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Eugene Schwartz's video, Recessitation, provides rich insight into the symbol laden world of Steiner, both in its style and execution as well as in its use of representation. It is also an astonishingly accurate illustration of one common method used to minimise and even totally obfuscate the realities of bullying, and one which I have had personal experience of within Steiner education itself.
This method, of inversion, centres on replacing the reality of bullying with the idea of play. This is the whole premise of the movie and it happens on many levels including the didactic as it begins with a statement that Waldorf schools are the worldwide guardians of play, extending play times while the whole of the rest of the world is shortening them.
The inversion between "play" and "bullying" in this video is like a sleight of hand, where the bullying disappears in front of your eyes, and some kittens are pulled out of a hat.
When I was a drama student at Exeter University we were taught something of play theory by the wonderful and challenging Les Reid. Huizinga and Callois after him are commonly recognised as significant play theorists. Huizinga saw play as being a central building block of civilisation. He went as far as to attribute civilisation itself to the human propensity for play.
“We have to conclude, therefore, that civilization is, in its earliest phases, played. It does not come from play like a baby detaching itself from the womb: it arises in and as play, and never leaves it.” Huizinga 1955, p173.
“In the absence of the play-spirit civilization is impossible.” Huizinga 1955, p101
Caillois likewise divided play into six identifiable characteristics, of which two will serve to highlight the problem with attempting to reframe of bullying behaviour as play:
“it is governed by rules that suspend ordinary laws and behaviours and that must be followed by players”
“it is unproductive in that it creates no wealth and ends as it begins”
Play as an activity with rules that players must agree to follow, does not allow for a definition whereby some (targets) are forced to comply with rules set by those more powerful or more numerous.
In the second case, bullying is certainly not unproductive and certainly does not end as it begins; the sole purpose of bullying is specifically to create unequal power relations in the real world in which there is an actual effect on the target that will continue to have consequences for them after any active bullying episode has finished.
Play and bullying clearly differ in many obvious characteristics.
Another of the two most simple things Les taught us was that in theatre you see something and you hear something, and this is a helpful starting point to examine this video.
What you see in the movie, is a man standing somewhere arbitrary from several different angles for the first five minutes, and then some kittens.
What you hear is Schwartz reading a letter from a mother, who earnestly talks about the worrying situation. The mother, actually a construct out of several testimonies, is presented as anxious, but sounds unable to entirely give in to her worry, or to leave it alone.
She goes into a lot of detail about the way boundaries are pushed, and feelings hurt, and she appears to be anxious that her concern over these matters will result in her being labelled as a "Nervous Nellie".
Then, after five minutes, the mother mentions that she also happened to get some video of this fracas she's described in the letter, and she would like you to look at it. When the visual changes, Schwartz himself commentates on the situation in his own voice as if the kittens were children. Following that there is another didactic bit of word play tacked onto the end.
Schwarz's structure is a basic set-up and a reveal, and it's worth noting that the description of the video is also a "seen" element and part of the set-up as it will usually be read before the movie is watched. The description describes bullying as a "pervasive problem," which the movie takes a "long and hard look" at.
Strangely, compared to other movies using similar structures, Schwartz’ video contains no evidence of any intention towards comic timing (there is a reason for this which I will return to a little later), nevertheless this form does require distraction during the set-up so it doesn’t become either boring, or transparent.
While I wouldn’t personally consider Schwarz much of a distraction, this long build up to the reveal, broken into several angles, shows that Schwarz has worked to create at least some distracting element to allow him to create a build up of expectation, echoing the promise of the description and using "harassment" "rough housing" "fighting" "crescendo of aggressive behaviour" among a litany of other words to express the perception of bullying as "non-play" in order to confound it at the reveal.
This means that the eventual joke is on you, the watcher/listener. You were the one who fell for the idea that bullying was being talked about. In fact, the whole thing, the letter and also the video, came from the fictitious mother. When she pretended to worry that others would label her as fussy, she (Schwarz) was taking the piss out of you. If this were not true we would be being asked to believe that the mother was keeping her revelation even from herself which is a step too far even for a movie as structurally flawed as this one.
What's left is only a representation of bullying, couched in a report, and the clear suggestion that if you see bullying, then there is something wrong with you. This is because the inversion is that bullying has been symbolically put into inverted commas.
Once you see the kittens playing, you know that what was being talked about all along was not in fact bullying at all, but “bullying”. Those two little speech marks (sometimes literally but often metaphorically applied) are all that is required to effectively invert bullying from a reality to something that only exists as a representation, or report. It's been effectively cloaked.
