Greg Whiteley’s 2007 documentary on debate as she is practiced in the high schools today is entertaining and smart, and maybe that’s all you need to know. Following the exploits of two schools/teams, one from well-off suburban Texas and the other from an underfunded public h.s. in Long Beach, the film engages all our narrative expectations about the role of the underdog–even refers to such expectations early on–and then goes in other directions. These two teams never meet, and that failure to meet is illustrative of both a central thesis (about the systemic relations of class and privilege to this activity) and the film’s own sly wit. We get a film about underdogs winning and one about underdogs losing. And in both cases the film is clearly valuing these showcased participants while also clearly more interested in the subculture and its relation to the broader culture.
You may not realize that debate, as she is practiced now, resembles an abstract chess game of formal rhetorical/logical rules performed by breath-gulping-speed-reading auctioneers. (I had read the excellent Cross-X by Joe Miller, but even without any prior knowledge, Whiteley provides a crash course in the technique and form of debate that is quite masterfully concise and easy to follow, a bit of brilliant editing and narrative design.) The movie sets up two central dilemmas, both intriguing. 1, how do high school misfits find a voice and home (and competitive purpose, and intellectual engagement) through this subculture? (And following the smoking goateed Sam and earnest youthful Matt, two guys who are marginalized even among the marginalized, Whiteley gets to have his underdog story even when everyone is kind of an underdog.) 2, how do public high schools with far more racially- and class-differentiated populations come into this subculture, if at all? Following two other, equally-charismatic and charged debaters (Richard and Louis), Whiteley engages not just a story of competition but a social-institutional critique.
Both sections are riveting, and fun. Highly recommended.
I haven’t said enough here about the critique: it is less Whiteley’s than Richard and Louis’ critique — they deploy Paolo Freire and attack the structure of discourse itself, and they’re fucking sharp. I wish there was more footage of their arguments. All of us out there still teaching some version of Comp might find the film’s points about discourse and argumentation really useful….
This is well worth watching, if only to get a glimpse of one of the more bizarre subcultures of American high schools. I especially liked the way the documentary explored Mike’s point #1, about the kinds of kids who find a voice in debate, and how they themselves fit uneasily into the mainstream of their schools. You get a clear sense of what Richard and Louis have to battle against within their own schools and families to participate in debate, and also the way that debate offers an unusual road to college out of weak urban high schools. Both in fact get to good colleges, one on an explicit debate scholarship.
But the documentary loses its way for me in the last half hour when it becomes fully engaged in the cause of Richard and Louis, a cause it never challenges. And I suppose I should add that I think it engages in an intellectual bait and switch. What begins as an argument against an arid formalism, becomes first an argument for debate as transformative of society, then an argument for the identity and experience of the speaker being more important than fact or logic, and finally a straight critique of debate as under-representing minorities. Contrary to Mike’s viewing of the documentary, I thought we saw a lot of Richard and Louis’s arguments (certainly more than those of Sam and Matt), but regardless of the subject-matter of the debate, the argument was always exactly the same: identity trumps argument. The Freire material about education as an act of self-emancipation was deployed as little more than window dressing for the repeated appeal to identity.
In fact, the pair are remarkably successful, winning the California State Championship, a couple of lesser invitationals, and going a long way in the Berkeley invitational. But by the end, the viewer is urged to agree with Louis that any defeat is a reflection of ingrained racism. Their personal success becomes the measure of how far debate culture can be changed. Every round of debate is invested with a broader significance that the documentary never justifies or challenges.
That is a really sharp, interesting critique. And I think you nail the documentary for its limits, its constriction into a less-clearly-defined and reductive analysis. (I think the book I reference unsurprisingly does a far better, fuller, more complicated job with such ideas.)
But I wonder if it opens up some really intriguing other ways to read these issues. First, I wonder if identity politics or the racism card they toss isn’t the equivalent of the nuclear option so many other debaters deploy. The movie touches on this, perhaps too quickly, but in the more formal approach to the new speed debate a key method to succeed is to tag the other side with causing the most sweeping kinds of destruction. So even a policy argument on an innocuous topic often ends up leading to (say) famine and mass death, or (yes) nuclear war. Debaters apparently use the nuclear war option A LOT, as a formalist exclamation point. And it works, as they suggest in the film, A LOT. It’s rather silly, but effective: once the other side is accused of setting in motion a chain of events that lead to destructive/bad X, they MUST counter it–no matter how ridiculous that slippery slope may be. What Richard and Louis deploy is an argument that, in such a competition, is quite equivalent. An unnuanced assertion that the other side’s argument can NEVER be anything but racist is, ironically, a formal analogue (switching the exaggeration from an end result–my opponents’ argument will lead to destructive X–to an origin–my opponents’ argument begins in destructive X). Rather than getting outside the system, as they believe or claim, they are using the tools of the system, its structures and habits, to shift the ground so that they are always in the right.
