Why “Whiplash” Won an Oscar for Best Editing

xkcd's chart for Primer feels just as helpful:

https://xkcd.com/657/

Daniel Kahneman (from his autobiography, but he tells the same story in Thinking, Fast And Slow):

> I had the most satisfying Eureka experience of my career while attempting to teach flight instructors that praise is more effective than punishment for promoting skill-learning. When I had finished my enthusiastic speech, one of the most seasoned instructors in the audience raised his hand and made his own short speech, which began by conceding that positive reinforcement might be good for the birds, but went on to deny that it was optimal for flight cadets. He said, “On many occasions I have praised flight cadets for clean execution of some aerobatic maneuver, and in general when they try it again, they do worse. On the other hand, I have often screamed at cadets for bad execution, and in general they do better the next time. So please don’t tell us that reinforcement works and punishment does not, because the opposite is the case.” This was a joyous moment, in which I understood an important truth about the world: because we tend to reward others when they do well and punish them when they do badly, and because there is regression to the mean, it is part of the human condition that we are statistically punished for rewarding others and rewarded for punishing them. I immediately arranged a demonstration in which each participant tossed two coins at a target behind his back, without any feedback. We measured the distances from the target and could see that those who had done best the first time had mostly deteriorated on their second try, and vice versa. But I knew that this demonstration would not undo the effects of lifelong exposure to a perverse contingency.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_toward_the_mean

Just because a movie evokes a strong emotional impact doesn't make it good. A strong emotional response can be highly negative as well.

If the movie is made to create a negative emotional response then I suppose one can say it succeeded in doing so, but it still doesn't make it good to the people who view it negatively.

One of the problems is that the article ascribes a lot of decisions to the editor that were actually made by the writer or the director. Which is weird, because something can't be an editing decision if it had to be shot a certain way, because editing comes all the way at the end after everything's been shot.

Of course, writing about film is hard, because it's such a collaborative medium. It's hard to attribute a decision to a single person, when in actuality it was probably hinted at in the script, then improved from the director talking to the actor, or the DP suggesting an experimental camera angle, or the editor finding an accidental shot that just happens to work for the scene.

So let's look at whether some of these decisions were born in "writer," "director", or "editor" land. I'll pretend that Whiplash wasn't written and directed by the same guy.

  However, after rushing to get to the studio, he 
  realizes that he is early — by 3 hours. He was 
  manipulated, leading him, and us, to question: 
  should he trust Fletcher’s version of “time?”

This series of cause-and-effect events is the story, which is the purview of the writer.

  Andrew re-enters the rehearsal space in slow-motion.
  He gets behind the drums, also shot in slow-motion,
  until Fletcher re-enters the room, which resets the
  film into normal motion. 

Again, if you had to shoot it in slomo, it wasn't the editor's decision. It's hard to say if this would come from writing or directing. The script could say "he approaches the bench in slow motion," or it could say "he approaches the bench" and the director intuits that the film should ratchet up the tension.

  It’s interesting to note that while his drumming is off, 
  the editor chooses to place cuts of Andrew placing 
  band-aids on his hand that are in perfect rhythm with 
  the timing of the ride cymbal –-

This does sound like an editing decision. But again, the script could easily say "He band-aids his hand in rhythm with the cymbals."

If you want to read more about some actual decisions an editor goes through, I highly recomment In The Blink Of An Eye, written by sound and film editor Walter Murch. Tony Zhou's Vimeo series Every Frame A Painting is great too, although it focuses more on directing and cinematography.

I hated it because its message was perverted. The "mean" character was rewarded -- not punished -- for his most sadistic act (the last 10 minutes of the movie), and as sofal has pointed out here, audiences seemed to have taken his behavior as the norm when pushing students to greatness. If the movie had ever implied that greatness can be achieved without abuse (which it can), I'd have had no problem with it.