“The Perfection That Kills” (225-2026)
I knew for some time that I would be reflecting on the film Whiplash. As a musician who grew up in an intensely competitive educational environment, the story hit close to home. What ultimately compelled me to voice my own take was the noticeable lack of cultural engagement with systemic forces portrayed in the film. After digging through reviews, video essays, podcasts, and Reddit threads, I found that the dominant discourse still revolves around questions like whether the ending was “happy” or what the cost of greatness really is. These are valuable conversations, but the broader institutional critique embedded in the film seems to garner far less attention. To me, that systemic dimension was impossible to ignore, whether it was consciously intended by director Damien Chazelle or not. It felt essential to the story, and something someone ought to have named.
As I began writing, I thought I was simply offering a cultural counterpoint to popular interpretations of Whiplash. But throughout the revision process, I realized the essay was about systems all along. All the examples I’ve placed in the essay surfaced as systems, which shape how we view success, discipline, and self-worth. I didn’t write the essay linearly, but built it in fragments, piecing together sections as different systems came into focus. At times, I wasn’t sure how they connected, but returning to the film and to my own experience grounded me in seeing that they were all part of the same architecture.
Looking back, I seeded many of these ideas using a list of “critical moves” for argumentative essays our professor gave us early in the semester. While revising, I returned to it as a kind of lens through which I began to see my own writing more clearly. What started as a “cultural counterpoint” evolved into something that pulled from multiple moves at once: a counterintuitive reading that challenged surface-level interpretations, a cultural and political contextualization grounded in my own background, and a theoretical inquiry shaped by philosophical ideas.
In the end, though, I was focused on telling a story. A story about systems we live inside, myths we inherit, and silences we are used to. These tools helped me shape the essay, but what sustained it was a desire to translate something complex into something that might make someone, somewhere, feel a little more understood.
Eric Shan, a native of Shanghai, China, moved to Bellevue, Washington when he was 11. He is currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in Music Technology at NYU Steinhardt. As a classically trained pianist and composer, Eric works across screen scoring, jazz, pop, and orchestral fusion. His creative process centers on storytelling, vulnerability, and the search for emotional clarity. Writing and music offer him a space to translate interiority into something shareable and deliberate, reflecting his broader artistic pursuit: bridging the emotional and the analytical, the intuitive and the crafted. Beyond the studio and the page, Eric finds clarity in nature and draws creative energy from hiking, skiing, and travel.