A dumpy, middle-aged man sits before a class of third-graders at one of the most prestigious private schools in the state of Texas. The man, an aspiring rock star named Dewey Finn, is posing as a substitute teacher at Horace Green Elementary School, and Summer, one of his new charges at the school, has challenged his seemingly nonexistent pedagogy. After Dewey instructs the class to “Do whatever you want,” Summer sharply retorts, “I want to learn from my teacher.” After some additional dialogue between the two characters, Dewey responds to Summer’s challenge to his authority with the following monologue:

What? You want me to teach you something? You want to learn something? All right, here’s a useful lesson for you. Give up! Just quit! Because in this life, you can’t win. Yeah, you can try, but in the end, you’re just going to lose, big time! Because the world is run by the Man. The Man. Oh, you don’t know the Man? Well, He’s everywhere. In the White House. Down the hall. Miss Mullins, she’s the Man. And the Man ruined the ozone, and He’s burning down the Amazon, and He kidnapped Shamu and put her in a chlorine tank, okay?

This scene is, of course, from Richard Linklater’s School of Rock, one of the most critically acclaimed films of 2003. Most reviews of the film, though, characterized School of Rock as a highly entertaining, if anodyne, “fish out of water comedy”, a smarter, hipper update of Ivan Reitman’s Kindergarten Cop (USA 1990). Indeed, given Linklater’s reputation as an indie forefather, most critics treated the director’s work as efficient craftsmanship, but hardly the stuff one would expect from the auteur of Slacker (USA 1991), Before Sunrise (USA 1995), and Waking Life (USA 2001).Yet despite-or perhaps because of – School of Rock‘s generic trappings and studio imprint, Linklater has fashioned one of his most trenchant critiques of American youth culture, especially the role of the educational system in producing compliant social subjects who possess economically viable job skills. Of course, Linklater hones the film’s critical edge by highlighting the cultural clash created by juxtaposing two fundamentally opposed institutions. On the one hand, School of Rock presents rock and roll as a commodified form of adolescent rebellion, a strand of popular culture that celebrates individualism through a vague, amorphous and aimless opposition to the values of mainstream culture. On the other hand, the film reminds us that the American school system is perhaps the most hierarchized, ordered, and regulated institution in American culture. Moreover, because of the vast gulf between public and private education systems, it is also one of the most salient and visible markers of class difference in American society. In this essay, I wish to explore the social and political implications of Linklater’s “fish out of water” comedy by examining three interrelated dimensions of School of Rock: 1) its inversion of tropes typically associated with the cinematic representation of teachers; 2) its use of popular music as a marker of class and age differences; and 3) its perceptive analysis of the cultural capital and use value of rock and roll. In doing so, I intend to show that while School of Rock is hardly a “rock film” or a “kid-film” in the usual sense of those terms, it nonetheless functions as an elegy to both the Utopian spirit of rock and roll and to the fragility, preciousness, and resiliency of childhood.

Those who can’t do…

As I noted in my introduction, School of Rock draws heavily on the conventions of the “fish out of water” comedy. The sense that Dewey is “out of place” at Horace Green is even visually underscored by the cover art of the School of Rock soundtrack album, which features an image of its generously proportioned star squeezed into the elementary school uniform he wears for the final performance. This promotional image is not only a witty homage to guitarist Angus Young of AC/DC, one of the bands featured on the soundtrack, but it also is a quite literal representation of Dewey as “ill-suited.”

Unlike romantic comedy, which utilizes each half of the heterosexual couple to represent opposed character traits and value systems, the “fish out of water” comedy is more concerned with the relationship of an individual to his or her environment. [1] Moreover, while discussions of “Otherness” play a very prominent role in applications of critical theory concepts to film comedy, these analyses often confine themselves to specific articulations of the “fish out of water” concept. Christopher Beach, for example, offers a broad historical overview of the relation between class and outsider figures in comedy while William Paul traces an analogous articulation within the rise of “animal comedy” during the late seventies and early eighties. [2] Similar analyses of gender, race, and ethnicity as they figure within film and television comedy can be found in the work of Kathleen Rowe, Mark Winokur, Mel Watkins, Vincent Brook, and Mark Reid. [3] Still, unless we are willing to treat every possible manifestation of difference as a metaphor for gender, race, and class, then these discussions are, once again, not wide-ranging enough to cover instances in which the abnormal individual is characterized as an alien, a monster, a machine, or even an inanimate object, such as the Coke bottle in The Gods Must Be Crazy (Uys, Botswana 1980).

More specifically, the humor of the “fish out of water” comedy is derived from an implicit dialectic between normalcy and deviance and the comic incongruities that arise from that dialectic. [4] (See the table below for a summary of the ways in which this dialectic operates.)

Table 1 Axes of normalcy and deviance in “fish out of water” comedies

At its most extreme, the “fish out of water” comedy borrows elements of the fantastic to define deviance in terms of a kind of ontological or categorical violation. In these instances, the “fish out of water” functions in ways that are not unlike the monster in the horror film.

In its articulation of this dialectic, the “fish out of water” comedy splits into two characteristic narrative strategies. Either it takes seemingly normal individuals and places them within strange, weird, and alien environments or it takes unusual, disruptive, or eccentric individuals and places them within highly ordered, organized, and rational environments. School of Rock falls squarely into the latter category insofar as Dewey’s “rock and roll” ethos makes him seem ill-equipped to be either a teacher or caretaker. On his first day as a substitute, Dewey shows up late, hungry, and disheveled. Although he borrows the identity of his roommate, Ned Schneebly, in order to get the job, he is unable to even spell his roommate’s name when asked to write it on the blackboard. About the only thing he teaches his class on that first day is the definition of “hangover,” and even this lesson is offered only as an explanation for why he is scrapping the regular instructor’s curriculum plan. Since Dewey seems barely able to care for himself, he appears to be the last person to whom one would entrust their children.

