"Educating Rita"
Director: Lewis Gilbert
Screenwriter: Willy Russell
Released: 1983
With Julie Walters, Michael Caine, and others
Rita (Julie Walters) is a twenty-six years old hairdresser from Liverpool who
has decided to get an education. Not the sort of education that would get her
just a better job or more pay, but an education that would open up for her a
whole new world--a liberal education. Rita wants to be a different person, and
live an altogether different sort of life than she has been living so far.
She enrolls in the Open University, a government program that allows non-traditional
students to get the kind of higher education that used to be reserved more or
less for the offspring of the upper classes, and mainly for male students at
that. "Educating Rita" describes the trials and transformations that
the young hairdresser has to go through to develop from a person with hardly
any formal schooling at all into a student who passes her university exams with
ease and distinction. In the course of telling this story, the film also suggests
what the ultimate purpose of a liberal education may be.
The story is presented in the form of a comedy, a comedy that revolves around
the personal and pedagogical relationship between Rita and her main tutor, Dr.
Frank Bryant (Michael Caine). Frank Bryant teaches comparative literature, and
it is his job to prepare Rita for her exams. Unfortunately, Frank Bryant has
lost all enthusiasm for his academic field and its related teaching duties.
He loathes most of his regular students, and the main function of the rows of
classical works that still fill the bookshelves in his office is to hide the
whiskey bottles without which he is not able to get through the day and the
semesters anymore. When he teaches his regular classes he is frequently drunk,
and in response to a student's complaint that students are not learning much
about literature in Bryant's class, the burned-out teacher gruffly advises:
"Look, the sun is shining, and you're young. What are you doing in here?
Why don't you all go out and do something? Why don't you go and make love--or
something?"
Frank Bryant is a disenchanted intellectual who has no real use anymore for
literature, culture, or the life of the mind. Introducing working people in
particular to the world of higher education seems utterly pointless to him.
When he finds himself assigned as the primary tutor for Rita he remarks to a
fellow-instructor: "Why a grown adult wants to come to this place after
putting in a hard day's work is totally beyond me." He himself would much
rather go to a pub than spend the evening instructing some disadvantaged student.
When Rita appears at Frank's office for their first tutorial session, however,
the two take a sort of liking to each other. Rita is bright, vivacious, charming,
and good looking to boot. "Why didn't you walk in here twenty years ago?"
Frank exclaims. He is twice her age and looks somewhat disheveled (like a "geriatric
hippie," as Rita puts it), but he impresses his new student by his irreverent
humor and easy-going manner. Trying to deflate her respect for his seemingly
impressive academic accomplishments, he says: "I am afraid, Rita, that
you will find that there is much less to me than meets the eye." To which
Rita replies: "See, y' can say dead clever things like that, can't y? I
wish I could talk like that. It's brilliant." In spite of Frank's initial
attempt to excuse himself from his assignment and to repair to a pub, he eventually
gives in to Rita' s pleading and agrees to be her instructor.
Frank wants to know why Rita has "suddenly" decided to get an education.
She has a secure job, after all, and there is no pressure on her to enroll in
a program of higher education. Rita answers that her desire is not sudden: "I've
been realizin' for ages that I was, y' know, slightly out of step. I'm twenty-six.
I should have had a baby by now; everyone expects it. I'm sure me husband thinks
I'm sterile. He was moanin' all the time, y' know, 'Come off the pill, let's
have a baby.' I told him I'd come off it, just to shut him up. But I'm still
on it. See, I don't wanna baby yet. I wanna discover myself first. Do you understand
that?"
