American Words Used in School Stories

Down Under, we grow up reading American books and watching American TV, so the following words are familiar even if we don’t use them ourselves. That said, our language and culture is borrowing more and more from North America. High schools often have faculties now instead of departments, and I’ve heard teenagers start to say ‘math class’ instead of ‘maths class’. New high schools are calling themselves colleges.

FRESHMAN - A freshman is a first-year student in secondary school, high school, or college. (I worked that one out – the ‘fresh’ gives it away.) We call them ‘first years’. At university in New Zealand, a ‘freshman’ is often required to do an ‘intermediate year’, which is the first year of a university course. It’s relatively easy to get into university there, in fact you don’t even have to pass a thing at high school – you can simply wait until you turn 25. But if you want to do a rigorous course such as medicine, you’ll have to do an intermediate year of health science, from which only the top students are accepted for further study.

SOPHOMORE - a student in the second year of study at high school or university. In New Zealand they are called second years (university), or year tens (high school).

BLEACHERS – For the longest time I thought this was something you’d find in a janitor’s closet. Then I read about some kids kissing behind the bleachers, and I realised the handle of a mop would hardly provide cover, so I took the time to look it up. Turns out they refer to those tiered seats you get on playing fields and lining gymnasiums. I have no idea what we call them, but I’ve never heard anyone talk about ‘bleachers’. Perhaps we call them ‘forms’. They’re not standard equipment, in any case.

pic by Garrett Coyte

JANITOR – But we don’t say ‘janitor’ either. That would sound distinctively American. We just say ‘cleaner’.

GRADUATE – In New Zealand you don’t ‘graduate’ high school. You just get your qualifications (or not) and finish up. You graduate from university.

CAFETERIA – New Zealand and Australian schools don’t tend to have those huge dining hall set-ups. We had to eat a packed lunch outside. If the weather was terrible we were (reluctantly) allowed to eat inside our home classroom, but in year ten, several drop-ins broke windows, so we were all locked out no matter the weather. I have memories of sitting inside a cleaner’s closet with two friends because it was snowing outside. (There were no bleachers in there.)

If students want to buy lunch (which is usually a meat pie because salad rolls are for pansies) they go to the ‘canteen’ or the ‘tuck shop’, but there’s no place to sit down and eat lunch at a civilised table, unless you go to an expensive private school. Even then, such privileges are often reserved for seniors.

‘SIGNING UP’ FOR CLASSES – This sounds more like something you’d do as a university student, but American books tell me that high school students ‘sign up’ for their classes at the start of an academic year.

Down Under, there is a core of compulsory classes (English, maths, science) and even in senior high school, you have to select your subjects the year before, in the hope you’ll pass your end of year exams and get into them. Therefore, ‘signing up’ for a class is more a matter of visiting your subject teachers on the first day back and letting them know haven’t changed your mind about your subject choices over the summer holidays – or if you haven’t passed your NCEA courses, you’ll be having a sit down with a careers teacher to discuss your options. ‘Signing up’ sounds like there’s way more freedom than there actually is, because even with elective subjects, you’ve still got to choose something. (Maybe that’s the deception.)

CHEERLEADERS – I don’t know of any local high schools with a cheerleading team, and while I appreciate the strength and agility required, to me it is on a par with pole dancing. That said, there is a local gymnastics teacher who offers classes in cheerleading to little girls. (I suppose little boys could join in too, though I doubt it’s full of male participants.) Since pole dancing seems to have taken off lately, it wouldn’t surprise me if cheerleading took off in high schools here in the next generation. We do have cheerleading teams for regional and national rugby games, so the concept is here.

pic by arbron

HOMECOMING QUEEN – I’m so glad we don’t have this tradition. Really. It sounds just awful. We do have end of school celebrations.

PROM –  Some of our schools call them ‘balls’. Others call them ‘formals’. But I’ve not heard proms. What is it short for? There is usually an ‘after party’, which is shut down if the teachers get wind of it, then it moves somewhere else. Traditional high schools still teach their students ballroom dancing beforehand, and retain the ‘invite a partner’ thing, but more and more liberal high schools are deconstructing the idea of ‘partners’, and instead encourage their students to just turn up and have a good time when they get there. This is to avert the need for major stress for students who can’t find a partner, and avoids discrimination of non-heterosexual students, who are still banned from bringing their partners to the school ball at some schools, both state and religious.

