film the wave

A high school teacher's unusual experiment to demonstrate to his students what life is like under a dictatorship spins horribly out of control when he forms a social unit with a life of its own.
- IMDb.com

When Rainer Wegner, a popular high school teacher, finds himself relegated to teaching autocracy as part of the school’s project week, he’s less than enthusiastic. So are his students, who greet the prospect of studying fascism yet again with apathetic grumbling: “The Nazis sucked. We get it.” Struck by the teenagers’ complacency and unwitting arrogance, Rainer devises an unorthodox experiment. But his hastily conceived lesson in social orders and the power of unity soon grows a life of its own.

In probing the underpinnings of fascism, The Wave is far from a social-studies lesson. As with his previous film, Before the Fall, director Dennis Gansel fashions an energetic, gripping drama that cuts through superficial ideological interrogatives and goes straight for the veins--the human psychologies and individual behaviors that contribute to collective movements. In unpeeling the emotional layers and contradictions of his characters (the need to belong, to be empowered, to escape social distinctions), Gansel offers a humanistic perspective on the terrifying irony that these students may welcome the very things they denounce.

And lest we too easily dismiss this cautionary tale, it’s noteworthy that the true story that prompted Todd Strasser’s novel The Wave (from which the film was adapted) did not take place in Germany, but at a high school in Palo Alto.
–Sundance Film Guide

Pr: Vero Bollow
CoP: Miguel Sánchez
Ed: Vero Bollow and the Igar Yala Collective

I have a soft spot for society in a microcosm stories, ones where a small group of people stand in for the rest of us, and where we see social and political ripples going through them. Think Lord of the Flies, or Das Experiment. The Wave is another film in that tradition, based on a supposedly true story but of course gussied up a bit in the name of dramatic license. The real experiment, in which a teacher tried to explain fascism to his high school class by implementing it, happen in Palo Alto California in 1967; The Wave is set in Germany in the modern day, and the change of location offers a brand new layer of depth and meaning. Sadly, the film insists on smashing the audience over the head with that meaning.

I liked The Wave, despite the fact that it was brutally obvious and painfully didactic. Besides being a sucker for society in a microcosm stories, I'm a sucker for high school movies, and it turns out that German high schools today are indistinguishable from American high schools, down to the Zoo York hats. The movie is well made, filled with attractive young actors and if I was 16 years old it would have blown my mind.

The Wave is essentially Fight Club 90210 in German. Punk rock teacher Rainer Wenger gets stuck teaching autocracy during 'special project week' when he had wanted to be teaching anarchy. Despite the dull subject - and a general lack of interest on the part of the students in revisiting the evils of a Germany two generations removed - the class is packed full because everybody loves Rainer. When the students insist that modern Germans could no longer fall for a dictatorship, the teacher decides to prove it to them indoctrinating them into fascist thought and practice.

The story, which sees the kids go from skeptics to fanatically loyal white shirt wearing members of 'The Wave' (every fascist group needs a name, uniform and salute, and The Wave has all of that), takes place over the course of a week. Some of the critics at my screening were having a hard time buying this, but I feel like a week is an epoch in high school time. You can fall in love, become part of a new subculture, have your heart broken and become part of a completely diametrically opposed subculture over the course of a week in high school. Plus the true story apparently took place over just five days, instead of the expansive six in The Wave.

The Wave begins as just a class, but soon students from all over the school are joining in. Like Tyler Durden's Space Monkeys, the entire thing gets massively out of hand with lightning speed. Rainer, meanwhile, finds that he kind of likes the adoration from the members of The Wave, and besides, there's a lot of good coming out of the whole project - slackers have become attentive students, misfits have begun to fit in, enemies have found common ground. Of course some of the students see the inherent evil in The Wave and begin a campaign to end the group; since every step of the story is dead obvious, the only real tension in the movie is waiting to see if this will be the kind of film where the students turn violent against their opponents or not.

The plot isn't the only obvious point; as soon as each student is introduced it becomes wildly evident which role they'll play in the story. Which kid is going to take the whole experiment too seriously? Which kid will become the muscle? Which kid will use the unity of The Wave to move in on someone else's boyfriend? Duh. If the film wasn't as well made as it is, the whole thing would be torture, as you'd just be waiting around to get to the point, all while sitting through characters delivering speeches straight from a high school civics text.

The biggest bummer about The Wave is that it doesn't address the most interesting issue that it raises; at the end, as the whole experiment is spiraling out of control and must be shut down, one student says that The Wave has brought some good things, and it's hard to deny that. The film just blows past this point, though, and I feel like it doesn't make a strong enough argument against the fascist system. Ask anybody who has been in the military what they think about an autocratic system and they'll likely tell you how it shaped them into the person they are today. There are aspects of the ideology espoused by The Wave - especially the idea of unity as strength, a basic tenet of all political and social movements - that make a ton of sense. The other place where the movie drops the ball is that it doesn't give enough time to the fact that the teacher is approaching autocracy from a left wing perspective, instead of the usual right wing angle. There's a great argument to be made about how the left can just as easily lean to dictatorial overkill as the right (and you'll find lunatic bloggers claiming that Bill Clinton et al already did this), but The Wave sort of skirts it.

I liked The Wave because it hit a couple of my sweet spots. It seems like a movie that could be easily remade for American audiences (in fact, if dubbed films played anymore it could be released dubbed and inattentive viewers might never even realize it was set in Germany), but I don't think that would be ultimately any more successful than the original. It's hard for me to recommend The Wave to anyone unless they share my own particular partiality.