Frank says that he understands, but he is never quite convinced that he is doing
the right thing in turning Rita into the kind of person who is acceptable to
and approved by the academic world. He fears that too much of her original charming
personality will be destroyed in the process. The comical paradox of the situation
is that Rita desires exactly what Frank does not value anymore: the clever speech
of academics, the culture and tastes of the upper classes, and an escape from
the trivia of down-to-earth life into a realm of ideas that seem more significant
than the preoccupations of ordinary people. The things that Frank appreciates
these days, Rita already has in overabundance: spontaneous feelings, a unique
personality, and a solid grounding in the unpretentious world of basic work
and simple pleasures. While in the coming weeks and months he succeeds in teaching
Rita how to read and analyze literature in a scholarly way, and to express her
insights in well-argued essays, Frank never loses the nagging feeling that he
is deforming Rita as much as he is educating her. What slowly emerges as a result
of his tutorials, as far as he is concerned, is not Rita' s true self, but a
pretentious mask and façade that may be desirable for a certain class
of people, but that are hardly worth the sacrifices that Rita is making in order
to acquire them.
Rita' s progress in her academic education does not come easy. The main obstacles
she faces come from her working class background and her husband Denny. Denny
has very traditional ideas about the social role of a good woman. He does not
only fail to support her educational efforts, but even obstructs them wherever
he can. He feels--not without reason--that he is slowly losing control over
his wife, and he bitterly accuses her of thinking that he and her family are
"not good enough" for her anymore. Rita s father sides with her husband.
For one thing, he nastily chides her for not having produced any grandchildren
for him. Indeed, almost everything in her environment seems to conspire to keep
her where, according to conventional wisdom, she belongs. The smoldering marital
crisis comes to a head when Denny discovers that Rita is still on the pill.
In a rage he burns her papers and books, and eventually he confronts her with
the ultimatum of either "packing in" her studies for good, or of being
kicked out of her home and marriage.
Rita decides to continue with her education, but it takes all her strength and
courage to cope with the consequences. Her scholarly work is still far from
adequate, and she still feels like an inferior stranger among regular students
and the academic crowd. On the other hand she has already moved too far away
from her old environment to be able to return to it. Once drawn into the orbit
of such writers as Shakespeare, Ibsen, and Chekhov, she cannot get too excited
anymore about such things as sampling different brands of beer in the corner
pub, or happily singing along with the tunes of the jukebox. Having moved out
of her old world, and not having arrived yet in a new one, Rita feels alone
and at a loss. As she explains to Frank: "I can't talk to the people I
live with anymore. An' I can't talk to the likes of them [the academic crowd],
because I can't learn the language. I'm a half-caste."
By making an utterly determined effort, however, Rita finally improves the quality
of her academic work to such a degree that Frank can rank it on a par with the
work of the regular students. Other students are beginning to respect and admire
her opinions in literary matters. Rita also moves in with Trish, a cultured
young woman who introduces her to people who listen to classical music, read
and discusses serious books, and sport the sort of clothing and entertainment
that distinguish them from ordinary folks. And when Rita comes back from summer
school in London, Frank finds that she has made much more progress than he had
expected. Other teachers take an interest in her, and she has gained an independence
of judgment that allows her to converse freely about topics that used to intimidate
her by their strangeness and complexity. Nobody doubts that she will pass her
exams, and most people would agree that Rita has achieved what she had set out
to achieve: she has acquired an education.
Yet, something is not right with what she has achieved. While Rita revels in
her accomplishments and newly found self-confidence, Frank is visibly unhappy
with what Rita has turned into. "What does it profit a man if he gaineth
the whole of literature, but loses his soul?" he rhetorically wonders on
a couple of occasions. When Frank, somewhat drunk, openly expresses his skepticism
about the ultimate value of Rita' s new state of mind, however, she blows up
at him: "I'll tell you what you can't bear, Mr. Self-Pitying Piss Artist.
What you can't bear is that I am educated now. What's up, Frank, don't y' like
me now that the little girl's grown up, now that y' can no longer bounce me
on daddy's knee an' watch me stare back in wide-eyed wonder at everything he
has to say? I'm educated, I've got what you have an' y' don't like it because
you'd rather see me as the peasant I once was. … I don't need you anymore.
