Learning to Learn

So, I'm applying for a promotion, hoping to move up from a yearly contract as an lecturer with a huge course-load but no expectations or either service or scholarship to a tenure-track position as a professor of Foreign Language Education where the service and scholarship that I'm doing anyway will be more rewarded. It's an equally exciting and daunting prospect as I put myself up for, effectively, judgment by my peers.

A part of any application for a position is academia is defining your "Philosophy of Teaching," those basic principles that guide the crafting of lesson plans and assessment tools. For many years, this was a constant preoccupation for me as I revisited the pros and cons of what I had been doing and seeing what worked and what didn't. But, after 11 years of foreign language instruction (wow, more than a decade now...), I've really established some comfortable parameters, to the point that I pretty much copy/paste the same paragraph whenever my work comes up for review:

My philosophy of teaching has three major tenants: 1) respect the free-will of the student, 2) serve as a guide and a facilitator, 3) adapt to the needs of the student. Respect for free will is paramount in avoiding the “Atlas Complex,” which engenders little more than the parroting of preprocessed information. It further helps to convince the student of his capacity to learn through exploration, creativity and personalization. This relates as well to the second tenant of my philosophy: that instructors are most effective not behind the lectern, but amidst the students. My primary role is to structure activities, not to directly transmit information. The former allows the student to explore the material and adapt it to his own needs and interests; the latter squelches these practices. Finally, the most effective structures are adapted to the constantly-shifting needs and capacities of the student. These three components coexist in a cycle of testing, correction, implementation and critical feedback.

As I was reading this over, the last phrase struck me, particularly the idea of critical feedback, that need for self-reflection. Because, while my three main principles are solid, there are some underlying counterpoints that I'd like to take the chance to nuance.

I've had teachers like this; it's how I learned what not to do.

Respect the Free Will of the Student
This is more than a pedagogical approach for me; it's a fundamental ideology in life. As simple as it may be to state, and as appealing as it is in the abstract, it's a difficult line to walk, especially for a teacher. Part of the teacher/learner binary is an assumption of superiority/inferiority. On a certain level, it's true: I have a mastery of the subject that my students lack; not just in knowledge, but in skills. It's tempting, seemingly efficient, to simply transmit this knowledge in a top-down fashion: lecture, drill and assess student retention of cultural and linguistic information. However, cognitive theory and many years of experience demonstrate that this doesn't work. Students may be able to, in the short term, perform well on a test, but they quickly lose the general skill-sets and specific knowledge that the instruction is supposed to instill.

Instead, the acquisition - and retention - of the knowledge and skill sets that define a skilled language user actually requires a bit of trickery on my part. And this is where my professed "respect" for students' free will can seem to become suspect. Rather than a direct transfer of data, it's more effective to establish a goal (the more realistic and authentic, the better), and then show students some tools helpful for accomplishing that goal. The precise method of getting there is up to the student. There's a certain level of frustration and uncertainty inherent to this method. Some students don't respond well to this, especially as first. Conditioned by more hierarchical and discrete teaching methods, they feel lost, splashing about in a seemingly-infinite sea of possibilities.

Yet, eventually, they start swimming. Some are faster than others. Some have already taken a few lessons at the local pool; others just have a talent for the best stroke; still others just barrel through with sheer stubborn determination. But the end result is the same: a finished product of which they can be proud (whether that be a letter, or an oral presentation based on independent research of Parisian cybercafés, or the ability to conduct a meaningful, unscripted conversation with the professor), and a set of skills and knowledge that they have accrued on their own.

Be a Guide (not a Demagogue)
As you can see, the solution to the paradox of my first tenant is my second principle. Yet, this gives rise to another contradiction. If building assessments in an open-ended but helpfully structured manner best aids learning, it is best conducted with a interactive style that many find uncomfortable, even confrontational or hostile.