In Australia, there is ‘schoolies’ week - an huge week-long party which started at Broadbeach. But not everyone is interested in attending that. It receives a lot of media attention every year because bad things happen there too. A lot of Australians have very fond memories of schoolies. In New Zealand, there isn’t a huge organised thing like that, but lots of students get together with friends and stay for a week in someone’s family bach (holiday home) or take a car trip around New Zealand before spending the rest of summer stacking shelves at a supermarket.

pic by Capt Piper

DRIVER ED – Are not usually run through a school in the way they are in America. Until recently, we got taught by our dads. But licences have gotten a little harder to pass, and have now turned into a formal industry. It’s hard to pass the tests unless you get taught by a qualified instructor. So more and more high schools now are taking the American model, and hiring driving instructors through the school. Unlike what I saw in Mr Holland’s Opus, these instructors are not their regular teachers, but contractors who specialise in driving instruction.

YEAR BOOKS – Most high schools seem to produce year books here, which are either put together by a teacher or by a group of students. Either way, I’ve not ever seen a ‘Student most likely to…’ situation. That sounds rather unkind to me. That’s not to say year books are not unkind, especially if the students collating photos have malevolent intention. Mind you, this is no worse than what goes on online, where ‘friends’ can tag you in the most heinous positions, and then share those photos with the world. I wonder if year books are on their way out everywhere. An online forum would be a less expensive way to share photos and memories of school. Mind you, its very fluidity is also its downfall.

 

Nemesis by Philip Roth

This book is about polio.

Several years ago I visited the supermarket to buy Panadol infant drops, on the recommendation of the mother-and-child-health nurse who’d just given my daughter another round of vaccinations. As I was carrying a pink-cheeked, ratty baby with me, I got into conversation with the checkout operator — as you do — who told me she never used to believe in vaccinations. Then her neighbour came down with something horrific — not polio, but something like it — and she completely changed her mind about immunisation.

I wish more parents would seek out both sides of the vaccination argument. Instead of focusing entirely on autism risks (which I believe is a load of bullshit anyway), it would pay for parents to educate themselves on the absolute tyranny of preventable diseases which are still hanging around but which should have been eradicated from a well-off country such as this one, but haven’t, because of parental ignorance and belligerence. (And even if vaccinations did cause autism in some, which is worse? I can think of fates worse than autism.)

A good place to start might be reading fictional accounts of horrific viral disease. Philip Roth opens Nemesis with a non-fiction description of what it was like to live in a community afflicted by polio in 1940s Newark.

This is the first Philip Roth novel I have read. (That’s why I picked one of his shorter ones.) This book is easily read in two sittings, and I think it may have been designed for that purpose. It’s been divided into two (long) chapters.

I almost gave up on it. I found myself thinking, “Is this dialogue deliberately unoriginal ? Does he really need to show off his writing talents with this poetic piece of unnecessary description of setting?” I was also pulled out of the story because of certain point of view decisions, so Roth had me wondering if his narrator was speaking from the grave. (I hate that. Anyway, he wasn’t dead.)

Then the point of view decision became clear, on page 244 out of 280, and I was utterly absorbed and finally, much affected. I realised that the languorous build up was all in aid of whacking us over the head with what — in hindsight — I should have seen coming but didn’t. I felt much empathy for the main character, and am left contemplating the injustices of life.

Perhaps I had the wrong end of the stick regarding the work of Philip Roth, but I hadn’t been expecting a love story. Nor was I expecting to be affected by a book in the final 40 pages when the entire first 250 odd pages failed to engage me much at all.

So there you go. Sometimes it’s worth persevering.

(I know previous borrowers of this library book didn’t persevere, because at least one reader had dog-earred every second page as bookmark. The bookmarking creases stopped around the point where I thought of giving up too. Anyway dog-ear makers, scribblers and coffee-stainers: Do that to your own copies. Leave library books alone!)

THE VACCINATION DEBATE

For more on denialism in general (including discussion about GE food and climate change science) listen to Michael Specter on SETI’s Are We Alone? podcast. Also Merchants of Doubt, an interview between Kim Hill and Erik Conway, an historian of science and technology.

You might also be interested in hearing from a specialist in infectious diseases interviewed by Kim Hill on RNZ: Paul Offit (author of Autism’s False Prophets).

Movie Review: Into The Wild

I knew nothing about this movie before going into it. It’s far too easy these days to know far too much about a movie before you’ve even seen it, courtesy of the internet. I was taking a stand against possible plot spoilers.

So I didn’t even realise it was based on a true story. I spent the entire movie wondering this, and it wasn’t until we got to the end, and were shown a real photo of Christopher Mccandeless, that I knew for sure.

