; and the students who crawled, endured, and scrambled for his opinion on the way they play the sax, the piano, or in this movie, the drums. Only his opinion mattered to his students, and all of them did absolutely everything to get into his ensemble. Bloodied hands forced to beat on that drum set just so to get 'his' tempo, not theirs, not the way it is written on the music sheets. Tears flowing from the best music students from humiliation of being called names by 'him' who seem to have his ear magically plastered on all the instruments that he can identify one off-tune among the many playing together. Chairs, music sheets, even instruments, fly off over the heads of the students, thrown at them by 'him' when 'he' is displeased by a bar of music played. Insults from 'him' so seething that only those with hearts frozen can take.

I finished the movie quite shaken by its intensity. I fidgeted over the nervousness of those students, felt their eagerness to please, the anxiety and sleeplessness over that which they are eager to prove: they are the best of the best. I shared their impish smiles when they are praised, not in the 'good job' category of praises but those insinuations that one is better than the other and that other is put to shame by being assigned to 'turn the pages of the music sheets' for the one who is better. I lifted my chin up with the one student who dared to challenge 'him', who showed up late in a competition all smashed up from a car accident en route to the stage, where he tried to put the rythm together in his mind and soul, but his bearings no longer could. I stared in blank space in the face of failure and defeat, together with 'Andy', the drummer who just wanted to die even at 34 years old like his idol, drunk and penniless, rather than live to 90 and not be remembered even at the dinner table where his family would talk. I reeled towards depression with 'Andy' and got back up with him when he was given another shot by 'him', who turned out to be exacting revenge from 'Andy' for challenging 'him' and cost him his 'reputation'. I cried with 'Andy' in embarrassment for that moment when revenge was played out successfully, but I cried, too with him when he came back full force and proved that yes, he is one of the best. The monster-conductor had no choice: with his eyes meeting 'Andy' who was playing the drums as if in a state of semi-death, and his hand finally making the whole band playing, in the 'tempo' he wanted. 

So much of me in that movie, I wanted to hug the monster-conductor because in his character, I thought of the journey I have taken for the last 49 years. And that there all lessons in this life we all learn but the most important are: that in life, we are driven by our desire to please all, to reach that one goal of being the best at the same time, but those two do not go together; that there are people in our lives who have cold, cruel, iced hearts and play us to satisfy their needs, and their needs only; that it is only within us and our resolve to decide and choose what and whom we allow to rule our own lives with the cold, cruel, iced hearts to play us; that in the end, while we are able to feed our hunger for acceptance, for love, for anger, for self-pity, for longing, for bitterness, for happiness, in the end, what matters is that we fed that hunger, whichever it was, on our own terms. Our choices. Those who think they put one over us, with that sly, crooked grin on their faces, lost, really. For they will never know how it is to have the courage to take a stand, on one's own.