Review

Culture

Education

7 September 2023

6 min read

Back to school on the big screen

It’s back to school for many. Yaroslav Walker picks his favourite films capturing the friendship, the drama, and the expectation of school life and beyond.

Yaroslav Walker

Yaroslav is Vicar of Christ Church, Hampstead.

School students walk across a playground confidently talking and laughing with us

The History Boys.

BBC Films.

The summer is coming to an end, the last BBQ embers are sputtering to sleep, the weather…appears not to have been told, at least in London! Sweltering! Most importantly of all, our children are back to school, nursery or college. In light of this momentous time of year here are my top five back to school film choices, one each for the last five decades, and some honourable mentions.

1970s - American Grafitti

A teenage couple dressed in 1950s clothes sit on a kerb in deep conversation.

Charles Martin Smith and Candy Clark in American Graffiti

American Graffiti isn’t just a lovely piece of nostalgia now, it was back then. A misty-eyed look back at 60s Americana, this film is packed with slicked-back hair, classic cars, diners with roller-skating waitresses, and the complexities of teenage romance. Four friends meet on the last day of summer to experience the joys of a California evening one last time before two of them jet off to college ‘back East’. Curt is unsure about his future and is even considering staying in his hometown. Steve is hubristically thrilled about the prospect of fleeing his humdrum life and even shedding his loving girlfriend for new conquests. Terry is insecure and simply desperate to prove he is as good as everyone else, and Milner is the older friend who never left town and is a local-legend drag-racer. Over the course of a long night they go their separate ways, have adventures, and finally find some closure to their ongoing anxieties: one finds new confidence, another begins to take risks, another learns to be happy with his lot, and Milner wins a drag race…oh, an learns the genuine happiness that can be found in adult responsibility. It's too long, but it is a lovely atmosphere to meander about in, and is edited superbly so it never really drags. With superb performances and a soundtrack bursting with 50s and 60s hits, this is well worth a watch.

1980s - The Breakfast Club

Five glum students perch on stools in school room.

Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, and Anthony Michael Hall in The Breakfast Club.

Well what else could it have been!? In many ways the film set the classic pattern of US High School living (which did and sometimes still does inform UK attitudes) and the High School movie. John Hughes didn’t invent these archetypes and wasn’t the first to put them on celluloid, but he was the master of crystallising them. The Breakfast Club presents an all-day detention that just so happens to have a representative from every social caste of the High School system: Andrew the jock (Emelio Esteves), Brian the nerd (Anthony Michael Hall), Allison the weirdo (Ally Sheedy), Claire the popular girl (Molly Ringwald), and Bender the burnout (Judd Nelson). These five kids have nothing in common but their dislike of the domineering Vice-Principal (Paul Gleason was born for this role!)…OR DO THEY!? Whereas American Graffiti explored the process of maturing into adulthood and the taking charge of one’s sense of self (with a background hum of Vietnam paranoia and the end of golden Americana days), The Breakfast Club is much more forthright in demonstrating just how difficult being a teenager is. These kids don’t need help ‘growing up’, if anything they need to be allowed to be kids. Over the course of the day their defences break down and they learn that each of them has expectations and pressures that seem overwhelming, and grown to have genuine respect and compassion for each other. A script that is sometimes on-the-nose and prone to soliloquy is saved by the sheer bravura of the performances. A go to comfort film, that will always be iconic. Any film which ends with Simple Minds is a 5 star affair for me.

1990s - The Faculty

Two students walk down a school corridor, one looking away.

Elijah Wood and Jordana Brewster in The Faculty.

We move to slightly scarier fare with the 90s. The Faculty asks the question you were all asking…what if Invasion of the Bodysnatchers took place in an American high school? The answer is subtext; a lot of subtext and allegory. You know, when you’re a teenager, everything can seem quite tough. The world can seem like it's against you. It can seem like everyone you know has changed overnight and you’re lost in a sea of hostile faces. It can seem like a parasitic alien is using your school as a beachhead for a planetary takeover. The Faculty is cinematic junk-food and unapologetically so. It is camp and silly and fun. It takes those Hughesian archetypes, puts them on steroids, and then throws them into a plot joyfully riffing on the most classic sci-fi and horror tropes - all held nicely together with a quip-filled Kevin Williamson screenplay. An underrated Robert Rodriguez directorial effort which shows that he can work well across genres, and an excellent opportunity to see early performances from Josh Hartnett, Elijah Wood, Jon Stewart, and…wait…is that Usher in that film!?

