A friend recommended the 1989 Oscar-winning film Dead Poets Society starring Robin Williams, Robert Sean Leonard, and Ethan Hawke to me the other day. With it being 2 a.m. and me being unable to sleep and unwilling to study for my two pressing final exams this week, I thought fuck it, why not?
Unfortunately, my agitated, fatigued (but still insomniac) self found the film underwhelming and undeserving of the "revolutionary" praise it has garnered in the past two and a half decades. I am by no means a qualified film critic, and to most my opinion will either be unread or mean nothing. But I am not critiquing theatrical aspects of the movie like acting skills or lighting, as I am an impressionable viewer with absolutely no gauge on how to judge those parts of a movie. Rather, I found that for a message that harps substantially on the themes of individual free thinking and originality, it fails in its goal.
Also, if you hate spoilers and still want to see the movie, you probably shouldn't read on.
Dead Poets Society is a movie about a group of boys in an all-male prep school named Welton Academy. An unconfident and very quiet boy, Todd Anderson (Ethan Hawke), is a new student in the school and is quickly absorbed into the friend group of his roommate, Neil Perry (Robert Sean Leonard). The kids have many boring and routine classes together, including trigonometry and chemistry, but the English teacher, Mr. Keating (Robin Williams), engages the students in many explosive and unusual class activities, like having them rip out an introduction to a poetry textbook that quantifies the importance and perfection of a poem. He also has the students step on his desk to look at life in their own unique way.
In these activities, Keating stresses to the students the importance of the latin phrase, carpe diem, in his quote, "Make your lives extraordinary." The kids find Keating's yearbook, and realize he was in the "Dead Poets Society", a secret underground club where the kids compose poetry and recite both their own and renowned poets' verses in a cave. In the class, Todd Anderson overcomes his shyness as he has an outburst of composing a poetry verse. Neil Perry discovers his love for acting, and wins the lead role in a local play. However, Neil's father strictly wants him to go to Harvard and go to medical school, and is enraged at Neil wasting his time in acting and commands him to stop pursuing this passion. When Neil disobeys him and does the play anyways, his father withdraws him from Welton and sends him to a military school. Neil kills himself that night.
The remainder of the movie goes through the firing and outing process for Mr. Keating's role in Neil's death. After he is fired after the students are made to sign testaments to his guilt, and the movie ends optimistically in the famous "O Captain, My Captain," scene.
Although it ultimately had a feed-good ending compared to the tragic climax of Neil's death in the middle, there were many parts in the films message that were problematic and hypocritical. Keating continually stresses to the students the importance of non-conformity and finding your own voice, especially in an environment where the kids are pushed towards discipline and respect towards authority. In one striking scene, he has a class in the courtyard where he has them demonstrate how walking in a group of three boys has them conform their walk to that of the group, despite their own unique stride. He then has them each demonstrate their own walks in their own spaces in the courtyard.
The kids, over the course of the movie, become more brash in finding their voices throughout their movie. One of the more outspoken of the group, Charlie, publishes an editorial in the paper calling for girls to be admitted to the school. However, in one of the closing scenes, kids coordinate to not "sell out" Mr. Keating and reveal what had occurred in the Dead Poets Society. When they discover that one of their group, Richard, had sold out, Charlie punches him. The movie clearly depicts Charlie as the right person in the scene, and Richard's own sense of non-conformity with the Dead Poets Society is vilified as cowardly.
In the closing scene, Todd steps on top of his desk in front of the strict principal to salute Mr. Keating by saying "O'Captain, My Captain." Recognizing his immense courage, his companions follow suit one by one. My issue with the scene is that the way the movie makes the boys fight the conformity in the school is through yet another unified act of conformity. At the end, the camera angle shifts to the back of the room to show approximately one-third of the students in the class who had not risen to salute Mr. Keating. The movie clearly tries to show us that they are cowards because they had not joined in the salute.
This vilification of those that disagreed with the pro-Keating group was especially problematic, if not hypocritical to me. The movie departed with the sour message that "conformity is wrong, unless it's for the right cause." Todd, Charlie, and the other pro-Keating boys are shown to be in the right, while Richard is arguably the most abhored character in the movie with being a "snitch". While the headmaster and Neil's father's attitudes towards allowing the boys to express themselves were restrictive, so were Charlie and the the other boys' attitudes towards Richard.
The pro-Keating attitude ultimately led to an act of non-conformity that reeked of the very thing it sought to condemn. It is what I see as my struggle with American liberalism: the hypocritical intolerance towards those with differing opinions. As Richard is condemned as an unfaithful snitch, all Donald Trump supporters must be condemned as racists, bigots, and sexists. If you don't do so, you're "privileged" and complicit in the bigotry, even though if you've met Trump supporters that are by no means any of those characteristics.
That precise attitude is one that I can no longer conform to.