As the film goes on, however, Dewey’s disruptiveness takes on a different form. Having learned of the class’ prodigious musical talents, Dewey sees this group of ten-year olds as the perfect backing band for his self-proclaimed musical genius. Armed with this ambition, Dewey becomes a dedicated teacher, if one scarcely interested in the typical curriculum of a third-grade class. Dewey begins to teach his class about the fundamentals of rock theory and history in an effort to prepare his new group for a performance at a “Battle of the bands” contest. In an effort to gain the class’ trust and participation, Dewey convinces his kids that the success of this new class project will go on their permanent records and may even help them get into a prestigious school like Harvard. By misleading the class about his true aims, Dewey unwittingly threatens to undermine the process of social engineering through which these economically affluent children will reproduce their parents’ social status as the next generation of lawyers, doctors, and business leaders. Both literally and metaphorically, the “noise” of Dewey’s beloved rock and roll imperils the educational order and social safety net promised by Horace Green Elementary School.

Yet while the “fish out of water” comedy is perhaps the most important generic template for School of Rock, the film also draws heavily on the conventions of two other generic subtypes, namely the backstage musical and the “heroic teacher” film. [5]  School of Rock‘s debt to such prototypes as Goodbye Mister Chips (Wood, USA 1939), The Blackboard Jungle(Brooks, USA 1955), Stand and Deliver (Menendez, USA 1987), Dangerous Minds (Smith, USA 1995), and Mona Lisa Smile(Newell, USA 2003) seems straightforward enough, but the film’s use of comedy leads to an inversion of several important tropes of those films. Indeed, because of the mixing of key elements of these genres, Linklater offers a cinematic depiction of the teaching profession that departs from its dominant representations in several significant aspects. [6]

First of all, most films about teachers depict the profession as one of noble self-sacrifice. Consider, for example, Mr. Holland’s Opus (Herek, USA 1995), a film which shares more than a passing resemblance to Linklater’s comedy. In that film, Richard Dreyfus plays a talented musician and composer, who gives up his dreams of fame on the concert stage, and then, as one popular film guide puts it, “spends the next thirty years of his life dedicated to imbuing his students with a love of music.” [7] To be sure, this theme of self-sacrifice stems from both the widespread perception that teaching is an undervalued and underpaid profession, and from our culture’s elevation of children to an almost exalted status within American society. This leads to a set of rather paradoxical and contradictory attitudes toward children within American culture. On the one hand, there is the widely articulated view that children are a special class in need of protection from various threats to so-called family values, and thus they become the site of multiple forms of institutional supervision. On the other hand, the discourse on family values conceals an underlying impetus for such an extreme level of public and private regulation, namely the brute fact that within a service economy children are, indeed, our most precious human resource as both a future labor pool and a source of long-term productivity. To fulfill this role as custodian of our children, one must not only be willing to work within these systems of regulation, but one also must have an almost completely unblemished character. Anyone who is foul-mouthed, gay, promiscuous, or a casual drug user need not apply.

Yet, in School of Rock, Dewey’s motives in becoming a teacher at Horace Green are certainly not noble. Barely able to pay his rent as an underemployed musician, Dewey views the low-pay of a substitute teacher as a godsend and takes the job purely out of economic self-interest. Likewise, economic self-interest governs Dewey’s pedagogical strategies as he teaches the kids to play rock music in the hopes of winning a $20,000 prize at the “Battle of the bands” contest. Even if we set aside Dewey’s selfishness, other moments within the film reveal his generally contemptuous view of the profession. When Patty (Sarah Silverman) says that Ned (Mike White) has the “most important job of all,” Dewey sarcastically responds, “A temp?” Later, when the principal of Horace Green, Ms. Mullins (Joan Cusack), emphasizes the importance of order at her school, Dewey interprets this as a directive to smack the kids or verbally abuse them if they get out of line. This, of course, not only heightens Ms. Mullins’ suspicion of her new temp, but it also reveals for the audience just how much Dewey is out of touch with current school regulations, or even basic parenting skills. Finally, when Dewey is asked about his teaching philosophy by his colleagues at Horace Green, he can only respond by reciting the lyrics of Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young’s “Teach your children.” When asked if his words were song lyrics, Dewey then compounds his faux pas by denying their origin and presenting them as his own ideas. This, perhaps more than anything else, reveals Dewey’s genuine disregard for the teaching profession; he is so unattached to the notion that “children are our future” that he mimes our culture’s attitude toward their preciousness in an effort to fit in with the group. Rightly or wrongly, Dewey believes that this naive sentimentality about children is exactly what other teachers believe.

While Linklater’s hero is hardly consistent with the dominant representation of teachers as noble altruists, the director does something equally strange in his depiction of Dewey Finn by actually showing him teaching. In another paradox of the “heroic teacher” genre, most films spend very little time representing the actual labor involved in a teacher’s workaday routine. The assumption here is that movie audiences are interested in the human relationships that develop between teachers and students and will not sit still for long lessons in basic arithmetic or science. Instead, much of what audiences see of the classroom involves scenes of the teacher gradually gaining his class’s trust, listening to students as they confide personal problems, or dealing with non-curricular issues like school policy or external institutional and social pressures. (I should note that this is true even of more rarefied examples of the genre, such as Chen Kaige’s King of the Children (China 1987), Louis Malle’s Au revoir, les enfants (France 1987), or Zhang Yimou’s Not One Less (China1999). Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society (USA 1989) might seem to be an exception to this insofar as its hero, Mr. Keating, is often shown instructing his class in literature appreciation. Still, what passes for teaching in this film is barely discernible from Robin Williams’ usual stand-up banter, and most of these scenes are an excuse to showcase the comedic talents of its star.)

