The Tall Rob Report

2026/03/24

Steve (Tim Mielants, Big Things Films, 2025)

Why I chose to watch this movie on the first day of my spring break is a mystery to me, too. I have been asking colleagues and friends about movies that center teachers’ daily lives (as laborers and as people) and one of them suggested Steve. It’s got Cillian Murphy, she said. He’s the headmaster, she said. It’s about a reform school for boys in England, she said. The boys have behavioral and emotional problems, she said. The look on her face as she said these words communicated that it would not be an easy, gentle watch. It was not.

I’d either misheard her or she did not say that the film is set in 1996. I had hoped a movie made in 2025 about teaching would have been set in that era, or at least one touched by the pandemic. Even so, its chaotic camerawork and pacing reflects plenty of what a teacher’s day is like, even if it doesn’t involve older adolescents who are in a boarding school setting. They do add a great deal of tension and excitement to the 24-hour period shown episodically in the film.

There are glimpses of what these boys could be like if they were featured in the fuller narrative of a short series based on the same source material (the novel Shy by Max Porter). The half-dozen of them who get enough screen time to be named have established beefs with each other and society at large. They each have an understanding with Steve (no last name is given, so he’s never Mr. Surname) as a more knowledgeable other in their lives. They are sick of him and his go-to phrases and prompts for reassuring or disciplining them in turn. There’s a comfort revealed in these interactions that could have been interesting if it were fleshed out across multiple days or weeks of time. For the purposes of communicating the sturm und drang of the boys’ lives and their resonating effects on their teachers, a short burst is enough.

Even so, there is still more going on in the day of the film that adds even more detail (i.e., stress) to the narrative. Our first view of Steve is from an interlaced video taken in the confessional format so familiar to documentaries and mockumentary sitcoms. The producers are trying to get him to speak about his job, yet his mind is elsewhere. Turns out there is a news crew at Stanton Wood that is creating a short segment on the school. Their program, Points West, runs as a packaged segment at the end of the nightly news. Initially, the camera people, producer, and presenter are trying to do their best to make an honest look at the school and the troubles its staff and students are facing. This does not remain the case, as they end up disregarding the requests from Steve and the other staffers to not film in certain areas or during certain times of day. They’re more of a nuisance than anything. Their presence helps break up he scenes and give more context for the boys and the staff; the confessional segments with “give me three words that describe you” or “what would 1996 you say to 1990 you?” prompts are interspersed between the classes and conflicts of the day in question.

Because this is a single film and not a series, there’s never a grand reveal where the viewers or the characters see the completed Points West segment. It’s simply more background noise for all involved at Stanton Wood. It’s “just one more thing” that is contributing to Steve’s on-the-job chemical abuse. The same goes for the conversation the staff has with two people who appear to be the managers of the trust that owns the property where the school is located. Turns out they are selling the land, so the school will shut down in December 1996, which is a few short months away. The immediate effects on Steve and the other staffers are uniformly negative, but we are never sure how the boys might have reacted to this news. One gets the feeling that it is simply too heavy a burden for the adults to bear, so they need time to process that trauma before sharing the news with the students. Again, this is “just one more thing,” but it is the sort of all-encompassing “thing” that makes going through the motions of teaching children into a soul-draining exercise for reasons that have nothing to do with the children at all (see also teaching during the polycrisis). Urie Bronfenbrenner might have said that this property sale is an example of a change in the exo-system affecting the meso-system and micro-systems for those in this school.

Steve is the title character, so he gets the most screen time, but his colleagues Amanda, Shola, Owen, and Jenny all play a role in each others’ lives. As expected, Tracey Ullman’s Amanda does the emotional labor for the staff during meetings, making sure that Steve is emotionally and physically regulated when they gather. As an aside, it seems like a blessing and a curse to have meetings that do not involve agenda items prepared in advance. There is a lot of planning that goes into making an effective meeting happen, but being so busy dealing with so many issues means there is not time to cobble together line items to discuss. Everyone is just in survival mode. Steve reveals this existential exasperation when he speaks voice memos into a personal voice recorder. He’s addressing himself in the third person and being quite hard on himself about all the things he has plans to do during the day. Anyone keeping track of all of these tasks will easily see that he falls short of his intentions, even as he takes the day as it comes.

