The Philosopher Kings | DocumentaryFreak
The Philosopher Kings profiles eight janitors who work at elite American universities (Duke, Berkeley, and Cornell, for example). We see them at work, meticulously scrubbing toilets and dusting windowsills. We see them at play, building sculptures and playing guitar in cover bands. We learn about their childhood, their unique struggles, their greatest triumphs, and through it all, wisdom is revealed in the unlikeliest of places…or so is the point of the film.Why janitors? And why at universities? The film’s frame at first appears both esoteric and limiting, but upon examination, it is quite effective. Universities, because there is a sharp distinction between employees whose work is intellectual and those whose work is physical. Janitors, because they are so often overlooked. But also because their work is repetitive. As we watch custodian Oscar Dantzler rearrange the endless rows of chairs in the Duke chapel we hear him say, “If you’re miserable every day, you’re doing something wrong.” Simple, bold, and true. As the subjects wash, rinse, and repeat, we see the zen in their occupational ritual. They are American monks living amongst us.
Early in this uneven yet moving documentary, a university janitor greets a woman exiting the restroom he's about to clean. She doesn't respond. Neither does she look at him nor acknowledge his presence in any way. In "The Philosopher Kings," director Patrick Shen insists that we look at individuals usually relegated to the margins.
That straightforward insistence is the lifeblood of the film, which profiles eight people who work as custodians at institutions of higher learning. The sole woman notes that when she tells people what she does, they usually clam up, certain that nothing interesting could possibly ensue. Their loss.
The documentary The Philosopher Kings, directed by Patrick Shen, is punctuated by Bill Clinton’s 2007 commencement address to the 2007 class of the Rochester Institute of Technology. (My old film school alma mater, by the way.) In the speech, the former president advises the recent graduates to consider the workers who set up the chairs for them to sit on during the ceremony, and who will then remove the chairs and clean up the mess they leave behind before they move out into the real world.
Shen does just that. While the director doesn’t profile any custodians at RIT — the Clinton footage appears to have been acquired, rather than produced for this film — The Philosopher Kings gets up close and personal with eight maintenance workers at seven different institutes of higher learning all over the country for an extremely moving and engaging film.
Choosing this topic for a documentary, and choosing a title like Philosopher Kings, there’s a real risk of over-dramatizing and over-elevating one’s subjects. Yet, Shen directs with a restrained hand. His subjects are just people. Nothing more, nothing less. They are hard-working folks just trying to make their way through this world like anybody else.
When you think of successful university careers, you might think of presidents, provosts and deans; when you think of the wisdom to be found on campus, you’re likely to think of professors sharing the fruits of their decades of research on chemistry, classics, or quantum mechanics. You almost certainly won’t think of the folks cleaning the bathrooms, washing the floors, and changing the trash bags. Might you be missing something?
I think it was a culmination of things really. I remember stumbling upon a CD from the band The Philosopher Kings at one of the music stores where I worked in high school.
That led me to Plato’s “Republic”, which then ultimately inspired me to want to make a movie someday called The Philosopher Kings that would somehow challenge our views about whom we turn to for leadership and guidance.
Years later while I was shooting interviews for my last documentary, Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality, a professor remarked that if we talked to janitors we might gain better insight into the human condition than we might from talking to professors. That’s when it all clicked for me.
BNT: Why did you pick custodians from prestigious universities over other types of environments?
Choosing learning institutions as the backdrop for the film was our subtle attempt to challenge people to reexamine our notion of wisdom and what constitutes a proper education.
We’d all agree that it’s a bit ironic to be seeking wisdom from janitors rather than the professors on a college campus. The question is, why is that ironic? What has led us to think of wisdom being exclusive to a particular profession or class of people?
Philosopher kings are the rulers of Plato's utopian city of Kallipolis. If his ideal city-state is to ever come into being, "philosophers [must] become kings…or those now called kings [must]…genuinely and adequately philosophize" (The Republic, 5.473d).
The Philosopher Kings (2009)
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