Kim compares and contrasts two versions of the same story as a German version of the story prepares for UK cinemas.

German writer-director Dennis Gansel's Die Welle (The Wave), out now, is based on an incident which took place in 1967 at a high school in Palo Alto, California. The story, about a social experiment which got out of hand, has already inspired a long-in-print non-fiction book by Todd Strasser and a 1981 'After Hours' TV special (both called The Wave) directed by Alexander Grasshoff. Gansel's film owes a lot to the earlier TV show and the book, which in turn are based on a 1972 article ('The Third Wave') by teacher Ron Jones (which you can read here; with a little clicking, you can find the 1981 show online too).


The new film can't help but feel like a follow-up to Oliver Hirschbiegel's successful Das Experiment (The Experiment), also based on a Californian social experiment which got out of hand (in the earlier film, test subjects were arbitrarily divided into prisoners and guards and those given positions of authority proceded to misuse it). Given that both real-life stories have been used to theorise about the way ordinary decent people enabled the Third Reich, it's unsurprising that they retain resonance in contemporary Germany; in this case, Strasser's book remains a set text in German classrooms and perhaps better known than in America -- though, asking around, I found Americans and Brits who'd read it in school too.

Comparing versions, The Wave is dated by the peculiarly over-stressed performances and sunstruck look of US educational TV (not to mention a lot of hairspray), but Die Welle reprises key sequences and lines ('can I be your bodyguard?') from the earlier dramatisation. For followers of 1970s and '80s genre schlock, The Wave also gets a certain frisson from casting Bruce Davison (still growing out of his creepy youth image from Last Summer and Willard) as liberal potential fuhrer Mr Ross, and filling his classroom with the likes of Lori Lethin (Bloody Birthday, Return to Horror High), John Putch (Jaws 3-D) and Jamie Rose (Just Before Dawn) -- whereas Die Welle has good German actors we're not that familiar with even on an I-know-the-face-but-not-the-name basis.


Popular teacher Rainer Wenger (Jürgen Vogel) -- taking the Davison role - is introduced singing along to the Ramones' 'Rock 'n' Roll High School' as he drives to work. Assigned to teach a week-long special project of autocracy, he can't get a stuffier colleague to switch with him so he can tackle the more congenial subject of anarchy. His cross-section of kids -- some good students, some committed jocks, some slackers, a lot of apathetics and one or two troubled types -- are initially unimpressed, and especially bored and alienated by the mention of Nazis. So, rather than explain autocracy, Wenger sets out to demonstrate it.

He insists on orderly behaviour and good posture, institutes formal rules for answering questions, jokingly refers to the anarchist class as 'our enemies', hurries through an election for class leader (which he, of course, wins) and suggests everyone adopt a simple uniform (plain white shirt and jeans). He is surprised at how positively the bulk of the pupils (a couple of spiky princesses and a single troublemaker excepted) react to talk of 'strength through discipline' and form a movement called 'the Wave' which soon overspills the class.