Those voice memos and his negotiation of how best to address each new eventuality as it unfolds during the day are both very effective in reflecting how day-to-day concerns can easily overwhelm the executive functioning abilities of teachers. Students, of course, are still beginning to develop executive functioning at this age, so having a more knowledgeable other be not the most helpful model of managing actions, emotions, and thoughts makes for a challenging learning environment. Sometimes surviving the day is all you can do. There’s an effective scene toward the end of the film where Steve returns home to his wife and daughters and his wife (she is not named) rhetorically asks him “Another tough one?” as he is covered in dried mud and has dead, exhausted eyes.

Steve represents a telling case, if not a representative one. Most teachers are not dealing with all of the overlapping layers of stress and pressure that we see in the film. This seems to have been a particularly bad day for us to have seen Steve at work. Even if Bronfenbrenner’s layers of structure are not visible or made manifest all the time, they are nevertheless part of teachers’ and students’ lives. In the days, the moments, when we have to reckon with the existence of these structures, the compounding stress brought on by that awareness can be debilitating. Steve does an excellent job of making those structures visible and, in this particular case, apparently immutable.

2026/03/17

Election (Alexander Payne, MTV Productions, 1999)

After considering the idea for a few years, I figured I’d execute it. This entry is part of what I hope will be a long-running series of reviews of movies that are set at schools and focus on teachers as characters instead of caricatures. The source of this idea is a comment from one of my high school teachers who referenced Election as a rare example of a movie that examines the humanity or complexity of a teacher’s inner life instead of reducing them to a mere punchline. If this introduction sounds familiar, it’s because I referenced it when writing about Teachers in late 2024.

The difference between watching Teachers for the first time and watching Election for the first time is that the latter was just a movie I saw when I was in high school, while Teachers was an off-hand suggestion from a professor in my English Education graduate program. I came to Teachers with the intention of learning from it how not to conduct myself as an educator. For Election, I was just a dumb teenager looking for a funny movie.

Now that I’ve watched it at least three times, and have spent most of my working life in schools or other settings related to K-12 education in the United States, I feel more informed about addressing how it depicts a teacher’s daily life.

The beginning of the movie involves a repulsive comment from one of the teachers about the student he is sexually abusing. It’s said in an extreme close-up shot with each word enunciated sickeningly. This comment and the wider plot arc it is part of is meant to establish the importance of morals (or is it ethics?) in a one’s life. That teacher is fired after the the administration learns about his behavior. The rest of the film focuses on the student (Tracy Flick, played by Reese Witherspoon) running for student body president while a friend of the abuser (Jim McAllister, played by Matthew Broderick) attempts to sabotage her campaign because he finds her persistent try-hard persona annoying.

Look, I never said this kind of movie had to make teachers into exemplar human beings. I am not holding up either of the white male teachers (and yes most of the characters in the film are white) as models of pedagogical or personal renown. The actions of Flick’s abuser are reprehensible and both McAllister and the principal deal with them appropriately and swiftly, without much of any guilt over punishing a colleague they’ve been friendly with to that point. McAllister’s turn toward vindictiveness is a little harder to understand, which is why he is not a character that is a source of our sympathy. Surely, a more enlightened way of assisting a student in Flick’s position would be to support her emotionally, academically, and socially as she processes her trauma. Given that those elements are an afterthought, Election is a time capsule of how trivially society treated child sexual abuse in the ‘90s. One would think a similar movie set in 2026 would be more invested in exploring Flick’s perspective instead of focusing on the various ways McAllister destroys his life.

As this movie is about McAllister as much as it is Flick, his misdeeds are the focus of most of our time. We see Flick at home with her mother a few times, but all we get of her inner life is that she appears to be as dedicated to scholastic greatness as McAllister suspects. Her father is dead and she wants to achieve all that she can in high school and beyond. McAllister, positioned as the more reasonable or relatable teacher, in contrast to Flick’s abuser, is a little more entertaining to watch unravel. He’s unable to conceive a child with his wife, Diane (played by Molly Hagan) and starts to lust after his former colleague’s recently divorced wife (Linda Novotny, played by Delaney Driscoll). These desires spiral out of control in a darkly comic fashion, complete with a swollen eye from a bee sting that helps McAllister to appear all the more pathetic. When he returns home after the next school day, Diane and Linda are there on the couch waiting for him to realize the gravity of the mistake he made. He’s left to spend the night alone at the hotel where he’d once planned an afternoon tryst with Linda before his misdeeds caught up with him.