Admittedly, School of Rock contains its share of these typical generic moments. Several scenes involve Dewey grappling with the school’s policy regarding field trips, and several others show him responding to Lawrence’s concern about being uncool, Tamika’s anxiety about her weight, and even Summer’s questions about the educational merit of the “school project.” That said, Linklater and screenwriter Mike White include a rather generous number of sequences in which we see Dewey actually teaching his class about the “theory” and history of rock and roll. Consider the early scene in which we see Dewey showing Zak, Freddy, Lawrence, and Katie to play Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the water.” A bit later, after noticing some stiffness in Zak’s performance style, Dewey instructs him to spread his feet in a power stance and to grunt as he strums a power chord on his guitar. Dewey concludes this brief lesson by urging Zak to raise his “goblet of rock” in a droll celebration of what he has learned. Or consider the wonderful montage of classroom instruction that is accompanied by the Ramones classic “My brain is hanging upside down (Bonzo goes to Bitburg).” During this sequence, we see, among other things, shots of:

* Dewey’s genealogy of rock on the blackboard
* Dewey demonstrating dance moves to backup singers Alicia, Tomika, and Marta
* Dewey teaching Katie to grimace while playing her bass
* Freddy watching various video clips of drum solos by Art Blakey, Buddy Rich, and Keith Moon
* Zak watching a similar assortment of clips that depict the guitar theatrics of Pete Townshend, Jimi Hendrix, and Angus Young
* a slide show on rock and roll style that includes digitized images of Iggy Pop, the Ramones, the Clash, and Kurt Cobain.

Admittedly, much of this montage is devoted to Dewey teaching the class about the theatrical aspects of rock performance, but it also motivates the rather eclectic-indeed almost postmodern-visual style of the band’s climactic performance.

Perhaps the most interesting example of Dewey’s pedagogical style, however, occurs in the scene in which he shows the class how to write a rock and roll song. As is typical of classical Hollywood narrative causality, Dewey’s actions are motivated by the scene just prior to this one in which he witnesses Zak’s father berating his quiet, contemplative son for his newfound interest in the electric, rather than classical, guitar. In the scene that follows, Dewey solicits the class for information about the things that they dislike doing, an inventory that includes no allowance, chores, and bullies. Having written the first two lines of the song, Dewey then turns to the chorus. Prompted by the earlier reference to bullies, Dewey asks Zak how he might respond to someone who got in his face, who was “really up in your grill.” Zak initially declines to answer, but when Dewey presses him, Zak responds meekly, “Step off?” Having elicited this response, Dewey then uses Zak’s hypothetical assertion of independence as the basis for his chorus. As is evident from my description, Dewey’s “lesson” clearly has a hidden agenda, namely teaching Zak to be more assertive and to question his father’s authority. In this respect, Dewey gives the class, and Zak in particular, a “life lesson” that is typical of the kinds of interaction commonly found in more conventional “heroic teacher” films. Still, while that is undoubtedly true, the scene remains faithful to School of Rock‘s overall emphasis on actual instruction insofar as Dewey’s lesson is also a pretty good explanation of how rock and roll songs are frequently written.

As should be obvious from these examples, School of Rock contains several scenes in which we see Dewey genuinely teaching the class about his “academic subject.” This generally differs from other cinematic representations of teaching in which the mundane labor of instruction typically takes place offscreen in the narrative ellipses between the scenes of teacher and student social interaction. Because many of the lessons take the form of musical performances, School of Rock is able to bypass this tacit prohibition by developing a textual address not unlike Dewey’s backhanded explanation of his guitar’s presence in the classroom. When Miss Mullins questions Dewey about complaints of noise coming from his classroom, Dewey justifies his use of the electric guitar as an instructional tool by stating that he finds music a useful means of teaching the boring subjects that make up the typical elementary school curriculum. The audiences for School of Rock would likely agree.

Besides its interest in showing actual teaching and its depiction of Dewey’s ignoble motivations, School of Rock also inverts one of the most important and cherished conventions of the “heroic teacher” film, namely the transactional nature of classroom instruction. Indeed, it is one of the truisms of cinematic representations of teachers that they learn as much from their students as the students learn from them. Almost all “heroic teacher” films build toward the epiphany that the teacher “makes a difference” in the lives of his or her students. And in films like Conrack (Ritt, USA 1974) or Dead Poets Society, this occurs only after the teacher has been fired or has retired. Thus, in core examples of the genre, the “heroic teacher” film paradoxically suggests that practitioners of the trade only realize their worth once they have lost their social and cultural status as educators.

Here again, School of Rock‘s representation of teaching shows Linklater toying with the usual conventions of the genre. To be sure, Dewey learns something from his interaction with his students, but what he learns is highly negative and might even be considered tragic. Dewey learns that he really is a fat, washed-up loser, a joke, an appropriate object of ridicule for his former bandmates and for other local musicians. Dewey learns that he has the passion and desire to be a great rock and roll musician; what he lacks is the taste and the talent to do so. In fact, Dewey’s own “life lesson” is that he has come to embody the subject in the old joke he tells during a school lunch with his colleagues: “Those who can’t do, teach. Those who can’t teach, teach gym.” This, too, is hardly in keeping with the elevated status of teachers usually implied by the genre.

Finally, School of Rock deviates from more conventional representations of teachers in one other important way. Whereas most “heroic teacher” films depict their protagonists as forward-thinking and progressive, either in their pedagogy (Stand and Deliver, Dangerous Minds) or their values (Dead Poets Society, Mona Lisa Smile), School of Rock presents Dewey as a figure behind the times, one who is nostalgic and even anachronistic. This aspect of Dewey’s character becomes obvious early on when he questions his students about their own musical tastes. When they respond by citing contemporary pop avatars, like Christina Aguilera and Puff Daddy, Dewey dismisses their musical interest as being too pop-oriented, and thus, aesthetically worthless. Instead Dewey queries the class about their knowledge of seventies rock acts, like Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, and AC/DC. Yet Dewey’s rock and roll recidivism goes well beyond matters of taste. Dewey’s values and personal philosophy seem to be molded by the memory of sixties counterculture. As Dewey says to Ned and Patty, “rocking” is his contribution to society and, as he says to his class, “one great rock show can change the world.” Viewed from a contemporary perspective, Dewey’s values seem both outmoded and dangerously naive. As such, School of Rock not only holds these values up to a critical light, but it also suggests that its narrative is founded on a delicious irony: mocked by his friends and peers, Dewey finds that the only segment of society gullible enough to buy into his vision of rock and roll is a precocious band of ten-year old children.

