4. Teacher’s Pet (George Seaton, 1958)

There was a Taoist story about a rainmaker Carl Jung always liked to tell and it goes like this:

“There was a great drought where the missionary Richard Wilhelm lived in China. There had not been a drop of rain and the situation became catastrophic. The Catholics made processions, the Protestants made prayers, and the Chinese burned joss sticks and shot off guns to frighten away the demons of the drought, but with no result. Finally the Chinese said: We will fetch the rain maker. And from another province, a dried up old man appeared. The only thing he asked for was a quiet little house somewhere, and there he locked himself in for three days. On the fourth day clouds gathered and there was a great snowstorm at the time of the year when no snow was expected, an unusual amount, and the town was so full of rumors about the wonderful rain maker that Wilhelm went to ask the man how he did it.

In true European fashion he said: "They call you the rain maker, will you tell me how you made the snow?" And the little Chinaman said: "I did not make the snow, I am not responsible." "But what have you done these three days?" "Oh, I can explain that. I come from another country where things are in order. Here they are out of order, they are not as they should be by the ordnance of heaven. Therefore the whole country is not in Tao, and I am also not in the natural order of things because I am in a disordered country. So I had to wait three days until I was back in Tao, and then naturally the rain came."

What this little fable tells us is nothing more and less this: that everything in this world is about balance and harmony and that when this has been found, everything else will take care of itself. Depending on what your views or beliefs are, you may find this either incredibly logical or outlandish, although in my experience, most people seem to experience a strange combination of the two: they can rationally understand the moral of the story and can give very few arguments against it, but are at the same time not able to actually apply it to their daily lives and live it accordingly. Therefore, there’s an immediate gap between what they understand and feel which would make any attempt at real harmony impossible. This should sound obvious, but unfortunately isn’t as obvious to most as it should be.

It may sound crude to use my grandmother in law as an example, but she’s such a perfect example of everything I try to describe here, so I hope I may be forgiven. As I already said in an earlier post on this blog, I have only recently become aware of my deep ecological feelings which led to a rather profound change in my life. It began with a ten day period of detoxing in which I cleansed my body from all the accumulated waste and after this I’ve radically altered my diet: now I only eat biological and organic food, stopped eating meat, cut out most of the bread and try to use a little sugar as possible. The results were directly visible: not only was there a huge increase in physical fitness and mental clarity, I also lost about 13 kilo’s in less than two months (perhaps I should add that my boyfriend lost the exact same amount in the same period, which should more or less rule out the possibility that I’m some physical wonder). My weight loss was noticed by everybody around me, including granny but when she asked me how I managed it and I told her the simple truth, she quite simply refused to believe me. To her, the only logical explanation of my sudden loss of weight could be something like self-imposed starvation, but really nothing could be further from the truth: I literally eat what I feel like and certainly don’t eat less than before – if anything I even eat more than before. It’s just that I eat differently and only things my body can handle properly, so it can take care of the rest of its functions like the burning of fat. When I confronted granny with this, there was a problem: on the one hand she just couldn’t believe what I told her to be true (because it goes against everything she has ever believed in), but at the same time, she couldn’t very well call me a liar to my face. So there she was, visibly torn between her feelings and the actual facts and because she couldn’t reconcile these two she did what everybody does who can’t cope with a certain fact: she just blocks it out, trying to pretend it’s not there. So, first she herself creates a mental blockade because of her lack of mental harmony and then she has to block out this blockade, with my sudden loss of weight magically disappearing somewhere along the line, mysteriously unaccounted for.

