If you were a teen in 1984, the marketing probably sold you a Ralph Macchio-starring high school zoo movie. The .38 Special music video certainly encouraged that impression. But if you were over a certain age and Nick Nolte or Judd Hirsch were the bigger pull than Ralph, you were pricking up on the allegory of what happens to people who spend too long inside an institution they once believed in. That’s a thread that wove through a lot of material in the 80s.
Nick Nolte is Alex Jurel, a fifteen-year veteran social studies teacher who’s running on fumes. He drinks too much, cares too much to quit but not quite enough to fight anymore, and he’s watched the world around him slowly turn into something he doesn’t recognise anymore. The school graduated a student who couldn’t read or write his own name, and now a lawsuit is closing in. The administration’s response isn’t a promise of reform. Shock.
It’s damage control, because their only real concern is optics. Fixing the system would break it. There’s too much at stake and too many people in high places benefitting from the wreckage.
Nolte anchors the whole thing with that particular mid-80s brand of weary, hung-over authority he’d been perfecting since 48 Hrs., and he’s good at playing men who know they should have fought harder, sooner.
Judd Hirsch plays the assistant principal, and you can see exactly where the idealism went. He used to be one of the rebel teachers alongside Alex, back when they both believed they were going to change the system from within. Now he’s the guy managing the paperwork, putting out fires, covering up the gym teacher’s relationship with a sixteen-year-old student by reassigning him to another school rather than dealing with the scandal.
He’s become efficient, and he knows exactly what he’s doing and why he’s doing it – and he’s too deep in the machine to climb back out.
These kinds of movies were giving 60s disillusionment its 80s vocabulary.
The Boomers had spent the 60s and early 70s questioning every institution. From Civil rights, to the endless Vietnam war, to the Watergate scandal and the 1973 and the 1979 oil crises. Plural. They’d spent their formative years watching systems fail people and vowing to do it differently when it was their turn. Thing is, in 1984, it was their turn, and the system was still failing and they were the ones running it. Somewhere along the way the job of fixing things had been eclipsed by the job of managing them.
Ask anyone who’s worked inside a bureaucracy long enough and they’ll tell you there’s a moment when the mission statement stops being the point and the machine becomes self-sustaining as long as no one looks at it too closely.
That’s usually the stage where the people it was all designed for become an inconvenience.
Even at the other end of the faculty, Mr. Ditto hands out mimeographed worksheets every morning and falls asleep at his desk while the students fill them in. He’s won three consecutive awards for most orderly classroom. One day he dies in his chair and nobody notices for hours because the students keep filling in their worksheets around a dead man. The routine survives, and the system keeps going because the system is designed to do just that.
The story was conceived by producer Aaron Russo of Trading Places fame, and his brother Irwin, who’d spent ten years teaching in New York City public schools. They hired first-time screenwriter W.R. McKinney to spend ten months researching from the inside, interviewing students and teachers and studying press coverage of education policy. When you distill the satire down, the message is so basic it shouldn’t need saying: the school exists for students, not administrators.
That fundamental idea gets buried under institutional self-preservation, until the institution is only serving itself and nobody can quite remember when that started. Any institution, really. Schools, governments, corporations, whatever. The machine starts with a purpose and eventually the maintenance of the machine becomes the purpose. This movie came out in 1984.
The people inside it aren’t bad, mostly, they’re just tired and compromised and doing what the system rewards, which is compliance. And the longer that goes on, the more the excuses and rhetoric fill the space where the mission used to be, until one day the whole operation is running full tilt and nobody can tell you what it’s actually for anymore.
If the movie teaches us anything, it’s that somebody usually has to stand up and say it out loud, to the whole class, before anyone pays attention. -Pop
Teachers arrived on Home Video this week in 1985, after an October 5th, 1984 theatrical release.