Between Transcendence and Pedagogy: A Nietzschean Analysis of Two Music Teacher Representations in Cinema

Abstract

This article explores a particular figure of the musician in cinema, namely the figure of the music teacher in two different American movies. To study this representation, we first define a couple, two cinematographic “modes of being” of the music teacher: 1) the excessive teacher, sometimes violent and cruel towards his students, who values and promotes standards of perfection in regards to music (the character of Terence Fletcher in Whiplash, 2014), and 2) the humanist teacher who succeeds in positively transforming the lives of his students by his teaching (the character of Glenn Holland in Mr. Holland’s Opus, 1995). Through this presentation, we wish to show how these two figures embody the double identity that characterizes them both as musicians and as educators: in other words, we aim to illustrate the way in which these two characters negotiate, on one hand, the purely artistic demands of musical pr actice and, on the other hand, the properly ethical demands of the act of teaching. In order to theorize our interpretation of these two cinematographic figures, we contrast them with Nietzsche’s theories on music and education –both conceived, as shown by Stolz (2017), as forms of “cultivation of the self ”– by distinguishing how the characters of Fletcher and Holland symbolize respectively an individualist conception and a universalist conception of self-overcoming in Nietzsche’ s thought (Rowthorn, 2017).