Here we have a clear illustration of the two principles described above: first, if you just bring your body in harmony the rest gets taken care of, because every organism is self-organizing, IF you just give it the chance to do so (which is exactly what Taoism says). And second, how far Western civilization has drifted away from such an almost self-explanatory assertion and the troubled, split attitude most people take towards it: because although people saw the physical evidence of my Taoist principle, they quite simply refused to believe this could be so. So they saw and understood one thing, while actually feeling the exact opposite and as long as we refuse to bring these two principles in harmony we will never find the road to mental sanity. It is this fundamental split in Western consciousness that forms the basis of the lack of true balance and harmony. Of course, that this is clearly the root of all our ecological problems (you just have to remember that the title of ‘Koyaanisqatsi’ means ‘live out of balance’), is something most people can agree on. But it really goes much deeper than that and for instance also contaminates our complete educational system. As cosmologist Brian Swimme puts it in ‘The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos’:

“I do not know of any science department in the American system of higher education where a change of perception is the primary aim of the curriculum. Our focus has always been dominated by the central task of accumulating and producing knowledge. Learning to actually experience a dynamic evolving universe does occur, but always in a haphazard manner as a by-product of the primary focus. What I am suggesting is that such a transformation of one’s subjectivity might become an explicit goal in the next millennium, not to be considered as a replacement but as a completion of the traditional goal of knowledge acquisition.

My aim here is not to simply hand over information as if I were passing on a sheaf of papers from me to you. My aim is to present the birthplace of the universe in a way that invites you to participate in an inner transformation. It would be a great thing if a person learned the facts of the new story. But even greater would be to take the first steps into living the new story. We study the story primarily in order to live the story.”

With this, Swimme cuts to the very essence of everything that’s wrong with our system of education: facts are just presented without any consideration to how we can give all these little facts a place in the life of the students. Nobody seems to be interested (with a few exceptions of course), how we can make this transition from mere learning of facts to really living them and this has always been one of the main reasons why I’ve always felt unhappy during my studies and actually dropped out prematurely partly because of this. Even though I couldn’t have articulated it as clearly back then, I always intuitively felt this huge gap between feeling and thinking, between learning and living should be closed and not once during all my time at school did I feel this was taken care of. This has always put me in a spot, because I’ve always felt I’ve been living between two worlds: I’ve never felt really at home with people of average intelligence, mainly because my interests have always veered toward the more intellectual things. At the same time I always feel at sea with intellectual people too, because even though we may share the same interests, the way we approach these things is fundamentally different. I know quite a lot highly intelligent and educated people who know all the theories and facts they’ve been taught and are brilliant in explaining these concepts, all the while failing to apply these same concepts to their own life in any meaningful way. They usually make me think of one of the characters from Richard Linklater’s magnificent ‘Slacker’, a guy who’s constantly sprouting the words of all kinds of intellectuals and when someone says to him ‘you don’t have any thought of yourself, you just reproduce what you’ve read’, she says exactly what I always feel. This broad distinction between thinking and feeling may feel much too schematic for most people and I’ve had people criticize me for just that; obviously everybody can think and everybody can feel, I’m not at all disputing that, but all too often these two qualities more or less exist on top of each other, like oil on water. To me, the balance always seems off, with people clearly leaning towards either a cerebral or an emotional attitude. What I’m interested in is a true synthesis of feeling and thinking, so that they actually work together instead of against each other and where the distinction between rational thinking and gut feeling disappears. In short, that everything revolves around harmony.

Which, finally, brings us to our film in question, ‘Teacher’s Pet’. At first glance it may seem little more than yet another screwball comedy, this time with the rather unlikely pairing of Doris Day and Clark Gable (in a late day triumph), which it also is, at least in part. Obviously, with Gable playing yet another hardnosed newspaper reporter, the movie harks back to his major breakthrough ‘It Happened One Night’ (1932), on which ‘Teacher’s Pet’ is basically yet another riff. But the movie very cleverly uses the conventions of the screwball genre to drive home points which are very similar to my little story about harmony and balance. Of course, in a way every screwball comedy does this, because they all are about two people from very different background who must learn to negotiate their differences in order to end up together. But in a sense, you could say a lot of these movies are more about ignoring these differences than in really reconciling them: each party should give in somewhat so the road to marital bliss lies open (again). ‘Teacher’s Pet’ in contrast  seems to be more interested in harmony and balance than in steering the middle course (the two are clearly related but far from the same, with harmony implying the synthesis which middle course lacks). Also because it’s not just a love story between Day and Gable, the stakes are raised considerably higher: the movie has also quite a lot to say about Western society and its lack of balance.

