Teaching is one of the most challenging professions; a lot is expected of teachers, they have many tasks and people they’re responsible to, and working with students can be a mixed bag, both rewarding and vexing. Each age group presents its own challenges: elementary students can be hyper and difficult to manage, middle school students are in the awkward stage of the changes, and high school students can be apathetic and more intimidating now that their bodies are closer to maturity. Here’s a secret about teachers: they talk about their students with other teachers; they share horror stories about nightmare students, and there are even some students they absolutely despise. While there are students that teachers detest, a teacher would most likely not try to run them over with a car, saw their arm off, or set them on fire. By the sounds of this, it’d seem that the teacher was the twisted one, not the students. But after watching the teenagers in theClass of 1984,whose mothers might havewell been named Rosemary, enacting violence on the punk gang from hell feels completely justified.
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‘Class of 1984’ May Cause All the Rage
WatchingClass of 1984is a rage-inducing experience. It’s a film that leaves viewers rooting for the demise of a group of high school students at Lincoln High. The film,released in 1982, begins with a warning: “Last year there were 280,000 incidents of violence against teachers and their classmates in American high schools. Unfortunately,this film is based on true events. Fortunately, very few schools are like Lincoln High…yet.” The premise is a new music teacher, Andrew Norris (Perry King), takes a job at a troubled inner-city school. Andrew has taught before, but not at a school like this. The students have to pass through metal detectors (which wasn’t as common in the ’80s) and the security guards are unable to keep up with all the students bringing weapons into the school. Andrew befriends a biology teacher, Terry Corrigan (Roddy McDowall), who drinks on the job and comes to school armed. It’s extreme but so are some of the students. It doesn’t take long for Andrew to realize he’s not in Nebraska anymore. His first class is met with turbulence — most of his students are good kids who enjoy music, but a group of misfits is a disruption from the moment he walks into the classroom. Immediately, the troublemakers test Andrew’s authority and make the class anything but an environment conducive to learning. The other students also loathe the recalcitrant punks, but most are afraid to stand up to them because of their threatening behavior.
Eventually, Andrew forces them out of the class. What he doesn’t realize is that by standing up to them, he became their number one enemy, a teacher who finally won’t overlook their baleful attitude. The punk groups consist of five: Fallon (Neil Clifford), Barnyard (Keith Knight), Drugstore (Stefan Arngrim), Patsy (Lisa Langlois), and Peter Stegman (Timothy Van Patten). Stegman, brilliant but depraved, is the leader. The gang’s activity goes beyond typical troubled youth; in addition to being drug suppliers to their school, they also run a prostitution ring. The gang is respected in the city’s punk scene where hedonism runs into the early hours of the morning. Members of the group wear swastikas and display other attributes of Nazis. And, of course, the gang is racist, which is exemplified during a turf war with another gang composed of Black members. At Lincoln High, the punk gang may not be the only students who cause trouble, but they’re certainly at the top of the food chain.
‘Class of 1984’s Gang Takes It Too Far
The gang’s drugs cause one student to unintentionally kill himself in front of the entire school. Andrew knows the gang is the one who sold the deceased student the drugs, but when he goes to the principal and even the police about his knowledge of the gang’s activities, he is met with apathy and technicalities in the law that protect the gang. The principal (David Gardner) refuses to effectively deal with the gang and doesn’t take Andrew seriously because he didn’t see the gang sell the drugs to the student even though they all know (Andrew, the principal, and the other students) that the gang was behind it. Furthermore, the principal sees all the students as bad even though the ones causing serious problems are just a small number, a point that Andrew makes to him.
The police also won’t do anything. Since they’re all minors, the officers insist that their hands are tied despite the gang members having records, some as serious as rape. Andrew embodies the kind of person who becomes a teacher to reach students, and he won’t abide a gang endangering the students and teachers any longer, and the gang knows this. The gang discovers Andrew’s address and begins to torment him; at first, it’s juvenile, but it quickly graduates to arson and even rape. They want to destroy anyone who’ll dare to stand up to them. In fact, they even have a student, Arthur (Michael J. Fox), stabbed because they think he’ll tell the authorities about their drug dealing. But one teacher is willing to take on that fight.
The malicious behavior of the gang also includes threatening students and even murdering Terry’s beloved laboratory animals and making a grotesque display of their bodies across the lab. They’re more than just misguided youth, they’re evil.
