While in high school, Damien Chazelle ended every day in a jazz band where his drumming would be picked apart under the gaze of his music teacher, where every unexcluded beat of wood would beckon scrutiny. When scaled up a hundredfold, that teacher became conductor Terence Fletcher in Chazelle’s 2014 Whiplash—a monster of humanity only completed by J.K. Simmons’ performance.
For thousands of people, the perceived sign of good theatre can be reduced to “a whole lot of loud voices”. It looks like a yelling DiCaprio in Django Unchained and it is Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood as he screams the line “I’ve abandoned my child.” Certainly, these performances are great, but at the same time, there’s more to their acting than the redness of a face. J.K. Simmons’ Terrence Fletcher is one of the greatest examples of this.
Whiplash is a movie with a simple premise: Andrew is a drummer who wants to become great, so much so that he does everything he can for a chance to play in Fletcher’s band—a renowned status for all jazz musicians within the story. Fletcher is a gruff, strict man vaguely resembling a military grandfather. He is a stereotype of what the world has dubbed “tough love” and he uses psychological manipulation to push his students into self resentment in order to reach perfection. Andrew himself is victim to this, struggling throughout the story to weigh his desire for greatness and the toll of Fletcher’s tutelage. The movie ends, where Andrew (after testifying against Fletcher in an academic court and still being manipulated to play for him again) plays a final drum solo in open defiance to the conductor who had once held a stranglehold on him.
Simmons possessed an ability to fool the audience with his acting. Terrence Fletcher is a character that relies on psychology: to misdirect his students and by proxy, the audience as well. Towards the end of the film, Andrew is put into a situation where he has to choose between playing for Fletcher once more or abandoning his dreams, and in this moment, Fletcher apologises. It is utterly disparate to what we know of him, and yet Simmons eases into it: his gaze lowers to the ground whenever he speaks and his wrinkles and bristles of facial hair are distorted to a frown. The audience fully believes that Fletcher has changed, and this is only possible through the minute intentions of Simmons’ acting nuance. He spends the whole film with the same mannerisms of a straight posture and consistent displays of repulsion when there is anything that betrays his interests. He convinces the audience into an image of himself, and when he suddenly inverses these small mannerisms he has built up, the audience is led to the entire opposite impression. It is only in the final scene when Fletcher is revealed to have been feigning apology that we are able realise the scheme.
Simmons allows Whiplash to subvert audience expectations—one of the functional abilities of a good film—and by doing so, grounds the theme. The movie is intended to be a warning of psychological mind games and when the audience themselves are tricked by the characters, it is a way to put into perspective the magnitude of manipulation. Thus, Simmons’ ability to “chameleon” himself into different persons within 10 minutes of a movie is a demonstration of how his character manipulates Andrew.
The character of Terrence Fletcher is easy to fumble into the ploy of what I earlier described as a “whole lot of yelling”. Audiences theoretically conflate acting with loud voices, but subconsciously, we can recognize when the latter has fully consumed the former. This is to say that Simmons humanises his character, he is never just the stereotype of an angry old man, but occasionally, he seems like someone who may just be passionate in their job. When Fletcher walks into a room, everyone becomes silent and stands in a salute: this isn’t meant to be villainous, it’s a symptom of the sort of respect he commands. His philosophy seems intense but fair, and once the audience is in a push and pull between what they think of Fletcher, the film has already succeeded in sympathising with the antagonist. It is, once again, a psychological struggle for not only the characters in the film, but for us in front of the screen.
There is, of course, much to be said about Miles Teller’s performance of Andrew: he perfectly captures the essence of apprehension through a slumped posture and a consistent quake in his voice. However, behind closed doors, he is grit personified. Teller’s ability to flip a switch in his character and drive lines within himself is something interesting for the audience to watch. By seeing him in moments of awkwardness in one minute and then in the next where the bases of his fingers are bleeding from drumming, we get to see the pure ambition that drives him. We as the audience are impressed by Andrew and he becomes more complex as a character.
Teller is also an expert at facial contortions: he can make a resting face look utterly disgusted (as he does when Fletcher tells him that he has been dropped from his position as the first chair drummer) or utterly insecure (as he does when he sits on his couch having abandoned his dreams).
However, even the film’s biggest supporters have often voiced disappointment with its ending. The conclusion is admittedly ambiguous: Andrew chooses to drum for Fletcher in a one-time gig even though he is fully aware of the type of person he is. Audiences often cite this as an out of place endorsement of abuse, whereas rather than staging the completion of Andrew’s fight against manipulation, he ultimately relapses. Of course, it is open to interpretation, but to me, Whiplash didn’t represent helplessness, but rather it was a defiance against it. Manipulation can only grow when one is unable to recognize it. In Whiplash, Andrew knows he has been manipulated (of course, he struggles to reach that point) and in the end, he is not submitting to it once more. Instead, he ignores it; he chooses to follow what he wants, regardless of who or what is at the head of it. The ending, actually, underscores the nature of ambition. Just as ambition can lead to the Fletchers of the world, it can lead to liberation and actualization, which is what Andrew is eventually able to accomplish.
Whiplash is the type of movie made lovable by the tension and relationship between the two central characters. I’d argue that in the hands of different actors, Fletcher and Andrew would have performed as caricatures, losing all nuance that made them as complex as they are. The film is a masterclass of casting and a thorough understanding of the theme they wanted to tell. With one misstep, it could have easily become the next Patch Adams. Thankfully, it never made that error and still persists in cinematic conversations over a decade after its release.
By: Joshua Kwon
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