Some people are too alive to be contained
This is my type of people, shown in my type of movie.
“What is my type?” you may ask.
Jack Kerouac did a good job explaining:
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
―Jack Kerouac, On the Road
In Wes Anderson’s Rushmore (1998), Max Fischer is a fifteen-year-old genius who fails in school because he spends all his time doing extracurriculars. He’s smart, and anyone who’s also smart knows he’s smart. Don’t get me wrong, he’s failing school, and the private school he attends, where he also received a scholarship after the principal saw the play he did in second grade, now wants to expel him because he keeps getting bad grades.
But it takes one to know one, and Herman Blume—played by Bill Murray, super successful steel magnate, father of twins at Rushmore, a man surrounded by money and boredom—likes the guy.
Herman Blume: What’s the secret, Max?
Max Fischer: The secret?
Herman Blume: Yeah, you seem to have it pretty figured out.
Max Fischer: The secret, I don’t know… I guess you’ve just gotta find something you love to do and then… do it for the rest of your life. For me, it’s going to Rushmore.
At some point, Herman wants to hire him.[1]
Max is the type of guy who doesn’t study for his classes but is involved in every club, and if there isn’t a club for an interest of his, he starts one. He’s also the type of person who is willing to do things. At one point, the school wanted to cancel Latin classes, but because he wanted to impress the first-grade teacher he was falling in love with, he gets a bunch of signatures, and Latin became required from 7th to 12th grade. He can do stuff. He’s capable. In my vocabulary, he’s Jailbroken.
He’s not street-smart. That’s a fallacy. A fallacy created by “book-smart” people to explain why other people are more capable than they are, so they call them street-smart. When in reality, they’re just smart, and the book-smart people aren’t.
Don’t believe me? Max was reading Diving for Sunken Treasure[2] when he read a note a previous borrower had left. Here’s the note:
“When one man, for whatever reasons, has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself.”
— Jacques Cousteau
Max immediately loves the quote, asks the librarian for a list of people who have checked out the book, and finds that the person who wrote the note was the attractive and elusive Harvard graduate who didn’t have a major and is the new first-grade teacher.
She didn’t have a major? I must say again: this is my type of movie by my type of people.[3]
You may call him book-smart, but as we already talked about, that’s just nonsense. Max is just alive. He’s Jailbroken, and it’s a pity he’s at school surrounded by people who care about normal things. That sounds bad, but let me clarify. For instance, Herman’s sons just have force. In the part of the world where I come from, we say those people have “the body of a bull and the mind of a chicken.”[4] They are the classic tough, play-hard private-school boys who already seem like they have become the worst version of men before even becoming men at all, loud, physical, spoiled, incurious, the kind of boys who mistake aggression for personality because nobody has ever forced them to become interesting. When Herman sees his sons wrestling, of all things, it causes him great disappointment. He wanted them to be alive, to be interesting. Yet here they are, grinding another kid’s face into the mat. They have no beauty. They don’t have an obsession, a private need, or a desire of their own. They’re just blank. Herman looks at them and sees (and feels) nothing. He finds this quite boring, if not downright depressing.
Max Fischer is the epitome of the jailbroken character.
To understand a jailbroken person, you must understand his enemy.[5] In school, that will always be the bureaucracy. This movie impressed me the most because it understood how to deal with the bureaucracy. It showed how to get things done despite their existence. Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson did a great job.[6]
Max knows school rules are flexible and made up, and that they feel inescapable only because we collectively agree to act as if they are. But we can decide at any moment that they’re not laws of nature, because, guess what? They are not. I’ll give you an example. At one point, he wanted to build an aquarium to impress the lovely first-grade teacher who likes fish, so he went to Herman Blume to ask for money. When Blume asks him if he talked to the principal, Max says he wanted to talk to him first. Why? Max knows the bureaucrats’ answer will always be no. So he does what one does, finds the money, and just does the thing. A bureaucrat is phobic of two things in his life: money and public image. You can use those two as knobs to liberate yourself and reach enlightenment.[7]
But that’s the least interesting thing about him because he’s a Renaissance man. He’s beyond capable. Schools fail to recognize his genius as they often do. For all we know, he might be the next Lin-Manuel Miranda with his plays. But no, no, let’s make sure he passes all his classes.