Dewey the dinosaur

By most measures, Richard Linklater’s soundtrack for School of Rock is a wonderfully eclectic mix of glam, punk, and heavy metal classics, and is undoubtedly one of the most tuneful soundtracks of the past five years. A worthy follow-up to his soundtrack for Dazed and Confused (Linklater, USA 1993), School of Rock boasts an enviable roster of artists that includes the Who, Cream, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, T-Rex, David Bowie, the Ramones, the Clash, and even proto-Goth chanteuse Stevie Nicks. Landing Led Zeppelin’s “The immigrant song” was something of a coup for Linklater, especially given the band’s previous reluctance to license its music for movies. [8] Used for the group’s celebratory drive back from the “Battle of the bands” audition, the upbeat riff of “The immigrant song” is perfect for the joyful mood expressed by Dewey and the kids, but more importantly, its reference to the “hammer of the Gods” is extremely important as a keystone to Dewey’s somewhat skewed faith in rock as religion with its own mythology, social utility, and promise of salvation.

Viewed from the broader lens of popular music history, however, the soundtrack for School of Rock is a much more limited enterprise that is, in fact, unified by two implicit biases. First, almost all of the songs and artists included in School of Rock are old. With the exception of a single song by the Black Keys and, of course, the songs written specifically for the film, all of the songs were composed before 1986, or at least seven years before the kids depicted in the film were even born. Most of the songs are much older than that, with the bulk of them dating from the late sixties and early seventies. Secondly, with its implicitly “rockist” trappings, School of Rock ignores large swaths of popular music history by making only scant reference to soul, funk, rap, and pop. It also omits several rock subgenres, such as prog rock, new wave, and nu metal. Both of these biases make sense, however, when one considers the narrative motivation for their presence within the film. While the music of Linklater’s earlier rock film, Dazed and Confused, is motivated largely by setting and situation, the music of School of Rock is almost entirely keyed to its protagonist, Dewey Finn.

As a marker of class, gender, and generational identity, School of Rock‘s soundtrack is remarkably effective at elucidating Dewey’s social location within structures of white, working-class masculinity. [9] And in fact, it is, in this respect, quite consistent with broader representations of teachers in popular culture which use classroom instructors as emblems of whiteness defined largely in opposition to the racially mixed or multicultural groups of students that they teach. [10] ) The inclusion of sixties bands, like the Who and the Doors, indexes Dewey’s belief in the power of rock as a force for social change, a belief derived from the “summer of love” ethos espoused by the sixties counterculture. The presence of punk bands like the Ramones and the Clash, however, bespeaks Dewey’s self-image as an outsider, a maverick opposed to the values of mainstream culture and society. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, heavy metal bands, like Led Zeppelin and AC/DC, emphasize Dewey’s recognition of rock’s power as a form of somatic stimulation and bodily pleasure. [11] This “sensibilist” dimension to rock listening is undoubtedly a large part of the music’s appeal, and also accounts partially for the common association of rock and roll with other forms of hedonistic indulgence, such as sexual promiscuity and drug use.

Of all the character traits indexed by the film’s soundtrack, perhaps the most important is Dewey’s age. Although Dewey’s status as a “fish out of water” is derived largely from the specific circumstances surrounding his presence at Horace Green, he is nonetheless out of place in a much broader social sense as an individual who seems to belong to an earlier era. Dewey’s temporal dislocation is perhaps best captured by School of Rock‘s early use of The Who’s “Substitute,” a song that not only underlines Dewey’s bogus professional status, but also states: “I look pretty young, but I’m just backdated.”

If the soundtrack is especially important in signifying its hero’s age, both literally and figuratively, School of Rock is also unusually precise in its handling of the age of Dewey’s students. One of the most important dramatic conceits of the film is that Dewey is assigned to a class of third-graders. At age ten, these kids have a somewhat liminal status in their relation to the adult world; they are old enough to have a general awareness, if not actual knowledge, of grown-up activities, but they are not yet old enough to have developed their own tastes and preferences in fashion and music. Indeed, School of Rock would be a very different film if its school-age characters were just a few years older or younger. If the kids were kindergartners, for example, their precocious musical abilities might seem unbelievable, and they would know little about the culture of rock and roll, not even its loose association with “getting wasted” or “scoring chicks.” If, on the other hand, the kids were seventh or eighth graders, they likely would be in the process of defining their own identities by their musical tastes and using these to establish cultural hierarchies among themselves (goths vs. punks vs. jocks vs. teenyboppers). As such, these students would undoubtedly resist Dewey’s fondness for “old time rock and roll,” and would possible even recognize Dewey as a musical dinosaur, a figure seemingly out of touch with contemporary reality.

Yet because Dewey’s class is made up of third graders, there is a certain preciousness to School of Rock‘s depiction of youth. As advanced and self-motivated students, the kids soak up everything that is given to them, and in a short time, kids like Freddy add “punk” touches to their school uniforms and even debate the role of gender for rock and roll drummers. At the same time, the darker, more adult components of the rock and roll lifestyle functions within the text as a specter that constantly hovers over the children’s innocence. This becomes especially evident in the scene where Freddy sneaks away from the rest of the group at their audition. As Freddy’s custodian, Dewey is forced to drop his posture of arrested adolescence, and suddenly adopts a parental demeanor when he discovers his errant drummer hanging out in a van with a rival band. Dewey’s actions are fueled by an unspoken awareness of the various hazards of the rock and roll lifestyle, and his barely concealed fears that Freddy has been exposed to drugs, alcohol, or something even worse.

