Our Common Nature #5
Hi everybody, Mary here.
So, here's the second movie we'll be analysing in this Our Common Nature series, will be a German movie called Die Welle (literally, The Wave) made by Dennis Gansel in 2005. Without further ado, let's get started, shall we ?
As seen in the movie... Die Welle
Ever thought that a dictator like Hitler could never come back to power and that nazism had taught a good lesson of not following blindly the orders of a mad man who could convince us to do so ?
Apparently we still need to learn our lesson.
Die Welle (The Wave) is a movie produced by Dennis Gansel in 2008, based on the real life experiment done by the History teacher Ron Jones with his junior students in the Cubberly high school in Palo Alto during the first week of April 1967.
While talking about how Germans followed Hitler from his beginnings in politics until his fall and his death, he talked about how people followed him because they weren't aware of being manipulated by the dictator. And when one of his students jokingly said that such a horrible dictator couldn't come back in power because we were supposed to have learnt our lesson and not repeat the errors of the past.
And yet, their students were proved wrong.
The experiment was to replicate a little "dictatorship" in the classroom. A one-week experiment that started with all students wearing a white shirt. Then, some rules were added to "increase the discipline in the class", such as always raising your hand to answer a question, and standing up when you're asked to do so. A salute was even added, a wave. This "new third Reich" was called "The Third Wave".
What was supposed to be "just a one-week experiment" degenerated quite quickly. Right from the third day, people from the Wave started bullying students that weren't in the movement, that was now spreading in other classes, in the entire high-school even. During a water-polo match, people even went to physical fights and everything was out of the teacher's control.
In the end, he had to pretend to rally all the students "for a meeting to rule over the town" (how crazy !!!) to have them listen to him, and stopped the experiment, as the principal of the school told him how bad the situation was.
The question is : how did the students follow the teacher so blindly ?
First of all, it's just like the Germans during the Third Reich : they weren't aware of the power of the teacher, just like the Germans weren't aware of the power of Hitler.
Secondly, it's because they thought that the values proposed by the teacher were "valid" because of his authority, just,like the Germans didn't realise the same thing about Hitler.
Third thing : peer pressure. When the teacher imposed the white shirts on the first day, one student didn't want to follow the rule (I believe it was a girl who was wearing a pink shirt). She told the teacher that she didn't want to follow the movement, and in return, just like Hitler would have probably said, he said "well, you just should follow the rest of the class, or you'll end up being hated by them".
On the next day, she was wearing the white shirt.
The fact that the teacher was scaringly accurate as a fictional Hitler, can only prove that it could be "anyone" in this position. Anyone could be a dictator if they had the charisma and the values necessary to be followed by the masses. We are clinging onto authority as a mean of putting the responsibility of crimes in someone else's shoulders.
Isn't that the scariest thing, in the end ? How we were white sheeps following supposed "values" when, really, we are just accepting the unacceptable under the pretext that it's the authority ?
We'd rather live in the comfort of having others ruling our lives rather than questioning said authority to make sure that it's fair for both sides.
I don't know about you, but this movie (and the book I've also read) changed my entire life and perception of the situation.
Anyways, I'll stop it right here, as usual, please tell me if I've done any mistakes or inaccuracies in this post, and I'll see you very soon with the next post in this series.
And as usual, our last word : KIDNEYS !!!
Die Welle (The Wave) is a movie produced by Dennis Gansel in 2008, based on the real life experiment done by the History teacher Ron Jones with his junior students in the Cubberly high school in Palo Alto during the first week of April 1967.
While talking about how Germans followed Hitler from his beginnings in politics until his fall and his death, he talked about how people followed him because they weren't aware of being manipulated by the dictator. And when one of his students jokingly said that such a horrible dictator couldn't come back in power because we were supposed to have learnt our lesson and not repeat the errors of the past.
And yet, their students were proved wrong.
The experiment was to replicate a little "dictatorship" in the classroom. A one-week experiment that started with all students wearing a white shirt. Then, some rules were added to "increase the discipline in the class", such as always raising your hand to answer a question, and standing up when you're asked to do so. A salute was even added, a wave. This "new third Reich" was called "The Third Wave".
What was supposed to be "just a one-week experiment" degenerated quite quickly. Right from the third day, people from the Wave started bullying students that weren't in the movement, that was now spreading in other classes, in the entire high-school even. During a water-polo match, people even went to physical fights and everything was out of the teacher's control.
In the end, he had to pretend to rally all the students "for a meeting to rule over the town" (how crazy !!!) to have them listen to him, and stopped the experiment, as the principal of the school told him how bad the situation was.
The question is : how did the students follow the teacher so blindly ?
First of all, it's just like the Germans during the Third Reich : they weren't aware of the power of the teacher, just like the Germans weren't aware of the power of Hitler.
Secondly, it's because they thought that the values proposed by the teacher were "valid" because of his authority, just,like the Germans didn't realise the same thing about Hitler.
Third thing : peer pressure. When the teacher imposed the white shirts on the first day, one student didn't want to follow the rule (I believe it was a girl who was wearing a pink shirt). She told the teacher that she didn't want to follow the movement, and in return, just like Hitler would have probably said, he said "well, you just should follow the rest of the class, or you'll end up being hated by them".
On the next day, she was wearing the white shirt.
The fact that the teacher was scaringly accurate as a fictional Hitler, can only prove that it could be "anyone" in this position. Anyone could be a dictator if they had the charisma and the values necessary to be followed by the masses. We are clinging onto authority as a mean of putting the responsibility of crimes in someone else's shoulders.
Isn't that the scariest thing, in the end ? How we were white sheeps following supposed "values" when, really, we are just accepting the unacceptable under the pretext that it's the authority ?
We'd rather live in the comfort of having others ruling our lives rather than questioning said authority to make sure that it's fair for both sides.
I don't know about you, but this movie (and the book I've also read) changed my entire life and perception of the situation.
Anyways, I'll stop it right here, as usual, please tell me if I've done any mistakes or inaccuracies in this post, and I'll see you very soon with the next post in this series.
And as usual, our last word : KIDNEYS !!!
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