I should note something that might not be obvious if you’re not a character like Max Fischer, and perhaps even yours truly. Why does he join all the school clubs? Why does he do all of this? To get into a good college? To impress people? Because he’s insecure and afraid? No, no, this is just what he does, the way a river does not decide to move and the way light does not decide to illuminate. He has a duty to understand all parts of the universe, and the clubs and everything he does are slices that give you a more accurate representation of reality. But really, he can’t help himself. He wants to learn about everything and do just about everything. The truly incurable, curious would understand. That is the only way to live and the only way there ever was for such people.
If music is about learning how to listen, art about learning how to see, writing about learning how to read, reading about learning how to learn, then learning itself is about learning how to become human. He must become a spy of reality, always listening, always watching, always learning, collecting fragments to do his thing: make the plays.
He’s mature. That’s something else you might think about him. Some might call him “precocious” if he had some kind of disability. No, no. He understands that life is just a flicker, so why cosplay as a kid, which is usually just an ageist way of saying a dumb, agency-less individual? He wants to do things. Understand things. Become things. He knows that age or time alone do not grant you the wisdom to speak and act freely.
Max ends up getting expelled. Surprise? Well, not really. He doesn’t get expelled because of his grades. He gets expelled because he’s building a freaking aquarium. He got the money, he got the plans, and just started building. The bureaucrats were appalled and kicked him out.
Now he goes to a public high school. The second he enters, you can see Wes Anderson and his team completely change the visual language of the movie. Rushmore Academy was warm, theatrical, carefully composed, almost storybook-like. The public high school is wider, flatter, harsher, with fluorescent lighting, washed-out colors, more physical distance between people and the camera. The frames suddenly feel emptier. Max looks smaller inside them. The energy changes. Rushmore felt curated by imagination and people who cared. This new school feels governed by inertia.
He starts at this new school. He notices things are missing, and he says he’s going to start a fencing club. He doesn’t wait. He wants to improve things. This is just what he does. He creates. He’s a little Benjamin Franklin trapped in society’s compulsory containment of the young: school. Go become an apprentice to Blum, go to Broadway, go to San Francisco, find a fully alive person, a scientist, an artist, an entrepreneur, a filmmaker, just please, someone help him out. Have John Galt call him!
A few days ago, I met a Christian pastor from New York City. How does one meet a Christian pastor from New York City? I have no idea, but I did. I do my serious search to understand his soul, and what he’s truly about. I found a few things, but I’ll only tell you about one now. His deep belief about the world is that most people are followers and very few are leaders. There are bad leaders and good leaders. Bad leaders try to benefit themselves at the expense of others and often have no vision or intrinsic cosmic duty. Good leaders steward people to the true, to the right, and to the beautiful. Emphasis on beautiful. He didn’t quite put it this way, but that was my understanding. Viscerally, I don’t like how it feels to think that most people are followers, but this pastor believes it and doesn’t question it. If that’s true, then your role is to be a good leader. To lead, because if you don’t, he felt, people could be prey to bad leaders, and the world would be worse off.
Assume the pastor is right for a moment. I don’t know if he is, but let’s assume he’s right. Max is a leader in a world where most people are followers. He will start things, he will learn things, and he will get things done. Max is a leader, and there’s nothing you can do about that. Expel him if you want. Offer him money or power. He doesn’t care. He has that dog in him, as some Gen Z folks might say. Talk the talk, walk the walk, a dog will always bark, and especially when the world goes dark.
So, of course, when he gets to the new high school after he’s expelled, he becomes active, starts things, and becomes immediately involved in everything. He makes the school better. He makes the world better. Leading, coordinating. This is just who he is.
Now, let’s go back to your high school years. Would you have befriended him? Would you have made fun of him like everyone else? He stood out, no doubt about that. But will your fears of being with the “not-so cool kids” prevent you from being with a source of aliveness that you know is right but refuse to get close to?
In an interview with Charlie Rose, Wes Anderson was asked if he would ever direct a movie written by somebody else. Anderson says no, because the movies he writes and makes are personal to him, and the other stuff isn’t as meaningful.
