The Young as Oxygen
It’s Time to Invest in the Future
Fortune smiles on those brave enough to teach class — provided the teacher is open to receiving it. Over 17 years of teaching film directing at graduate level I have come to know some 450 new directors, for me both a rare privilege and an ineffable delight. Actually, although I say “teaching”, what I mean is “working with”. That vital distinction I learned from my colleague Gill Dennis — co-writer of The Black Stallion and Walk the Line — a sage lost to us now but living on in the creative minds of so many. With his revelation, Gill rescued me from the perils of the pedestal and put me on a level, literally, figuratively, with my students. Now I didn’t have to know everything. (I didn’t and don’t.) Now I didn’t have to be better than those in my charge. (I wasn’t.) Now I didn’t have to project myself and my failings on any of those remarkably inventive souls. (Heaven forbid!) I could be their co-explorer, one moment their steward, their interlocutor another, but always the supporter and facilitator of the filmmakers before me, in front of me, to my side, and with me as now I could be with them.
Had I mounted the pedestal, such was the talent, the voice, the promise I encountered that that unstable column would pretty soon have toppled over and I would have ended up flat on my ignominious face. Spared the broken bones, I came to discover rewards I could not previously have imagined. To begin with, I lost my jealousy, or the more malevolent part of it at least. Here I was, with people younger than me, people hungrier than me, people more courageous and me who weren’t afraid to make mistakes, even if those mistakes hurt them — and not only that, but they would transform each mistake into a lesson. I was with people who weren’t afraid to ask questions, often of the simplest most fundamental kind — the kind I thought too obvious to ask, or too dangerous maybe… They asked the questions I couldn’t be bothered with, ones I was content to pass over, to ignore, ones that sometimes I simply hadn’t noticed and they had me face at last, reflect upon them, admit that such challenges invite no easy answers, perhaps no answers at all. I had been asleep, the class was awake and opened my eyes for me. I had been looking back, it was looking forward, as now I could too. I remained jealous of course, no point in denying it. I still remain jealous, but with the help of those 450 souls — and I stay in touch with many — I’m able to keep that envy saboteur in myself at bay. Why permit the toxin to interfere with the elixir?
Am I laying claim to altruism? Service to the community? Selfish dedication to those in less powerful positions than my own? No. Quite the reverse. I have, in fact, an admission to make: I was acting out of pure selfishness. It was such a great deal — I was being paid while they were paying, and paying so much too. I was teaching year after year while they would be around for a little more than two years after which they would have to move into the terrifyingly competitive world of professional filmmaking — if they could find their entry point. Altruism? No — it was they who were the teachers, and I the student.
As my educators though, they were hardly monolithic. Far from it. Not only was there a spectrum of sensibility within each individual year, but there were generational shifts from the age of 911 to the era of badassery, from the dying embers of post punk to the flames of #metoo, the dawn of social media to its inescapable embrace. The Star Wars generation morphed into the Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter colloquy. Early on, I might mention Led Zeppelin, even The Beatles. Later I strived for cred by proudly letting everyone know I had watched J. Cole perform — he was, I insisted, as good as Homer. There is clearly something uniting this protean progeny however, in spite of its shifts of sensibility and attitude, and that is the criticism, disapproval, lack of enthusiasm, even contempt it encounters from many of us more senior in years. The Millennials, Generation Z, the generations younger whose nomenclature I don’t yet know — Generation Y maybe — are seen as entitled, irresponsible, ignorant of civic obligation and responsibility, carefree, lazy, and generally going to the dogs. Even if this were true — and in my experience it’s not — who would be to blame for laying the seeds of such dereliction?