It's called the Socratic method. In some ways, it's a microcosm of my assessment approach. (You might begin to see that I don't really differentiate instruction from assessment; more on that later.) I prefer to ask questions rather than make statements. Indeed, each session in the classroom begins with a question; I call them démarrer questions, from the French term "to start up." It's a verb used with machines like motors or computers; the connotation is that something gets revved up, starts turning over and conducting power. These questions aren't necessarily the central idea of the entire session, but they have several purposes. First, they are a capstone of the previous night's homework. The questions are published in the syllabus and I encourage my students to prepare their responses to the démarrer question at the end of their work at home. Secondly, they induce the students to begin thinking differently, to jump-start the French parts of their brains that they need to be developing: the different sounds of French phonetics, the unique manners of syntax and the different ways of thinking that speaking in another language not only implies but needs. Thirdly, it provides a moment for formative feedback. A successful, correct response by the student in turn prompts a meaningful, encouraging response from me; an unsuccessful response to the démarrer question is a "teachable moment," where we can collectively highlight a discrete difficulty or address a misunderstanding of the specific grammar or vocabulary at hand.

Finally, the démarrer question models my typical approach to the rest of lesson, wherein rather than drill students on verb conjugation or lead them in choral repetition of vocabulary, I prefer to pose questions: "What's this? What's a synonym for this term? How would you respond in this situation?" These questions are rarely posed to an individual student, but to the class as a whole and creates an context of collective problem-solving, where the stronger students can feel a sense of accomplishment by leading, and the weaker ones can learn by the examples of their peers rather than from me.

Adapt to the Needs of the Student
This last practice leads to my final tenant. Using questions as the basis for lessons and crafting assessments that are authentic but with open-ended methods of completion allows me to keep a quick, constant pulse on how well my students are doing. It not just a matter of "Is their pronunciation correct?" or "Did they conjugate that verb right?" or "Did they use the best word for that idea?" These are important; but other questions are equally pertinent: "Are they asking the right questions of themselves?" and "Do they demonstrate initiative to reference outside resources?" and "Do they make useful connections between the various parts of the curriculum? Between their native culture and those of French speakers? Between French and the other language(s) they speak?" These are forms of my own self-assessment.

When the answer is "yes," then things are going well; I keep at it. When it's "no," it's time to step back and re-examine. It's time to pose more questions. "Why did they have difficulty with that exercise?" or "How can I make this clearer?" or "How can I modify the goal to make it more authentic?" These are the things that drive a constant continuum of refinement in my lessons as well as assessments.

Continuum
This is the crux of effective teaching for me: reflect, employ, assess, reflect again. It's the same process for both me and my students. The result, for them, is more than the ability to speak French, it's learning how to learn. For me, it's a never-ending puzzle, a constant progression that is adaptive by intent. It's learning how to help people become learners.

Cold Burn

Welcome (Lioret, 2009)
There's something significant about the synopsis on the DVD jacket from Netflix for this film:

When authorities forbid young Kurdish refugee Bilal (Firat Ayverdi) from crossing the English Channel to reunite with this girlfriend, the 17-year old resolves to swim to his love - and finds an unlikely ally in the form of swim instructor Simon (Vincent Lindon). Facing an inevitable divorce from his wife (Audrey Dana), the middle-aged teahcer takes the resolute youth under his wing in this stirring, beautifully acted French film.

After watching this, I can hear my graduate adviser's voice in the back of my head: "What makes this movie French, anyway?" The question maybe a poor one, but its answers are illuminating. It's a poor question because it shouldn't really matter if this film is French or not. Indeed, in many ways, it's more than that. Take a look at the the nationalities and ethnicities involved in this production: a French film with and Kurdish protagonist headed for England. Nothing like this would ever be made by an American mainstream production company. In fact, I think it would be difficult for an independent filmmaker to do. This movie is an example of a growing new trend: transnational cinema. And Welcome wears is polycentric outlook and composition on its sleeve. The polyphony of languages alone used in the film is dizzying. Its very existence is already an socially and politically engaged statement: "We are not only French, or Kurds, or Europeans; firstly, we are all people. Humans, together."


And this movie is a slow, burning indictment of the horrible things we do to each other in the name of social order and economic stability. The synopsis above is vague about just who those forbidding "authorities" are, and the movie is pretty cagey about it, too. But the clues are present, dropped casually here and there: five seconds of a Nicolas Sarkozy press conference, the understated aggressiveness as of the Calais police barge into Simon's apartment, the purely-business attitude of a lead detective investigating Simon's involvement with those in "situation irrégulière." (No one can match the French in their use of euphemism; the term means "illegal immigrant," but literally translates into "those of unusual situation, those who are unregulated," and hence, unchecked, outlaws, dangerous.)

