Freedom Writers: The Film's Impact on a Group of Viewers

Freedom Writers is the gripping 2007 film that tells the true story of Erin Gruwell, an idealistic English teacher who helped turn around the lives of students who were traumatized by gang violence that pervaded their Los Angeles communities. There is a special affective power in films that are based on true stories.

Fourteen people, including eight psychoanalysts, got together to watch and informally discuss this film at the Waugaman's home in February 2013. Our guest of honor, Ashton Palmer, is a local middle-school English teacher and chair of her department. Her teaching career began at the sort of inner-city school that is depicted in the film.

With its deft directing by Richard LaGravernese (who also wrote the screenplay), the film constantly shifts the viewer's perspective among those of the students, their respective ethnic groups, and that of the teacher. Shifting camera angles from close-ups of individual faces to small groups and fractured crowds create a sense of instability and incoherence that mirrors a major theme of the film: The students' lives are unstable from many different perspectives—societal, familial, and psychological. Watching this film with a group is a much more powerful emotional experience than viewing it alone. Unconsciously, the group of viewers identifies with the group on the screen, expanding one's range of empathy for the various subjectivities reflected in the film and the true story it dramatizes.

The Power of One

Ashton Palmer commented:

Erin Gruwell's story is so inspiring because she demonstrates that one person can make an enormous impact on the lives of those who many people think are beyond help and without value. However, her success and the difference she made in the lives of her students came at great personal sacrifice. Erin only teaches at that school for four years, and she lasts only two years teaching ninth and tenth grade, which is where she initially made such a dramatic impact on the lives of her students. Erin discovers the only materials available for her students are tattered copies of low level books, sad materials that symbolize the way the world sees them and how they think of themselves as tattered, '“low,” unintelligent, beyond hope. Erin works a second, and then a third job, to provide the materials the students need. Working late hours, she neglects her marriage, which ends in divorce. As inspiring as it is, the film is also a warning to society. We cannot leave students like Erin's to the Erins of the world because there simply aren't enough Erins to go around. They get burned out and leave the teaching profession, or keep teaching, with even more problematic results.

At first, Erin Gruwell's desire to teach did not encounter a desire to learn on the part of her students, who had given up on school. The ethnic tension among the Cambodian, Latino, and African-American students always seemed on the verge of physical violence.

Erin looked shocked, overwhelmed, and afraid in her first classes. She perseveres with extraordinary determination and the desire not to fail her father's altruism. The plot turns and hope appears, ironically, when the teacher discovers a racist drawing depicting one of her African-American students, and Erin angrily compares it to Nazi caricatures of Jews. Erin, a Jew, calls the various gangs in her students' communities “rank amateurs,” compared to “the biggest gang” in the 20th century, the Nazis.

Her students have never heard of the Holocaust, or of the Nazis who perpetrated it. The honor and respect gang members claim is worthless because it is based on hate, prejudice, and vulnerability. The students suddenly realize they have not reached bottom. Paradoxically, with this unexpected realization, hope is found. Things could be worse. Once there is hope, change is possible.

Tilting the Mirror

Comparing their world to that of Hitler's is effective. She also tilts the mirror so that they can simultaneously see people persecuted just like they are, but even more so—the Jews, well educated, successful, and white, everything the students are not. Discrimination has no racial borders. Sensing the opportunity, Erin buys copies of The Diary of Anne Frank for all her students. The book changes their lives. They can now see both sides, that of the perpetrator and the victim. This mirroring provides the necessary distance the students need to begin to free themselves from their own imprisoning prejudices. Erin also gives each student a blank book to use as a journal. She tells them she will only read their entries if they want, and she is amazed that they all do. She later publishes their stories in the form of a book, The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World Around Them.

Silvia Bell and Christopher Keats felt that while this film documented the miraculous work of a charismatic teacher, teachers need support lest they become discouraged by the serious, seemingly intractable problems encountered daily in inner-city schools. Denise Fort spoke of her work providing such support to teachers at a school where she has regularly consulted for many years. Bruce Sklarew commented that James Gordon, a DC psychiatrist, designed a successful pilot project to nurture teachers in the DC schools with a program that included food, massage, and support groups.

Christine Erskine said, “One's optimism for a project is directly proportional to one's ignorance of the difficulties and challenges that will arise in the pursuit of it. I felt myself wanting to hold on to the sense of hope and optimism, of real uplift, particularly in the pursuit of such a good cause.”

Unmourned Loss

Bruce Sklarew noted a key moment in the film when Erin lined up the students by ethnic groups divided by a red line. When Erin asked the students how many friends and relatives each student had lost to violence, the students saw that peers from other groups shared their experiences of loss, and their common mourning became an effective bond that cut across ethnic lines.

Their losses reminded Sklarew of stories of loss from the School-Based Mourning Project. One boy said, “I feel so sad that I'm about to cry and then I get mad and beat people up and start messing stuff up. I want to kill the person who did it.” A 15-year-old suicidal boy with multiple losses explained that “sadness comes out as anger. Anger makes the sadness go away. Doing something [acting out the anger] always works.”

Unmourned losses and trauma lead to a threatening abyss of helplessness and depression that is acted out aggressively, including sexually, or by self-medicating with drugs. Sklarew connected another moment in the film with Joseph Noshpitz's discussion of the negative ego ideal, a central self-destructive dynamic that shapes the lives of those who suffered so much from trauma, abandonment, or neglect.

In closing, Ashton Palmer commented, “Often the suggested answer is to pay teachers more, but teachers aren't in it for the money. Giving teachers the materials that the students deserve, giving them manageable class sizes and class loads, and staffing schools with enough guidance counselors to support the students would go a long way to preventing good teachers from leaving and preventing effective teachers from becoming ineffective.”

Erin Gruwell continues her inspiring work with the Freedom Writers' Foundation. The foundation provides a Freedom Writers' Institute, an outreach program, and curriculum (). Palmer said, “It's not just writing….it's transformative education. Through the Freedom Writer methodology students significantly alter their self-images and understandings of society and culture…This is not just education, it is a personal odyssey.”