Tabard — Feminist icon.
“Zero for Conduct” and it’s timeless power to teach us.
The 1933 French movie “Zero For Conduct” brought youth rebellion on screen through a subversive narration that reversed the pedagogical narratives of it’s time. It showed children rebelling to adult authority and framed them as heroic revolutionaries rather than brats to be tamed. The film was censored back in the day and it remains today still a subversive theme. As Beck explains in the article “It Takes an Exorcist: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Brat Camp, and the War Against Children” today the viewer, always an adult, is looking for even more misopedic narratives than 1933. He seeks punished children. This is what makes “Zero For Conduct” still an important viewing. With the 40% of the world’s children still unprotected from school corporal punishment, little changed in children’s status. The positive changes can only be attributed to a general improvement of the quality of life. Among the main characters of the movie, there is Tabard, modelled on Jean Vigo himself. Tabard doesn’t change much throughout the movie, what changes is the way he is perceived by the characters around him — and by us. The way Tabard is talked about reveals age old masculinist assumptions about femininity, childlikeness and capability. The way he is treated reveals truths about sexual harassment that we refuse to confront even to this day, even after, especially after, the #MeToo movement. We’re first confronted with Tabard as he struggles to separate from his mother, which signals to us that in him childness is a much more defining trait than for the boys smoking a cigar on the train. We are struck by his tearful expression, his longish hair and delicate features. Tabard is consistently shown as wearing shorter shorts than other boys, as occupying less space and as being quiet and reserved. He is supposed to be one of the youngest and younger children and girls are known to generally occupy less space on the playground as they are pushed aside by older boys. But the reason behind his quietness and his occupying less space are not only tied to the marginalization he experienced — they’re traits he genuinely possesses. It never occurs to us to consider why we shame these “soft” traits and associate them with weakness and powerlessness. Definitely women’s rights — unlike children’s- decidedly improved since 1933 but the cultural baggage of femininity as being something negative and shameful, something to beat children, especially boys, out of still remains. A 30s boarding school may have been a cut throat environment, but contemporary schools are far from friendly for boys who present traits like those presented by Tabard, the feminine boy might still be the archetypal target of peer bullying and adult injustice (Sedgwick, 1993). Other boys exclude Tabard from their revolutionary plans because they see him as too inept, too girly, too childish, and therefore inept, to participate, as if he wasn’t part of their community, as if he wasn’t also directly impacted by the brutality of self centred adults. As if he wasn’t especially impacted by them. Misopedy targets childlike traits as much as it targets children. It banishes softness and vulnerability to the realm of childhood and since Adult is the ideal, it penalizes everyone who embodies them. Feminism has closed it’s eyes to how adulthood is a strongly masculinist, and for a long time masculine, ideal. In the desperate research to reclaim adulthood for women, feminists behaved no differently from the boys who wanted to exclude Tabard from the revolt. The figure of Tabard stresses on the contrary that “child” and “power”, “feminine” and “strong” do not exist on opposite poles. Tabard might seem to exist for most of the movie outside of the adult world that the other boys are treading, as almost exclusively inhabiting his own mind. But there is one aspect of the adult world that Tabard is consistently associated with — sexuality. The other characters portrayed in the movie seem almost sexless while he is immediately marked as less a sexual being and more a sexual object. Perhaps, as our sexual abuse rates might suggest, the only form of sexuality that is seen as adult is agentic sexuality, being a sexual object definitely isn’t restricted to adults, quite the opposite. It’s youth that is fetishized (Vandenbosch and Eggermont, 2013) and it’s young people who are most often raped (Felson, 2013). His friendships, like the one with Bruel, are seen as instantly suspicious, because those coded as “men” are not supposed to show an interest towards him that is uncorrupted by sexual desire, since he has already been marked as just a pretty face. The stereotype might dictate that he should passively accept it, because inability to perform masculinity on the part of boys is often mistaken as consent. But Vigo’s subversive narration extends also to gendered age stereotypes. Tabard gives us one of the most memorable scenes of the movie. When the predatory chemistry teachers talks down to him in an infantilizing and paternalistic way, stroking his hand, he pulls away violently and yells at him to leave him alone. The shock the teachers, the other students and us experience is tied to the fact that we expected him to nod or smile shyly. Because after all, the teacher was just being kind. He was just exaggerating. He is crazy. We can’t help but think that because that form of harassment is normalized. We all talk to children as if they weren’t human, even the suggestion that that kind of unwanted touching and attention could be sexual harassment almost insults us. And yet, children tend to be honest when they’re asked about experiens like these. The famous AAUWW survey revealed that 10% of all boys who are sexually harassed in school, and that’s 1 in 10 boys, are harassed by teachers. If this scene took place in a contemporary school, it probably would have went even worse, and he would have been diagnosed with some made up “disorder” like Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD). Especially seeing how the scene proceeds, with the adults around Tabard waxing about how kind the teacher has been to give him another chance, and him looking down at the ground and then rising his face to stare into their eyes and declare: “Monsieur le professeur, je vous dis merde!”. This becomes a cry of rebellion. The most quoted line from the entire movie. It stuns us to se Tabard filled with rage but at that point we start revaluating things. The women and children of the #MeToo movement were seen as stuck up bitches and brats for standing up to much more. And yet, we sympathize with him. We almost admire him for teaching us a lesson about our vision of him. And that’s the same thing other boys start to do. He becomes the focal centre of the revolt. But it leaves a sour taste in my mouth that seeing his inner strength they want to incorporate in a plot he was excluded from since the beginning without even apologizing. But after all, he becomes the leader. And it’s wrong that to this day this still surprises the adult viewer. “Child” and “feminine” are some of the most stigmatized identities, a leader cannot afford to be even one of them, both is still just unthinkable. It wasn’t unthinkable for Vigo in 1933, it was for the censors of the movie. What matters most about the legacy of it, and of the character of Tabard is that the joyous, hopeful, childlike nature of the movie doesn’t prevent adults from still fearing it. That sexual harassers won’t stop pausing at that scene trying to dismiss the importance of nonconsensual touch, because it was “fatherly”, because according to them a teacher should have the right to talk and touch a student however they please since the student has no right of their own beyond the limits of the criminal law. It happens to all of us in those moments, we freeze because we were taught to be good. Perhaps if all children had a role model like Tabard, who taught us that there is nothing shameful in femininity and that delineating your boundaries and wanting them to be respected won’t make you a brat nor a bitch but that it’s an heroic act. Standing up to adult authority to remind it your body is your own, even in the space of the school where it seems like it’s not at all, makes you a revolutionary leader. For many women and children, the street is an extension of it, and patriarchal authority in that space is exercised similarly. And we were taught that responding to a cat call with anything other than a smile was not polite. But at the same time that the simple display of femininity could make us a target. We absorbed it from all the media we consumed, where children were nuisances who needed to be kept under control, girliness was silliness, and where men’s harassing behaviors were kindness. The extraordinary exception embodied by this character is worth celebrating.