I've got a room full of books. I know what clothes to wear, what wine to buy,
what plays to see, what papers and books to read. I can do without you."
"Is that all you wanted? Have you come all this way for so very, very little?"
Frank replies. "Oh it's little to you, isn't it? It's little to you who
squanders every opportunity and mocks and takes it all for granted," Rita
shoots back. She is not about to see the culture disparaged for the attainment
of which she has expended so much effort. But Frank continues to chide her:
"Found a culture, have you, Rita? Found a better song to sing, have you?
No--you have found a different song, that's all. And on your lips it's shrill
and hollow and tuneless. Oh, Rita, Rita…"
Rita, to be sure, has good reasons for being weary of Frank's remarks, for Frank
has been deteriorating at almost the same rate as Rita progressed with her education.
His bouts of drunkenness have increased in number and intensity, and he has
displayed signs of a petty and immature jealousy as Rita became intellectually
more independent and socially more curious about other people. As with her ex-husband
before, the issue of control has clearly become a problematic issue in Rita'
s relationship with her teacher. Nevertheless, Frank's admonitions are more
justified than Rita can see at the moment. And it is indeed the less than impeccable
conduct of Frank that gives substance to the dim view that he takes of higher
education. For Frank himself is a primary illustration for the fact that an
academic education in itself may mean little or nothing. Frank's command of
words and literature, his ability to participate in the cultural life of society,
and his position at the university are indeed little more than a hollow façade,
a façade that masks a dismaying and profound emptiness in his actual
life.
Frank used to write and publish poetry. His work was well received, and a good
number of readers still think highly of it. Rita and Trish praise it as witty,
profound, and brilliant. But Frank has nothing but contempt for it: "This
clever, pyrotechnical pile of self-conscious allusions is worthless, talentless
shit…" For a while he had tried to save in himself the feeling of
creating significant work by consuming increasing amounts of alcohol, but by
the time of his encounter with Rita he has lost all faith with regard to the
value of his, or anybody else's, artistic endeavors. In his mind, education
and culture are not expressions of a higher or deeper wisdom anymore, but pretentious
exercises in futility. In spite of the high regard in which official society
seems to hold education and culture, he cannot find any compelling reasons to
support them. He simply does not know anymore why they should be so important,
or why they should be more esteemed than the working class culture from which
Rita struggled to free herself. Their supposed value may in the end be nothing
but a prejudice. That is what he tried to tell Rita at the time when he suggested
that she had better find another teacher for herself: "Everything I know--and
you must listen to this--is that I know absolutely nothing."
What happens to Rita's friend Trish also casts doubt on the value of education.
Trish is an enthusiast of high culture. When Rita first introduces herself to
her as a possible room-mate, sounds of a Mahler symphony are blasting through
the apartment, and Trish keeps exclaiming admiringly: "Wouldn't you die
without Mahler?" Trish was the one who brought Rita together with people
who "talked about important things"--classical music, theatre, and
all the events that constitute a cultured life. But one day Rita finds Trish
unconscious in their apartment: her friend has tried to kill herself with an
overdose of sleeping pills. After Trish is brought back to life at the hospital,
Rita asks her: "Why?" Trish explains that she always seemed to feel
alive when classical music was playing, or when poetry was being read. But whenever
the music or the poetry stopped, "there was just me. And that is not enough."
In the end Trish's education was as much a mere façade for her inner
emptiness as it was for that of Frank. The enthusiastic celebration of such
things as classical music or poetry by itself did not really provide her with
a genuine and fulfilling life. In the midst of her educated companions and their
cultured life she still felt disappointed and deprived.
