Much of the social detachment that the film highlights comes from the absurdity of trying to foster growth in mechanized schools. The out-of-control students’ rebellion mirrors rather than challenges the surrounding ugliness. But if Detachment blamed the school system for all of the characters’ pain, the film would just be preachy. This amazing piece of art explores all of our slow daily deaths.
But while institutions do not cause our existential dilemmas, a day at the DMV will show you the connection between systems and death.
Frances Alice Kellor (1873 – 1952) was a asocial scientist and educational theorist. And while the system caused Detachment’s educators to simply worry about State test scores, Kellor promulgated systems that took the human element into account – that sought to combat the very lethargy and mood of Kaye and Lund portray.
“Some women are abnormally sensitive and introspective or morbid, and live too much on the subjective side of life” Kellor noted in her book Athletic Games in the Education of Women.[i] Detachment exposes just these sorts of brooding states. Kellor called these states “feminine” and sought to combat them by getting women involved in action via sports. In a phrase, “When down do!”
Basketball instills the aggressive characteristics Kellor found feminine girls lacked. Among the desired characteristics were focus, energy, and initiative. And, the newly constituted active female would have mastery of herself. “All forms of ball-playing, from simple chase-ball up to basket-ball,” Kellor wrote in 1901, “require self control.”[ii]
In trying to make women as effective as marines, Kellor could be said to mirror one of the systemic traps that Detachment poetically shows us. In the film, exterior goals remove all internal values and feelings. Brutal self-control for the sake of a goal can kill.
But from her earliest sports writing, Kellor insisted on the “play-spirit.” This coach never wanted her girls to become “too hard and business-like.”[iii] Eerily predicting Detachment, she wrote that without the “play-spirit” humans were “a machine, which without its operator either runs amuck or becomes a mere automaton.”[iv] And, on Detachment’s very subject, she worried that “the growing commercial spirit in education institutions so hurries students that they have no time for games.”[v]
By way of a cure, Kellor enthused that sports “Seem to awaken a spirit of play and fun which brings a level of healthy excitement to even the most sluggish natures.”[vi] Yet, insightfully, she held that even in sports, “The play-spirit is yielding to the work-spirit and the loss of individual play spirit has not yet found its counterpart in the proportionate increase of the group play-spirit.”[vii]
We can see herein that Kellor promoted a complicated nuanced vision of play that deserves analysis. And, if we wish to use social systems, such as sport, to enliven people, we would do well to investigate the values that competition and other structural trappings our sports and other endeavors tend to cultivate. If nothing else, Detachment should encourage such discussions.
Kellor’s greatest notoriety came from leading the Americanization movement. From 1906 – 1921 this movement greeted immigrants and attempted to assimilate them into our national fiber. This systemic confrontation with alienation parallels took on the sort of alienation Detachment depicted, only on a national level.
While other’s brand of Americanization sought to make immigrants conform culturally, Kellor Americanized via having immigrants and long-term Americans work collectively on progressive reform efforts. Thus, quite literally, her Americanization work became a direct analogy to team building in sports. When undertaken with a play – spirit such reform could bring a joyous sense of vibrancy to our national community.
In Detachment, the lead character finds some salvation via helping his father and a prostitute. No impersonal goals, such as saving the homeless, grace the screen. Such distant impossible goals would only insert more distance into any of the immediately needy Detachment characters. Whereas Kellor dealt in social justice writ large, she also understood the importance of human connection.
Kellor’s Neighborhood Americanization project urged long-term American women to spend time in the homes of immigrant women. Beautifully, she advocated entering immigrants’ homes without an agenda. She told her female audiences, that immigrants just wanted “friendliness and new contacts.”[viii] The public social scientist told them to visit, “Not with the idea of uplift, but of getting acquainted for mutual benefit.”[ix]
Detachment painfully exposed the intimate pain and distance in modern lives. As a sensitive humanist Kellor realized that large systems could not solve deeply intimate psychic issues. She asked, “Have we gotten into the habit of asking too much of our government – thinking of it as something impersonal – unfailing, like air and sunshine? The governments cannot impersonally Americanize the home.”
Yet as a sensitive soul, Kellor understood, as Detachment conveyed, that social systems can promote or hinder well-being. This creative sociologist began the national celebration called Americanization Day. And she often crowed that immigrants told her “it was the first time they had shaken hands with an American!”[x] We can create venues for intimacy. And, sports, with a proper sense of the play-spirit, can promote well – being. Thus can the social sciences combat Detachment.
[i] Dudley, Gertrude, Kellor, Frances, Athletic Games in the Education of Women, (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1909), 135
[ii] Kellor, Frances, Experimental Sociology: Descriptive and Analytic (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1901), 29
[iv] Dudley, Gertrude, Kellor, Frances, Athletic Games in the Education of Women, (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1909), 142
[v] Dudley, Gertrude, Kellor, Frances, Athletic Games in the Education of Women, (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1909), 38
[vi] Ibid, pg. 238
[vii] Ibid., pg. 5
[viii] Ibid pg.,17.
[ix] Kellor, Frances, “Americanization of Women: A Discussion of an Emergency Created by Granting the Vote to Women in New York State,” Address delivered before the New York State Woman’s Suffrage Party in New York City, Jan. 17, 1918, 7
[x] Kellor, Frances, Neighborhood Americanization: A Discussion of the Alien in a New Country and of the Native in His Home Country, An address to the Colony Club in New York City, Feb. 8, 1918; in Wisconsin State Historical Society Pamphlet Collection #54-997, 8
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