I found this an uncomfortably voyeuristic movie. I had much the same feeling I had when watching Grizzly Man a few months ago – that this is the story of two men with a mental illness who can’t quite cope with life in civilisation. I’m sure the Grizzly Man suffered from bipolar disorder. It seems likely that Christopher Mccandeless suffered something similar – delusions of some sort, at least – which led him to seek a solitary monastic life. Unfortunately, when he slipped further and further into his illness, it seems he starved to death.

As a film, I think Into the Wild is well done. But I much preferred thinking it was pure fiction.

Why is that? I think it’s because turning a young man’s life into a Hollywood story, complete with omissions of fact, seems a little bit like a lie. Pure fiction is an acceptable lie. But an accumulation of small lies* feels slightly fraudulent.

*the importance of his family background in relation to his stupid decisions; how he died (it wasn’t from eating poisonous plants but most likely from starvation); he never burnt his money; he did carry ID with him all that time; once sick, he did want to be found and left a note in the bus window saying so.

By the way, this film has a really great soundtrack, by Pearl Jam vocalist Eddie Vedder. I’d love to hear more folksy acoustic stuff out of him.

Movie Review: Sideways

I hated this movie.

And that would make a nice, short blog post, but it’s always worth considering why.

1. The cheesy soundtrack. At funny moments (which I never found funny) the soundtrack turned from elevator music into jaunty, like something out of an old French film. I was distracted by this, and felt my emotions were being manipulated. Upshot being, no emotions at all, except annoyance at the music.

2. The main character. I don’t subscribe to the idea that main characters have to be likeable, not at all. We can still be interested in a character enough to follow him through a journey without feeling the need to invite him round for dinner. But when this unlikeability fails is when we are meant to like the main character. I think we were meant to feel sorry for this guy. And I might have. Had he not STOLEN MONEY from his own MOTHER in the first third of the film. What kind of arsehole does that? This behaviour was made even worse after his mother offered to give him some money, and when he crept out of her house without saying goodbye. Both characters spent the rest of the film lying.

3. Too long. Perhaps this is related to the second issue. I might have wanted to see more of a sympathetic character. But I kept thinking this movie was about to end. And it just. would not. die.

*

I may have forgiven these things, but here’s what really gets on my wick: Hapless, Dishonest, Arsehole Male Character Almost Gets Really Nice Girl But Misses Out and Aww Bring Out The Violin.

Were we supposed to feel sad for this guy, who never got the girl? (And he might, by the way – the ending is left open.) I’ve lost track of the number of movies I’ve seen in which we’re led to feel sad that a romance has not worked out, rather than relieved on the part of the (much better-looking, far more intelligent) women who narrowly escaped hooking up with absolute losers. That, folks, is what really annoys the hell outta me.

When did movies get so same-same?

I kind of love that someone woke up one day and thought to themselves, “You know what this world needs? Another Planet of the Apes movie.”

- Nathan Bransford

In the movies, the impact of infantalization is…pronounced… As the sale of movie tickets declines (as it has over the past several years), Hollywood is ever more dominated by blockbuster films aimed at the elongated thirteen- to thirty-year-old ‘teen market.’ As Peter Biskind suggests in his history of Hollywood in the 1970s (paraphrased here by Louis Menand), ‘around 1967 American filmmaking caught fire and grew up, and then Spielberg and Lucas came along and put out the flames with great deluges of cash generated by junk food for fourteen-year-olds. To take but a single year, of the biggest films of 2004 in terms of ticket sales, four of the top five were aimed at kids: Shrek 2 at number one, Spider-Man 2 at number two, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban at number four, and The Incredibles at number five… of the twenty largest-grossing films, at least half are directed at the youth market, and all but Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 – both special cases of grown-ups struggling against the norm from religious right and the secular left – belong either to the cartoon market (four of the top twelve), the adventure-action-picture youth market, or the girls’ market. Three films (including numbers one and two) are sequels to earlier formula hits. Most belong to the category of ‘event’ films which, like Star Wars or Harry Potter or The Matrix, are designed to reach the largest possible global audience where selling to youth is a prime consideration.

The global film scene mimics the American picture. In 2003, the top-grossing film in Argentina, Germany, Mexico, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom was the animated cartoon Finding Nemo. Along with Finding Nemo, kiddie blockbusters and youth-marketed movies such as The Matrix Reloaded, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Bruce Almighty prevailed throughout the global marketplace.

