Private School

Q: So, how was Private School? A: It is a grave in which art is buried alive. It makes the devil himself cry and lose hope. It is what it would look like if an existential crisis had an existential crisis. Q: Aren't you being a little hyperbolic about an 80's teen sex comedy? It's just a movie, not a war atrocity. A: Oh, you sweet, sweet summer child. It is not a movie. Q: Sure it is. Phoebe Cates, Matthew Modine, Betsy Russell-- A: No. I mean, if you are referring to Private School as a movie in the literal sense -- that it is a series of moving pictures created with actors portraying roles and saying pre-written dialogue -- then yes, it is a movie. But there is more that defines a movie than those mechanical elements. Q: There's another definition for "movie"? A: Let me put it to you like this. Did you know that the Olympics used to have chess as a medal-winning event? They were considered Olympic athletes because they're at the Olympics, but really, is a gold-medal-winning chess player on the same athletic level as gymnasts or cross-country skiers or decathletes? Is Bobby Fischer an athlete like Michael Phelps? Q: Well, they're both excellent in their chosen competitive fields— A: Yes, yes, but you know that’s what I mean. Can a chess master post up and drop a 3? Can a chess master run a 4-4 40? Can a chess master do the things that people think of when they think of athletes? Q: ... No, I guess not. A: There you go. Q: I don't understand how that relates to Private School. A: Private School may have all the components of a movie, in the same way my pantry has all the components of a cake. That doesn't mean my pantry is a cake. Q: Okay, we're getting lost in metaphors. How about this ... tell me what it's about. A: This is what I'm trying to tell you. You ask what Private School is "about", as if Private School functions like any other movie. You presume Private School has a plot. Or character development. Or characters, or themes, or comedy, or drama, or anything that human beings expect to see in a movie. It isn't "about" anything. Q: Oh, come on. Even the worst movies have some kind of plot. The Room has a plot. Blame It On Rio has a plot. I Spit On Your Grave has a plot. A: Yes, all terrible movies, true, and every one of them is torture. And every one of them has a plot, as threadbare as they may be. But this is different. When I say Private School doesn't have a plot, I mean it in as an absolute, literal truth. It does not have a through-line that ties together all the scenes that occur. It has story threads that come and go as needed to facilitate the scene in which it is occurring, but that is the limit. And those scenes are almost always driven by sex. There is no motivation at this school by any of the student body to do anything other than get laid. Boys break into the girls' dorm. Couple wants to have sex, so they go to a convenience store to buy condoms. The girls doing aerobics in a field. It all revolves around the basest version of sexuality. The individual scenes have their own unique beginning, middle, and end, with almost no consequence on the scene that follows. It is a series of scenes, connected by recurring characters and setting, and nothing else. The scenes are connected the same way tissues are in a box of Kleenex. Q: Could you give me an example? A: The main female character, Christine, is dating Jim. They haven't had sex yet, but they want to. At one point, about 45 minutes in, there is a misunderstanding that requires a set of Rube Goldberg-ian events to occur that Goldberg himself would declare preposterous. They break up. There's a montage of Jim trying to make amends in various ways, and Christine rebuffing him. Five minutes later, at a party, Jim sees Christine, says he is sorry and that what happened was a misunderstanding. She shrugs, they hug, and they're back together. I did not leave anything out here; there was no big public display of sorrow, no passionate explanation or rationalization of the events surrounding the misunderstanding, no nothing that would, should, or could convince any human being to feel forgiveness. The reconciliation took less time than most kills in a slasher movie. And to top it off, you would think this would occur, like most break-up-and-make-up arcs in movies, near the end of the final act, so that it is the crescendo of the movie. Nope, this happens with a half an hour left in the movie. The closest thing this movie has to a story arc begins and ends in the span of 10 minutes, and is resolved with as much effort as apologizing to your spouse when you forget to buy something on the shopping list. Q: So what is the third act? A: That’s not a valid questions, because as I’ve said before, THIS IS NOT A MOVIE. It does not follow a three-act structure, because it has no need for acts. That is how a normal movie progresses: set-up, conflict, journey, resolution, denouement. Private School has no overarching story to speak of. When a movie is devoid of structure and story, and its scenes have no connection or purpose to drive forward a story thread, acts are not just irrelevant, they're anachronistic. What happens in the first scene has no bearing on what happens in the next, or the next, or the next. Other than the final scene being at graduation, almost every scene in Private School could be shuffled around and it would not impact the quality or flow of the movie. It's like a sketch comedy movie where the characters are consistent for the entire runtime; just random scenes of wacky hijinks, and it all revolves around sex. Except the part about being a comedy. Because this is not funny, not even accidentally. You won't even laugh nervously for how bad it is. It is as regressive and exploitative as possible, to both sexes. Q: How so? A: Every boy in Private School is a Venn diagram of three circles. One circle is labeled "horny". The second is "idiot". The third is "creep". These three circles overlap 100% at all times. The only male character in this movie that does not lose all self-control or dignity or become a low-grade sex criminal when he's in proximity of a female is the pharmacist played by Martin Mull, because he's only in one scene. Every other male character -- every teenage boy, the main antagonist's father, several older men at school functions, and even a chauffeur played by Ray Walston -- all seem to suffer catastrophic brain damage and lose all impulse control when they're within less than 20 feet of anyone with two X chromosomes. Even those in committed relationships like Jim and his buddy Bubba are incapable of controlling their base desires to see naked breasts or touch female flesh when near a woman. Commitment and love mean nothing to them when the opportunity to see boobies is there. Revenge Of The Nerds is somehow less offensive, and that has a sex scene that is rape by deception. People