The framing of McAllister as the protagonist is delightful when his world collapses. He’s so self-centered at undermining Flick that he doesn’t see how all the threads of his life are connected. Teachers learn that their capacity for with-it-ness (basically executive functioning) is an important part of their success in the classroom. We see very little of McAllister’s actual teaching, so it’s not possible to give a fair assessment of his with-it-ness in the classroom. However, it is very clear that he is unaware of how other people may have actions or agency that conflict with his own. The janitor who sees him miss the trash can when throwing away an old box of Chinese food ends up being his undoing. He bluntly suggests that Linda and he get a hotel room, so when she later plays along with the offer, he takes it at face value. He sees his colleague destroy his career and a child’s life through sexual violence but thinks he’s not going to have the same problem with his own schemes. It may not be the point of film, but a message that comes through loud and clear is that McAllister is oblivious to the lives and intentions of everyone else he meets. He gets his deserved consequences (job loss, divorce, relocation), but he might never realize he is the one that caused all of those problems. One hopes that actual teachers are not so clueless and careless about their conduct in the real world. We at least have one more example we can point to of what we don’t want to be like.

2026/03/10

Thought Crime: Ideology and State Power in Interwar Japan (Max Ward, Duke University Press, 2019)

Before I get to a review of Max Ward's book Thought Crime, I thought it would make sense to offer a prologue in the form of a reflection I wrote about one of his bands (SCHOLASTIC DETH) for additional context. Both that write-up and the subesequent review are lightly edited versions of what originally appeared on facing pages of issue #2 of the zine Anxiety’s False Promise, published February 2023.

X X X

Although I never really got into a lot of the bandana thrash revival bands aside from TEAR IT UP (they count?) or LIFE’S HALT (they count), I really fell hard for SCHOLASTIC DETH when I first heard about them. They were a band that sang about being a nerd and I was in my first year of college. How could I not love them? I recognized art on the cover of “Shackle Me Not” from my older brother’s skate tape collection. I think it was H-Street’s Hokus Pokus video? I mostly remember the part of that video where the kid dips his head in the gnarly sludge bucket for money. Seeing something like that as a child leaves an impression.

SCHOLASTIC DETH has also left an impression on me. They’re a rare band that was active while I was involved in the scene that I’ve never seen yet still listen to or think about regularly. That first part is the crucial distinction. I find it hard to hold on to records of HC bands I could have seen, but didn’t, because there’s no memory to attach to their music. For all other genres or for HC from before I was involved in the scene, the same metric doesn’t apply. So, there’s something special about this band. Beyond thinking about them, I’ve also held on to their three 7”s and CD discography for the past 20 or so years. I had a few of the comps they were on, but when weighing the storage volume of one CD versus a few records with only a couple good songs on them it’s clear that the compact part of CD makes a strong argument. I see they have an LP version of the discography out now and I have to say it’s not appealing to me at all. First of all, a CD discography is such a wonderful collection when there are short songs. A 39-song LP just seems silly, but a 50-song CD makes perfect sense. I can’t really say why. The 11 songs exclusive to the CD are the KZSU radio set. That’s Stanford’s radio station, in case you needed any more proof of these dudes’ nerd-dom. The title of the CD version is “Final Examiner,” which references SYSTEMATIC DEATH. They rip off the “Final Insider” art on the CD tray as well. The LP discography is “Book Attack,” which is OK, but doesn’t reflect anything more than a title of one of their songs. There’s also a video available on the CD that I don’t think is even usable with modern video players. Most of all, the CD discography is worth having because of the layout. A band about books wants you to have a modified version of all its releases on a single piece of plastic… what else is a CD discography but Cliff’s Notes for a band? Very clever, but I would expect nothing else from a band whose members studied for the GRE during their final recording session. The style of the Cliff’s Notes isn’t just the cover, either. They nailed the overall vibe of it the whole way through the packaging. My copy has been beaten up enough that its case is cracked and I’ve taped it back together, which is something I can’t say for any other broken CD case I’ve dealt with over the years. So, like I said, there’s something special about this music.