But this kind of understatement is precisely what makes this movie French. It takes part in a long line of films à thèse whose central focus is neither narrative twists nor fancy camerawork nor spectacular special effects, but using characters as manner of sociopolitical critique. Welcome is chock full of engaging people. There's self-assured Bilal, once a soccer star in his native land, now a desperate outsider with only a whiff of a plan. Marion, Simon's ex-wife, is tender, engaged, uncertain and defiant at turns. She wants to do what's right by the hundreds of immigrants flooding Calais, but she wants what's best for Simon, which means staying out of her humanitarian work. Simon is existentially lost, hunting desperately to... do what? He's never entirely sure. Win his ex-wife back? Give his life meaning through charity? Regain a sense of masculine bravado by defying the law? Just do the right thing? Their stories, as they weave together and apart, are filmed simply, in the most unassuming manner. Save for a few travelling shots and deliberate point-of-view takes, the camera is stable, at eye level, the narrator as invisible as possible. It reminds me of something Chabrol said about his 1984 Une affaire de femmes : "C'étaient des gens simples. Il fallait les filmer simplement." (These were simple people; they needed to be filmed simply.)

Welcome does take a while to get its feet under itself. It's twenty minutes into before we even see Simon, who eventually becomes the true protagonist, and it's a solid fifty minutes before I felt properly engrossed. But Lioret's work rewards patience, and attentiveness. Taking a card from Pierre Melville's deck, scenes often jump right to the heart of the important part; there is no exposition;  characters don't catch each other on what just happened. The film takes for granted that you were watching two minutes ago. I love this about French films, a quality that is so often missing in American ones.

Coupled with a clear, but never directly stated, agenda to indict the French crack down in illegal immigrants (including detention centers, police raid, tear-gassing French citizens and illegal search and seizure), this intelligence is what gives Welcome its cold burn: that slow, creeping, ironic sense of heat you get from swimming in cool water too long, from the Channel winds nipping at your exposed skin. It becomes sharp and hot, like the indignant rage you feel when a young man nearly accomplishes the nearly impossible, swimming alone across the Channel, only to drown 800 meters from shore, chased down by the coast guard.

IMDB | Movie Website | Interview with the director

Resurrection, Return, Reconnoiter.

I have a good friend with a very different view of the universe. (To be fair, I have many friends, each with their own engaging takes on things; but I digress). For this first friend, today is the New Year: 1 October. Forget all of that January nonsense; traditional New Year's resolutions all come unraveled and are not but dusty detritus by February. Now is a much better time to turn over new leaf as the old ones transform into a riot of color.

I've been plowing the same row in many ways for a while now. Life has been comfortable in its foreseeable patterns. And dust has collected on the shelves that once saw an ever-changing cavalcade of books from history to cinema to poetry and a few CDs to boot. Cobwebs have formed in my synapses, and I feel sometimes like I've reached that point where I need to let it ride or get off the boat and start swimming. (I like to mix metaphors).

That all sounds very dramatic. It's not so much. I just need a Swerve. So maybe I'll start with some Lucretius. What I am starting with this morning is Marian Calls' new album, Something Fierce. And it is fierce, and vulnerable and beautiful. (And I'm not a little glad to have finally found some music that my wife will like, too). It's everything good about music, being a geek and a feminist all in one place.

This place wants for a plan. I'm big about plans and to-do lists. Building this skill helped me survived grad school and makes sure that I can juggle 100-odd students plus lesson plans plus committee meetings plus research each semester. (The latter's been sliding lately; this little corner of the web is a small corrective to that.) So here's the plan and I want you all out there to hold me to it:

1. I'm going to write here three times a week. (That's a minimum, there may be more, but let's start small). Monday, Wednesday, Friday sounds nicely symmetrical. 
2. I'm going to write about movies and teaching and music and poetry. I know all of these things very well in different ways. You can see some of my older writings already lying about. 
3. I'm going to use this space to hone my writing towards concision and engagement. The subjects I write about will keep me current in a couple of fields that are important to me. 

Some things to know about me.

• I like big words. 
• I have a tendency towards prolixity.
• I like hyperlinks and the connections that they both literally and figuratively make. 
• I'm going to use the "f" word a lot. No, not that one. I am a  feminist. Third wave. Big fan of Ani DiFranco and Erin McKweon and Hélène Cixous.
• I might write about other things. Like the TV shows I love or the latest thing on NPR that strikes my fancy.

