Literature for Adolescents
School of Rock Gender GIF
Preferred Reading
Oppositional Reading
Reflection on GIF Process
I chose to use this site to create a gif of various images from the classic early 2000s comedy, School of Rock (2003), starring Jack Black as Finn Dewey. I recently saw School of Rock for the first-time last month and overall, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed watching it. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but notice the ways in which gender stood out in a movie that seemingly had nothing to do with it. On the surface, School of Rock seems to only send a light-hearted message about following your dreams and how music can be utilized both as a teaching tool and as a way to build community/bring people together. When you dig even a bit deeper, on the other hand, the movie can be seen as reinforcing misogynistic and homophobic views in general and in the rock and roll genre.
To showcase this, I tried using images that showed both a trajectory of the movie and highlighted the more problematic points in the movie for the viewer familiar with School of Rock. Unfortunately, I’m not convinced I was really successful in that aim. If the viewer is only casually familiar with the movie, whether that’s because they have seen the movie years ago or they only know about it from popular culture will most likely reject, and perhaps miss, the oppositional reading. However, even those who have seen the movie more recently, among which are most likely people who love the film, I doubt people will pick up the subtler gender issues that I did so I think they too will likely resist the oppositional reading. While I think the text changes how the image is read by making the viewer pause and think over why or how I could have come to the oppositional reading, I don’t think that the image and print has a strong impact on the viewer in my case. What I mean is that while I could verbally explain why I came to that oppositional reading, or even show them the clips I got the images from to make my case, I don’t think as a whole I ended up creating a powerful GIF. I’m not sure if that’s because this is my first GIF and thus my lack of skills contributed to the problem or if I chose too subtle of an example for this project.
Since I do not think my GIF explains my oppositional reading well, I go into more detail as to why I came to this reading in the following two paragraphs. I then conclude by linking it to the documentary The Mask You Live In, and the meme I was inspired to make for it.
Analysis of School of Rock
While anyone is sure to notice how some of the jokes have not stood the test of time (if they were ever really funny in the first place), such as Dewey’s numerous sissy jokes, it might not be as obvious to some folks how they contribute to the movie’s overall view on gender. Calling something sissy means that object is (negatively) too feminine and when it is used to police boys’ performance of masculinity it further reinforces the idea that you should not be proud to be feminine in any context. Given that gender performance is seen as directly connection to one’s sexuality—something that I detest but that’s a story for another time—this means that calling a boy a sissy has the added connotation that the person is, if not definitely gay, then in danger of being seen that way which is perceived to be just as bad. One boy student, Billy, enacts the caricature of an effeminate gay man who has a high voice and is very into fashion. Plus, Billy has minimal screen time and is often only there for comedic effect. In this way, sissy has both misogynistic and homophobic connotations. Therefore, the movie works to remind viewers that being gay and feminine, especially if you are a boy, is never a good thing and will always be ridiculed.
Furthermore, on a broader narrative scale the movie reinforces the idea that a) rock and roll is a masculine sphere meant for men and, relatedly, that b) the stars of the genre can only ever be men. As a whole the class has a decent mix of boys and girls, but the students who play the most important parts in the band, the drums, guitar, and piano, are all boys. Dewey teaches them the history of rock and roll and all of the great musicians’ techniques, but the only stars shown are men. The adult amateur bands later in the show are also, conveniently, only filled with men musicians and the main judge of the competition they perform at is, you guessed it, a man. Thus, the rock roll genre was repeatedly shown to be a masculine sphere meant for men. Admittedly, the band has one girl who plays a base guitar and there are three backup singers, but the base guitar player barely speaks so we know little to nothing about her and the backup singers are just that, backup. There is obviously nothing wrong with being backup singers and one of the girls even has her own solo in the final song, but when the only roles the movie has for girls are as groupies, a single base guitar player, and the backup singers it begins to form a subconscious message for the viewers: that in this genre the women cannot be the talents or the stars. Speaking of groupies, there was an awkward scene in the beginning where an overachiever that Dewey puts as a groupie says that she has to be something more important because she looked up groupies and they are all just sluts. Presumably, it was meant to be funny, but having a nine-year-old sex shame and demean women only enables girls’ internalization of misogyny. In all of these ways and more, therefore, School of Rock implicitly reinforces gender norms and hierarchies even though, at first glance, it’s just a movie about music and education.
Connection to The Mask You Live In
In the documentary The Mask You Live In, the viewer learns about the ways in which masculinity has become a mask that slowly suffocates the boys, and later men, who have to wear it. I have previously framed my gendered critique in terms of femininity, it also can be argued in the converse and fits nicely into the documentary’s narrative. The sissy jokes reproduce the idea that masculinity has to be a rejection of everything feminine. Dewey’s character can easily been seem as the archetype that Dr. Caroline Heldman describes as the “man child or the mook. . who’s in perpetual adolescence. His body typically doesn’t have a lot of muscle, but he tends to project masculinity in other ways, thorough degradation of women [and] engaging in high risk activities,” such as the aforementioned jokes and his first scene where he tries to crowd surf by jumping into a thin crowd and ends up falling flat on his face; plus he is portrayed as selfish, inconsiderate, and uncommunicative about genuine emotion throughout most of the film. While it can be persuasively argued that Dewey grows, I’m not convinced that his changes are enough to break him out of the mask he lives in.
Lastly, I initially misunderstood the assignment. I had thought that we had to create a GIF or meme based on the documentary we watched, and I knew exactly what I wanted to do: the surprised Pikachu meme. The following picture is the meme that I created based on The Mask You Live In.