Part of what makes them so accessible is their liner notes. One of the notes that caught my attention back then was Max’s comment in regard to “Book Attack” that he spent more on books than records in the past year: “This past year was the first time that I spent more money on books than records. My bookshelves are bursting at the seams with books that I have yet to read, or ones that I'm keeping on the shelf for reference purposes. There is not enough time in the day for me to get as much reading in as I want. And I still go to the independent bookstores to browse… I’m like a kid in a toy store. One day I'll win the lottery so I can sit and read books at a rate that I want to. And I'll give some of my winnings to Chris and Josh so they can write more songs with guitar solos.” This was years before tsundoku as a practice came to be discussed widely in various hifalutin papers, magazines, and journals. They were ahead of their time in so many ways. The practice of buying records (or books) is a different practice from listening to records (or reading books), and they wrote a couple songs about this all-too-human foible.

The music is extremely acceptable—it’s fast without turning into a blur. Some songs have moshable moments. The part of the sonic blur that is most useful for their longevity is Max’s vocals. They’re the kid-on-helium style of high-spirited cheer that makes the vocalist sound eternally youthful. I also love the complete saturation of the recording sessions with feedback—the guitar squeals leading into each song give the sense that these songs were all recorded in six-or-seven song bursts in whatever studio they used. The predetermined endpoint for the band due to their academic commitments gave them a sense of urgency that still resonates and reverberates two decades later.

A casual survey of music created since they broke up in 2002 makes it clear that a new movement of punk bands that are pro-reading hasn’t caught on. Basically, straight edge but for books. No TV, No social media, No venture capitalists. Something like that. They articulated a pro-literacy philosophy as clearly as MINOR THREAT did with a pro-sobriety philosophy, yet they didn’t have the lasting impact of straight edge. MINOR THREAT had good marketing going on, you know what I mean? Maybe if SCHOLASTIC DETH could have toured more extensively. In an alternate reality, Ward et al. could have flexed 625 to focus on a bookstore core movement that disdained screen time, social media, dot-com boomers, and Silicon Valley in general in favor of printed matter, academic achievement, and coffee. They had songs about the effect of the dot-com bust on their skate habits and work choices… the cusp of a social movement in response to Bush II’s bungling, belligerent idiocracy is right there, but something was missing. These guys should have been huge… They even had a member break up the band because he got accepted at Northwestern—just like MINOR THREAT. They have a solid discography CD—just like MINOR THREAT. (They are not as good as MINOR THREAT.) If there are any bands trying to ape their sound and style (mostly the bookish part) in the same way youth crew and OC HC bands did in the late ‘80s with MINOR THREAT, you need to let me know.

X X X

It’s great that a professor at Middlebury closes the Acknowledgments section of his book published by Duke University Press with the phrase “up the punks.” Could this have been true 20 years ago? Probably not. I bought this book specifically to write this review.

This book chiefly concerns the Japanese government’s efforts in the years between the first two World Wars to re-educate members of the Japanese Communist Party into citizens full of national spirit. As I am not conversant with Japanese history in any kind of way, I was mostly out of my depth with this book. It winds down as the beginning of WWII approaches, so Ward describes how the Japanese government was learning how to police members of its society who were out of line. Where did they learn this but through classes taught by U.S. police officers.

It does give a lot to think about with regard to nationalism and what it means to believe in a country. Is a country’s identity forged by thousands of years of history? If so, what does it mean when that identity has to change? (Can it?) Is a country’s identity formed through the creation of documents outlining its rules, policies, and procedures? If so, what does it mean when those documents have to change? (Who decides?) Finishing it as I did on the day the US Supreme Court heard a case about the independent state legislature theory, these questions seem quite relevant.

Throughout the book, Ward traces the development of a law that is meant to rehabilitate riff raff into Imperial Japanese Subjects. The concepts in the text that may be relevant to people living in the US are how ideas about a national identity are taken up by governments and put into process through laws and the other apparatuses of the state that act upon the people living in those nations. What it means to be Japanese and what it means to be American are informed by these things and I think about them every time I think about why children in the United States need to recite the pledge at the start of a school day.

