> bad genius
You're tuning into Cheers, a newsletter made by Tiffany Xie. This week: *Bad Genius* and meritocracy.
Hello friend,
Bad Genius (2017), directed by Nattawut Poonpiriya, is my favorite movie I’ve watched this year. It’s a heist film about a genius high school scholarship student who creates an elaborate cheating scheme.
I’m thinking about how the film critiques the idea of meritocracy. If wealthy students can buy their grades, then can profiting from cheating be a form of justice? If the school punishes low-income students by revoking their access to “meritocratic avenues” to higher education (e.g. scholarships), what other options are left to them except to cheat the system?
What would the alignment of the protagonist, Lynn, be? Chaotic evil or chaotic good? Lynn must be chaotic, because she disrupts the system—the educational system full of gatekeepers who mistakenly believe in meritocracy, people like her headmistress (lawful evil).
In contrast, people like Lynn’s father act submit to this system. Would he be lawful neutral or evil? Lynn’s father attempts to give her a “better education” by getting her scholarships and encouraging her to take exams to study abroad. But he fails to or is unable to address the larger inequities of the educational system.
What alignment the would the system have? Educational systems are ultimately created by people, people with many different alignments and intentions. Even though these categories are arbitrary, I’m not sure it’s useful to categorize an entire system with a D&D alignment, and in some ways I think it essentializes the complexities of education. An interesting question is who contributes the most to making that system—is it policymakers and administrators, or is it more at the level of teachers and students? And the question of who contributes most might help us answer the question of how much agency students have to determine their own education, or how much responsibility teachers and administrators have to give students that agency.
Which brings us back to the question—is Lynn evil or good? By reinforcing a system that allows the rich to get whatever they want, is Lynn doing net harm? Or, by refusing to “play by the rules” in a system that hasn’t given her a fair chance, is her cheating scheme a way of subversion and protest?
There’s a scene in the film where Lynn is trying to convince another scholarship student to join her scheme. Lynn says: “We are both losers, actually. We weren’t born winners like Pat and Grace. We have to try harder than other people to get what we deserve.”
It’s a line that echoes one in the Black community—that Black people have to be “twice as good” for half as much. I’ve heard similar lines from my immigrant parents, although I think I’ve also grown up with certain privileges that make this ironic.
Lynn saying that she has to work twice as hard is an admission of defeat. Although one could interpret her cheating scheme as a form of subversion, she ultimately has no plan of creating change. But there’s also the question of whether she has any power to effect change in the first place. Rich students who want good grades will find a way to buy them one way or another.
Money is a huge determinant of academic success even if there isn’t any cheating. Students (like me) from well-resourced families have the luxury of time. In college, without the pressure to work for my tuition, I had the time to focus on studying. Well-resourced students also have the option of hiring private tutors, buying expensive test prep books, enrolling in extra classes.
I see this in my English classroom. It’s apparent which students go to cram school classes, and other students even acknowledge this. “Why don’t you ask her to answer instead of me? She goes to cram school.” Students have already learned to reinforce class divides.
Meritocracy is an illusion created to morally reinforce the success of the wealthy. It’s a convenient way for the class in power to convince themselves that their success is the product of their hard work, and everyone who failed simply did not work hard enough, or were too lazy, or too stupid. By this logic, the wealthy can feel morally righteous and displace any guilt they have from profiting off of oppression.
I think it’s telling that a good number of students who received the same merit scholarships as I did come from affluent backgrounds (myself included). To be fair, this is not the case for all merit scholarship students, but it does lead me to question the meaning of “merit” when it so often correlates with wealth.
Merit scholarships were not meant to be a corrective for educational inequities—at their worst, perhaps merit scholarships exacerbate them. This is the rationale for why many elite medical schools have gotten rid of merit scholarships altogether, purportedly to invest more in financial aid for students with demonstrated need.
Even as I say these things, I know I’m a hypocrite. I’m worried about how much I profit from oppression. For example, many medical students gain their early clinical training from volunteering in student-run free clinics, but there are many questions surrounding the ethics of this practice. These clinics generally provide free care to uninsured and underinsured patients, but is the implication that poor people don’t deserve better care from more experienced health professionals?
The fact is that, historically, medical students learned from treating the poor. Historian Paul Starr, in The Social Transformation of American Medicine, writes that people built teaching hospitals in places with urban poverty so that students could “practice” on poor patients.
It’s not enough to be aware of the way I benefit from profound injustice. I want to be accountable for my actions, for the small decisions available to me. Will I work in a student-run clinic? If so, in what capacity can I acknowledge and mitigate the shortcomings of training medical students in these clinics? How can I engage in mutual aid to use my privilege to care for others?
I’ve strayed a bit from my discussion of the film, but I think it’s a good sign when I watch a movie and it turns into a prompt, a question about how I should live. It doesn’t hurt that the story is incredibly fun, too.
If you’re interested in watching Bad Genius, do yourself a favor and don’t watch the trailer. So much of the delicious suspense comes from not knowing where it escalates to next. After you watch, maybe you’d be interested in this review by Claire Ning Fang comparing Bad Genius to Bong Joon-Ho’s Parasite.
Cheers,
Tiffany