"Blasting Drummer" is director Damien Chazelei's blockbuster debut. Not only has it been well received at film festivals around the world, it has also won three Oscar nominations, making him an obscure Hollywood gunman screenwriter and become the world's best. The new Hollywood director who has been focusing on the boundless prospects paved the way for his later filming of "City of Philharmonic" and "The First Man on the Moon".
Most viewers feel that shooting a jazz film with such intense tension is the success of the film. We did see in the film that the two masters and disciples competed almost in a life-and-death way during the rehearsal and performance. It seems that this is the only way to become an outstanding musician.
However, onlookers who are relatively familiar with American society can experience from the film a strong American capitalist jungle law that is completely beyond music: the power consciousness and the desire for success that grow in the characters' hearts under the heavy pressure of Mount Tai. The protagonist and even the jazz itself have dragged into the abyss of one-way thinking of winners and losers.
1
In the film, Fletcher, as a teacher, repeatedly tells a story to his student Nieman: The famous jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker, known as "Big Bird", appeared on stage when he was young, but he couldn't keep up with the rhythm for a while, the drummer on the side. Joe Jones took the epilogue and threw it at him, almost cutting off his head. The audience in the audience burst into laughter, and Charlie Parker retired in shame; in order not to make his teammates and the audience laugh, he was early the next day. He got up and worked hard for several years and finally became the best saxophone player in the United States of that era.
Fletcher's intention is to tell Nieman that if you don't want to be laughed at by others for being incompetent, to become the best drummer, you have to endure the impact of insult, pressure and hurt your self-esteem, and practice hard to succeed. This is exactly what Nieman, who is only nineteen years old, is pursuing.
At family gatherings, cousins of the same age laughed at Nieman's purpose as a musician, but he angrily defended his ideal of becoming the best respected drummer. In order to ensure his position as the number one drummer in the band, he broke up with his girlfriend, suffered Fletcher's humiliation, squeeze, and deliberately making things difficult, and practiced desperately with blood and blood on his hands; even though fate was ruthlessly teasing him, let him go. He was injured in a car accident on the way to the performance venue, but he still appeared on the stage vaguely. In order to compete for the titles of "best" and "first", he almost took his life. And all this seems logical in a society that is based on the principle of hard work and success-the survival of the fittest is the survival of the fittest, and if you do not advance, you will retreat. In a world where the weak and the strong dominate, even musicians are no exception. They must unconditionally obey this social Darwinian law to survive. A place.
However, what ordinary audiences can’t expect is that Damien Chazele, who is both a director and a screenwriter, used skills here to tell a real “fake” story: in history, Charlie Parker did have to be on stage because of poor performance. Jia was ridiculed by the audience, but drummer Joe Jones never threw the film on Parker’s head (but Fletcher picked up the folding chair because of Nieman’s loss of rhythm and threw it at the latter headlessly), He just unscrewed the epilogue from the jazz drum and threw it gently at Parker's feet, reminding him with a kind of half-joking kindness that he should stop playing again if he didn't keep up with the rhythm.
Damien Chazelle used a celebrity gossip in the history of jazz as "I" and adapted it into a violent and oppressive collision, and annotated the theme of his film: musicians can only constantly break through the limits. Only by becoming the "best" in practice can you get rid of the fate of being insulted and ridiculed. The actor Nieman got into a psychological dilemma under such mental pressure. In the final stage of the film, he was not so much playing music as he was forced to the extreme by the tough and sinister Fletcher. The vengeance ignited his hail-like drums, which "shot" at Fletcher like pouring bullets. In this final contest with spiritual violence and bitter hatred, he and Fletcher finally met each other and met Liangcai.
2
"Burst Drummer"'s portrayal of the devil's music teacher Fletcher is not much, but it is the real core. He seems to be proficient in the technical aspects of jazz music and strives for the quality of performance, but in fact he is using his position as a conductor to repeatedly play with his power, using technical issues such as pitch, rhythm, and coordination as an excuse, to repeatedly perform unreasonable reasons for the members of the band. Psychological pressure establishes absolute authority by intimidating the wrist. He sometimes smiled and greeted the students with a relaxed posture, and sometimes snarled rudely and unreasonably, like an insidious and brutal Nazi officer in a concentration camp.