2026/03/03

Tonight It’s a World We Bury: Black Metal, Red Politics (Bill Peel, Repeater, 2023)

Black metal and Communism aren’t usually spoken of in the same breath. For those who know anything about black metal, it’s probably the violence and the anti-Christian themes that stand out the most. The average person likely doesn’t have much familiarity with blast beats, raspy vocals, and tremolo picking. Just the same, what people (at least in the U.S.) might know about Communism is limited to caricatures of the Soviet Union, Cuba, Vietnam, or North Korea.

Peel’s book might seem at first glance to be about a counternarrative for black metal. Those who know a little more of the genre are aware that some of its most influential groups have connections to right-wing or openly fascist politics. They are known as National Socialist Black Metal (NSBM) for short. Peel addresses this aspect of the scene early on in the text, explaining the Asgardsrei festival in Ukraine as an annual meeting of current black metal bands with explicit white supremacist messages (p. 3). Shortly thereafter, he clarifies that this book is not meant to be a catalog of bands that are socialist, feminist, antiracist, or otherwise inclusive of gender and sexual identities and orientation. That’s because a book about the “Red and Anarchist Black Metal (RABM)” scene “would be a very short book” (p. 8). Even though the anarchists might be outnumber the Nazis, there’s still not enough of them to document in a book-length rundown. (For the record, some of the RABM bands Peel cites are TRESPASSER, ISKRA, and SKAGOS.)

Instead, Peel focuses on the elements of black metal as a genre that might provide affordances for socialists to consider including in their worldview. The five chapters cover the ideas of distortion, decay, secrecy, coldness, and heresy. Each includes an explanation of the term as it relates to black metal, certain bands or songs or movements in the genre that exemplify the term, and discussion of ways socialists might interpret these same ideas for their own ends. In a sense, a reader does not need to have any familiarity with the music of the scenes Peel covers. A more engaged stance on this book would leave a reader with ideas of how to rethink their engagement with socialist politics. If you wanted to learn more about RABM bands, you’ll be let down; however, you might learn a little more about Deleuze & Guattari, Nietzsche, and Marx as you read.

The chapter on decay was interesting in that it reframed the usual way that black metal bands look at decay. They see it as a form of death or a long for a return to a “supposedly ancient, traditional moment” (p. 69). In this way, the yearning for decay is a desire for the world as it is to be undone. To accelerate the downfall of society so that we can live more simply once more. You know, RETVRN type shit. That’s gross (culturally). What’s also gross (well, also, culturally, but in a different sense) is that decaying fungi can be a source of new life, mutation (p. 64). The idea of flourishing. The possibility of life’s construction.

Intriguing ideas abound in the chapter on coldness. A cursory thought about this topic as it relates to black metal might call to mind the wintry climate of Norway, or Scandinavia in general. It might also call to mind the idea of growing “cold inside” or dead to the world in some way. To Peel’s credit, he expands his analysis beyond such simplicity. Because this is a book ostensibly about Communism, the importance of heat power to the Industrial Revolution comprises a great deal of this chapter. In his retelling, the success of coal-derived power was not due to its superior output. Rather, the old-fashioned water mills were more than capable of producing the power needed for most uses. The catch is that its hard to monetize the water flowing in a river because it is part of the commons. The “sluice gates and reservoirs” that could be built to manage that flow did not turn into profitable ventures because it was too difficult to determine whether it was better to spend money on setting up the gate or operating it (p. 97). So, coal power won the day because it reflected the individualist ethos necessary for capital accumulation. Dig the coal out of the ground and it's yours. Power your own steam engine with the coal and you can do what you want with the profits and the products.

What does that mean for black metal, though?

The coldness of the genre is reflected in the inability to do work or the disinterest in the world at large. Rather that combusting with kinetic energy like thrash metal or speed metal, black metal makes a point of displaying its power, its “puissance,” through inaction or stillness or coldness (p. 123). If still waters run deep, then imagine the everflowing stream frozen. There is a lot of power there (as distinct from energy) but it lies still. Black metal band members are “dominating capitalism by freezing its flows. They work by remaining useless, non-productive, insufficiently profitable. We should ask ourselves what has been gained through our supposedly productive activism, and if we shouldn’t join black metal instead, by turning towards non-productivity” (p. 123). Allowing ourselves to lay fallow and become useless might lead to new growth in our decay that helps to bring a new world into being.