ODTAA and Subjunctive History

I LOVE THIS MOVIE. I went into The History Boys thinking the plot was going to be clichéd, and it definitely was: students study to take important test, teacher gives lessons in life rather than just books. But the old familiar premise wasn't the driving force behind the film.

After acing their A-levels, a group of boys at a grammar school in Yorkshire study for history exams for admission to Oxford and Cambridge. Hector, the old teacher, has the boys for "general studies," mainly literature and music. Irvin, the new, younger teacher (played by a really cute and dorky unknown actor who unfortunately has the most unflattering photos available online), tries to challenge their automated answers. And here I show my bias. The movie pits Hector's literature-and culture-disguised-as-fun approach against Irwin's teaching-to-the-test ideas. Hector tells them to be themselves and pursue truth; Irwin tells them it's okay to lie and to highlight the irregular.

As a history major, I resent the portrayal of Irwin's history class. The old stodgy history teacher had them memorize nothing but years and facts; Irwin had them questioning the dominant paradigm. How is that lying? How it that opposed to truth and honesty? How is that teaching to a test? It shows critical thinking! "Revisionism" has a completely different context in popular culture and partisan politics than it does in the academic field of history.

Hector also teaches the boys to memorize poems and songs and essays, but it's portrayed as the enjoyment of enduring human sentiments rather than only in historical context. The problem is, the movie depicts a "detached" approach to history as necessarily a unhuman one, and yet fails to

So as a cultural studies major, I disagree that the two teachers' methods are at odds (yay, interdisciplinary approaches). There's a scene where one of the boys says the answer to a question depends on whether they need to seem "thoughtful" (gestures to Hector) or "smart" (gestures to Irwin). They shouldn't be separate, and neither should the two classes. The film confuses the feelings stirred up by Hector's coursework with all things related to thinking. There were too many scenes where Irwin says "What?" to a reference Hector taught the boys, and vice versa. Hello, tear down the walls in the ivory tower.

But in spite of all this, the debate on the role of teaching and knowledge (however muddled and uninformed) is presented in such a wonderfully compelling way, with great dialogue, that I love the film. What other film out there addresses theory and history and literature at the same time? The movie throws out a ton of really great questions (and answers them pretty sloppily), but the conversation continues in the viewer. There were so many great nuggets of conversation that I wanted to see expanded. And now I can bug everyone I know to see it so I can yap their ears off. =)

There's also a hilarious scene spoken entirely in French, but it's French spoken as teenagers learning the language speak it. So if you took high school French, it's pretty easy to understand. And laugh. (Judging by the lack of reaction in the theatre, though, I think everyone else took Spanish in high school...)

The characters aren't very deep; in fact, not much is revealed about the boys or the teachers. Except for a few scenes, we only see them in school, in their respective roles. Not having much insight into the characters gets a little dicey because there's also the subplot involving the molestation tendencies of some of the teachers. Actually it isn't so much a subplot, it's pretty central to the story. Basically Hector is a lovable fat mentor except when he gropes his students. And Irwin has his own issues too. In fact, all the male teachers at the school except the religious gym teacher are revealed to have inappropriate interactions with students. And the students are all weirdly okay with it, which the movie doesn't explore at all. Also, the unstated correlation between being gay and being a potential child molester made me a little uncomfortable. There's wrongness at all levels with this theme of the film. Personally, I think the movie would have worked even without it.

Obviously, a teacher would interpret this film differently in light of this aspect of the film. I choose to focus on the history part, with the other stuff as useful tangents. Maybe it's really the opposite....

That's the beauty of polysemic texts.