Half Nelson

Introduction

Half Nelson (2006) is a film about a popular, young, White teacher named Dan Dunne, who has been teaching eighth-grade history for at least six years at a junior high in Brooklyn, New York. Dan has a passion for teaching and he cares deeply about his students (most of whom are African Americans), and he forms a peculiar relationship with one of his students, a thirteen-year-old girl named Drey (short for Audrey). (McCann, p. 102)

I will analyze the film's representation of the teacher in terms of two main clichés of the “teacher savior” film. First, I will explore the way Half Nelson radically departs from the cliché of the ahistorical cinematic educators who appear in the teacher savior genre. Then, I turn my discussion to the other main cliché that the film partially subverts, which is that Half Nelson does not offer a one-dimensional representation of an educator who is an unquestionable figure of moral authority, which is the case in all such “teacher savior” films.

Discussion

Drey's identification of “Prisons” is straight out of Althusser's definition of RSA. According to Althusser, Repressive State Apparatuses refers to State's function by violence, where repression and administrative repression may take non-physical forms. Furthermore, Terrance identifies “White” (which Dan also calls “the Man”) as another part of “the machine” that keeps people from being free. He might be said to capture the kernel of a critique that argues that all of the institutions which the Repressive State Apparatus contains, are controlled by a White power structure that has owned and run this country since its beginnings.

Althusser (1971) came up with another apparatus: Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs). These apparatuses are entirely related to the area of public, (Althusser, p. 124), and they incorporate churches, culture industries, media, political parties, the educational system, and other such institutions. ...