Second, even if logically their position produces the reductive identity-politics claims you make, couldn’t we still say that such claims are in this case true? Doesn’t an ingrained racism pervade not just the formal system of logic but the messier practical systems of education and opportunity in which debate occurs? Richard and Louis are indeed remarkably successful. They are also–and perhaps the film doesn’t underscore this as fully as it should–remarkably anomalous. This may be race-related, or rather race-related insofar as it reflects how race and class are imbricated. The film’s pretty clear-eyed about how various kinds of privilege allow access to debate, and how such access produces more kinds of privilege. (Louis and Richard do okay, but their school’s debate program is shut down at film’s end. I wish there was more systemic analysis, but it gets buried in the personal stories.) How on earth–as debaters–could you address such systemic disadvantages? Pulling out the racism nuclear option seems to me a limited argument, but it reflects almost the only channel of communication/argument they have open to them to make such a case.
So reframed in terms of context–whether the context of formal argument which often relies upon exaggerated claims OR the context of social access which limits who debates as well as how debate happens–in terms of context, isn’t their identity-centric approach a sophisticated and effective one? (Perhaps rather than seeing them as identity-politics-centered, could we instead say that identity politics is an efficacious stance given the rhetorical context in which these debates occur? That rather than crude identity politics, we see a fairly sophisticated rhetorical stance?)
Very smart, especially the analogy of the use of the race card to the nuclear option. And clearly, from an instrumental perspective, it works pretty well. I think that is what ultimately pissed me off. By the end of the Berkeley invitational, all pretense of debating has disappeared, and Richard and Louis were effectively mau-mauing (to borrow Tom Wolfe’s racially-inflected phrase) their largely white opponents and judges with the obverse of a claim of white privilege: vote for us because it is a blow against racism; it shows you oppose racism.
Absolutely, race (and class, though that is largely buried in the documentary, or race is made a proxy for class) pervades the debate activity. It does so in the same way that race pervades the entire educational system in the US. Of course, black kids in inner city public high schools have vastly fewer chances of participating in debate as an organized activity than their white counterparts in affluent private high schools. The debate program is closed down at Jordan, but then we can safely assume that the same is true of every major extra-curricular or vaguely optional program other than sport: art, mock trial, model UN, power of the pen….
The documentary needs to make the case, it seems to me, that there is something specific to the grammar of debate that is inherently racist, that goes beyond the anticipated consequences of unequal resources. That is where the Freire argument is deployed, and where it seems to me that it operates as sophisticated window dressing for the identity politics argument. In truth, nothing that Richard or Louis say is something we haven’t all heard (those of us who teach in colleges and universities), often in identical language, from our students for the last 20 years. We reach the absurd position near the end of the documentary with Richard arguing that any debate that relies on knowledge of facts is racist, and one of their opponents is forced into defending his argument about the coast guard on the grounds of personal experience: he owns a boat!
I also thought it was interesting that Richard and Louis win the State Championship in 2005 using more or less traditional debate techniques — i.e, playing by the debate rules — but by 2006 they are deploying the identity/purpose/method approach. I wonder why they changed.
Responding to the last bit first: I think Richard and Louis changed out of a genuine, Freirian rejection of the structures. I buy their–and their debate coach’s–intense critique, the sense of personal transformation they felt in shifting to this other argument. I think the way it pans out, perhaps unsurprisingly, is far less deconstructive than they might want, and (I’m sold on your critique) certainly than the filmmakers seem to know. (It is interesting to think about how the film is a pretty clear case study of how identity politics might arise, even how it might serve many personal *and* social benefits, but how it doesn’t truly or substantively engage with the systemic problems it ostensibly tackles.)
I still recommend the film enthusiastically, but I do think a potentially great opportunity for an entertaining critique of systemic issues fell into the kind of underdog stories the doc initially, with a wink, challenges.
It’s interesting how hard it is to make an institutional critique without losing focus, shifting blame to things like individuals or formal logic or ways of knowing or what-have-you. There is a case to make about the deadening formalism of these debate structures, and perhaps even a case to how such formalism helps to reproduce inequitable systems (like any kind of cultural capital, eh?). But you’re dead right: there’s nothing inherently racist about the form, and the film ironically shifts substantive attention away from the systemic problems and onto a mcguffin. Maybe makes for a better story?
Given this discussion, I think I’m even *more* interested in throwing this out in one of my writing classes… and to our pals here at WLTW, I do think you’d enjoy/engage with the film.
Don’t get me wrong: I enjoyed the documentary a lot. Anything that I spend 90 minutes arguing about, and then large parts of the next day rethinking, is worth while. I watched it with Jay, who is about to be a sophomore in high school, and heavily invested in mock trial. Mock trial is different, but it has its own set of rules and norms, and ‘Resolved’ forces you to confront those rules, even if you eventually decide to endorse them. I hate to be corny, but this documentary is a perfect teaching tool. I wish I taught something for which it would be appropriate.
Time for a mid-career switch.
Okay, I got nothing to add, except I just watched Ji-Woon Kim’s The Good, the Bad, the Weird — it’s not available on Netflix, it’s as best I can tell yet to be released in the states (beyond festivals), but I bought it on Amazon — and it’s the summer film we all wish had come out. Funny, energetic, gloriously shot. Good god I think I’m going to go watch it again.
I just went to Amazon and it said “ships within 1-2 months.” Did you get it more quickly than that?
I got it in two days. Hm. Well, I’d be happy to loan you my copy? I think Jeff wants to see it, and then we could pass it around to interested parties…
I’ll buy it. I just wondered about the length of time advised by Amazon.