Gable, not surprisingly, plays the world-wise and self-educated reporter who basically lives by the famous dictum from ‘Showgirls’ which says “an MBA is a degree which you get in college and which is mostly useless in the real world”. At the very beginning of the movie he is approached by a worried mother who pleads with him to fire her son, so he could go back to college, a request Gable can only scoff at because he himself has done pretty well without education. Gable’s self-confidence is then of course complicated quite a bit when he is sent to a night school class where he encounters Doris Day’s teacher. When seen in purely schematic terms, it should be clear by now that Gable represents all the virtues of the school of life and Day stands for all the wonders of a formal education. But since this movie is all about harmony and balance, it quickly makes clear that while both positions have their strong points, both are also inherently weak in themselves. To become whole then, it’s imperative for both characters to be open to what the other represents, which is clearly the hardest thing to do: at first Gable is only interested in Day as a sex object, thereby blithely ignoring the possibility of her having to say something. Similarly, when Gable gives Day a hard time during one of her lectures, she rather weakly replies he should enroll in the class first. In both instances, the two characters are essentially trying to protect their comfort zones to avoid real openness to the world around them. Balance also means being open to change, a point Day makes when she says to Gable ‘your kind of reporting went out with prohibition’. She has a point here of course, since Gable is still stuck in his familiar thirties kind of reporting, while radio and TV in the fifties can report news much quicker than the printed press ever can, which necessarily also should change the role of newspapers. 

 

But even though both characters are at this early point of the movie not yet able to be truly open to change and everything around them, the beauty of Taoism is already silently working its magic. Because the moment Gable and Day meet balance is restored almost immediately: whether they like it or not, both worlds begin to contaminate each other, starting to render both more complete. For instance, when Day asks Gable what he would like to tackle next, he suggestively blows smoke at her ass, thereby introducing some love and feeling (and just plain lust) into her restricted and cold academic world. Reversely, suddenly Gable wants a ‘think piece’ for his paper (which they never use, we are told) only after being told by Day that the why behind a story should be more important than the what or when, which of course introduces some deepening of thought into his street life.

What the movie basically proposes then, is the bridging of the gap between learning and living Brian Swimme spoke about. Learning facts can be a great thing and can greatly enhance a person’s life, but can ultimately never mean anything when it isn’t used directly for living. Conversely, the virtues that can be gained from living can never reach truly great heights until they are infused with knowledge and the virtues of analysis. A line of dialogue which illustrates this point most clearly comes from the Gig Young character: “To me, journalism is like a hangover: you can read about it for years, but until you’ve experienced it you have no idea what it is”. We (and Gable) first meet this character in a bar and at first he seems almost superhuman: he has the ability to laugh at himself, is able to talk sports, knows his dancing, knows all about different cultures and even claims (preposterously, but hilariously) he can mentally control the effect of liquor. This obviously feels very threatening to Gable, who instantly develops an inferiority complex, until Young gets outside and rather foolishly takes a few deep breaths of night air only to drop to the ground unconscious. In one fell swoop he is transformed from superman to schlemiel, because for all his knowledge he apparently doesn’t even have sense enough to know that liquor and oxygen don’t really go together. The rest of the movie he is seen giving intellectually sound advice, while all the while struggling with mundane and earthly things like a hangover. 

With this, Gig Young typically follows the pattern of the humorous but inadequate sidekick who’s basically only there as a contrast for our two protagonists and the proper task of finding the necessary harmony is, of course, up to Gable and Day. But in order to reach this state of harmony, they have to learn to truly open themselves up and let go of their preconceived notions. This process can be frightening and exhilarating, often at the same time because new awareness will throw everything out of whack. It may seem rather pretentious of me to use a passage from a mathematical cosmologist in relation to a Hollywood screwball comedy, but I want to refer again to Brian Swimme. He uses the metaphor of the relation between the earth and the sun for the gap between feeling and thinking we’ve been talking about and how most people take this for granted. Because when we say ‘the sun goes down’, this is obviously not true, because the earth actually revolves around the sun and not vice versa. The fact that even our language bears out this confusion is highly significant, because it shows how deep-seated the gap between what we rationally know and (seem to) see really is and until these contradictions are truly resolved, no real harmony can be possible. So Swimme goes on to describe a method of actually experiencing the fact the earth goes under instead of the sun and when the experiment has been successful he says:

“As before, a new awareness will come in a sudden shift where a door opens and you feel yourself sliding into an unsuspected and disorienting awareness. It is disorienting not in the sense of an irritated confusion – for the experience is not at all irritating but on the contrary is usually breathtaking. It is disorienting in the sense of a bottom dropping away, as if for the first time in your life you have closed your eyes and leapt into a body of cool water and are suddenly turning about weightless without toes or fingers touching any ground.”

I really love the idea that Swimme actually uses the metaphor where someone closes his eyes in order to see more clearly, but apart from that, I was struck at how his description actually fits some scenes from ‘Teacher’s Pet’. Arguably, the feeling may not be quite so breathtaking for the Gable and Day characters in the movie (at least not at first), but the sense of disorienting awareness applies directly to the movie. Both characters have to be obliterated completely in order to rebuild their new selves on the ashes of their own pasts, thereby shedding new light on everything they’ve ever known or thought they knew. Gable actually talks about this at length, in his scene with Young, a passage which is worth quoting in full:

“It’s not what I’ve done, it’s what she’s done to me. Before, I had contempt for eggheads like her and you. Well, I was wrong, brother was I wrong. But at least I was definitely wrong. I was an obstinate, prejudiced, inconsiderate, cold-hearted louse! But at least I was something! Now that I’ve learned to respect your kind I’m just a big understanding remorseful slob. A complete zero.

You don’t know what it is to live one way all your life, confident that you’re right and then suddenly find out that you’re all wrong. I’m like a guy whose house burned down, I’ve got no place to go.”

Day goes through a similar crisis of self-doubt when she suddenly realizes the father she’d always placed on a pedestal and which she had a habit of quoting in her classes, was nothing more than a passionate hack. She, like Gable, is reduced to a complete zero which may be a quite painful process to go through, but one from which she only can emerge a better and more complete person. Or in other words, whether they like it or not, both Day and Gable have to let the other person and what they represent into their lives. Because only when formal education is reconciled with the knowledge of living can both begin to mean something. Two bits of dialogue from the movie illustrate this beautifully: early in the movie Day says “Education means that you can spell experience correctly” and later Gable chimes in with “Experience is the jockey, education the horse”. When taken separately, they may seem a bit pretentious, but together they suddenly form a synthesis: the first quote emphasizes the necessity of education, while the second approaches the same problem with a sports metaphor. Both say the same thing, but only together can they really mean anything.

The beauty of all this if that none of this is actually accomplished by doing anything, which is highly irregular for an American movie. Because basically, the only thing Day and Gable have to do is be around each other and open up and the universe will weave its magic by itself. If we accept the basic difference between West and East is the difference between doing and being, it makes ‘Teacher’s Pet’ an almost Oriental film which its constant emphasis on being instead of acting. Whether or not this was a conscious attempt from the writers I do not know, nor is it very interesting. One thing Hollywood practice has in common with oriental thought is the cyclical nature of all things, because ‘Teacher’s Pet’ has also been composed around a beautiful cyclical logic: the mother from the start of the movie approaches Gable again and thanks him for honoring the request he refused at the beginning. But unlike quite a lot of similar movies, where the differences between characters is more of less glossed over, these two characters have actually made a profound change during the movie. So, that when the movie ends with Day lighting a cigarette for Gable, in a manner very reminiscent of Howard Hawks, you realize the walking away at the end of the lovers signifies a true synthesis of two human beings and complementary values instead of ´just´ a new couple. It also makes you wonder who exactly has been the teacher and who the pet. But of course, with true harmony and openness such a question is completely irrelevant, because influence always works both ways.

Available on DVD from Paramount