in cults have more free-will than the boys in Private School. Q: How is it offensive towards women? A: There are four women of material consequence in Private School. The headmistress of the school, who is the quintessential old-person-befuddled-by-the-kids authority figure. She exists to clutch her pearls and have permanent "well, I never!" face. You have Christine, the platonic ideal of a nice girl, and that is the end of her character. She's almost allowed a shred of agency a couple times, but the scene immediately following retracts it faster than someone touching a hot stove. Her friend Betsy is her friend Betsy. She seems to be dating and constantly almost on the verge of but not quite sleeping with Bubba, when he isn’t committing misdemeanor sex offenses against every other girl on campus, a fact for which she pinballs between annoyed and apologetic. Finally, Christine's rival Jordan is the prototypical hot bitch character. Her entire purpose in life is hating all other girls, and she wants to make sure all boys lust for her to the degree that they become Tex Avery cartoons, and she will stop at nothing to that end. Her infamous topless horseback riding scene is all to seduce Jim and piss off Christine; she does not care that numerous other classmates and teaching staff are there. In fact, with the exception of the headmistress, getting naked is all every woman does in this movie. Q: Every? A: Oh, I'm not kidding. Even a teacher is made to go topless. The front page of Pornhub doesn't have this much nudity. There are not one but two invasions by boys into the girls' dormitory, AND an invasion of the girls' locker and shower room. And, of course, this is the male fantasy of a girls' dorm, so girls are constantly walking around in see-through bras and lingerie as flimsy as a truck stop napkin -- if they wear anything at all -- and the girls' shower is packed a dozen deep. And every girl has a centerfold's body; not a single girl has big hips or sagging breasts or cellulite. It's like a girls' prep school that runs out of the Playboy Mansion. I have seen more breasts in 90 minutes than a mammogram operator in a day. This has somehow made female nudity boring and repetitive, and I thought only Showgirls could pull that off. Q: Aren't you setting the bar a little high? This is an 80's teen sex comedy. Movies like Screwballs, Joysticks, Porky's ... these barely had plots. A: I counter that with Fast Times At Ridgemont High, Weird Science, and The Last American Virgin. All of those are teen sex comedies, and all of them also have a plot. I mean, yeah, Last American Virgin's plot isn't the strongest, and the ending is a serious punch in the gut, but it's certainly memorable. Fast Times doesn't center everything around sex, and actually uses sex and the consequences of it to tell stories. It is possible to use the medium of a teen sex comedy to tell a story. Hell, even American Pie did it a decade and a half later. Private School does not. More than that, it cannot, and not in the way that I can't play the guitar, but in the way that a penguin can't operate a tractor. I know how a guitar works; I just lack the training required to make music. A penguin does not even have a concept of what a tractor is, let alone have the framework to understand its purpose and how to use it. Private School is that penguin. It is not simply incapable of being good, it is so fundamentally flawed in form and function, it has no concept of how to be good. This could not have been saved with a better director, or a rewrite of the script, because its problems go deeper than that. The very genetics of Private School are an affront to movies. Private School is what happens when a movie studio executive sees a trend and believes that paring down that trend to its most base elements and presenting them in the form of a recurring checklist is all that is required to satisfy the demands of the audience. Even 90's Skinemax erotic thrillers had more plot than Private School. It is as if someone filmed a porn movie, then trimmed out the actual scenes of penetration, and left in random softcore nudity and the flimsy dialogue that bridges the gaps between sex scenes. Private School does not fail at what it does, but only because it was not built to try. It was assembled -- not made, because that implies passion and artistic endeavor -- solely to capitalize on a market, without understanding that the market came about because of good movies. It's like the slasher movie craze. That started because of Halloween and Friday The 13th, right? Private School is The Mutilator. Not just a pale imitation, but an imitation five generations removed and stripped to its barest essentials, to the point that all sense of quality and craftsmanship has been lost, and all that remains is empty content that functions at a sub-primal level. It is to movies what Big Rigs: Over The Road Racing is to video games. It is to movies what emojis are to language. It is to movies what being in a permanent coma is to living. Do you understand now what I mean when I say Private School is not a movie? Just because it conforms to the technical requirements of being a motion picture does not mean it meets the minimum artistic requirements to stand shoulder to shoulder with even the lowest hanging fruit of its genre. It is not the most offensive movie ever made or the most inept or the most boring, but, on a creative level, it is the most barren and bankrupt. It does not lack an artistic center because it was designed not to accommodate one in the first place. If it were a flavor of ice cream, it would taste like picking out a coffin for your dead mother. If it were a weapon, it would be a rash on that spot on your back you can’t reach. If it were a sexual act, it would be doing your taxes with a broken calculator. It stands in defiance and mockery of the marvels the human race has accomplished by being so bereft of purpose. We built the pyramids with our bare hands. We split the atom. We not only conquered gravity with the airplane, we set foot on the moon. We have cloned living beings. We have created majestic works of art that capture the triumphs and tragedies of human existence in ways that are eclipse not just words, but language itself. Human beings have done things that push the boundaries of imagination. And somehow, beyond all reason, beyond all hope, we also made Private School. Now do you understand? Q: I ...I don't know what to say. A: And all I’ve done is explain it to you. Imagine being in my shoes. I watched the damned thing. Q: I ... I think I need to go sit on the porch and just ... I don't know. Think. About nothing. A: I've got an extra chair. It's what I'll be doing all weekend. Q: ……………. But that scene with Betsy Russell on the horse. That’s right up there with Phoebe Cates in Fast Times, right? A: ................ That’s not relevant.