School of Rock does offer a kind of curriculum, since the character of Dewey makes two specific claims about “the power of rock.” First, rock offers a way to “stick it to The Man.” However, the “Man” is in short supply around this elite prep school. Some of the parents come across as overbearing, but no one openly rebels against them, and they’re all won over in the end, as the formula requires. The only “Man” in the student’s world is Principal Mullins (herself a closeted Stevie Nicks fan), played by Joan Cusack. And she’s hardly a threat to the students—when one of the students says to her in the hall, “Miss Mullins, you’re The Man,” she absently replies, “Why thank you very much!”9
Dewey’s second great claim is that “one great rock concert can change the world!,” and at the end of the film, he seems to need just that—but it’s really just his world, not the world in general, that needs changing. Dewey’s bluff at being a teacher has been discovered and he’s kicked out of the school. However, he still manages to gather his young band together to compete in the Battle of the Bands. They don’t win the competition, but they win over the outraged parents and school officials that descend on the concert hoping to get the children back from Dewey’s clutches.
Is that enough? Nothing grandiose results from the concert. Instead, at the end of the film, we enter an old building that is now named “School of Rock.” There, Dewey has resumed rehearsing his young students on his own terms. As the credits role, we see Dewey and the kids work through a version of AC/DC’s “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Want to Rock and Roll).”
It’s an ending worth sticking around for. Jack Black tosses off funny asides as he gets each student to solo in turn, and the talents of the young actors/musicians really shine. As McKinney might say, there’s a rightness to the scene. But it doesn’t take on the cosmic dimensions that he sees in the Beatles every move. Instead, it’s a more private enjoyment being shared, the joy of the performance itself. Indeed, one feels it’s now “Jack Black,” not Dewey anymore, just as the students are the talented young actors, strutting their stuff for real now.
Is that enough for “changing the world?” After all, fighting “the Man” and changing the world isn’t what it used to be. Dewey offers this rant to his class about the overwhelming challenge of fighting The Man in the current world, in hopes of stirring up some rebellion:
“Give up, just quit, because in this life, you can't win. Yeah, you can try, but in the end you're just gonna lose, big time, because the world is run by the man. The Man, oh you don't know the man. He's everywhere... in the White House... down the hall…Ms. Mullins, she's the man. And the man ruined the ozone, he's burning down the Amazon, and he kidnapped Shamu and put her in a chlorine tank! And there used to be a way to stick it to the man, it was called Rock and Roll, but guess what, oh no, the man ruined that too with a little thing called MTV! So don't waste your time trying to make anything cool or pure or awesome cause the man is just gonna call you a fat washed up loser and crush your soul. So do yourselves a favor and just GIVE UP!”
So is opening a tiny little “School of Rock” at the end a retreat from Dewy’s grander claims? Or, in our current environment, does this count as an innovative approach by creating a kind of “charter school of rock”? Or, better yet, is it just a rejection of the grand gesture—after all, when Dewey first appears in the film, it’s onstage with his original band as he goes through every obnoxious rock star pose possible, ending only when no one catches him as he dives into the audience. Maybe it’s that rejection of the overarching curriculum of Dewey’s classroom that really is at work here. “It’s a long way to the top…”, they sing, and just going along for the ride is the best part.
***
Richard Meltzer, a rock critic who has made his own forays into capturing the rock spirit, wrote about his reaction to first hearing the Beatles’ White Album in its entirety with some friends after it was broadcast on the radio: “…we scampered out into the cold, high on more than the hash, feeling (for prob’ly the final time in the 60s…or ever) a distinct sense of UNLIMITED POSSIBILITY…Even Allen, a mocker who until then hadn’t even liked The Beatles, was driven to say, ‘Well, I guess the object is no longer just to listen, or even memorize—it’s for everybody to internalize this shit and SPEAK IT’.” Black’s Dewey Finn and Devin McKinney are both trying their best to “speak it,” although Dewey's version is more practical and local compared to McKinney's poetic speculations. The question is whether, at this stage in the rock and roll game, both attempts sound mostly like a foreign language. Or maybe it’s as Paul Westerberg once sang:
No one here to raise a toast
Be my guest and I will be a host
To a rock 'n' roll ghost…
Notes
1 Jack Black is often criticized for always just playing Jack Black, and yet journalists who have interviewed him always note that the “Jack Black” character is very unlike the real Jack Black. Only time will tell if playing “Jack Black” is seen as legitimate as it is to play “John Wayne.”
2 See http://slate.msn.com/id/2089819/
3 See http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1135399,00.html
4 See http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,1101460,00.html
5 See http://www.villagevoice.com/vls/180/park.shtml
6 McKinney 87. Further page references are included in the text.
7 Despite several pages of endnotes, the total bibliography isn’t particularly deep, relying mostly biographical/ historical sources such as various Lennon interviews or Buddy Miles’ book about McCartney…hardly the heft you’d expect from a book published by Harvard UP.
8 In the end, McKinney admits that maybe John Lennon really did have it right when he said, “We were just a band who made it very, very big—that’s all.” But that explanation is overly simplistic and at the other end of the spectrum from McKinney’s musings. So then what’s the alternative, keeping in mind that taking some “middle way” hardly fits well in the “rock spirit”?
9> There is one sequence that hints at a larger ”Man” to tackle. In the middle of the film, there's the obligatory "training montage" (a la Rocky, et al.) where Black puts the students through rehearsals, drawing out flow charts of what bands influence what other bands, and so on. And it's all set to the Ramones' "Bonzo Goes to Bitburg"—the song that attacked Ronald Reagan for laying a wreath at a German cemetery. Further, almost the whole song is played, unlike any other song used in the film. Of all the songs that could've been featured there, why that one? I have a sneaking suspicion Linklater was smuggling his own version of "sticking it to the Man"—or at least remembering how straightforward rock music can occasionally take on larger concerns at the same time.
