The 25 Greatest Characters of the Last 20 Years
17. Max Fischer- Rushmore

I saw Rushmore for the first time at an advanced screening with my mom. As the theater cleared after the film, a girl with a legal pad hounded people about their opinions. Most swept by with grumbles about nothing really happening and the main kid being annoying. I had the opposite reaction—I had just seen something special—but I was overwhelmed and couldn’t express it properly: “And when they do the slow motion in the middle of the shot…” I stuttered, “And, like, it’s amusing but not really obviously funny.”

My mom’s review was more succinct: “He reminded me of you.” Because I liked the movie and had an affinity for Max Fischer, I took that as a compliment without interpreting it too much. As an adult, I now see that my mom meant something different.

In one of his first scenes, Jason Schwartzman’s Max is being threatened with expulsion because of his poor grades. He sits across from Dr. Guggenheim, the caretaker of Rushmore Academy, and reminds him of how he was admitted to the school on scholarship as a child. “I wrote a play,” he recalls, “A little one-act about Watergate.” That’s, of course, an exaggeratedly mature thing for a first-grader to do, yet we can still imagine a younger version of this kid doing it. It’s absurd but believable in this context. Guggenheim, played by Brian Cox, looks wistful at the mention of how bright Max used to be, but he straightens up and remembers why he’s here now. It’s years later, and Max has not delivered on that promise. In a nutshell, Rushmore is about that moment when someone stops being precocious, when a person is judged on what he is instead of what he could be.

It doesn’t take a psychologist to figure out that Max is sabotaging himself in school so that he isn’t forced to move on. He wants to fail with the security that someone will tousle his hair and send him on his way. Increasingly though, his actions take on mature consequences. Attempting to prove his worth in other ways, Max partners with the hardened Herman Blume and romances the damaged Mrs. Cross, and he finds himself unprepared to navigate the adult world’s complexities.

For example, Max knows that Blume likes him, sees a piece of himself in Max’s blazer and glasses, so he propositions Blume for a $35,000 check for a school aquarium. Blume curtly brings him down to earth with $2500. It isn’t a devastating disappointment, but it’s a clear sign that Max can no longer get whatever he wants with premature charm. The rest of the movie, particularly Cross’ rejection of him—as much for who he is as for how old he is—is more devastating.

In the film’s first half, Max’s actions toward Mrs. Cross are mature, but they are rooted in the superficial intentions of a child, like building an aquarium so that a girl will like you. Eventually Cross picks up on Max’s juvenile display of affection and confronts him. She demands: “Do you want to finger me? Or maybe I could give you a hand job in the back of a Jaguar. Would that put an end to all of this? What do you really think is going to happen between us? You think we’re going to have sex?” When he says that she’s cheapening that possibility, she says, “Not if you’ve ever fucked.” He is taken aback because, while he probably does find her sexually attractive, he really just wanted to possess her, like a little boy would a toy. By making concrete the emotions that he isn’t able to articulate, she intimidates and emasculates him.

In general, the film communicates distance between people by the way they cling to concrete objects. Blume always matches his bright ties to his dress shirts, presenting an outward sense of completeness and order to mask how chaotic he actually is. Even after getting kicked out of Rushmore, Max still wears his uniform to camouflage himself with the prestige and promise that he now lacks.*

In a way, that’s what I did with the movie Rushmore itself, which ended up being seminal in my own development. Whatever I felt when I first saw this at fifteen, I wanted more of it, and it was my gateway to films that are amusing but not funny, with characters who are sort of annoying, with plots that don’t really go anywhere. In some ways, it helped me to evolve. I can think critically now, and there aren’t many opinions I stumble over. In other ways, it became an escape and a disguise, a distraction from all of the aspects of myself that I need to inspect and improve.

By the end of the film, Max takes responsibility for his actions, and he shows progress through his accomplishments. Just as importantly, however, he does things for the right reasons. He dedicates his play to Cross’ dead husband, and he uses the performance quite unselfishly as a vehicle to promote reconciliation between Cross and Blume. He even gives acting opportunities to those who have wronged him in the past. His works exist for something more than defining himself, and in that way he has truly matured.

As my mom would have told you exiting the theater that night, as any reader of this blog will tell you, I’m still a work in progress.


*- In one of the most satisfyingly surprising scenes of the film, Max introduces himself to his public school classmates with a speech. We expect a quick cut of people kicking his nerd ass after class, but instead he gets polite, deferential applause and is quickly forgotten. It’s a warm but subversive moment.