Rock’s association with sensuality and bodily pleasures underpins School of Rock‘s other major reference to the potential despoiling of youth. During parents’ night, Dewey faces a barrage of questions regarding his curriculum and supervision of students’ activities. Knowing that he is about to be exposed as an unlicensed substitute, Dewey pleads with the parents in attendance to recognize the special abilities of his class, abilities that were revealed only within the context of Dewey’s unusual class project. With police lurking just outside the doorway, Dewey makes a last ditch effort for forgiveness by saying: “I’ve been touched by your kids and I’m pretty sure I’ve touched them too.” While in other “heroic teacher” films, such a speech would be the emotional and dramatic high point, the crux of the highly sentimentalized view of teacher-student interaction, in School of Rock Dewey’s speech reveals the dark undertone of these relationships as the parents mistakenly take his tacit admission of fraud as a confession of pedophilia. While the joke here is the narrative outcome of a completely logical chain of causality, one might speculate that it is made much more believable by the kids’ immersion within the world of rock and roll and the latent fear that they will be corrupted by their exposure to a form of culture so bound up with notions of sexuality.

In sum, much of the humor of School of Rock arises from this cultural dialectic between the children’s world of Horace Green Elementary School and the adult world of rock and roll. And as I noted earlier, this dialectic itself depends on a larger dramatic irony, namely that the kids are the only group naive enough to accept Dewey’s nostalgic, Utopian vision of rock and roll’s place in contemporary culture. Yet despite School of Rock‘s considerable comedy, Linklater nonetheless encourages the audience to place Dewey in a critical light. Recognizing the protagonist’s selfish motivations and clearly aware of the dark underbelly of rock and roll history, the film’s audience might well conclude that Dewey himself is as wide-eyed as his students and impulsively careless in choosing to expose these ten year olds to something so loaded with cultural baggage. If this is the case, however, it leads to one final important question about School of Rock: is it Dewey or is it rock and roll itself that is the “fish out of water” at Horace Green Elementary School?

Lessons in cultural capitalization (or how I learned to love being a schoolboy in disgrace)

If Dewey is hardly a role model either as a rock musician or a caretaker of children, should one conclude that his students learned nothing in doing their class project? As a comedy, does the absence of sentimentality or nobility in its representational strategies mean that School of Rock avoids the “heroic teacher” genre’s emphasis on life lessons? If not, what exactly do the kids learn from their interaction with Dewey?

Granted, School of Rock contains no overt life lessons like the “seize the day” motto that animates Dead Poets Society. True, Dewey gives the children several lessons about “stickin’ it to the man”, but these lessons are comically inflected, and the phrase itself seems to function as part of Dewey’s Utopian rockist ideology. Yet, it seems to me that, almost despite himself, Dewey manages to teach his students two important life lessons: one concerned with the importance of cultural capital in the production of knowledge; the other an appreciation of the value of “la perruque.” Space does not allow for a thorough theoretical foundation for each of these concepts. As such, I will confine my remarks to a brief discussion of the ways in which each lesson is illustrated within the film.

In his groundbreaking work Distinction, French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu detailed the importance of cultural capital as a means of establishing and reinforcing class hierarchies within modern society. Traditional Marxism, of course, had always emphasized the role of capital accumulation within class formation. Bourdieu, however, refined this maxim by suggesting that traditional forms of capital accumulation (salary, inheritance, etc.) were not the only means by which an individual achieved social distinction. Through one’s knowledge of fine art, history, music, gourmet food, etc., one could acquire academic and cultural capital, and thus establish social distinction through erudition rather than actual wealth. For Bourdieu, two things play a dominant role in social subjects’ acquisition of cultural capital: 1) their education and 2) their family’s class status. Neither of these elements is sufficient in itself as an explanation of how a subject acquires cultural capital, but the combination of these factors explains the way that the productive forces of economic and cultural capital are jointly reproduced from generation to generation. [12]

Bourdieu’s work is especially pertinent to School of Rock insofar as the film is unusual to the degree that it traces the link between economic and cultural capital. Set at a prestigious prep school, the film is fairly precise in its depiction of the way that the educational system transforms economic capital ($15,000 yearly tuition payments) into cultural capital (a liberal arts education) and back into economic capital (disciplined, productive members of society, who ultimately function within the established structures of corporate capitalism, and more importantly, do not question the goals or values of the system). Of course, this system depends on the careful management of the educational curriculum to determine what constitutes officially sanctioned knowledge. Indeed, according to this view, canon formation functions less to determine the ontological status of art, and more to create tacit agreement about what society deems to be worthwhile knowledge, thereby establishing the very basis for the acquisition of cultural capital.

With this in mind, we can better understand why Dewey’s introduction of rock and roll constitutes such a violation of boundaries within School of Rock. Unlike LouAnne Johnson in Dangerous Minds, who uses Bob Dylan’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” as a way of teaching her class the principles of poetry, Dewey does not use rock music pragmatically as a heuristic means of approaching a difficult, but more culturally sanctioned subject. Dewey’s teaching of rock and roll is not a way station for kids on their path to the “great masters” of music, such as Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven; he treats the music as intrinsically valuable and as a path to the “great masters” of rock, such as Jimmy Page, Angus Young, and Johnny Ramone.

Yet, as a popular art form, rock and roll does not, and could not ever, function as the basis for acquiring cultural capital insofar as its mass distribution and sensate pleasures make it too accessible and available to the general populace. [13] School of Rock more or less acknowledges rock and roll’s culturally debased position within its subplot regarding Dewey’s efforts to get his class to the “Battle of the bands” auditions. In order to account for the class’ anticipated absence during the school day, Dewey proposes to the principal, Ms. Mullins, taking the class on a field trip. Knowing that a proposed visit to an audition of rock bands would be rejected outright, Dewey suggests that he take his class to a concert of classical music so that they may be exposed to the works of Mozart and Beethoven. In this brief but important scene, Dewey implicitly concedes that rock and roll music might not be an appropriate part of an educational school curriculum even as he unwittingly discloses his own distance from this official culture by including Enya in a list of the great classical masters.

