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The advantage of writing and editing is that at any time you can stop what you're doing and walk around the block, or have lunch, or take a phone call, or go dig in the garden and think. At any particular moment, the editor has the freedom to interact or not interact with the material. You can always step away and let the subconscious do some work.
When I write a script, I lie down—because that's the opposite of standing up. I stand up to edit, so I lie down to write. I take a little tape recorder and, without being aware of it, go into a light hypnotic trance. I pretend the film is finished and I'm simply describing what was happening. I start out chronologically but then skip around. Anything that occurs to me, I say into the recorder. Because I'm lying down, because my eyes are closed, because I'm not looking at anything, and the ideas are being captured only by this silent scribe—the tape recorder—there's nothing for me to criticize. It's just coming out.
That is my way of disarming the editorial side. Putting myself in a situation that is as opposite as possible to how I edit—both physically and mentally. To encourage those ideas to come out of the woods like little animals and drink at the pool safely, without feeling that the falcon is going to come down and tear them apart.
In any film scene there's a petitioner and a grantor, a weaker character and a stronger. Otherwise you don't have a scene. It may be obvious what the power relationship is, or it may be hidden from one or even both of the characters themselves. So at each moment in every scene there is a dynamic between two people that can be expressed in many ways.
In making a film you're trying to get the most interesting orchestration of all these elements, which, like music, need to be harmonic yet contradictory. If they're completely contradictory, then there's chaos. It's like when instruments are tuning up before a performance, you can't make anything coherent out of it. It's a fascinating, evocative sound, but only for about fifteen seconds. If, on the other hand, all the instruments play the same notes—if they're too harmonic, in other words—yes, there's coherence, but I'm bored after a few minutes. Just as bored as with the chaos of tuning up.
The growth of growth requires a different kind of person, one whose abilities, skills, emotions, and even sleep schedule are in sync with their role in the economy. We hear a sweetened version of this fact whenever politicians talk about preparing young people for the twenty-first-century labor market, and a slightly more sinister version from police officers and guidance counselors when they talk about working hard, flying right, and not making mistakes. It’s tough love, and young Americans are getting it from all sides. This advice is uncontroversial on its face, but its implications are profound. In order to fully recognize the scope of these changes, we need to think about young people the way industry and the government already do: as investments, productive machinery, “human capital.” If people have changed as much as other engines of productivity have over the past three or four decades, it’s no wonder the generation gap is so significant.
A hard look at these trends suggests that Millennials represent the demographic territory where a serious confrontation has already begun: a battle to see if America’s tiny elite will maintain the social control they require to balance on their perch. It’s not an arrangement they’ll let go of without a fight, and they have a lot of guns—figurative and literal. Political reforms seem beside the point if the next generation’s hearts and minds are already bought and sold. Millennials have been trained to hold sacred our individual right to compete, and any collective resilience strategy that doesn’t take that into account is ill-conceived, no matter how long and glorious its history. A regular old political party with a social media presence is insufficient on its face. No one seems to know what we—with all our historical baggage—can do to change our future.
This sort of intensive training isn’t just for the children of intellectuals; the theory behind the rhetoric advocating universal college attendance is that any and all kids should aspire to this level of work. College admissions have become the focus not only of secondary schooling but of contemporary American childhood writ large. The sad truth, however, is that college admission is designed to separate young adults from each other, not to validate hard work. A jump in the number of students with Harvard-caliber skills doesn’t have a corresponding effect on the size of the school’s freshman class. Instead, it allows universities to become even more selective and to raise prices, to populate their schools with rich kids and geniuses on scholarships. This is the central problem with an education system designed to create the most human capital possible: An en masse increase in ability within a competitive system doesn’t advantage all individuals. Instead, more competition weakens each individual’s bargaining position within the larger structure. The White House’s own 2014 report on increasing college opportunity for low-income students noted, “Colleges have grown more competitive, restricting access. While the number of applicants to four-year colleges and universities has doubled since the early 1970s, available slots have changed little.”15 Still, the Obama administration remained undaunted and continued to champion universal college enrollment, as if we even had the facilities to handle that.
[...] In a culture that increasingly rewards only exceptional accomplishment, any disadvantage or challenge can seem like a disqualification. One mom told Francis that because she had expected her son to star on the football team, his ADD diagnosis made her feel the way a parent who had expected a “normal” child must feel upon hearing a diagnosis of Down syndrome.30 It’s an insensitive comparison, but there’s something revealing in the equation: A hypercompetitive environment sets parents up for dreams of champion children, and then for almost inevitable heartbreak. Millennials of all abilities have grown up in the shadow of these expectations, expectations that by definition only a very few of us can fulfill.
Using the data carefully and anxiously prepared by millions of kids about the human capital they’ve accumulated over the previous eighteen years, higher education institutions make decisions: collectively evaluating, accepting, and cutting hopeful children in tranches like collateralized debt obligations that are then sorted among the institutions according to their own rankings (for which they compete aggressively, of course). It is not the first time children are weighed, but it is the most comprehensive and often the most directly consequential. College admissions offices are the rating agencies for kids, and once the kid-bond is rated, it has four or so years until it’s expected to produce a return. And those four years are expensive.
You can’t talk about contemporary higher education without talking about money, which is fine, because only fools are even tempted to try. Between 1979 and 2014, the price of tuition and fees at four-year nonprofit US colleges, adjusted for inflation, has jumped 197 percent at private schools and 280 percent at public ones, accelerating faster than housing prices or the cost of medical care or really anything you could compare it to except maybe oil.1