Accepted: Take a Break from Dystopia

“Cut the crap Bartleby. Society has rules and the first rule is you go to college. You want to have a happy and successful life? You go to college. Want to be somebody: you go to college. If you want to fit in: you go to college.” (Bartleby’s Dad, Accepted, dir. Steve Pink)

The other day I was watching the movie Accepted. My husband had put it on as a lightweight, undemanding watch while he waited for his chilli to bubble to tender perfection. Of course I came along and after five seconds began an annoyingly earnest, intellectual critique of its themes. He went off to stir the chilli. I carried on watching.

The movie is bright and fun, tightly written, and well acted. I’d recommend it to anybody looking for a bit of light in the world’s darkness at the moment. It was anarchic and silly and an antidote to the overly earnest, deep-voiced portentousness of the age we’re living in. More than that, I realised as I watched, it really had something to say about the controlled, sterilised, miserable world we currently inhabit.

Charming Bartleby (my husband insisted throughout he was called Barnaby, but my bat ears were right!), a ‘slacker’ in American parlance, has failed to get into any colleges, and so, unable to face telling his parents, he uses his fake-ID-making skills to create a convincing acceptance letter, and enlists his nerdy friend Sherman to make a smart website. His parents are relieved he has got into a college, even one they have never heard of. They are convinced by the fake website and gush about dropping him off on his first day. At which point Bartleby realises exactly how much he has bitten off.

He encounters fellow mis-fit friends and his best friend Sherman, who is a ‘legacy’ at the real, high-ranking Harmon College, in the parking lot of a convenience store and between them they cook up a plan to fake a college. One of them knows of a disused mental health hospital which will do for a campus. Then follows a montage of them cleaning and renovating the building so that it will be convincing as a college for the brief period of time it takes Bartleby’s parents to drop him off.

Sherman’s failed-academic uncle agrees to pretend to be the Dean for one fake meeting with Bartleby’s parents and they are all set. This is a movie, so the plan goes brilliantly. B’s proud parents leave satisfied and our hero is happily playing a computer game, without a care in the world, when there is a knock at the door. He opens it to find a parking-lot full of students, complete with luggage and proud parents. They have arrived for their first term at what he has dubbed the South Harmon Institute of Technology or SHIT (!). Somehow it seems Sherman connected the fake website to the applications system and these students, rejected from everywhere else, have found their home at South Harmon.

For anybody who loves education but has doubts about the value of the education currently provided by the universities of the western liberal democracies, what then unfolds is strangely heart-warming and thought-provoking. This is a story about uniqueness, quirkiness, and non-conformity. We have been presented with this theme by movies, musicals, and books over the years, but at this time it possesses real resonance.

If there is something this world, or at least the western hemisphere, has been about for a solid year-and-a-half, it’s conformity. Walk here not there. Wear your mask when you’re told and don’t argue. Just ‘take the damn jab’ as one celebrated free-thinker put it a few weeks ago.

Not just do all these things: only exercise once a day; don’t stray more than five miles from your home; don't have anybody from a different household in your house; no more than four people at a restaurant table. No, not just do this and don’t do that, but also say this and don’t say that. Say ‘I’m looking forward to getting my jab’. Say ‘we are all in this together’. Say ‘health workers are heroes’. Say ‘lockdowns are worth it if they just save one life’. Don’t say, ‘I don’t think lockdowns work’. Don’t say ‘lockdowns are doing way more harm than good’. Don’t say ‘there really is such a thing as natural herd immunity’. Don’t say ‘I think vaccines should be a matter of personal choice’.

So this is a movie about not conforming. While the stuffed shirts at the real Harmon waste their time hazing the desperate-to-fit-in Sherman, the students at South Harmon skate-board, meditate, rock, cook, and invent new cocktails served from their tiki bar by the pool.

It’s colourful, it’s loud. There’s been no risk assessment and they don’t have any insurance but they are really, really happy. The washed-out academic has an ever-growing circle of students listening to, what I would call ‘Real-life Economics 101’ in which he explains how tax systems are designed to protect the wealth of the rich whilst fleecing the little guy, and how your health insurance will only pay out on the things you don’t need it for.