In the 50s, when I was born, England remained in a state of concussion from the preceding war. When my grandfather carried me on his shoulders around a blitzed London I marveled at what I later came to see as its devastation, the streets upon skeletal streets of bombed ruin. There was the rebuilding though, the looking to the future: the cranes lancing the sky, at which I loved to gaze, and the steady ceding of those “bomb sites” to the fresh architecture replacing them. A parallel to that was the reconstruction of society itself, the investment in infrastructure, in healthcare, in housing, and in education. Even if there were 43 children to one penurious teacher in my primary school class, that teacher rarely seemed short of resources or equipment — and he certainly showed no corresponding lack of enthusiasm or passion. Looking back moreover, I recognize the sense of stability and hope that pervaded his classroom. And later at my grammar school there always seemed an airy freedom of opinion and expression to match the spaciousness of the clean 60’s block and the wide prairie presented by the playing field. The old imperialist mindset was there of course, as it was in the country (and it has returned to disastrous affect with the sentimentality of Brexit), but there was something else… The Beatles on the radio. The brightness. The newness. The light. Then came university. Three years for which neither myself nor my parents paid a penny, three years from which I incurred absolutely no debt. Indeed, although many found it hard to live on the grants we received, I had never lived such a life of Riley. Society’s largesse, I thought, was a given. I loved it and loved the encouragement it afforded me.
Throughout my 17 years of graduate teaching to the contrary, the fees paid by the students climbed unremittingly year upon year. Those arriving with debts from undergrad education, saw that burden rise with every week of class. Those who didn’t, soon found their balances making up for it. In society in general, the investment in those who didn’t need it shot up while those less powerful found the ground beneath them crumble. Unable to escape this trend, education itself became not so much an enabling engagement as a transaction; classes changed into vocational training sessions in which students became customers — knowledge accorded a dollar amount per snippet of wisdom. They came to feel like consumers while institutions of education treated them as such. Questions were forgotten and answers were substituted as the currency of the pedagogy. The light and air of my youth had vanished, shadowed and stifled by the chilling gloom of the market. And yet…
Never did the energy and commitment of the students with whom I worked falter. There were, admittedly, those in other disciplines who calculated the cost of each hour at school and who demanded the answers to get them into the industry; one can hardly blame them — their response to the environment in which they found themselves is eminently understandable. Those in my classes however cleaved to their exploration of story and storytelling through the moving image with consistent passion and intelligence. Yes, there was the placard waving, as current agendas made their way to the forefront. Yes, there was the anger that arose from the continuation of social and ethnic injustice. Yes, there recently came about a harsh sensibility evident in popular idioms such as “killing it”, “crushing it”, “badass” and “kicking ass” and so on, as if self-worth might be attained only by an assault upon some poor victim. But the deeper truth of the younger generations with whom I have been so fortunate to interact was, and remains, one of integrity, of invention, of kindness, and of smarts. They met the lack of investment accorded them, with an investment in themselves, and a commitment to the future.
In the months of the pandemic, the disrespect leveled by their elders has grown. Whether we are seniors now or in the budding gerontocracy, we claim the greatest hardship of all, as though life is somehow easier for the young. Is it? New filmmakers at film school find themselves missing out on the programs they thought they were signing up for while first features are arrested in pre-production or have to battle bravely through production, and finished movies are facing an uncertain festival and distribution environment. No, those at the beginnings of their careers are immeasurably more challenged by Covid-19 than those heading towards the end of theirs.
In short, why would one generation not do everything to facilitate, encourage, respect and further the interests of those following it? Why would it think to feather the nest for itself while tipping the fledglings out?
The young are our oxygen. We cannot breathe without them. No, they’re not perfect, no more perfect than humanity has ever been. But they are remarkable. Just watch the Obama’s virtual high school commencement from earlier this year. How could you not be amazed? I could barely cross the road when I was the age of some of these kids. Not only can they cross that road, they are fully capable of building it too, of giving it direction and destination. This they will need to do. The challenges posed by climate change, social and cultural polarization, of the stubborn persistence of racial inequality and repression, and the denial of the precious complexity of gender and sexual orientation are formidable indeed. Time then to empower those inheriting a provenance we seniors, and those coming just before us, have done so little to mitigate. It’s time we redeemed ourselves. It’s time to let the young have their time, fully supported, fully enabled, fully encouraged, fully loved.
We owe it to them.
Peter Markham October 2020
Author: What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. (Focal Press/Routledge) 9/20