I’ll let him answer and describe Max Fischer’s character and why he cares about Rushmore:
The movie is about someone who doesn’t try. In high school, one of the central things is to be cool, and this is a kid who’s not cool at all, but who has his own ideas about the things he wants to accomplish. He has this great enthusiasm for those things, and this kind of drive about it, and resilience. That’s something that means something to us. I like people who are kind of unusual characters and kind of originals.
—Wes Anderson
Don’t worry. The minute he donates a building to the school, all of a sudden he’s cool.
At one point, Max asks Herman, “How much are you worth?” “Maybe ten million.” Max says, “We’re going to need all of it.” He has a plan for the money, and he uses it. He’s playing to win. He’s not afraid. He wants to do things, people, and money are all just parts of the grand project of life he is trying to create.
I must confess something to you now.
Everything you just read was written before roughly the 40:00 minute mark of the movie.
He does get a little nuts. And he’s not perfect. He’s vengeful, causes chaos, and is often not very forgiving.
But he learns.
One of the most important things Max learns is that one of his bullies, who was probably jealous of him the entire time, did not actually want to destroy him. He just wanted to be included in one of Max’s plays. That’s such a Benjamin Franklin thing to understand: if you want to lower tension, do not confront people directly. Ask them for advice. Borrow something from them. Give them a role in your world.
“He that has once done you a kindness will be more ready to do you another, than he whom you yourself have obliged.”
—Ben Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Towards the end of the movie, Max makes the biggest play he’s ever made to date, and before the play starts, some bureaucrat says, “But the plans were never submitted to the city.”
He just did the thing. More importantly, he brought everything into it: the disciplines, the lovers, the bullies, the mess, the science, the friends, the enemies, the technology, the not-so-good, and the good. He made his play, which the word “play” is too small for what it was. It’s his life. He showed his life to us.
The play is a masterpiece, and afterward Wes Anderson cuts to a small sequence of reaction shots, not dramatic revelations exactly, but people quietly trying to process what they just watched.
Coach Beck, still trapped in the practical mindset of an administrator, says:
“I’m surprised they let him build a real campfire onstage. It’s clearly a safety hazard.”
Ernie responds:
“Well, last year he tried to raise piranhas.”
Then they ask Mr. Littlejeans, the Indian groundskeeper:
“What’d you think of the play, Mr. Littlejeans?”
And he simply says:
“Best play ever, man.”
Are you out of your goddamn mind, Coach Beck? What do you mean, they let him? You’re asking the wrong question. Who will stop him? And the answer is nobody.
But the final triumph is not that nobody can stop Max. The final triumph is that, by the end, people stop wanting to.
Rushmore is about the rare person who does not wait to be authorized into existence. Max Fischer is failing school because school is too small a container for him. He is not admirable because he is a good student, or even because he is talented. He is admirable because he turns private obsession into a public good[8]: clubs, campaigns, aquariums, plays, whole worlds. But the movie is smart enough to know that aliveness alone is not virtue. Max has to learn that the highest use of agency is not getting your way. It is creating a world other people can enter.
The entire movie is proof that your obsessions can become a world large enough for other people.[9]
“You can’t change the world. It’s not possible. All you can do is try to make your own world and then invite other people to be a part of it.”
—George Lucas
He has ideas, he has a million aspirations, and he doesn’t ever give up.
A couple of months ago, a friend called me. He has a job he doesn’t really like and was a bit bummed out. The kid is one of the smartest people you’ll ever meet; it’s self-evident, and he has been thinking about taking on a grand adventure. Anyways, we have a conversation and at the end, he says, “One of the reasons why I like talking to you is because you believe. You’re a believer.” Max is also a believer. He believes in something. He doesn’t just want to be told what to do; he wants to do things. He believes in the arts, in human potential, and in the opportunity to be alive. He believes in himself and in other people so much that he makes them believe in themselves.
I believe in what Max Fischer believes. That’s why I had something almost every day of the week in high school, some club, some meeting, some project, some thing I was trying to start or improve, while still not exactly doing great in school. That’s why I do things intrinsically. That’s why I know becoming jailbroken will be one of the most important things in the 21st century.[10]
Go, go, go,
Juan David Campolargo
P.S. First time I ever watched a Wes Anderson movie, and I’m impressed. He’s only made 13 feature films. 12 left. Obsession: loading.