This very same uncle has announced previously “Three years from now I’m finished with this crap. I’m going to Papua New Guinea…I’m going off the grid, No more franchises. No more botox. No more ‘hey let’s clone another goat’…”. Many of us would relate to this sentiment. Some have been considering going off-grid to avoid the nascent totalitarian state, many of us have been thinking for years how we would just like to get away from the obsessions of the modern world: physical perfections resulting in ever younger women putting fillers in their lips and paralysing their forehead muscles; disturbing scientific advances; the push for everybody to be connected and tracked electronically all the time, but to be physically together less and less.

These kids are definitely together, they skateboard together, they talk loudly and chaotically with each other in the common room. The college syllabus is a huge white-board on which students write what they want to learn: ‘Advanced Skepticism 401’ is my favourite. That got me thinking. I started to think, in line with the professor teaching the kids the reality of being an economic being in this world, what would I really want kids to learn at university.

While I was studying for my PhD in the cultural studies department of a red-brick university, I taught the first year Critical Approaches to Literature course which included Roland Barthes’ ‘Death of the Author’, Saussurean Structuralism, Marxist Literary theory, Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault. Hearteningly many of the students hated this course. Unfortunately it was compulsory. I think we all arrived at seminars filled with a similar level of dread.

Using one of these approaches to analyse a novel, as opposed to the joy they had felt in literature that had brought them to this course, felt like the difference between a naturalist enjoying observing an animal in the field, in all its pulsing vitality and mystery, and dissecting that same animal on a slab. Some of these approaches could kill a novel stone dead.

Many of the students were clearly aware of this possible effect, and they would doggedly resist these approaches as a way of preserving the joy and mystery of the novels, plays, and poetry they loved. I couldn’t blame them, so between us we would try to find the least destructive way to use these theories. I found I could neutralise them to some degree if we paid close attention to the text and language, and we focussed on the psychology of the characters. We would also bring in historical context as a way of understanding the novels, and we would talk about the lives and preoccupations of the authors, as much as they could be known. We stayed away from structuralism as much as we could.

That being said, I was inculcated into these methods of analysing texts as an undergraduate and they are now just a part of how I see the world. I see power structures expressed through language, the print media, television and films, advertising, everywhere. It is something that once infected with, you can’t fully clear from your system. You are permanently a little bit jaded, and art is permanently a little bit spoiled for you. It’s tragic.

Although the failed economics tutor reveals the truth of how structures like the taxation system, and the insurance systems, are rigged, he is not encouraging the students to view everything around them, from their friendships to their society, as mere structures of oppression, as critical theory does. That view is cynicism, not scepticism. Sceptics question what they are told by the media, their governments, and other people in positions of power, and employ critical thinking skills, but they have a belief system, they value humanity. The economics professor is advising his students on how not to become mere drones.

Cynics, on the other hand, fail to believe in human goodness, or the value of principles and morality, and believe that all actions can be justified by their ends. That does not mean they are immune to belief systems, but that they are likely to become embroiled in systems of oppression from which they believe they will benefit personally. For cynics the ends justify the means. That other human beings are made to suffer by these systems is no cause for concern because human beings have no intrinsic value, they are just higher order animals full of base instincts.

That got a bit dark. I am perhaps stretching the meaning of this film to its ultimate limit, but it seems clear that as a celebration of uniqueness, the film is a celebration of what makes us human. Lockdowns and all the technocratic solutions to the problems such as climate change, imagined by the technocrats, are all about denying the uniqueness of human beings and the freedom to express that individuality.

So back to classes that could be on the curriculum that might actually be worthwhile, rather than all the different permutations of critical theory that students are presented with now. Taking a cue from the economics tutor, it would be worthwhile for students to know something about the real world.

They should study politics, but not just political systems, they should be taught about all the politicians in the governments of the major countries in the world. They should learn not just where those ministers were educated and where they have worked but also their familial and corporate connections, and their network of friends, as far as that information is in the public realm and does not constitute an invasion of privacy. For example understanding that Mark Carney is currently an informal adviser to Justin Trudeau on financial issues, at the same time as he is advising Boris Johnson on the COP26 conference, and operating as United Nations special envoy for climate action and finance, shows how influential just one person can be and might lead a politics and economics student to pay close attention to such a figure’s education, career, mentors, and influences.

