My first semester here has petered out to a close. The students have tomorrow off, the grades are all entered, and no one wants to pay any attention. As a result, five or six teachers decided to play hooky today and most of the ones remaining took their kids to a nearby cafe. In two of my classes, all the previous classes of the day had been cancelled, leaving me little choice but to sign the students off, give them a little something to do at home, and wish them a good weekend. I certainly didn't have any tests planned for them or anything.
The hard thing about a system where classes are taken this lightly is identifying whether or not the students respect your classes. I get some comfort when I see a delegation from some class or other outside the teachers' room door before every class. It means they do it to all of their teachers. It's part of the culture here as the students batter away at the teachers until they get an hour off. It's probably the hardest part of my job, not succumbing to the constant requests to skip classes. I've adopted the flattest "no" I've ever had in life, and this is probably a good thing for me to have picked up. The students come to my classes, look bored, but eventually start to learn something, by force if necessary. And I've always thought that was the whole point of this school thing: to get a certain number of students to listen to something and hopefully absorb and retain it. I like to think I'm doing pretty well in the numbers category. The other signs of respect are more qualitative.
For example, a few of the students from my eighth class invited me to Once Upon a Time in Mexico, which has been showing at the movie theater here all week. I appreciated it. It shows they wanted to be able to study English outside of class (and we spoke only in English), that they think I deserve a good time outside of school, and that they can watch really gory movies at a young age here in Bulgaria. I figured it was still probably better than suggesting that we see Boat Trip instead. At least OUTM had some art to it.
It was a halfway decent flick. A strangely relaxing action movie. Despite some eye-gougings, lots of shootings, etc, it all felt very calm and cool. All under control. It meant there was a little boredom in the middle, but there always seems to be in these kinds of movies. After the movie, we covered the gore aspect quickly, and the conversation moved on to the invincibilty myth the movie more than embraces.
It used to be that heroes, if they survived, would come through without a scratch and with perfect hair. It's been that way since Homer. You either got a javelin through the eye, or you slaughtered hundreds of Trojans and returned to a happy wife after killing all of her false suiters. But something changed in the late eighties.
Lethal Weapon and Die Hard both came out in 87-88, and I think both are responsible for pushing the new invincibility trend into the mainstream. Lethal Weapon Americanized Mel Gibson's penchant for nearly crucifying himself at the end of movies and Die Hard started the same thing for Bruce Willis. At the end of both movies Riggs and Mclane are beaten nearly beyond recognition, but left alive and triumphant.
The trend expanded from there and has infected nearly every action movie. James Bond no longer walks away with a girl and an ironed tux. These days he's tortured in the introduction, just to get the martyrdom out of the way. The Terminator, a machine, winds up the most beaten down character in all three of its movies.
[spoilers in the next paragraph]
Once Upon a Time in Mexico leaves Johnny Depp with his eyes gouged out, his legs shot twice and a bullet in his arm. Yet he still manages to kill his two assailants and the chick that turned on him, and stumble out of the city with the aid of a boy helping him out. Nothing in the movie's previous hour and a half led us to believe that Depp was an ironman. It's just expected these days that the hero bleed for the audience. We want our heroes gory and our villains even worse.
Now we also have 50 Cent, a real-life "hero," taking 9 bullets in a single sitting and earning all kinds of street cred for it. I have no doubt it's getting into kids heads. Until you get shot, you never know how many bullets it would take to get you down, and I think it's every guy's fantasy to have a bit of invincibility. I have no idea where this will lead, but it seems to be going somewhere. Heroes are going to wind up looking like Holy Grail's black knight at the end of movies, and villains are going to have to go down with a fatal headbutt from the man they just made a quadrapelegic. I can't wait.
Posted by Rob at January 29, 2004 01:45 PM