Ça suffira.

More French Class, s'il vous plaît

RE: Jim Motter's Guest Column in the Opinion Section of the July 6, 2009 Atlanta Journal Constitution

I fully sympathize with the plight of Jim Motter's son, and Mr. Motter's frustration with the state of foreign language instruction in today's public schools. However, Mr. Motter denigrates French as an “increasingly irrelevant,” while he gives Latin a pass because “this ancient language is an essential component of a 'classical' curriculum.” Without prioritizing French over Latin, let us note the double standard here: how is a dead langauge possibly more relevant than a tongue spoken today by more than 320 million people around the world?

Mr. Motter asks “What is the payback to Georgia from the study of French?” While French may no longer be the prestige language of the 19th and mid-20th centuries, it is still spoken today by peoples on 5 continents. A brief list: in North America, Québec, a province of the United States' number one trading partner; in South America, French Guyana; in Europe (beyond the obvious): Switzerland, Luxembourg and Belgium; in Asia: Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam; in Africa: Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, Mali, the Ivory Coast, Benin, Chad, Cameroon, Gabon, and Rwanda. Few of these may be considered economic powerhouses today – but thirty years ago, neither was China. So, to begin with, there is a tremendous pool of contacts across the world. 130 million people speak French as a primary language and fully 190 million more speak it as a fluent second language: 320 million Francophones is larger than the population of the U.S..

According to the Georgia Department of Economic development there 293 French businesses in Georgia, dealing with everything from telecommunications to cotton. More than 35 local Georgia businesses have operations in France, including Coca-Cola, Delta Airlines and Invesco. As a professional in the biosecurity field, perhaps Mr. Motter has heard of Louis Pasteur, and more importantly the Paris research institute that bears his name? The Atlanta Chapter of the French/American Chamber of Commerce was a partner of the recent Paris Air show.

This is merely the economic argument, and it seems that the “payback” to Georgia for students proficient in French is already quite substantial. Yet Mr. Motter's language casts the entire affair in a economic light. French is also a vibrant language of culture and artistic expression, far beyond the “art songs of Gabriel Fauré.” French and Francophone cinema is amongst the most accomplished in the world. Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie and A Very Long Engagement were just as popular in America as in France; Gillo Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers was screened by the Pentagon to help assess new strategies in the Iraq war. French philosophers and novelists continue to inspire people on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond.

All of this to demonstrate the vitality of the French language today. However, Mr. Motter's letter reveals a much more systematic and indeed sinister problem in our public education system: our disregard for foreign languages and cultures creates a zero-sum game when it comes to funding. As a foreign language teacher, I am fully sympathetic to the plight of Mr. Motter's son. He should be able to take German in high school – but why must this be at the expense of the French program?

Beyond the zero-sum bind in which public schools find themselves (and which conversely, they sometimes embrace to safeguard their pet projects), Mr. Motter's argument relies upon the idea of utility, specifically the perceived economic usefulness of a language. But his specific case leads us to a more global scale – literally. Without a doubt, the world's economic centers have shifted since the 1960's when Mr. Motter was in high school – and they will undoubtedly continue to shift. This is a why a broad and robust foreign language program should be essential to our public education system. Language courses do more than give students tools to communicate, they provide invaluable perspectives on other ways of thinking, on a plethora of cultures and practices. These courses sensitize students to the diversity of the world today and give them a better chance to interact positively with its inhabitants, whether they be from Berlin, Shanghai, Atlanta or Paris.

Les Croix de bois

After a harrowing brush with death defending a cemetery - of all places - the staunch if fatalistic Sulphart composes a grim tune : "Oui, tu l'auras ta croix / Si ce n'est pas la Croix de Guerre / Ce sera la croix de bois." This moment encapusilizes Raymond Bernard's 1932 film about the Great War: the dire circumstances of les poilus and their attemps to come to terms with the absurdity of their experience. Song is an important part of the French soldiers' lives, which oscillate wildly between drunken merry-making (that are more desperate than jovial) and fatal, oppressive artillery barrages in the wastelands between the trenches.