Rita has to learn at the end of the movie that the culture and education that
she has acquired with the help of people like Frank and Trish does not necessarily
amount to the rich new existence that she had hoped for when she enrolled in
the Open University. She has to understand that the life of cultured people
may not be a real life at all, but rather a sort of substitute life--a series
of preoccupations and activities without any deeper or meaningful purpose. Rita'
s over-all education, in other words, consists of two parts. The first part
is the learning of all the things that cultured people are expected to be in
command of: articulate speech, knowledge of classic literature and music, important
quotations and literary allusions, and so forth. The second part is recognizing
that all this may mean little in itself, that a learned academic may essentially
be as lost or impoverished a person as anyone without any formal schooling.
Only after acquiring her academic training and recognizing its potential meaninglessness
has Rita become a true graduate.
In one of their last conversations Rita acknowledges that Frank had been right
when he seemingly belittled her academic accomplishments: "You think that
I just ended up with a load of quotes and empty phrases; an' I did. I was so
hungry. I wanted it all so much that I didn't want it to be questioned. I told
y' I was stupid." After thinking things over, however, and after having
had a chance to take a closer look at the actual lives of people like Frank
and Trish, she can see now that higher learning has to be questioned, and that
seriously questioning it is an indispensable part of any liberal education worthy
its name.
It is one of the subtle ironies of "Educating Rita" that quite generally
the film seems to say much more against education than for it. At first sight,
of course, the film is the success story of a young woman who overcomes all
sorts of obstacles and who triumphs in the end by passing her academic exams
with distinction. (Hollywood blurb writers routinely describe such uplift stories
as "triumphs of the human spirit.") "Educating Rita," however,
avoids such hackneyed optimism by emphasizing not only Rita' s success, but
also the possible hollowness of the education and culture into which the young
woman has worked her way.
A skeptical view of Rita' s academic accomplishment is persistently alluded
to throughout the film, not only by the noteworthy unhappiness of Frank's and
Trish's lives, but also by the theme of false appearances that runs through
the entire story. The rows of classic books that hide Frank's whiskey bottles
are introduced early on as an important and revealing leitmotif. The motif suggests
that quite generally not everything is well behind the grand facades of the
neo-classical buildings that dominate the campus of the University--that there
really is "much less than meets the eye." Repeatedly we are shown
the prominent wall of the auditorium inside which students attend lectures and
take their exams, a wall that appears to be solid masonry, but which is in fact
painted wood into which hidden doors have been cut. Fitting into such a tromp
l'oeul decor, the two colleagues with whom Frank has personal relationships
are not only somewhat pompous philistines, but they also try to deceive their
friend by carrying on an amorous affair behind his back. Indeed, Rita herself
may be said to partake in the culture of false fronts by assuming the name "Rita"--after
Rita Mae Brown, the author of Ruby Fruit Jungle whom she greatly admires at
the time of her enrollment in the Open University. Rita' s original name is
Susan, and she eventually returns to that name once she comes to feel that her
name change was an unworthy pretense. All the little deceptions and pretenses
presented in the film are but so many hints at the possibility or even likelihood
that the world of education and culture may not be nearly as sound and worthy
as it is generally taken to be.
One might want to object to the film's negative characterization of culture
and higher education by pointing out that not all educated or cultured people
are as burned out or troubled as Frank and Trish, or as pompous and hollow as
some of the other academics that appear in the story. One might want to say
that an education can be misused as a screen for an otherwise empty life, but
that it can also be put to some authentic and profitable use. And if Frank's
poetry is indeed as bad as he says it is (the viewer of the movie never gets
to hear any of it), that does not necessarily mean that all poetry or all culture
would be of such dubious value. The film's persistent focus on false pretenses
and hollow facades, in other words, may encourage a facile over-generalization.
It is important to see, however, that Frank's disenchantment with education
and culture represents more than some sort of personal failure. His critical
attitude toward his academic environment is, in fact, nothing less than a necessary
philosophical challenge to certain widely held assumptions. It is no coincidence
that Frank speaks like Socrates when he warns Rita that he does not have anything
to teach her: "Everything I know … is that I know absolutely nothing."