In the film, there is a rehearsal scene in which Fletcher asked three drummers to compete for duty. Each drummer performed less than a few seconds each time, and was roughly interrupted by Fletcher. We began to think it was a competition of music technology. I gradually realized that this was Fletcher's method of establishing his own God-like power position by continuously humiliating the three drummers from their musical literacy to their personality. This was revealed at the end of the film when Nieman fell into Fletcher’s trap again on the stage: Although both of them have left the school system, the former still tricked Nieman onto the stage through insidious means to make him. Once again in a situation of being humiliated and ridiculed. The subtext in this is self-evident: No matter where Nieman hides, he can’t escape Fletcher’s demonic control, he can only make himself stronger than the devil, or, in other words, he can only turn himself into a demon. The nightmare can win in this contest.
Seeing this, we have actually realized that the role of Fletcher has undergone a "mutation". He does not aim at training students' musical skills and improving students' performance, but has fallen into contentment. In a game of using authority to conquer other individuals. It is also at this point that the real intention of "Burst Drummer" is undoubtedly exposed here: it uses jazz as a surface "mask", and it intends to outline a violent collision between people to conquer each other. .
3
In the history of contemporary music, jazz is indeed a kind of music that requires very high skills. The jazz musicians mentioned in the film, whether it is "Big Bird" Charlie Parker or drummer Batty Ritchie, were both original and pioneering figures in the development of jazz music skills in the 1940s and 1950s.
But on the other hand, pure dazzling skills will never be the core charm of jazz. If jazz is only measured by technique, the mediocre trumpeter Miles Davis cannot become an epoch-making figure in the history of jazz; the jazz singer Billie Holly Daye, who has a husky and broken voice, will lose her voice when singing. There is no way to gain a foothold on the stage. On the contrary, it is flaws that create beauty and give their music an unparalleled charm. Especially after the 1950s, when jazz entered the era of cold jazz, free jazz and fusion jazz, the mood and expression of emotions in creation and performance became its core, and the performance of skills retreated as one of the integral parts of the overall emotional expression. . In the era of "fusion jazz", a musician will not be advertised as great just because he is skilled and tempo-accurate. This is just one of the necessary conditions to become an outstanding jazz musician. What we see on the stage is not only technology, but the expression of inner emotions and thoughts accompanied by passion and talent. Technology is only a medium of expression. It can be a gorgeous chromatic movement, or it can be restrained by expression and tends to be minimalist and introverted. In this sense, jazz itself does not have the concept of "first" and "best" in competitive competitions. Only the perfect technique, extraordinary talents and inner emotions of musicians complement each other to form a form that cannot be copied by others. Moving style.
Nieman in "Burst Drummer" dreams of becoming the best drummer, but this is actually meaningless to jazz: this line is not based on strength, speed, and rhythm accuracy at all, and it will not be because it is just completed. The complicated technical difficulty became a precise drum machine and left its name in history. From the very beginning, Nieman took a divergent path that was not music at all.
In jazz music, there is indeed stage time for musicians to show their skills, consciousness and passion through improvisation solo, but this is not a competitive confrontation between musicians, but to stimulate each other through their respective performances. Inspiration to achieve the culmination of free play to the emotional climax. And even if it is a band and multiplayer led by famous musicians, they will leave each musician time and space to fully express themselves. And like the end of "Burst Drummer", Nieman used his personal dazzling skills to force the entire band into the performance as his foil. In essence, it was just a naked declaration of the strong position, almost completely betraying the free release of jazz. Spirit.
We may say that Damien Chazele’s intention is to tell a jungle social fable that maximizes one's self and becomes a strong man in the extreme confrontation of a competitive society. However, the attitude of the film creators is not clear, whether it is criticism or appreciation, we can hardly find clear clues to judge. However, the focus of the film’s performance is really on repression and counter-repression, revenge and counter-retaliation, and even exaggerated expressions of mutual hatred. It has become the source of power for the dramatic power of the entire film. And behind this, the infiltration thinking of being competitive, winning, winning and losing, penetrates the thinking and behavior of the characters, and becomes the deepest psychological motivation for them to explode with music on the stage.
We feel that "Burst Drummer" is tense and stimulating throughout, because Nieman and Fletcher, a pair of devil mentors and apprentices, have always been undecided in the contest of power conquest. And as if a Buddhist believer was given a butcher knife to force him to participate in a slaughter competition, Damien Chazele rigidly grafted such a social Darwinian competition to jazz music that was supposed to dispel hatred and free the soul. In the process of portraying a power contest with great interest, the film changed the original face of jazz, taking it as a handy prop that can be manipulated at will, and inevitably leading the audience to the essence of jazz. Is deeply misunderstood.
(First published in the movie public account "Iris")
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