For contemporary audiences, Les Croix de bois doesn't bring much of anything to new to our knowledge and understanding of either World War One or historical filmmaking in general. Works such as J'Accuse! (Gance, 1919), All Quiet on the Western Front (Mileston, 1930), Un long dimanche de fiançailles (Jeunet, 2004) and Paths of Glory (Kubrik, 1957) are better known and take more innovative approaches to the unprecendented horrors of the Great War. Content-wise, Les Croix de bois provides what had already become fixtures of the era on-screen: the filth of trenches, the hyprocisy of the aristocratic officer corps, the out-moded insanity of tactics and the desperate oscillations of hope and despair amongst the troops. Neither is their much to say about Bernard's cinematography. Aside from some dramatic tracking shots and hand-held camerawork that lend battle scenes a sense of urgency, the superimposition special effects seem to be either a non-sequitir in this otherwise very realistic movie, or incompletely realized - especially in comparison to the earlier J'Accuse! or the poetic Un long dimanche de fiançailles.

Nonetheless, it is illuminating to consider Les Croix de bois in the historical context of its creation and original release. Firstly, in 1932, very few French films had dealt with the still-fresh trauma of the Great War, which had decimated nearly a quarter of the adult male population and laid waste to vast swaths of the northeastern countryside. Also during this time, class tensions were high in France, and Bernard's film anticipates the pro-proletariat attitudes of the Popular Front by focusing on the clearly working-class foot soldiers. An interesting note is the quasi-sympathetic depiction of the German soldiers (again, through song), which in early works had been thoroughly demonized. Again, all of is much better treated in other films, notably Renoir's Grande Illusion (1937).

Les Croix de bois does include some laudable elements, notably in its realistic reconstruction of life on the front and the focus on the trials and tribulations of the common poilu. The hand-held camera work and rapid tracking shots of the battle scenes were rare at the time and their visceral nature certainly influenced later cinematic treats of war. There are some moments of elegaic poetry: protagonsit Demachy's visit to a comrade's grave, his prayer to the Virgin Mary ("We just want to survive"), langquid establishing shots of the desloate no-mans-land. These are occasional but heart-wrenching moments. Additionally, the ending is remarkable, even for the French who are more accostumed to unhappying endings: tragically (and with excruciating slowness) killing your protagonist is a dramatic statement about war's absurdity.

However, the tone of this ending is part of what's not quite right with the film: the obvious switch from location shooting to a studio set, the almost risible pacing and the non-sequitir superimpostion soliders (both French and German!) marching to their graves, each with a literal cross to bear. It's not over the top, in fact, it's insufficient, especially when compared to the expressivity of Jean Renoir's fluid camerawork and striking characterization or Abel Gance's visual reworkings of 19th-century poetic tropes that have the dead marching not to their graves but back home. Thus, Les Croix de bois may have had a certain influence on later war films (one can see direct borrowings in Paths of Glory), it remains a work of secondary importance.

Dominus In Absentia

Suddenly, Last Summer (Mankiewicz, 1959)

Gore Vidal's adaptation of Tennessee William's one act play is a powerful investigation of memory, trauma and, of all things, lack, the power of an absence. The only son of southern grand-dame Violet Venable, the ghost of Sebastian Venable haunts nearly every moment of this movie.



I don't mean "haunt" in the paranormal sense. There are no deep shadows, eerie apparitions or other tropes of horror films. Rather, it is the obsessive memory of Sebastian that confronts us at every turn. Sebastian is never seen, not completely. At the end of the film, at best, we get his white silk suited silhouette, but never his face, never his undeniable presence.

And there are some impressive actors present. Katherine Hepburn delivers a portrait of a grieving mother with overtones of crippling loss, incest and a meandering poetry that both fascinates and deeply disturbs. Elizabeth Taylor plays the confused and persecuted Cathrine Holly with understatement in most scenes, which makes her near-psychotic breaks all the more compelling. Keeping a firm anchor in this sea of (let's be honest, rather misogynistic) female insanity, is Montogmery Clift as Dr. Cukrowicz, with a calm and analytical performance. His character is a surgeon, but his role is more sedative - like the one he administers to Catherine before the penultimate scene.

With such a pantheon of actors all bringing their A-game to Williams's dense play, it is no surprise that the focus is mostly upon words. Evocative metaphors abound in sprawling monologues, images some times half-glimpsed, some times brightly conjured, that dance about the real problem: the deceased Sebastian.