It was Socrates who first introduced to the West the idea that all basic assumptions
ought to be questioned, and that such questioning has to start with a humble
admission of one's own ignorance. "I know that I do not know" stands
as a central piece of Socratic wisdom--in contrast to the smug self-confidence
with which most people take their commonly held assumptions for granted. Halfway
cultured people keep thinking that high culture is good, and educators keep
telling students that a liberal education is a most worthy goal to strive for.
Frank wonders whether that is really the case. Unlike his more complacent colleagues,
he does not take the truth of these assumptions to be self-evident. On the contrary,
he sees a good number of reasons for doubt--and thus for philosophical inquiries.
Frank focuses on the problem by pointing out, for example, a difference that
he sees between "poetry" and "literature." In Willy Russell's
stage play "Educating Rita," on which the movie is based, Frank tells
Rita: "Instead of writing poetry I spent--oh--years trying to create literature."
And he declares categorically: "Poets shouldn't believe in literature."
What he means is that genuine poetry is an expression of real life, not an attempt
to impress a literary establishment. Genuine poetry is a response to problems
and conditions that involve all important and pressing aspects of human existence.
When poetry is truly creative it devises not just new and clever ways of saying
things, but provides the reader with new visions, with new ways of understanding
the entirety of life. Poetry, as Frank sees it, is not just sophisticated rhetoric,
but a deep inspiration that affects our passions, our knowledge, and everything
we do in the world. Literature, by contrast, is merely a cultural institution,
a domain in which academic specialists concentrate on the primarily formal and
aesthetic aspects of the expressions of life. Within culture as an institution
there is an inevitable tendency to focus more on the forms of expression than
on what is expressed; questions of form become more important than content.
When the Bible, for example, becomes mere literature, it loses most of its power
to offend or inspire; when Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address or King's letter
from the Birmingham jail become specimens of fine speaking or writing, political
struggles and real suffering recede into the background. For cultural establishments
literature and high art become their own purpose, and the classes that support
the institutionalized arts are not moved anymore by the disturbing questions
and events that once inspired great works, but function more as expert consumers
who delight in the aesthetic texture of things.
This is not to say that it is always wrong to be concerned with form. There
have been times and situations when the explicit pursuit of the aesthetic was
an important and meaningful project. Militant aesthetes like Oscar Wilde or
radical "formalists" like Wassily Kandinsky had important points to
make. Nevertheless, there is a clear danger that art for art's sake and culture
for culture's sake degenerate into variations of vapid entertainment that are
ultimately as pointless as they are narrow-minded. It is this sort of institutionalized
aestheticism, this sort of isolation of culture from the whole of life that
Frank dislikes when he says that real poets should not believe in literature,
and when he remarks that "there is more wit in the telephone book, and
probably more insight," than in his cleverly crafted and highly cultured
verse. If by his instructions he had achieved nothing more than the transformation
of Rita from a traditional working class woman into a sophisticated consumer
of refined culture goods, he could not but conclude that he had not only alienated
her from her true self, but had also disconnected her from the depth and truth
of real life.
The Socratic disposition to radically test and question all commonly accepted
assumptions pertains not only to specific phenomena like cultural establishments,
but ultimately also to life as such. The matter comes up when Rita has her first
real experience with serious drama. She finds herself so moved by seeing Shakespeare's
Macbeth that she has to tell Frank about it during an impromptu visit. In Russell's
play (unfortunately not in the film) she does not only relate her excitement,
but also recites a key passage of the tragedy, a passage that reveals a philosophical
dimension in Macbeth's desperate thoughts:
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing.