2000s - The History Boys

Yes, we move to British shores at last. Alan Bennett’s stage-play is brought to beautiful cinematic life by original director Nicholas Hytner, who has an excellent track record of translating Bennett’s work from stage to screen. It’s another flash of nostalgia (which all such films are, as adult writers and directors look back to their own school days and teenage angst and adventure) which transports the viewer to 1980s Sheffield. A group of friends at the local Grammar School have all done very well in their A Levels and are now put to the task of preparing for the Oxford entrance exams. All are lovers of History (well, maybe not Rudge) and have received an enviously eclectic education in the full gamut of culture from the eccentric and long-suffering Hector. Like all the films above, The History Boys explores the challenges of adolescence, but with a specific focus on ‘doing well’ in a particularly British way. Sporting excellence or popularity aren’t the measure of student success - Oxbridge is. The teachers don’t push the young men nearly as much as they do themselves, seeing a place at Oxford as the best form of advancement. The witty and moving script also touches on the issue of infatuation, attraction, sexual fluidity, and chaste reciprocity: Posner’s love for Dakin being encouraged only so far in some sort of mutually agreed stand-off, Dakin’s willingness to sleep with the substitute teacher Irwin, and (of course) Hector’s tradition of giving the boys a ride home on his motorcycle and…appreciating them aesthetically. Not easy subject matter, but written and directed and shot and performed with such sensitivity that you can’t help but fall in love with every character.

2010s - The Inbetweeners Movie

Two students look at each in in incomprehension.

Blake Harrison and Simon Bird in The Inbetweeners.

We end with crudity. Crudity and friendship and a booze-filled week in Crete. Lovers of the TV show (I was one) - which explored the trials and tribulations of four unpopular, unremarkable, and unfortunate teens at a British comprehensive school- were well served by this upgrade. TV comedies, like plays, rarely translate well; The Inbetweeners Movie is an honourable exception. Will, Simon, Jay, and Neil have come to the end of their school days and decide that they need one final hurrah before they go their separate ways. The proceeding 90 minutes is a torrent of drunken antics, foul-mouthed discourse, and crass toilet humour, all threaded together by hapless and fruitless sexual intrigue. 90 mins of that might seem like it would wear thin, but The Inbetweeners Movie is too kind-hearted to go stale (unlike its successor which was a genuinely squalid and unpleasant affair which had me questioning humanity). The four young men are so pathetic in the true sense of the word, that you can’t help but cheer for them. The overall message of friendship as a virtue that transcends the ups-and-downs of life give the salty humour a sweet edge. For a certain generation - mine - this might be the definitive British school movie.

Honourable Mentions

Grease

Sort of like American Graffiti…but better. I’m talking Travolta, I’m talking Newton-John, I’m talking songs that are bullet-proof! Graffiti is on the official list because it speaks to the many cultural and political undercurrents of the time…but Grease is so much more fun. If you can only see one of the two, see Grease!

Gregory’s Girl

Pipped by Breakfast because of the archetypes and Simple Minds, but probably one of the finest British rom-coms ever!

Mean Girls

Obviously. It's so fetch!

Article

Books

Character

Culture

Virtues

3 December 2024

5 min read

In defence of Jane Austen’s unlikeable heroine

Fanny Price: passive and prudish or brave and resilient?

Beatrice Scudeler

Beatrice writes on literature, religion, the arts, and the family. Her published work can be found here.

A 18th century woman sits at a desk, beside a candle and stares out the window.

Frances O'Conner as Fanny in Mansfield Park, 1999.

BBC Films.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that nobody has ever liked Fanny Price. Or is it? Many in Austen’s own family liked the heroine of Mansfield Park. Her sister Cassandra was ‘fond’ of Fanny; her brother Francis called her ‘delightful’. Early critics of Austen’s works, like archbishop Richard Whately, also praised both the novel and its protagonist.

Where does our current dislike towards Fanny Price come from, then? The major literary critics of the last century certainly didn’t help. Lionel Trilling paved the way, announcing confidently in the 1960s that ‘Nobody, I believe, has ever found it possible to like the heroine of Mansfield Park’; Kingsley Amis even called Fanny a ‘monster of complacency and pride’. Two decades later, Tony Tanner agreed: ‘Even sympathetic readers have often found [Fanny] something of a prig…nobody falls in love with [her]’. The list goes on.

But we can’t blame academia alone. Sometime in the twentieth century, we simply stopped liking Fanny. Most Austen readers I know rank her as the worst of her heroines. We don’t like her moralising, her priggishness, and her insistence that she must follow her conscience along with the religious precepts which she holds so dear. To make her appealing to contemporary viewers, both major recent adaptations of the novel (Patricia Rozema’s 1999 film adaptation and Iain B. MacDonald’s 2007 TV adaptation) completely butchered her, turning a quiet, timid character into an outspoken Elizabeth Bennet type. The problem is not that we think Fanny is evil, it’s that we find her boring.