In other words, as long as you don’t look at the bullying, you won’t see it. And Schwarz isn’t showing you bullying, remember, just himself and the kittens.
It doesn’t matter, that kittens are not children, and that play-fighting is not bullying, because the movie isn't about any of that but about the act of appearing to make an acknowledging representation of bullying while in fact removing it entirely from view.
And this fits exactly with what I’ve observed of bullying in Steiner education.
The non-action of the school when severe bullying was reported (as per policy) relied on exactly the same technique of saying that bullying is taken seriously, but then representing actual bullying as something else, in our case “boisterousness”, and “wildness”.
And of course, under such circumstances concerned parents can be easily portrayed as making a fuss about nothing, justifying not listening to them, or in our case expelling all the children to shut us up.
In fact once bullying has been removed as a reality, encased in a representation, and put into inverted commas, it’s really game over.
Once it’s become “bullying”, then you can invert every other element associated with it and even project the whole situation onto whoever flags it up. If that sounds far-fetched just consider that if there’s no bullying, what is the target making such a noise about? They must be attention seeking etc., are they mad? They must have another agenda.
Even the concern for targets can be inverted as a worry about “separating the bully”, for cute reasons concerned with their well-being. This can then be used as a reason to leave other children in harms way.
This is exactly what happened to our daughter's reports of bullying at Steiner. They were put into inverted commas - allowing us as parents to be portrayed as "intruding" for even mentioning that the school policy stated that bullying would be taken seriously.
The Manager’s recent complete and thorough admission that there was bullying in this class of 17 boys, many two years older than the 5 girls, shows clearly how the inversion of symbolically putting the bullying into inverted commas at the time, allowed him to tell everyone including the press that what he has since acknowledged as parent’s "natural and dutiful concern", was "intrusion".
(In fact, in Schwartz’s movie the fictitious mother states that she was watching this "melee" during break time and it was precisely this, ours and other parents offers to boost low staffing levels to properly supervise break times, that were targeted as "intrusive" by the school. These issues of break time supervision appear again and again in accounts from parents.)
So powerful is the inversion demonstrated in this video and experienced in the testimonies of parents worldwide, that it even allows the target to be reframed as the perpetrator - in our case leading us to be framed as thugs for pursuing it, mad, bad and dangerous to know.
In Schwarz's video, of course, the predictable victory is that, in the end, it is the mother herself who shuns any notion of removing the inverted commas from the bullying. She knew you would see that video all through those long minutes of double-speak. She was playing with you.
So in spite of the description and script, this is really not a movie about bullying, and that is actually the whole point of it.
It's clunkiness is not, as I first thought, because it was simply a badly executed sleight of hand, but in fact the lack of comic timing is an intrinsic part of it, because bullying being seen only in representational form is the joke of the movie.
Only a Steiner movie could have the fact that it ends with a representation as the punch-line.
To use kittens to represent the serious consequences of bullying, is to turn away from the confrontation with bullying that is necessary. Co-incidentally it also destroys any Human Rights perspective on bullying, which begins with the experience of the target, because if there is no bullying, there is no target either, so voilà.
Eugene Schwarz is obviously not the only one to practise these evasive inversions. They’re common anywhere and everywhere it’s more important to bolster the status quo than to honestly address the issues.
Even self-styled “critics” of Steiner have been known to put Steiner bullying in inverted commas to suggest that it’s not real, even while simultaneously publicly castigating Steiner for the fact that unchecked bullying is the main complaint worldwide.
In conclusion I will just mention another great nugget from Les Reid that has stood me in good stead and provides another good yard stick for criticising this movie. It’s another deceptively simple rule: It’s got to be better than if it wasn’t there.
And as far as doing what it says on the tin goes, this little movie, slow as it is, and with it’s layers of obfuscatory inversions, is not better than if it wasn’t there. In spite of the mildly amusing but badly executed sleight of hand/joke of substituting playing kittens from bullying children, and the twee didactic wordplay at the end, the deliberately misleading action of prefacing the movie with a statement about the seriousness of bullying, without also labelling that as satire, only reveals the extent of the deception on offer.
And in an inverted way there lies its only usefulness because it does, presumably unintentionally, show a remarkably accurate picture of how bullying is not dealt with in this movement, reflecting almost exactly our documented experience - promise what you have no intention of delivering, and in spite of saying you'll take bullying seriously, make sure it stays between those inverted commas as, at worst, a probably bogus report.
Of course not everyone will fall for this obfuscation but for those who don't, or wouldn't, this this video certainly gives a true indication of just how ostracised they're going to be if they try to flag it up.
Movie Review - “Recessitation - Bullying in the Waldorf School”
Sunday, 10 February 2013