P.P.S. This movie reminded me of Almost Famous (2000), another one of the greats. If you’d like to read what I wrote about that, let me know by replying to this email.
If you’re into interesting ideas (like the one you just read), join my Updates, and I’ll send you new essays right when they come out.
Notes
[1]
Why does a depressed steel tycoon look at a failing fifteen-year-old and think: I should hire this kid?
Because Herman Blume recognizes something school cannot measure: Max Fischer is alive.
“He’s 15!!!! What could he possibly know about anything? Have you checked his GPA?”
Well, he has what you will never understand, no matter how much you study or how hard you work.
Max is alive, people! He’s fully alive, and Herman, surrounded by people he finds boring, wants aliveness in his life for once!
Max is interesting because he does not wait for permission. He starts clubs, raises money, launches projects, manipulates systems, recruits people, and treats life as material.
Ben Franklin figured this out, and Max is on his way to figure that out.
One of the most important lessons from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is that the fastest way for a poor or unknown person to rise is not talent or luck, but being so honest and reliable that powerful people trust you with their business.
Well, let me add another corollary. Be alive as well. Be energetic. Have vitality. Have the desire to do things. GO, GO, GO!!!
Most people don’t want to do anything. Let alone think! We live in the epochal times of N.O.I.T (No One Is Thinking). Think, create, and become who you’re meant to become.
Talent is important, sure. But if you want to rise in this world to the heights of those like Ben Franklin, you need to be alive, you need to have energy, and you need to have the desire to do things intrinsically.
That is magnetic. That will help you rise in this world. It worked for Ben Franklin, a poor kid from Boston who arrived in Philadelphia with nothing. And it is going to work for Max, the kid of a barber who, because of his talent, got a scholarship to a private school, and is on his way to do things.
If you’re a young person trying to do things in this world, you need to read The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.
Wes Anderson probably agrees. One of the papers that the wonderful and elusive Ms. Cross is grading at the beginning of the film is none other than Benjamin Franklin.
Don’t you get it? What are you waiting for?
Max Fischer is not admirable because he is talented. He is admirable because he turns obsession into institutions.
[2]
Wes Anderson gets inspired by this book to make The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004).
[3]
If I ever meet someone like that, I will not only fall in love with them, but propose to them on the spot.
Anyways, I also didn’t have a major. Here’s the story.
[4]
This is also known as toripollo.
Toro (bull) + pollo (chicken) = toripollo.
[5]
Enemy isn’t quite the right word here because it implies intent. The bureaucracy has no intent. Their indifference obstructs and shapes at the same time.
[6]
Wes Anderson made the movie in his high school.
It would be cool to make a movie in my high school. Let alone my college.
[7]
An excerpt from The Jailbroken Guide to the University:
19.3 Understand the University Bureaucracy’s Incentives.
Administrators are incentivized to maintain the status quo.
They prefer when nothing happens because fewer changes mean fewer headaches. They will act—or choose not to act—based on how much they feel any given decision or change threatens their job security.
Fear rules the university bureaucracy.
I wish I was joking, but I’m not.
Fear is one of the bureaucracy’s strongest operating systems: fear of complaints, headlines, lawsuits, donors, trustees, audits, and being the person who approved the thing that went wrong.
[8]
Is there a more American thing in the world?
YOU GET AHEAD BY DOING GOOD.
What a great invention.
[9]
This is such an important idea.
In The Jailbroken Guide to the University, a vision for the university is humbly proposed. One of the most important parts is about learning storytelling, which is actually world-building, because world-building is how you change the world; it’s how anyone who has ever changed the world changes the world.
Below you will find the excerpt:
3.11 A Storytelling Curriculum
Human beings live inside stories long before they live inside arguments. Every ideology is a narrative with planetary ambitions, a story that wants to shape how everyone sees the world.
Ideas spread because they offer a way of seeing the world that feels more real, workable, or meaningful than the alternatives. Capitalism, communism, secularism, nationalism work less as arguments and more as stories that shape how people live. They work when they give people a world they want to live in.
