Class Differences

My students are watching Fernando Leon de Aranoa’s beautiful film Mondays in the Sun in my class. In one scene in the movie, Santa, played by Javier Bardem when he was still a great actor and not a Hollywood lap dog, reads to a little boy the story of the ant and the grasshopper.

The story goes as follows. The ant was hard-working and toiled all day long. The grasshopper didn’t like to work and only sang and danced. When winter came, the ant had a lot of food and could live in comfort. The grasshopper, however, was starving. The grasshopper knocked on the ant’s door and begged for help.

“You chose to dance and play all summer while I worked,” the ant replied. “So now it will serve you well to die of hunger.”*

Santa, who is unemployed, who lost his job because of his activities as a union organizer and who saw his colleagues’ jobs outsourced, is incensed with the fable.

“No, this is simply not how things work,” he tells the little boy. “In order to live well, you have to be born an ant. If you have the bad luck to be born a grasshopper, no matter how much you work, you are screwed.”

When I showed this scene to my students at Yale and Cornell, there was no reaction. The students watched with blank faces and looked bored. When I showed it to my current students at a state school in an economically blighted area, the reaction was intense. The scene spoke to them in a singular way. There was not one indifferent face in the classroom of 30 students. I had to stop the video to let them discuss what they were seeing.

The moral of the story: remember that people always bring their personal experiences to an encounter with any work of art.

I’m sorry, dear voxcorvegis, for stealing the idea of the moral lesson from you. I resisted as long as I could but my passionately didactic nature won over.

*I’m retelling the fable as it appears in the movie, not the original Aesop version.