While [Basic Training] is open to individual analysis apart from the director's other work, a more sophisticated argument can be developed in terms of Wiseman's selection of material with clear affinities to concerns in his other films. The most certain connections in this case are between Basic Training and High School, although I think a more complex web of connections between all the films could be explored (dealing with, for instance, such things as the function of the church services in both Basic Training and Hospital). Wiseman is not only sensitive to the similarities between institutions, but also to the neat matrix of inverse influences—the ways institutions take on the functions and appearances of each other. In High School Wiseman repeatedly points up militaristic aspects of the high-school experience; in Basic Training he emphasizes the high-schoollike aspects of the training process…. [They] come to be seen as two steps in much broader processes of molding and regulation of citizens in nonvoluntary situations. (pp. 12-13)
[Wiseman] prefers to seek out defining moments, situations which either reveal institutional philosophy or those which (by their possibly seeming out of place) make possible the kind of institutional crossconnections we are talking about. Basic training is, after all, a kind of educational process, and perhaps a more efficient, concentrated learning experience than the high-school years. The film is full of assembly lectures, not the doctors' sex talks in High School but now indoctrination lessons about Why We Are In Vietnam and the importance of the "winning tradition" in the Army. Where High School's teachers drilled bored students on literature, Basic Training's instructors "teach" about rifles, bayonets, land mines, and the like, to a far more rapt audience…. [The] accumulation of evidence is too strong to avoid the military-high-school connections.
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