(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Image Facts.)
I still can’t for the life of me put my finger on why I like Linklater’sSchool of Rock so much. Rosenbaum quipped on a radio program that “If Jean Renoir had decided to make a movie about rock and roll musicians in the 6th grade, it would have been something like this.” I suppose there is a bit of anti-society to the prep school rock band, but it’s no Rules of The Game. Renoir said, “A director makes only one movie in his life. Then he breaks it into pieces and makes it again.” This auteur sentiment certainly applies to Linklater, but Renoir also said that, “Everyone has his reasons,” which may be more applicable to the guy who directed bothBefore Sunset and a remake of The Bad News Bears.
Renoir also penned the following introduction to his unnervingly charming La Chienne as a puppet show:
The first puppet says: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are proud to present a serious social drama proving that vice is always punished.”
The second puppet disagrees and says: “Ladies and gentlemen, we are proud to present a comedy of manners with a moral.”
The third puppet strenuously disagrees, pushing the first two puppets aside and exclaiming: “Ladies and gentlemen, pay no attention to them. The play that follows is neither comedy nor drama. It has no moral whatsoever… and proves nothing at all. The characters are neither heroes nor villains, but plain people like you and me. The three main characters are HE, SHE, and THE OTHER GUY, as usual.”
Jack Black’s character may be this third puppet, elbowing his way to center stage and telling us that this film is about nothing other than how to rock. It could be a “comedy of manners with a moral” if we were to stretch the material to fit some sort of Dead Poet’s Society “My Captain, my captain” framework, but the final scene of the film, playing over the credits, contradicts such a reading. In this last scene we just see Jack Black jamming with these kids who can actually play the instruments they have been playing throughout the film. There’s no artifice to it, no clear intention, it is just awesome. This is Linklater’s barbaric yawp, a sustained homage to an alternative way of being (Rock!) that “has no moral whatsoever.” The School of Rock is ultimately a form of pedagogy jacked straight into the foot-tapping nerve, and as an obviously commercial feature seems to revel in its own mirth.
But of course this is still all still mere description, I can’t quite put my finger on the pulse of the film. It certainly lacks a lot of the ambiguities and richly implicit moralisms of his other work. Perhaps this is from whence the pleasure of the film arises (even “pleasure” in the Roland Barthes sense, which is scarcely distinguishable in the French from eros). It directly juxtaposes fresh-faced youth with a far more ancient and inscrutable magic (Rock!). The entirety of the film is occupied with the creation of one giant riff with which the film finishes. Ultimately, the thematic pointlessness of the film, embodied by how much of a loser Jack Black’s character really is, is reigned in and harnessed by Linklater’s singular focus. There really is nothing more to it, and the pleasure of its experience lies in being able to comprehend it all in one glimpse. Like a catchy tune it just gets stuck in your head.