By Jack Forman
LA JOLLA, California–The Wave, a feature-length film made in Germany in 2008 and scheduled to be screened at 8 p.m. tonight (Wednesday) the San Diego Jewish Film Festival, dramatizes the events of a real Palo Alto high school teaching experiment conducted in 1969. The events were first featured in a 1981 American young adult novel of the same title by Morton Rhue (a pseudonym for prolific YA author Todd Strasser).
The film, to be shown at the AMC La Jolla, takes great liberties in changing the setting, characters and messages of the 1981 novel. Rhue’s original novel depicts an American teacher named Ben Ross struggling to find a way to teach his students what it was like to live in Nazi Germany. He decides to replicate the social environment of the Third Reich by creating a rule-dominated class sub-culture he calls “The Wave” marked by extreme formality (the teacher had to be addressed in a certain way), a class salute, slogans (e.g., “strength through discipline”), a dress code, prohibitions on individual expression and total obedience to the dictates of the teacher. The students in the class find they are attracted to this new society that eliminates individuals’ differences, and most develop a feeling of importance they never felt before the experiment began, even as they lose their individual freedoms. However, a couple of students protest. When a boy friend of a girl who protests becomes so upset with her that he slams her to the ground in anger, he is so appalled at what he has done that he gets the teacher to re-examine the wisdom of the experiment. In an assembly open only to members of ‘The Wave”, the teacher one by one knocks down the pillars of the authoritarian society he so carefully created showing the students how they have started to act like Nazis. The story ends with the teacher consoling one student who had bought totally into the ethic of this new order and who feels personally devastated by the dismantling of “The Wave”.
Set in contemporary Germany and imaginatively directed by Dennis Gansel, the film constructs a riveting story that incorporates the instructive events from the original novel into a new story whose climax results not in simple lessons learned but in unrelenting and shocking tragedy.
The German high school teacher, Rainer Wenger, can’t use Nazism to teach the dangers of autocracy because contemporary Germany has been saturated with collective responsibility for the Holocaust to the point where his students are bored with the subject. So, he creates a new class order, detached from Nazism although similar in some respects to the one created in the novel.
But in the film, everything is much more calculating on the teacher’s part. He seats poor students next to good ones, so they’ll be able to cheat and thus become socially equal, making all students feel more important as part of the whole and destroying individual incentive to be better academically than others. He insists on all students giving short, abrupt answers to questions he asks instead of encouraging class discussion of issues and asking students to make subtle distinctions. He orchestrates his students to bully the class below by stomping their feet. He creates a strict, simple dress code to eliminate social class differences. He stresses the importance of excluding others in the school from social contact with students in his class.
As in the novel, his students fall into line quickly. One student named Tim, alienated from his family and shunned by his fellow students, even burns his old clothes, so he can be re-born in this new order, and he shows up uninvited at Wenger’s house one evening purportedly to be his bodyguard.
But there are also a couple of holdouts from this rush to be accepted in ‘The Wave”. Similar to what happens in the novel, when one of the dissenters approaches her boyfriend for help, he slaps her and pushes her to the ground in anger. Then, ashamed of what he did, he meets with his teacher to get him to call off the experiment.
The teacher, now frightened by the hostile reactions of his wife and his colleagues to the experiment, the weird behavior of Tim, and vigilante graffiti attacks conducted by his students at night against public buildings, decides to put an end to his experiment. But he wants do it in a dramatic way by calling attention to what “The Wave” has become – a fascist society. He calls his students to an assembly, locks the doors, and sets up a public confrontation with a dissenting student to demonstrate the consequences of the autocratic society they have all so easily accepted. Unfortunately, Tim who has brought a loaded gun to the meeting, inserts himself in this confrontation – and the result is tragedy. With film viewers in a state of numbing shock, the film ends with Herr Wenger arrested by police and led away in handcuffs.
The Wave is a very well-made film, with superb acting, creative cinematography and professional direction. But the messages of the film are 180 degrees different from the messages of the book. The book’s message is related to what the students learn from the experiment – the seductive appeal of a world order that makes everyone the same, taking away individual responsibility and differences and accentuating the power of a member of a mass movement. Even though the experiment was cut short, the students who leave Mr. Ross’s class have learned its intended lessons about the dangers of autocracy and dictatorship. And so do the teenage readers of this novel. But Mr. Wenger’s students – and many film viewers, I fear – will take away with them not lessons related to the dangers of autocracy, but “lessons” related to the dangers of a misguided, overambitious teacher who initiated a class experiment that was a mistake. The unintended lesson of the film is that the experiment should not have been done.
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Forman is a freelance writer based in San Diego