Any study of economics should not just look at the systems but also the particulars. Not just how hedge funds and investment funds work, but how actual funds are operating in the here-and-now in the real world. It should consider how billionaires protect their wealth, monopolise markets, and use their foundations to gain influence, and more wealth.

These are the facts of life that if anything over recent years we have been educated to ignore. Naturally I would include a Conspiracy Theory course. There are such courses in existence, but they treat conspiracy theories as untrue and misinformation, as a kind of societal neurosis, instead of as a means of exploring the hidden power and influence in our world. There should also be a course on Powerful Dynasties, which examines the influence and reach of the richest families that grew out of the industrial revolution.

I realise this sounds a bit mad, but if there is one thing these last eighteen months has taught me, it’s that ideas like ‘climate catastrophe’, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Critical Race Theory, that globalisation will increase the likelihood of pandemics, are all apparently disparate ideas but share two features. The first obviously is that they are rubbish, nonsense, entirely untrue. The second is that they all fit neatly together into a narrative of fear that pushes civilisation down the path of decreasing individual autonomy, and increasing technocratic control over the individual in society.

Anyway back to the movie, only made in 2006 but a million light years from where we are now. Bartleby is found out by one of the bullies at the real Harmon College. The bully mails out an invitation to all of the parents of the students at South Harmon to come to a ‘parents’ day’ and then the Dean of Harmon arrives and announces to all the parents and students that South Harmon is a fake, and humiliates Bartleby in the process.

This, however, is not the end. Sherman secretly applies to the local education board to have South Harmon accredited as an educational institution and Bartleby is called to give his representation. Most of the students and parents turn up, and Bartleby gives the speech of his life. It is a diatribe against the conformity of the other schools, and the conformity demanded by the board. When the Dean of Harmon calls him a criminal he retorts: “You’re a criminal because you rob these kids of their creativity and their passion. That’s the real crime.” Passion and creativity are of course something that the technocrats cannot understand, and certainly do not want encouraged in their drones. Bartleby declares that “something happened that was full of possibilities”. Again lovers of a world with arrow stickers on the ground to show you where to walk are not people open to ‘possibilities’, or at least not your possibilities.

Finally Bartleby declares “We don’t need your approval to tell us that what we did was real. There are so few truths in this world that when you see one you know it. It is a truth that real learning took place at South Harmon…”. Real learning as opposed to indoctrination into the right ways to think and the right ways to view the world. Real as in concrete, physical, face-to-face, discussion and argument. Practical learning like wood-working, and building skate ramps. Not in front of a computer. Not on zoom. Not virtual.

Many of the kids at Harmon College, the supposedly real college, are legacies, they are copying their parents. They all wear the same blazers, they are being inculcated into the same privileged echelons as their parents, where they will pull the levers on the world largely unseen. They cannot think for themselves and they merely act out the cruel rituals of the institution, hazing Sherman, and cheating on their girlfriends. This is the heartless, status-obsessed, sterile world of the technocrats.

South Harmon is the messy, chaotic, creative reality of human beings. Bartleby loves Monica, he loves his friends, he loves his college, and all the students he has brought there. Those students in all their colourful, crazy humanity are the antidote, the very opposite, of the sterile, grey dystopian future the technocrats want for us. Whenever anybody says they prefer having their meetings by Zoom, or they are dreading going back to the office, or that online lectures are fine for their kids, recommend this movie.

Postscript - I watched As Good As It Gets yesterday, and realised that the appalling Melvin Udall, who everybody in the movie treats as an unlikeable weirdo because he has OCD and is not only a germaphobe, but also unable to relate to people, is now the ideal human being for the ‘corona age’: scrubbing his hands, working from his apartment, leaping out of the way of people on the street with a cry of 'don't touch', and unable to make a human connection with anybody. However even he goes out for lunch every day!