“Kids These Days” Is Not an Excuse
Class of 1984feeds into the ever-constant fear of the younger generations. The “kids these days” ethos is felt throughout the film. In the beginning, “I Am the Future” by Alice Cooper plays — “Take a look at my face, I am the future/How do you like what you see?” Students are seen graffitiing the school and shoplifting. “Is this what the future will become?” the film asks. But what many forget or fail to realize is that every generation is dealt skepticism and scorn for older ones. People complained thatGen Xwas too apathetic and nihilistic; to some,millennials whine too much and are entitled; now people complain that Gen Z is too political and “woke.” Every generation faces its own unfair descriptors from older ones that also had negative things said about them from the generations before them. It’s a never-ending cycle of “kids these days,” even though, for the most part, the kids are alright. But that still doesn’t mean thatClass of 1984wasn’t somewhat prescient.
While most students are good kids burgeoning into their lives, school has become far less safe. Like inClass of 1984, some students bear responsibility for the unsafe conditions that going to school has become. But the bulk of the failing, like in the movie, falls on apathetic adults. School shootings have become more common and more deadly since 1982, but the adults who have the power to change it won’t. The principal inClass of 1984is a stand-in for supine leadership. He looks likeRepresentativeTim Burchett, in the wake of a shooting at an elementary school in his state, saying “We’re not going to fix it,” in regard to enacting meaningful legislation to curtail gun violence. The principal could also be compared toTexas GovernorGreg Abbottsaying “It could have been worse,” when talking about the Uvalde school shooting that left 21 people (19 students and two teachers) dead. And he can even look like the school leadership atRichneck Elementary School in Virginiawho ignored concerns about a student that went unheeded until he shot his teacher.
‘Class of 1984’: The Anti-‘A Clockwork Orange’
Class of 1984bears a striking resemblance to a movie that came out a decade earlier:A Clockwork Orange. But unlikeA Clockwork Orange, which is told from the villain’s point of view,Class of 1984doesn’t frame its own evildoers as misunderstood. Instead,Class of 1984is a warning against apathetic, sluggish government in the wake of people being harmed.
Stegman andClockwork’sAlex (Malcolm McDowell) are similar boys: they’re both intelligent, they both have an appreciation of music, they drive around with their gang, they’re the leader of each of their gangs, their parents are disengaged from them, and they both flout authority.Clockworktries to bring viewers to sympathize with or at least understand Alex, as if he’s a mad genius we can’t look away from.Class of 1984, while acknowledging Stegman’s potential, doesn’t dare entertain the idea that this guy who commits vicious crimes is somehow a misunderstood mirror to society — he and his cohorts are evil, and they must be stopped. In many ways,Class of 1984is the anti-A Clockwork Orange. InClockwork, when Alex and his crew gleefully rape a woman, it’s made out to be dark humor, as if it’s maddeningly enoughinviting us to laugh along with them. When Andrew’s wife, Diane (Merrie Lynn Ross), is raped and photographed by Stegman and his gang inClass of 1984, it’s shown for what it is: a horrendous, brutal crime. When Andrew is brought the photograph during a music recital by the gang, the film begins to resemble another classic movie.
Just as he is about to start the recital, Andrew is shown the photo. He abandons the stage where he is about to conduct the orchestra and goes after the gang members to put an end to their evil. In doing so, he reacts just how they wanted him to. While chasing each of them down, they at first manage to attack him. However, he’s able to turn the tables, and, one by one, picks off each gang member until there’s only Stegman left, and he gets the ending he deserves. The rape-inspired revenge plot where each person who participated in the rape is killed is similar toI Spit on Your Grave—a movie where a woman is raped by a group of men but survives and goes on tokill each of themone by one. Both movies have endings that are viscerally satisfying.
“Do You Know Where Your Children Are?”
Class of 1984is also a warning against apathetic parenting. Stegmans’s mother refuses to believe that her son is dangerous in spite of him having been kicked out of different schools. He’s out into the late hours of the night, and she shows no concern. But when Andrew tries to tell her about her son’s behavior, she yells at him and believes her son’s lie that Andrew attacked him.
But for all the madness and anger the film can conjure, it ends on a triumphant note: we have the power to overthrow tyrants. Most of the students at Lincoln High live in fear of the gang and simply try to avoid being targeted by them. The terrible five ruled the school at the expense of everyone else being able to truly flourish. Stegman and his lackeys viewed themselves as the gods of their world and lorded over all. But all it took was one person not willing to stand aside and watch them cause any more harm. While tyrants never abdicate their power willingly, when there is the willpower to topple them, their reigns can end. And sometimes their demise might even culminate with a crashing end for all to see.