The philosophical importance of these words lies in their suggestion that the
entirety of life may not be as grounded, meaningful, and important as it is
commonly assumed to be. People may be passionately involved with each other
and in their various pursuits, but if looked at from afar all their urgent pronouncements
and activities may not have any more significance than the ephemeral performances
of actors on a very temporary stage. Beyond this stage there may not be anything
but a great nothingness, a nothingness that comes into view for Macbeth when
he approaches the end of his tragic career. It also comes into view for the
viewer of Shakespeare's drama, and that is one of the reasons why Rita' s experience
of Macbeth is a crucial part of her education. Macbeth' s despairing vision
puts human existence into philosophical perspective. It presents life as something
that is not simply to be lived, busily and thoughtlessly, but as something that
needs to be wondered at and examined. It needs to be made sense of in the way
Socrates tried to make sense of it by his persistent questioning. Rita is brought
into this philosophical frame of mind by vividly experiencing Macbeth's haunting
vision. By having a glimpse of an overwhelming nothingness she can see how deep
a mind has to go before it can hope to make sense of anything.
The idea of education that emerges from the film is one that emphasizes wonder,
doubt, and critical investigation: Radical and insisting questioning is ultimately
not something negative and destructive, but the very precondition of a true
life. No creativity or advancement would be possible without skepticism and
denial. Culture and education themselves would stagnate and degenerate unless
subversive minds were allowed to do their work. Civilization would turn into
dogmatic and repressive barbarism unless its very foundations were called into
question—repeatedly, passionately, and with utter sincerity. Negation,
as Hegel so famously advertised in his philosophy of dialectics, is the indispensable
precondition for anything positive.
There is, of course, no negation without something that can be negated; an empty
mind is not capable of any significant doubt. Rita had to acquire a great deal
of learning before she could even begin to raise serious questions about anything.
Education is the necessary precondition of its own deconstruction. Still, the
film's main emphasis is on raising doubts, on overcoming established conditions,
and on the hope of finding new ground. It celebrates leaving behind, the dying
of the old, and the forging of a new self out of the fragments of discarded
worlds. It leaves the viewer and the protagonists of the film cheerfully facing
a creative void.
At the end of "Educating Rita" Frank is sent to Australia; his conduct
at the University is not tolerated any longer. Australia was, of course, the
former penal colony where England sent her convicts, mostly victims of the social
conditions that racked the kingdom's lower classes at the time. Frank's reassignment
is a comical encore of those earlier exiles. His exile and demotion, however,
is entirely alright with him. It is a welcome way of saying good-bye to the
worn-out culture for which he has no more use, and it accords with his fondness
of the working-class culture that he finds more genuine than the world of the
academics against which his drunken bouts are in part a rebellion. Australia
is a New World. Proposing to Rita that she go with him to this new beginning,
he points out that "in Australia everything is only just starting, while
in England everything is ending." It would be the ideal completion of Rita'
s education if she left everything behind, her limiting old working class life
as well as her newly acquired bourgeois culture. It would be a radical new start.
Rita declines the invitation, but in essence she embraces the same idea: a new
kind of existence that lies beyond the old forms of life. By having overcome
the limitations of her old world through education, and by recognizing the limitations
of what she has acquired at the University, she finds herself in the same situation
as Frank: in some sort of existential Australia where "everything is only
just starting." She has choices to make, and it is her having grown beyond
the old forms of life that gives her the freedom to make these choices. This
in the end is the essence of her education, and the essence of any liberal education
as such: the knowledge-based ability to step back from all forms of life, the
capability to deliberate freely, and then to embark on a course of action that
does not grow out of established patterns and unexamined impulses, but out of
critical reflection and informed decisions. What Rita thanks Frank for at the
end, and what has made him a "good teacher" during all her trials,
is that he has helped her to get into this position: "You have given me
a choice." Education, in other words, is liberation. It is the emancipation
of a person from a state of being a mere extension of a given environment to
an active agent who can choose who she or he will be: a potential creator of
his or her own world.
From Jorn K. Bramann: Educating
Rita and Other Philosophical Movies
Mill: Culture and the Satisfied Pig
Bramann
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