Everybody wants to be the best, everytime you see someone great you think to yourself “I wish I could be them”, and that great person wishes they could be greater. Perfectionism is one of the main themes in Damien Chazelle’s Whiplash, a film which re released recently in September. 

The film involves a student jazz drummer (played by Miles Teller) and his perfectionist coach with anger issues (played by J.K. Simmons) going through unhealthy measures to make the drummer (named Andrew) “one of the greats”. For example, at one point in the movie, the coach (named Fletcher) makes Andrew play a song that he never practiced at a concert to force this idea onto Andrew that he didn’t have the skills to be a successful drummer. This idea of not being great enough tortures Andrew throughout the movie, and he is put through shameful and embarrassing moments to re-enforce that idea of perfection. 

A school is a competitive environment, with everybody striving to be the best. Some people will go through unhealthy measures to be successful, pushing themselves to do something they can’t. Some people will be trapped in their own delusion, believing that they’ll make a comeback; and there are little measures that prevent a student from pushing themselves too hard. 

At an early age, expectations are placed on young students, with them being told that they have great potential. Even those that don’t do well are told that they can be great with enough effort. The students are then convinced that if they can’t achieve something, it’s because they don’t put enough effort into it. This can lead to burnout, as a student overworks to become something they can’t. A student does not know their limits, yet they pursue goals beyond them. And once a student fails to achieve these goals, they lose motivation and sink in a pool of disappointment. Once they lose motivation in what they think they can be great at, they lose motivation in what they really want to do. It’s almost like they put too much effort into something they can’t reach.

Every day, students see themselves trying to impress the people who put these expectations on them, instead of reaching their own goals, just like how Andrew ends up doing with Fletcher. All their life goals now become dependent on whether someone approves it or not. Now, students struggle with knowing what they want to do for the rest of their lives because they spend everyday trying to learn what someone else tells them they should. A lawyer doesn’t need to know college level calculus or environmental science, but it would look good on their application to Stanford. In the movie, Fletcher gives Andrew a mold and beats him into it; he places these expectations onto Andrew by providing a model, Charlie Parker, one of the real  “greats” of jazz. However, Fletcher provides this mold while ignoring the tribulations that Charlie went through to be great. 

Charlie was great, you could say he was a common role model for jazz musicians, but in his staggering heights, he found himself struggling with substance abuse. He died from said abuse at the early age of 34. That is what the movie alludes to being Andrew’s end. Andrew’s mind has become so dysfunctional that he now solely identifies with drumming. Outside of drumming, Andrew has nothing. A student is taught how to do something and then apply it to schoolwork. A student gets influenced so much by this system of giving and receiving that they go headfirst into a career without any experience on the system their career runs on. Outside of school some of the students have nothing else. These days, experience is placed over education in most jobs. Some people can’t even get an internship without support from a college, and that leads to a huge roadblock between school and the real world. Many people burnout as they fail in knowing what to do. But these problems are rooted in the expectations that are placed on our mind.

In the beginning of a student’s educational life, they carry great expectations. These expectations can grow or diminish as a student strides through the years. But when a student completes their educational journey, the expectations become minimal, with most adults expected to do the bare minimum, and some expected to do nothing at all. When that time comes, a person is haunted by the expectations of their past, expectations that are fulfilled once in a blue moon. Now, they spend more time grieving their “wasted potential” and trying to push themselves further than they can. Now, Anthony will become fully developed, with Fletcher’s expectations forever plaguing his mind. Anthony will continue pushing himself, even if Fletcher is absent in his life, he will become a musician as great as Charlie Parker, but he will pay the same price as him. And with Fletcher absent, the expectations now only come from Anthony’s own mind. As a student’s mind develops, they will remember how they were told that they could be one of the greats, and as those memories echo their mind, they will forever run the cycle of setting high expectations for themselves and being disappointed that they couldn’t reach them. A student can only flourish if they know their limits, because a student that doesn’t burns out trying to achieve something unreachable.