Sequels also proliferated. Like children, we increasingly ask of movies and theater “Tell me the story again, please? Now please tell me again!” This makes for safe marketing, but it also satisfies an unadventurous puerile taste that wishes to be neither surprised nor discomfited. In the winter of 2005, as it learned successfully to track Hollywood’s marketing strategies, Broadway offered its public not only the usual menu of musical revivials such as Chicago, La Cage aux Folles, Sweet Charity, and Fiddler on the Roof, but a host of dramatic plays that in their time were risk taking, even taboo smashing, but are today drawn from the safe haven of familiarity and past success. (Enjoy the nostaliga of taboos once broken, without risking newly braking them!) These included A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Glengarry Glenross (1984), On Golden Pond (1979), Steel Magnolias (1947), The Glass Menagerie (1944), Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962), and Hurlyburly (1984). Were this a tribute to the enduring influence of American dramatic classics, it would be heartening, but in fact it represents the collective cowardice of a commercialized theater sector playing it safe even in the theater zone where you’re supposed to play it dangerous.

The movies are a market not just for theater but for the entire economy. As journalist and critic Lynn Hirschberg has written, “while other countries have interpreted globalism as a chance to reveal their national psyches and circumstances through film, America is more interested in attracting the biggest possible international audience. At Cannes [in 2004], war-torn Croatia was shown through the eye of the director Emir Kusturica, the French elite was exposed in Look At Me, the fear of female genital mutilation was depicted in Senegal’s Moolaade.” Meanwhile, Hollywood gave the world a (yes, charming) green fantasy creature called Shrek who returned for another record-breaking appearance later in Shrek 2.

The dumbing down of films and the blockbuster approach to filmmaking are not accidental features of an irrational Hollywood storyline, but a conscious decision by studio executives and film producers who understand that to make money their products have to sell worldwide. Back in 1946, a hundred million Americans went to the movies every week (of a population of 160 million), whereas today, only twenty-five million a week go. The number of big screens in America has been contracting for decades. As the domestic market for films shifted to television, rentals, and video-on-demand, the foreign big-screen market became ever more important. Around 1993, foreign box-office revenue overtook domestic revenue for Hollywood films, and today more than 60 percent of exhibition revenue is from overseas markets.

Hollywood thus needs exportable blockbusters whose primary target “is people with an underdeveloped capacity for deferred gratification; that is, kids.” Since increasingly Hollywood has come to depend on customers who see films three or four times or more, these kids – the “tell me the story again” kids referenced above – are ideal custoemrs, along with the new class of re-juveniled adults. Much the same can be said of the Merican-made soap oepras aimed at the American Latino market, “Bollywood” musicals from India’s prospering film market looking for an export market (Indian action-adventure tough-guy Salman Kahn has been introduced in the United States along with a couple of Bollywood leading ladies), or Madrid’s new appetite for global musicals, all of which suggest that the trends in Hollywood and New York have their global counterparts. The fourteen- to thirty-year-old market dominates. It will surprise no one that the hit television show American Idol now has its counterpart in the hit show Indian Idol.

Infantantalization has been Hollywood’s adaptive strategy, with the new blockbuster films featuring universal kid features like comic-book action, branded characters, numberless sequels, extensive product placements, and commercial tie-ins with fast food and other global enterprises, minima plots, and still more minimal dialogue. What is perhaps surprising is that serious films get made at all – like the ones screened in 2005 when mature fare and politicially relevant films such as Brokeback Mountain, Capote, The Constant Gardener, Syriana, and Good Night, and Good luck dominated the Academy Awards.

Thus do global marketers around the world, when not explicitly infantalizing adults, engage in the delicate task of empowering children as adult consumers without allowing them to forgo their childish tastes.

- from Con$umed: how markets corrupt children, infantalize adults, and swallow citizens whole. Barber, B.R.

The above excerpt, from Benjamin Barber, says nothing we don’t already know, perhaps. But he says it so well.

Also interesting: How Comic Books Changed Hollywood with Matt McAllister (podcast)

Movie: Dead Girl

(Not to be confused with The Dead Girl starring Toni Collette, which I haven’t seen.)

Okay so I wasn’t expecting a slasher movie. That’s the risk you run when you make the decision to keep away from reviews and plot spoilers.

Blood, guts, S&M aside, this movie had a few problems which pulled me out of the story.

1. An abandoned hospital had working lights. Who was paying the electricity bill?

2. Boys outrun a vicious dog.

3. One punch led to both a black eye and a split lip. The black eye cleared up. The split lip remained.

The friend who recommended this movie wasn’t bothered by these points. After all, someone locked a Dead Girl in an abandoned hospital. Except she’s not really dead because she moves, even after you try to kill her with a gun.