It is his absence that is the true motor of the plot, of Catherine's supposed insanity and Mrs. Venable's real psychosis. His name appears everywhere, and his description varies from character to character as the movie slowly builds the complex portrait of a son, a poet, a philosopher and a manipulative gigolo. This ever-present absence is also felt in the few artful touches of the director: the occasional skewed frame, the swelling music, the over-the-top garden at the Venable estate. When Sebastian's figure finally makes an appearance, we only see him from behind, through the haze of superimposition - through Catherine's drug-induced and traumatic memory recall.

Sebastian's ghost brings ambiguity and polycentricity to this otherwise realistic and straightforward work. He is many things, but nothing. The idea of him raises more questions than answers. This is the greatest strength of the film: fearless ambiguity and terrifying ambivalence. Ultimately, the movie breaks down the artificial barriers between reality and memory and reveals the detritus left behind in the act.

Wages of Fear

Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la peur), Clouzot, 1953

On one hand, one could critique several things about Henri-George Clouzot's multinational adaptation of Georges Arnaud's novel. It would be generous to call the characters two-dimensional; they are types more than people. The feral Linda (Véra Clouzot) is as a misogyntic a depiction as they come, Bill O'Brien (William Tubbs) is an underhanded corporate suit, barely a step up from the thug he used to be, and only Mario (Yves Montand) and Jo (Claude Vanel) show any kind of development - all of it downhill. No one is likeable: a libidnous café owner, thieves, expatriates and thugs are the only people that live in the hell hole village of Las Piedras. The plot is episodic, especially the last act, in which four desperate men encounter a series of improbable obstacles on an impossible mission to deliver nitroglycerine over a barely-tamed South American countryside. The final scene is gratuitous; it seems almost tacked on to nail home the film's nihilism.

On the other hand, it is important to approach this masterful thriller in the appropriate frame of mind. If Hitchcock were a Frenchmen, this is the kind of movie he would make. Le Salaire de la peur isn't concerned about realistic drama or storytelling. The psychology of the characters is of use only to propel them into impossible positions where they confront that greatest of existential bogeymen: the absurdity of death. This movie is an existential allegory par excellence and its derives its power from two things: its conventional weaknesses mentioned above and a paradox of improbable plot and the ontological effect of cinema.

Mario isn't even a villain - he's neither that important nor ambitious, merely a former thief and con-man with no scruples stuck in the middle of nowhere. At no point is he a sympathetic character: he uses his lover to steal cigarettes and then beats her, he befriends the newcomer Jo and eventually runs over him with a truck, he betrays his friend and roommate, Leo, just for Jo's tenuous friendshp. Nonetheless, as he skirts death again and again during the nitroglycerine run, we more than feel for him - we fear for him. Clouzot achieves this with great cinematography. There's nothing fancy about the cutting or the camerawork, but rather what the director puts in front of the camera: a multiton truck half-dangling over a cliff or a breakneck run over a washboard road with 5 tons of nitro on board (while barreling towards another truck just ahead). Everything about the episodic final act is unforgivingly taut, and the strain on the characters translates to the audience. This movie is exhausting.

This engaging cinemtography transforms the character types and thin plot from lamentable to allegorical. The walled-off Southern Oil Company is a thin stand-in for the French Colonial Empire, or post-war American mercantilism, or brutal Stalinism - take your pick. The rag-tag dispossed of Las Piedras are you and me pared down to the ugly interiors we try to hide. There's nothing romantic about any of this, just abstracted to the point of art and allegory. Le Salaire de la peur is bleak, but it doesn't use that to lead us to suicide but rather some poignant philosophical meditation. Exiled from everything we ever knew, our leg broken, half-drowned in oil and carting tons of explosives through a barren wilderness, what would your dying thoughts be? Jo remembers the Parisian street he used to live on, the passers-by, the shops and cafés - and the fenced-off lot at the corner. What was behind the fence he wonders?

"Rien. Il n'y a rien."

There's no moral to this, and there's no hope, either. You run through the wilderness at 40 miles per hour with tons of TNT in back just for a few bucks and in the end you blow up, you bleed out or you drive off the cliff on the way home. In other hands, this story would become a heroic tale of redemption, down-on-their-luck Joes give taking their one shot and proving their worth. And that would ruin it, cheapening the underlying critiques of corporatism and tunnel-vision that plague our world even today.