When Dewey is exposed as a fraud, his class thus learns a valuable lesson about the operations and interactions of economic and cultural capital. Knowledge of Mozart-along with knowledge of basic math, science, literature, and history-can get you a ticket to the boardroom. At best, mastery of rock and roll-a domain defined outside the sphere of officially sanctioned knowledge-can get you a job as a coffeehouse musician, record/video store clerk, or comic book store manager, a prospect reinforced by other popular media texts like High Fidelity (Frears, USA 2000) and The Simpsons. [14]

By traversing the boundaries of the official school curriculum, however, Dewey’s class also receives a life lesson about the world outside this corporatized environment of academic achievements and social distinctions. Their exposure to Dewey and his value system enables his class to appreciate the value of rock and roll performance as a means of self-expression and corporeal pleasure. The band’s performance brings neither financial reward nor the promised advantage of admission to the college of their choice. In fact, School of Rock receive their most important life lesson as a result of a second-place finish at the “Battle of the bands.” Denied the $20,000 prize, the class gets something greater than monetary compensation; they get an encore. In doing so, the contest paradoxically validates Dewey’s guileless faith that “one great rock show can change the world.”

Besides teaching his class about the relationship between economic and corporate capital, Dewey’s rock and roll pedagogy has the unintended consequence of teaching his class the value of “la perruque.” Translated as “the wig,” the term is cited by theorist Michel de Certeau to explain forms of everyday culture that constitute small forms of social indiscipline. According to de Certeau, “la perruque” is defined as “the worker’s own work disguised as work for his employer.” [15] De Certeau, however, extends the underlying principle of “la perruque” to a range of analogous social practices that take advantage of the “cracks” within institutional and regulatory systems, and enable social subjects to find ways of dealing with their own disempowerment.

Dewey, of course, is quite literally engaged in “la perruque” when he uses school time to prepare for the “Battle of the bands” contest and its $20,000 prize. Yet, true to de Certeau’s principles, Dewey also teaches his class to engage in a number of other forms of social indiscipline. Because of the need to conceal their class project from Ms. Mullins, Dewey and his students develop a repertory of tactics that are designed to deceive school authorities about the nature of their class project. In a reversal of their typical usage, the class installs video cameras to monitor hallway activities and to provide early warning of Ms. Mullins’ approach or that of other Horace Green teachers. Similarly, to give the impression of typical classroom instruction, the students create a recording of Dewey asking the class to recite the names of Christopher Columbus’ three ships. Thus, when the band sneaks out of school for the contest auditions, the remaining students use the recorded sound of classroom activities to fool Ms. Mullins into believing that the normal course of daily instruction has not been disturbed.

That the students have learned and internalized Dewey’s tactics of “la perruque” becomes obvious at two crisis points in the narrative. First, when School of Rock is denied the opportunity to audition for the “Battle of the bands,” Summer devises a scheme to convince the contest organizers that the group is made up of terminally ill children and that their entry into the competition was a last-ditch attempt to keep up the kids’ spirits. As Dewey explains the situation to the organizers, the kids loll lethargically around his broken-down van. Their performance proves so convincing that they gain entry to the contest without even having to perform. Later, after Dewey is unceremoniously dismissed from Horace Green, the kids follow the lead of their less-driven public school counterparts, and “ditch school” in order to take part in the “Battle of the bands.” The kids not only violate the school’s policy in order to achieve non-academic goals, but they effectively undermine Ms. Mullins’ almost simultaneous pronouncement to their parents that nothing is more important to the school’s administration than “a safe and secure environment.”

School of Rock takes these little lessons of indiscipline further, however, by suggesting that, within the right context, rock and roll itself might function as a form of “la perruque.” This possibility is especially evident with the subplot that depicts Zak’s growing sense of his own independence. Much more so than the other kids, Zak is burdened both with high expectations regarding his academic performance and a bullying father who berates his son’s nascent interest in the electric guitar. Although it is not part of his “homework,” Zak composes a song based on his experience as part of Dewey’s class project, one that expresses the boy’s growing sense of contempt for his educational experience at Horace Green thus far.

In the very first two lines of his song, Zak rhymes “straight ‘A’s” with “dumb daze”, a rhyming figure that serves as the central semantic opposition for the rest of the song’s imagery. This is followed by even more pointed commentary as Zak describes the ease with which students can “memorize your lies.” The first verse concludes with Zak describing himself as having “been hypnotized”, a phrase that not only serves as a formal counterpoint to the earlier reference to being dazed, but also subtly hints that the usual instructional process is a way of creating false consciousness within its educational subjects.
Having quickly sketched the status quo at Horace Green Elementary, the song’s bridge recounts the arrival of “a magic man” who announces that “recess is in session” and “two and two” make five. An obvious reference to Dewey, this “magic man” reawakens Zak’s passion for learning through the former’s unconventional pedagogical strategy and through his willingness to question the received truths of the typical elementary school curriculum. The bridge then segues into the song’s chorus, which notably has a harmonic structure that reverses the pattern established in the verse. Here Zak renounces the status of “teacher’s pet” and states that “rock got no reason, rock got no rhyme.” Now, having been fully engaged by the “magic man” and his lesson plan, Zak asserts his willingness embrace this alternative education by concluding, “You better get me to school on time.”

In many ways, Zak’s song serves as a narrative and formal counterpart to Dewey’s earlier song describing the “legend of the rent.” Like Zak’s, Dewey song is clearly autobiographical, a thinly veiled account of his problems with his roommates, Ned and Patty. Yet while Dewey’s song attempts to universalize his personal situation through oblique, nonsensical references to medieval legends-a trope that itself alludes to the Druidic imagery found in the lyrics of Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull songs-Zak’s song retains its highly personal, and indeed confessional, character, a technique that is reinforced by Zak’s use of first person narration in his lyrics in contrast to Dewey’s use of an omniscient voice. More than that, however, Zak’s song also recasts many of the narrative motifs established by the inadvertent appearance of rock and roll, as embodied by Dewey, within the Horace Green curriculum. In his lyrics, Zak aligns rock and roll with a questioning of authority, with a refutation of logic and reason, and with a concomitant appreciation of sheer physical sensation as a source of both power and pleasure (i.e. “I feel like I’m alive.”) Within the narrative dynamics of School of Rock, Zak’s song provides the best textual evidence of Dewey’s success as a teacher.

