Recent Media Consumption One: Institutions Doing a Poor Job of Getting to the Bottom of Something

     I think everyone has a childhood experience of a moment from TV or film that was so startling to their young mind that it became a permanent background feature of their consciousness, like a light in a closet that won't ever go off.   For me one of those moments is an image from an old black and white film that I happened upon on TV.  I don’t remember how old I was or any other context, just that this particular visual posted up in my memory and never left.   There was a man, imprisoned, chained to his bed.  He reached under the bed and pulled out a book.  The book was called Paris, the pages were disintegrating, and it was covered with crawling ants.  That disturbing image became an ur nightmare vision for me, a picture of what it is to be utterly forsaken.  Whether I watched the rest of the film I don’t remember.  The image of the forlorn prisoner clutching an ant-infested book was all that lasted.  And boy did it last.  I used to see it in my mind's eye on a regular basis.   Maybe that was the kind of thing that happened to you when you got expelled from school.

     I didn’t find out until many years later that the film I had been watching was not a horror movie but an inspiring biopic, The Life of Emile Zola (1937) and the chained-up character was Alfred Dreyfus.  The Dreyfus of history was a priggish but capable young officer in the French army.  He was also Jewish.  In 1894, in a case that divided the French nation, a military court convicted Dreyfus of selling classified information to Germany, degraded him in a dramatic public ceremony, and sent him to solitary imprisonment on Devil's Island, off the coast of Guyana.  The trial had been riddled with violations of due process.  Dreyfus defiantly proclaimed his innocence, and while he languished in prison his advocates (mostly members of France's beleaguered Jewish community) worked doggedly to clear his name and bring him home.  One of those advocates was Zola, an all-timer French novelist, champion of the downtrodden.  With a famous newspaper editorial entitled “J’Accuse”, Zola accused the military of railroading Dreyfus, of sheltering the real traitor, and of obstructing exposure of their injustices.  Zola was sentenced to a year in prison for libel, but in the end he was vindicated, along with Dreyfus himself.  It came to light at last that the case against Dreyfus was not just weak but utterly fabricated.  In 1899, in a preposterous attempt at face-saving, a court upheld Dreyfus' conviction but "pardoned" him, liberating him from Devil's Island.  After a few more years passed it became politically viable for the government to drop the pretense of guilt altogether: in 1906, Dreyfus was fully exonerated and restored to his post in the army.

     Zola also happened to be the author of the decomposing novel that TV Dreyfus had under his bed.  Perhaps because of that vivid memory, I'm kind of fascinated by this story.  So when a source I trust recommended Robert Harris’ L'Affaire Dreyfus novel An Officer and a Spy, I put all other reading aside and dove in (but only after thoroughly checking the book for ants).  Harris narrates the story not through the experience of Dreyfus himself but that of Colonel Georges Picquart.  A highly placed internal security officer in the French army, the Picquart of history was the reluctant but tenacious whistleblower who uncovered the injustices that Zola proclaimed in L'Aurore.  Harris chose well in building his novel around Picquart, as he was a player in the Dreyfus Affair from start to finish. We see him first as Dreyfus' military college instructor and a willing participant in his prosecution, later as a canny sleuth and an intrepid foe of corruption, willing to sacrifice his career and go to jail on behalf of a man he doesn't even particularly like (Harris gives his fictional Picquart the same muted anti-semitism as his real life counterpart).  Picquart's animating principle is duty, a conception of duty that puts integrity before self-preservation.  Don't try that "I was just following orders" stuff with Georges Picquart!  And because his investigation features all the classic espionage tropes - covert surveillance, secret meetings, coded letters, elaborately choreographed dropoffs of volatile documents, "Can I trust anybody?" paranoia, snooping for hidden files in a darkened office before time runs out -  An Officer and a Spy works not only as historical fiction but as a spy thriller.  The heart-pounding moment when Picquart realizes that the handwriting in an incriminating letter is not Captain Dreyfus's but that of Major Esterhazy (the real traitor) - it's like something out of an Mi5 drama.  

      Harris' novel entertains, but the story also speaks in a serious way to our times, as the Dreyfus Affair always has.  As Harris depicts it, the ease with which the French military frames Dreyfus owes a lot to straight-up bigotry, widespread and rampant.  The problem isn't just a few well-placed anti-Semites in the army.  Huge swaths of the public are all too ready to believe that Dreyfus' ethnicity alone is a sign of guilt. The case of the Central Park Five comes to mind. But there’s more. I also see a contemporary parallel in the insider nature of Picquart’s story.  He's a prodigy, a rising star in the French high command.  They clearly see him as one of their own and count on his loyalty when they promote him to head of intelligence.  Picquart has no motive other than attentive curiosity in revisiting the now-closed Dreyfus case, but once he smells something fishy there's no possibility of him looking the other way or calling off the dogs.  And when he finds the unpleasant truth he understands very well that to the men he serves it is a damning one.  It will make them look corrupt and incompetent.  But he hopes that when confronted with the facts they will swallow hard and accept that they have to do the right thing - duty and the good of the army demand it.  But they don't.  Instead, they double down on the bogus conviction, conspire to keep Picquart's findings concealed, and run him out of the country and eventually out of the army. Like Alexander Vindman and Liz Cheney, Picquart finds out the hard way that there are so-called leaders among us who may trumpet their patriotism and rectitude but who do not in fact love their country, or its institutions, or honor, or truth. The only thing they value is their own stature.    

     Picquart's ordeal was still very much on my mind when I watched The Teacher’s Lounge, the new German film about a scandal that entangles a passionate young teacher and her sixth grade class and much of the school staff.  Like An Officer and a Spy, The Teacher’s Lounge depicts the multiple blindnesses – some willful - that can afflict institutions as they fumble to resolve crises within their ranks.  In this case, attempts to solve a string of petty thefts expose problems of trust between teachers and students, between teachers and parents, between teachers and each other.  And there are issues of child development and institutional racism and coerced testimony and rogue surveillance and image-consciousness in schools.  There's even a crisis in student publications!  This old student newspaper advisor was really taken with that storyline.  And there were more aspects The Teacher's Lounge to compare with my own professional experiences. In my career I’ve seen multiple cases in which administrators and teachers (myself included) miscalculate in what they’re willing to make a big deal of.  I see that problem in this story.  These people have been to the Captain Queeg School of Prioritizing.   I also recognized in the main character, Carla Nowak, how a kind of professional vanity can be mixed in with what may appear on the surface to be pure teacherly selflessness.  But what struck me most of all is a setting choice the director made, one that evokes how all-consuming this work can be for some of us, some of the time: other than one very brief scene we never see Nowak outside of school.   It is as though she lives there, has no existence apart from her professional self.  There are multiple shots of her standing at her classroom window watching kids come and go, like some imprisoned person watching the world outside.   She's like the Dreyfus of my memory, chained to her desk instead of a bed.