Miss Jean Brodie is, as she will utter a good dozen times in the course of this film, “in her prime.” She has sacrificed everything for her craft, and “her girls” – the young ladies attending the Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh, Scotland – are her raison d’etre. She will teach them, mold them, and set them straight, all so that they may, as young women, face life with chins up, eyes ahead, and morals firmly intact. And Miss Brodie is more than up to the challenge. Not only is she revered by those in her charge, she is ogled, desired, and often kissed by every last man on campus. She can wax poetic on just about anything, including etymology, fine art, world events, and the glories of amour. She’s Mr. Chips with a Margaret Thatcher tone; a typically repressed flower waiting to burst forth, if only the agents of repression would get out of her way.
At least that’s how she sees herself. In reality, Miss Brodie is a fascist. Yes, a literal fascist. Despite occasionally sticking to the assigned curriculum, she spends at least 90% of her classroom hours getting moist at the mere thought of Il Duce. “Mussolini is a great man! A man of action!”, she cries, before and after demanding girls as young as twelve consider joining the army in his service. And remember, this is 1932, not some faraway time when naïveté still had a defense. But Brodie, well, she knows better. She’s also quite fond of Francisco Franco, and during an outdoor bull session, thinks little of pushing her fundraising cause against the so-called “force of darkness.” Meaning those who just might believe in democracy or free will. No surprise, one of her students takes her at her word and runs off to Spain to be promptly gunned down.
During one particularly spirited lecture – which consists of nothing more than Miss Brodie pulling out her Italian vacation slides – she concludes her wide-eyed defense of Mussolini with a full-throated, “The greatest Roman of them all!” She’s all in, yet somehow, in her twisted, vile mind, she’s convinced herself that it’s individuality itself she’s extolling. Mere coddling won’t do, she believes, and these young ladies must be battle-tested and sufficiently inspired to live lives of virtue and significance. All well and good, except she’s confused militarism for discipline, and authoritarian control for strength. As we know from a century of experience, the worst fascist of all is the one who believes he’s offering liberation instead of hopeless conformity. Brodie, cutting a reasonable figure for the time, is little more than a tinpot butcher without the silly moustache.
Still, it’s amazing that no one at the school noticed until the midnight hour that Miss Brodie harbored such ill intent. Sure, she seemed bright enough (and anyone who can quote Shakespeare in a pinch can’t be all bad, right?), but if anyone bothered to look closely, they’d have seen the jackboots masquerading as loafers. The condescension, haughtiness, and frigid demeanor, sure, they’re all so typically British no one would bat an eye. And in a school with the all the expected trimmings – glassy-eyed lesbian PE teachers, humorless headmasters, and, worst of all, a perverted art instructor who uses “nude modeling” as a grooming technique to bed half the student body – who can blame anyone for failing to isolate and expose the far-right fanatic? A stiff upper lip is, after all, only a hair’s difference from cultish devotion.
In fairness, Miss Jean Brodie is ultimately destroyed for her beliefs (dismissed with extreme prejudice by the school board), but Brodie herself remains steadfast in her martyrdom (she describes her termination as an “assassination”). Having been pushed to resign before for trumped-up charges of sexual impropriety, she quite reasonably concludes that this latest attempt to sack her has more to do with fear and jealousy than actual crimes against the state. She’s as blind as an ever-loving bat, of course, but who really “wins” when we damn well know that the old battleaxe will run off to Neville Chamberlain and try with all her might to keep the whole of Britain out of Nazi Germany’s business? Hell, she’s just as likely to slip across the Channel and man an extermination camp or two.
We know this: just as pedophiles play the long game and enter professions they know will give them access, Miss Jean Brodie became a teacher solely to emerge as a weapon of war. As a student of history, she saw the writing on the wall and knew that hearts and minds had to be captured for tyranny well before the bombs started to fall. She learned well from the Great War, only this time, she wouldn’t lose the love of her life to a cause. Instead, she’d lead the way, grinding away the innocence of youth in order to save them. Instilling the idea that dying is the only way to live. The path of all foolish romantics, who are but fascists with a little poetry in their hearts.
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