believe what was coming out of her mouth. My wife was so vehemently committed to her position that Carol was a victim of sexual assault I started to laugh! Tip for the fellows: never laugh at your wife in these moments! After another 2 hours of discussion I moved my opinion to the `middle ground'. All in all this was the most thought provoking and `shake up my atrophied beliefs' movie ever.Highly recommended when you watch that you do so with someone else of the opposite sex! Very intriguing discussion afterwards!

had consenting sex might have actually been cheated - by evil men, I suppose . I don't even know how the producer could find a distributor for this film.. Thanks God he did.People, you do not deserve a film like this. Go get a crappy independent movie!

Academia. Susan, the victim of her own false expectations of how the university is to transform her existence, repeatedly mentions the struggle she had to endure in order to get into college. For her, academic success is central to her vision of a better life. John, the pedantic professor, also sees Academia as the means to a comfortable, upper middle class existence with his new house, wife, and son. All he needs to do is make tenure, and his future is secured. However, John presents himself as an academic bad-boy who debunks the very Academia with which he is trying to secure his comfortable future. This ridicule of the academic process strikes at the heart of Carol's dreams of a better future through education. She quite rightly sees that the professor is trying to have it both ways--playing the academic outsider while trying to kiss-up to the tenure committee in order to ensure his cushy new home in the suburbs. When someone's dreams are threatened, they become angry and strike out, however they can.This is a brilliant movie. Anyone working in a high school or university, and anyone contemplating an academic career, needs to watch it, and allow it to soak deep into the structure of the brain. Perhaps that academic career isn't such a good idea, after all. Maybe that utopian real estate is really swampland. At any rate, one needs to be very, very careful when dealing with students.

moment Carol sets foot in his office is he's a dead man. He is her prey. Carol is a type of student I knew well. She is quite intelligent. She is, however, confused and angry. On top of that, she suffers from depression, which diminishes her cognitive abilities. In self-righteous sociopolitical outrage, her "group" has given her a scapegoat--the white male establishment. Her "group" has also given her a deluded purpose--tear down the white male establishment. Much of what some commentators here attribute to John's "stilted" nature is actually Mamet's writing style. However, John is indeed stilted. He is a nerdy college professor. I met many of them too. He lives in his ideas. He pursues ever more clever theories about life and learning. Ironically, he is a bit hazy on what's going on in the here and now. He cannot read Carol's rage and this is his Achilles heel. Carol did not start out as a "bad" person. She started out as a "sad" person. I don't remember the exact quote, but John tells her: The Stoic philosophers say if you take away the statement "I have been injured" you take away the injury. Something like that. Carol's "group" has done quite the opposite. It has goaded her to build her entire life around being injured and being a victim. This is the bread-and-butter of "identity politics." By the time Carol enters John's office she has been trained to kill careers the way the drill sergeant's charges have been trained to kill enemy soldiers in "Full Metal Jacket." "Oleanna" is a tragedy about the consequences of misguided anger. The term "politically correct" is now no more than a term of abuse bandied about by right-wing half-wits; however, I remember the year 1990 and the pins leftie militants sported: "PC and Proud." I saw a lot of people get hurt by political correctness but two things I never saw PC give anybody: 1. Real empowerment. 2. Happiness. David Mamet nails the essence of PC in "Oleanna."

least as I see it is the destruction from which absolutely nothing good will come. The professor is utterly destroyed and any enlightening epiphany will come too late and too privately to balance out the murder of his life Kafka, anyone? and the student is is, ironically, empowered in her ignorance and will now be forever locked in a moment of victory that closes off any possibility of her ever learning to be compassionate. Others may cheer when the professor explodes. I saw it as his death. Every hope he had died and the blood that ran from his arm was in fact his life blood and he saw it. This is a tragedy and it is our tragedy, whether or not we are teachers, students, bosses, underlings, whatever our relationships to each other, the world of Carol and John threatens us all with the loss of personal liberty until we reject it and it doesn't seem that many have the courage within our society to look at our PC truths and declare them to be errors in judgment. The barbarians outside of our society do not suffer from our PC-driven misery but also don't have our old hard won liberty. A very disturbing and illuminating look at our brave new world and our fellow creatures and, of course, ourselves.

to not believe in the truths of fate. Great movie in a bad way.

struggle, the viewer finds him/herself switching sides early and often. The tension in the film becomes the viewer's tension; during the final scenes you'll barely breathe.The tagline is right -- whatever side you choose, you're wrong. I've seen this movie lambasted as being anti-feminist, lauded for being pro-feminist, hated for being anti-establishment, pro-establishment, racist, sexist, etc. In reality, it is all and none of these things. Oleanna is a mirror that forces us to examine and discuss our own convictions. That it accomplishes this while still being an exciting film makes it worth seeing more than once.

use this term is a phrase that damns efforts to offset the disadvantage that minorities suffer, particularly through the use of language a subject one can presume is close to any playwright's heart . Those who rubbish its absurdities usually have a point, but in focusing on them, they often appear not to care for the injustices that motivate it of course, it is logically possible to care about both the underlying cause, and the over-reaction, but many seem to worry about one of these only . 'Oleanna' depicts a nightmare scenario for a many a middle class male: William Macy's professor behaves slightly unprofessionally, but scarcely wickedly and with only the most indirect of sexual motivation , and finds his life and career ruined. The character is pretty unsympathetic, but also unquestionably innocent of the charges, and in telling his story and even, at the end, seemingly encouraging the audience to applaud his final resort to violence , Mamet apparently reveals which injustices are most important to him. Aside from it's unfairness, another complaint made against the strictures of political correctness are their anti-intellectualism, and Mamet also enjoys exploring this aspect. The female student who brings Macy down reminds me of Naomi Wolf when she wrote of her experiences of being harassed as a student, in that she unashamedly upholds her right to blame others for her failure to love herself. Her manifesto is that her teachers should make her understand what she wants to learn and moreover convince her of its own integral worth: not least of Macy's crimes is a scepticism affordable, she suggests, only to those in power. Mamet deconstructs such beliefs quite brilliantly, but again, perhaps, tells only one side of the story in what is still a male-dominated world. But the film also demonstrates how true power resides in control of the discourse, something which tellingly shifts over the course of the play. Ultimately, though, it is the writer who truly controls the discourse, and however well-acted and highly thought-provoking, 'Oleanna' also leaves one wondering whether it is truly aimed at a real target of importance, or just a straw man. A more humorous, and maybe more honest, treatment of the same subject can be found in the first chapter of Jonathon Frantzen's book 'The Corrections', which makes an interesting companion piece.

to the girl because she relied on dogma as much as he did which I suppose is Mamet's point. She managed to be both strident and weak and he managed to be both in complete denial and ultimately the more vulnerable one. I say this about all Mamet's movies: at least it was semi-literate even if you don't agree with or like the movie. The says more about movies than it does about Mamet.