Now this, I can accept.

So what the hell? What are the rules for credibility in fiction? There’s no point pretending there are no rules. There so definitely are. I just haven’t worked them out. Anyone who’s ever written knows that you’d better not try to recreate reality, much less something that’s actually happened to you. That’s either way too boring or way too incredible. (Unless you’re writing non-fiction, in which case  I’m still unconvinced that there’s any such thing. Once it’s written down it’s been through someone’s biased reality filter.)

So we make stuff up. Some of this works, other stuff doesn’t. One person will suspend disbelief and another won’t be able to. Obviously, when you go into a movie called Dead Girl you know the story will be far removed from reality. For me, the issue is in the details. If the director had taken care of the details, the big Suspension-of-Disbelief would have taken care of itself.

When you’re watching a movie or reading a book, are you regularly bothered by Stuff That Wouldn’t Really Happen? Does it depend on the genre? What implications are there for writers?

No wonder we rely on tropes. I think I’ll stick to stock.

Movie: The Hangover

I thought the first third of this movie was funny. The characterisation was set up, none of them were likable (but in really funny ways) and they got themselves into a bizarre, bizarre situation.

Then, they woke up in Las Vegas and wondered why one of them was missing a tooth, why there was a tiger in the bathroom, a chicken in the hotel room and a baby in the closet. And I thought, “It’s going to take a wonderful scriptwriter to explain this one away.”

Unfortunately, the rest was all downhill from there, with the kind of Hollywood ending that Hollywood directors seem obliged to create.

Overall, watching this movie is part guilty pleasure – I’m sure the target audience is 17 year old boys – part groan. And the worst part is, you have to watch nearly til the end if you want to find out how these idiots got themselves into such a situation. This movie is on a par with Wedding Crashers. Which is shit.

Movie: The Wrestler

This is a sad story which follows the life of a wrestler – the kind of American wrestling that’s just a show, where they decide beforehand what they’re going to do to each other, cutting each other, stapling each other… all to get the audience riled up. Gladiator wrestling. I hate that stuff. It’s a form of prostitution, really.

And so I had to look away for much of this movie because, like a few others in Margaret and David’s top rated picks, this one is a bit cringey. Randy Robinson (The Ram), washed up gladiator, struggles to come to terms with life after wrestling. It’s shot and edited in documentary style, which adds to the misery of it, I think. This character is wholly believable.

This movie is very good. (And this coming from someone who has not the slightest bit of interest in the sport.) I’d recommend it for the character exploration, and to see it’s possible to turn a generally unlikeable character into a tragic figure with whom the audience can feel empathy, all within two hours.

Movie: Million Dollar Baby

Million Dollar Baby has got about the same emotional intensity as Crash (same script writer) or Shawshank Redemption (also starring Morgan Freeman). Having recently watched Gran Torino, it struck me how Clint Eastwood tends to play the same kinds of characters. That’s okay because he does a great job, as does Freeman and Hilary Swank and all the more minor actors: especially the trailer trash mother.

It was a sad movie but melancholy passed quickly. I think this is because the characters were stereotypes. And it helps that the script’s not based on a true story. Thank goodness. As far as the true-story equivalent goes, though, I’m reminded of a movie starring Javier Bardim: The Sea Within. That’s as close as ‘spoiling it for you’ as I will venture.

I recommend Million Dollar Baby even if you have no interest in boxing, but it’s a little gory in parts. If you’re squeamish there are times you’ll look away.

Related Links: Fascinating article from a female boxer in Meanjin; Outrage over girls’ kickboxing reeks of hypocrisy.

Movie: Gran Torino

This film has received great reviews from critics, which is what drew me to it. I’m not much interested in cars, you see. But it’s not really about a car. It’s about a world-weary old man whose wife has just died. Estranged from his own family, he finds himself involved in the gang wars his Asian neighbours have become invovled with – a minority group who resided in various parts of Asia – ‘The Hmong’.

Perhaps because of the minority group it was hard to find decent minority actors. If some of the acting had been more convincing the movie would have been better.

The ending worked. It wasn’t what I expected but, looking back, it couldn’t have worked any other way. The old man was on a mission.

I think Clint Eastwood probably wrote and directed a movie of the kind he would like to see himself, about a man he wishes he could be himself. I’m sure it appeals to an audience a little older than me: an audience more used to slow-moving character sketches. I did enjoyGran Torino but if it’d been a bit shorter it would’ve been even better.