Yet while the song is literally a tribute to the film’s protagonist, it also exposes Dewey’s limitations as a rock and roll performer. By learning and performing Zak’s song, Dewey realizes that he is merely a poseur and that Zak is a genuine rock and roll prodigy. But rather than being humiliated by his youthful rival, Dewey urges the group to perform Zak’s song rather than his own. While School of Rock generally deviates from the tropes of the “heroic teacher” film, its conclusion is, in fact, highly conventional in its completion of the educational transaction between teacher and students. Through their performance of Zak’s song, the kids display their mastery of the subject matter and life lessons imparted by Dewey; through his public admission of his own limitations, Dewey acknowledges the social value of “those who can’t do.”

Conclusion

At this point, it might be useful to reconsider the question I posed earlier in this essay: what exactly do the kids learn from their interaction with Dewey? While it is tempting to claim that the kids truly learn the value of oppositional politics (i.e. stickin’ it to the man), that analysis is ultimately too complicit with the “rockist ideology” of outsiders and authenticity that School of Rock so relentlessly critiques. Rather, it seems to me that several aspects of the film call for a more moderate conclusion. Although the kids’ departure from the school during the school day might be seen as a genuine act of rebellion against rules and authority, especially since it takes place with the kids’ parents at the school, the “Battle of the bands” sequence that follows this act of defiance is merely a performance of social opposition. Set within the space of the stage, Dewey’s class enacts an imagined form of social rebellion that substitutes for the real thing.

Yet this does not mean that School of Rock’s performance is without social value. Like their counterparts in the song and dance numbers of classical Hollywood musicals, the kids experience the value of the energy, vitality, and Utopian possibility that are part and parcel of musical performance. [16] Perhaps more importantly, while they never develop truly oppositional strategies, the kids learn the value of indiscipline as a means of managing their own position within hegemonic power structures. The kids’ tactics of deception and masquerade function as a form of “la perruque” that momentarily subverts the power structures constituted within Horace Green’s administration and embodied within the school’s principal, Ms. Mullins. (Think of the scene where one of the kids mockingly refers to Ms. Mullins as “the man” after she has just scolded Freddy for his violation of school uniform codes; Ms. Mullins takes this as a compliment without realizing that her authority is being tweaked.)

Still, despite this representation of everyday forms of resistance to hegemonic power, School of Rock ends on an oddly conservative note. Accepting the mantle of teacher, Dewey establishes the School of Rock as an after-school program. This final scene-which is bracketed by a sound bridge that links the kids’ encore at the “Battle of the bands” to their performance of AC/DC’s “It’s a long way to the top” during the closing credits-suggests that rock and roll may play an important part in a child’s education, but only if it is defined as an extra-curricular activity. This final scene provides harmonious narrative resolution to the complications caused by its “fish out of water” premise, but, of course, it largely reinstates the status quo. The conclusion, though, also offers a pointed reminder that it is ultimately adult institutions that define our children’s tastes, pleasures, and goals. The question is: should we? This is especially pertinent when such influence takes the form of intellectual bullying (Zack’s father), careerism (Lawrence’s father), or simply rigid dogmatism (Ms. Mullins). In sum, if the School of Rock shown at the end of Richard Linklater’s film is merely a safe alternative to the structures of school and family, at least it is an alternative. Years ago, during the heyday of “alternative rock” some critics asked sardonically, “alternative to what?” With its Utopian, retro values, School of Rock offers a useful, if limited, answer to that question.

I wish to thank Gerald Early, Miriam Bailin and the other members of the Washington University Children’s Studies group for their comments on an earlier version of this essay. I also wish to thank April Thomas, Jackie Tissier, and Ryan Valleroy for their help in sorting out aspects of the “fish out of water” comedy.

