The scene of popular demand overturning the teacher's rules, in Everybody"s Talking About Jamie, when Jamie's classmates force his admission to their school prom in a dress, achieves a direct brilliant case example of both dress rules and authoritarian teacher culture being wrong. Whether or not it was made so intentionally, that is what it shows. It needs saying so and using so, against those systems. Its TV elite makers Film4 won't do that, we should.
The film has just premiered, the theatre musical was around for several years. Films with school settings are usually unwatchable: there has long been a US-led film norm where it is as predictable as clockwork to show traumatic bullying scenes, usually with no just resolution and just with the character implausibly rising above them. They spin a bigotry against kids by presenting such scenes as part of childhood, instead of as the preventable product of an ill-designed barbaric institution herding captive inmates around in large groups like cattle with no care for peer compatibility, which has the same results among adults when done to them.
So this film has to be complimented as more bearable than most school films, because it avoids showing any long scenes of bullies winning, and you always know its whole message is that Jamie will win. While the story includes an inevitable presence of toxically masculine boys' prejudice, and in its early scenes that prejudice's dominant place, it always avoids showing such scenes through to a nasty denouement. It makes use of being a musical for this: as soon as it has to show an emotional confrontation moment with the toxic boy arise, it goes straight into a positive song, so that it can keep up its gender liberty message.
It's really interesting, how its tie to show positivity and winning for a cause that has become popular forces its hand not to follow school films' usual destructive trope of having nasty peer grittiness immovably win. In the process, it shows how that trope's gloomy cowing effect on society is part of school's effect so.
A concern is that the film Jamie's character comes across so perfectly stereotypically gay that the toxic-masculines could extract a reinforcement of prejudice that only that character wants to do what he did. A straight drag queen story remains needed. Of course the story's whole value is that it is based on a true story of a valuable victory, Jamie is gay, and overall, toxic masculinity is fought well by telling the story. But to counter that drawback it needed a writing in of cross-dressing's influence on a straight boy too. That is a lack.
It rubbed in a life-defining gender related hurt for me, with my autistic spectrum physical sensitivity to textures, called a "sensory issue", giving a comfort need for shorts. Its school uniformed scenes of course have every boy encased in trousers, while in the same temperature, many girls with substantial uncoverings of legs. Every sight of that is emotional agonies to every sensory issues male who suffered, by both gender and age, both logically ridiculous, both uniform and school peer cultures against shorts. Indicted by its imaginable contrast with the Australian lesbian school film Ellie and Abbie ! on at Grassmarket last week.
Sensory issues are biological grounds against all dress rules, known for 20 years now, but still clearly unknown to the Jamie story's writers. Sensory issue identities still have none of the same popular following as gender identities, though they merit it equally logically. As a result, subject to trans support's seriousness against bullying which must be scrutinised sceptically, the solution now offered to straight sensory issues boys is to temporarily feign as transgender for school's duration. Though gender politics has brought praise to the boy skirt protests that now happen every summer, still no prominent voices speak out against how in 1986 Blackadder barbarically openly incited bullying of shorts and laughed at victim trauma. Blackadder's cast need forcing to meet all those boys, televised.
Maurice Frank21 Sep 2021