Enter Whit Stillman’s brilliant 1990 film Metropolitan, itself a loose adaptation of Austen’s novel. Tom Townsend, one of the film’s young protagonists, recommends the very essay by Lionel Trilling that I’ve cited above to Audrey Rouget, the main character and moral compass of the film. When they later discuss the essay, Audrey is puzzled by Trilling’s dislike of Fanny:

I think [Trilling] is very strange. He says that nobody could like the heroine of Mansfield Park? I like her. Then he goes on and on about how we modern people today with our modern attitudes bitterly resent Mansfield Park because…its heroine is virtuous? What’s wrong with a novel having a virtuous heroine?

Trilling is at least partly right. Fanny, with her religious principles, offends our modern sensibilities. Our reading culture is one deeply embarrassed by goodness, and Fanny’s piety makes us deeply uncomfortable. But Audrey is right, too. There shouldn’t be anything wrong with ‘a novel having a virtuous heroine’. What if the fault is not with Fanny Price, but with us, the readers? What if we’ve simply lost our taste for goodness?

Fanny is often compared unfavourably to Pride and Prejudice’s Elizabeth Bennet. Mary Crawford, the argument goes, is the Elizabeth Bennet character in Mansfield Park: blunt, stubborn, self-assured. Fanny, on the other hand, is a kind of Charlotte Lucas, quiet, introspective, and concerned with social mores. But following her conscience doesn’t squash Fanny’s individuality, and neither does it make her ‘conventional’. This is only true on a surface level.

Presentism, the insistence to project current sensibilities onto the past, is the poison of good literature.

In fact, these four characters (Elizabeth, Charlotte, Mary, and Fanny) represent examples of real versus false virtues – what philosopher Alasdair Macintyre would call ‘simulacra’ of virtue. While both Elizabeth Bennet and Mary Crawford are opinionated, only Elizabeth is truly brave. Mary, though she acts like she doesn’t care about social norms, is all too eager to marry Fanny off to her brother Henry – after he has committed adultery with a married woman – for the sake of keeping appearances. Similarly, although both Charlotte Lucas and Fanny Price are reserved, Fanny’s reserve comes from humility, Charlotte’s from the kind of timidity that is a failure of courage.

I think that’s precisely the challenge that Austen sets for us in Mansfield Park: to discern true from simulated virtue, even when true virtue might be less immediately attractive, less noticeable. When we look below the surface, Fanny emerges not as a passive, prudish character, but rather as brave and resilient. She may not be witty, but she is not a pushover. She rejects Henry Crawford’s proposal of marriage even as her uncle Sir Thomas pressures her to accept, on the grounds that he’s not good enough for her.

By going against the will of her uncle Sir Thomas, Fanny finds herself banished from Mansfield Park, the only place she knows as her home. She’s sent off to visit her parents in Portsmouth, not knowing when she’ll be allowed back. What’s more, she is rejecting the prospect of financial security through marriage with a rich man for the sake of her principles. She neither respects nor loves Crawford enough for the commitment of marriage: ‘I—I cannot like him, sir, well enough to marry him’, she confesses to her uncle despite her own shyness. In her confidence about a decision that will affect her future happiness, she can be as headstrong as Elizabeth Bennet is when she turns down Mr. Collins.

Once we acknowledge how brave and resilient Fanny can truly be, we can begin to cherish her other qualities, too. Still, someone might ask, why do we need to force ourselves to appreciate characters like Fanny in the first place? Why can’t we just leave people to have their own taste in literature? To that I answer: if we have come to dislike a character for being virtuous, as Trilling claims, isn’t that in itself pretty compelling evidence that something has gone amiss in our literary taste? Don’t we need to rediscover our lost enjoyment of goodness, if we want our culture to be a flourishing one?

Fortunately, the line connecting Austen to our culture today has not been entirely cut off. ‘Somewhere between us and [Jane Austen], the chasm runs’, wrote C. S. Lewis around the same time that Trilling pronounced Fanny Price to be unlikeable. Perhaps they were both wrong. If literary critics won’t value characters like Fanny, then it’s the common reader’s job to do so. Metropolitan’s Audrey is the fictionalised appreciator of Fanny Price par excellence, a custodian of good taste. But I remain hopeful that there are Audreys in real life, too: readers who are perceptive enough to appreciate Fanny; readers who, instead of judging a character written 200 years ago for not being ‘modern’ enough, choose to let past literature challenge their current assumptions. Presentism, the insistence to project current sensibilities onto the past, is the poison of good literature. Fanny Price, with all of her goodness, is the perfect cure.