"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.