Endnotes
[1] The “fish out of water” comedy remains an under-explored area of film comedy theory. Several scholars address issues that are quite clearly related to this trope, but none has really taken the concept at face value. In The Comic Mind(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), for example, Gerald Mast identifies eight characteristic plot patterns within comedy; the “fish out of water” is not among them. Two of Mast’s patterns, however, come close to characterizing the “fish out of water.” The first, which is exemplified by Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game, involves investigating “the workings of a particular society, comparing the responses of one social group or class with those of another….” (6) The second involves the “familiar journey of the picaresque hero-Don Quixote, Huck Finn, Augie March-whose function is to bounce off the people and events around him….” (7) Both of these plot patterns subtend Mast’s definition of comic films, the best of which are iconoclastic. Mast writes, “The greatest comedies throw a custard pie (sometimes literally) in the face of social forms and assumptions.”
Like Mast and his comic iconoclasts, many older works on film comedy discuss the importance of the outsider, individual, or loner as a means of exploring the genre’s social significance. Stuart Kaminsky, for example, identifies the “individual” as one of two dominant modes within the genre. Within this context, the comic individual is defined as “the man-out-of-keeping with his culture, the person whose comic adventures stem primarily from his inability to get along in society,” (See Kaminsky’s “History and social change: comedy and individual expression,” American Film Genres: Approaches to a Critical Theory of Film, Dayton: Pflaum, 1974, 141.) Steve Seidman (Comedian Comedy: A Tradition in Hollywood Film, Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981, 63), on the other hand, reworks Kaminsky’s definition in his theorization of the social comedy, which he defines as films that situate “the dialectic at the level of the individual versus the ‘system'” as represented by political institutions or by “the more general terms of bourgeois existence.” Each of these notions-the iconoclast, the individual, the outsider-has something to recommend it as a key concept of comedic characterization and narrative form, but each also seems limited in its scope. Certainly, for comedies that involve monsters, aliens, and even inanimate objects as “fish out of water,” the notion of the social outsider seems inadequate to explain figures who are categorical or ontological “mistakes.”
Several contemporary comedy theorists have extended and refined this notion of the “outsider,” but once again in a way that seems to emphasize a particular notion of social relations. Frank Krutnik, for example, describes the archetypal clown as a “spanner in the works” (Frank Krutnik & Steve Neale, Popular Film and Television Comedy, London: Routledge, 1990; and Krutnik’s “A spanner in the works? genre, narrative, and the Hollywood comedian,” Classical Hollywood Comedy, edited by Kristine Brunovska Karnick and Henry Jenkins, New York: Routledge, 1995, 17-38.) Using the famous sequence from Modern Times (Chaplin, USA 1935) in which Charlie Chaplin’s assembly line laborer gets caught inside the gears and cogs of a large machine, Krutnik reads this moment as emblematic of the genre as a whole, and claims the comedian disrupts the order and “conventional workings of narrative, genre, communication, bodily decorum and mature manhood.” (“Spanner,” 25) Henry Jenkins (What Made Pistachio Nuts?: Early Sound Comedy and the Vaudeville Aesthetic, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992, 221-230), on the other hand, sees this archetypal figure as a more specific feature of anarchistic comedy. For Jenkins, the clown is an outsider who represents forces of disorder that are pitted against the larger structures and order of the society as a whole. Both scholars identify this trope as one that explains comedy’s potential for political critique, but they ignore a whole strand of “fish out of water” comedies that move in the opposite direction (i.e. that involve pitting normal, ordinary individuals within crazy, illogical, or disordered environments.) Examples of this latter strain of the “fish out of water” would include Porky in Wackyland (Clampett, USA 1938), Defending Your Life (Albert Brooks, USA 1991), or the television series, Green Acres. More recently, in a discussion of Les visiteurs(Poiré, France 1993), Geoff King (Film Comedy, London: Wallflower Press, 2002), discusses the importance of temporal, geographical, and social displacement within film comedy, but never deals specifically with the “fish out of water” as a characteristic trope or plot pattern. In each of these instances, these scholars address issues, themes, and categories that have strong parallels with the “fish out of water,” but never deal with the ding an sich.
[2] See Christopher Beach’s Class, Language, and American Film Comedy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002) and William Paul’s Laughing Screaming: Modern Hollywood Horror and Comedy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
[3] See Kathleen Rowe’s The Unruly Woman: Gender and Genres of Laughter (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995); Mark Winokur’s American Laughter: Immigrants, Ethnicity, and 1930s Hollywood Comedy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996); Mel Watkins, On the Real Side: Laughing, Lying, and Signifying – The Underground Tradition of African-American Humor that Transformed American Culture, from Slavery to Richard Pryor (New York: Simon & Schuster,1995); Vincent Brook, Something Ain’t Kosher Here: The Rise of the “Jewish” Sitcom (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003); and Mark A. Reid Redefining Black Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 19-43.
[4] My discussion here of the “fish out of water” comedy is not intended to be exhaustive or definitive. Rather, I simply wish to describe a few of the modalities of deviance and normalcy in order to locate The School of Rock within the genre. My taxonomy of subtypes are not meant to be fixed or discrete categories. Indeed, one can find considerable “bleed over” between these various articulations of deviance and normalcy.
[5] Throughout my discussion here, I will refer to the “heroic teacher” film in terms of genre. My use of this appellation reflects a commonsensical, rather than theoretical, approach to the concept. To be sure, one would not find “heroic teacher” as a category at the video store, in a library catalogue, or in lists of Hollywood genres cited within introductory textbooks on film. I am, however, using “genre” as a convenient umbrella term to group together a wide corpus of films that cut across cinematic traditions, historical periods, and modes of production. As such, I believe the heuristic value of the concept outweighs any potential theoretical confusions that will inevitably result from my deliberate misuse of the term.
[6] For an excellent overview of the representation of teachers in popular culture, see Henry Giroux’s Breaking in to the Movies: Film and the Culture of Politics (Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 2002).
[7] Leonard Maltin’s 2005 Movie Guide (New York: Signet Books, 2004), 950.
[8] In a particularly notorious example, Cameron Crowe was forced to cut a scene from Almost Famous (Crowe, USA 1999), his foray into rock autobiography, when Led Zeppelin refused him clearance for “Stairway to heaven.” In an interesting bit of interactive video, Crowe’s DVD release for the film includes the deleted scene, but instructs the viewer to put on their own copy of “Stairway to heaven” to play along with the DVD.
[9] For more on the issue of rock music and identity, see Simon Frith, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure, and the Politics of Rock ‘n’ roll (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981); Susan McClary, Feminine Endings (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); Sara Cohen, “Popular music, gender and sexuality,” The Cambridge companion to pop and rock, edited by Simon Frith, Will Straw, and John Street (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 226-242; Theodore Gracyk, I Wanna Be Me: Rock Music and the Politics of Identity, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001); Bruce Horner and Thomas Swiss, eds., Key Terms in Popular Music and Culture, (Malden: Blackwell, 1999); and Sheila Whiteley, ed., Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender, (New York: Routledge, 1997).
[10] See Giroux, 136-169.
[1] For more on this aspect of heavy metal, see Robert Walser’s Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 26-56; and Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996).
[12] Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, translated by Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). See also Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, translated by Richard Nice (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977).
[13] This is not to say that rock and roll culture itself is devoid of either notions of social distinction or cultural capital. These same principles work to establish a hierarchy of tastes regarding mainstream and alternative artists. Because of their popularity and economic success, mainstream artists often have very little cultural cache among knowledgeable fans. Instead, these fans embrace marginal, obscure, little-known artists as a way of establishing and maintaining boundaries between mainstream and alternative rock cultures. In doing so, rock fans recreate the same sorts of relations that are found within the larger habitus, although their familiarity with these lesser known artists might be more properly described as an accumulation of subcultural capital.
[14] Jack Black’s previous work with Tenacious D and his breakthrough performance as an obnoxious, opinionated record store clerk in High Fidelity (USA 2000) remain significant intertextual touchstones for his role in School of Rock.
[15] Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, translated by Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 25.
[16] See Richard Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia,” Only Entertainment (London: Routledge, 1992), 17-34.
Created on: Monday, 11 July 2005 | Last Updated:Wednesday, 27 July 2005