You don’t win by out-arguing. You win by out-narrating.
Persuasion is no longer won by stronger arguments but by stronger narratives. People do not change their minds because they lose debates. They change their worlds by entering new ones. A position fades not through refutation but through the arrival of a stronger story. Narratives compete the way ecosystems do, through richness, coherence, and the promise of a future someone might want to walk toward.
Yet universities still act as if argument rules everything. Students are trained to make claims, cite sources, and build theses. These are useful skills, but they are not enough. In a world where narrative shapes reality, a bare argument has no pull. It cannot gather a community, shift a culture, create a movement, and open or close the horizon of what a society can imagine.
A university oriented toward the future must treat storytelling as part of its core structure. To teach storytelling is to teach world-building: how to guide attention, how to find meaning inside complexity, and how to create a reality that others can choose to enter. It is a practice that brings together philosophy, psychology, aesthetics, science, and ethics. The purpose is not manipulation. The purpose is to open spaces where new possibilities can grow.
George Lucas, who reshaped popular storytelling through Star Wars and showed generations how entire worlds can be built from imagination, explained this principle:“You can’t change the world. It’s not possible. All you can do is try to make your own world and then invite other people to be a part of it.”Transformation happens when someone constructs a world persuasive enough that others choose to inhabit it. Before any world can be shared, you have to be able to articulate it with enough clarity that it makes sense outside your own head. You have to turn a half-formed intuition into language that another person can actually understand.
Every serious undertaking begins this way. Every company begins as a story someone has to believe before anyone else will. Every movement begins with a small group trying to describe a future they have not yet reached. Entire scientific revolutions have started this way too: a lone researcher explaining an idea that sounds impossible until others begin to see its outline. Artistic circles, political reformers, explorers and inventors have done the same throughout history. First comes the story, then the slow work of making it visible to others. The story is what moves first.
The task of education is therefore not only to produce strong arguments. It is to cultivate world-makers who can imagine forms of life that are beautiful, durable, and worth inheriting.
A storytelling curriculum would not train students to entertain. It would train them to act with cultural agency, teaching them the ability to shape the stories and assumptions that guide how people see the world. They would learn to read stories as systems of power, persuasion, and possibility. They would learn to take apart the narratives that restrict them, and to design the ones that could carry us into futures we can only begin to see. They would study myth as technology, rhetoric as design, fiction as experiment, and media as a way of distributing worlds.
Most importantly, they would practice. Not by observing stories from afar, but by creating their own. They would make counter-stories, imagine futures, create traditions and bits of lore that future classes keep alive, win local elections, write philosophical fictions, launch clubs, newsletters, and micro-institutions with identities people want to join, make memes that spread, and build reconstructions of reality that reveal what the present can no longer express. The goal is not to win ideological battles. The goal is to widen the futures culture can imagine and make those futures feel possible.
A university that teaches storytelling understands that every discipline already tells a story: biology about life, physics about the universe, philosophy about meaning, engineering about human capability. Ask yourself, what draws people to an idea first? The data, or the story that makes the data matter? A storytelling curriculum does not replace these fields. It strengthens them by making their narrative foundations visible and usable. It trains students to use narrative as a central tool for thinking and making.
If the university wants to remain an engine of civilization rather than a museum of old debates, it must reclaim storytelling as a central intellectual skill. To build a world worth inviting others into is not a soft or secondary ability. It is the heart of leadership, invention, and cultural transformation. It is how entire eras begin.
A university focused on the future must become a workshop of narratives, both disciplined and imaginative, where students learn not only to interpret the world but to create worlds that expand the human horizon.
In the end, the task is simple: help students make worlds worth inviting others into.
[10]
The Jailbroken Guide to the University is a book for the Max Fischers from Rushmore, the Lewis Robinsons from Meet the Robinsons, the William Millers from Almost Famous, the Ranchos from 3 Idiots, the Giorgio Rosas from Rose Island, the Mark Zuckerbergs from The Social Network, the Tony Starks, and the people who cannot stop building, learning, organizing, experimenting, obsessing, creating, and doing things.