Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

Occasionally I will re-watch a generally highly-regarded movie that I personally didn't like, in an attempt to see what it is that I'm missing. More often than not I end up not changing my mind. Dead Poets Society is a prime example.

I was in my freshman year of college when DPS opened, and it made a pretty big impression then; as I recall, the on-campus screening of the film was packed. It's pretty easy to understand why; the John Keating character (Robin Williams) is everything that most students would want in a teacher -- funny, challenging but not in a boring way, wise without being condescending, unorthodox, et cetera. He's one of those teachers who has the uncanny ability to connect with just about every student in his class, but his methods of connection and liberal views end up getting him fired. It's not a terribly new story; there was an episode of The Wonder Years that followed the same track, albeit without a suicide.

So I just watched DPS again, and I still report the same reaction: the film's message is not presented fairly, the characters are all cyphers, the stirring ending is not stirring.

First, the message. The film is basically a paean to the sentiment Carpe diem!, and it shows us a group of prep-school boys who each, in their own way, come to an opportunity to "seize the day". This is Mr. Keating's apparent real goal in his teaching, because although he is ostensibly a poetry teacher he is shown teaching relatively little poetry. A film about poets, with the word "poets" in its very title, should be loaded with poetry and thoughts thereof, but in DPS there is almost no emphasis on poetry as art, as opposed to poetry as a source of inspirational slogans. Just about every poem quoted in the film is only quoted in part, and even then the parts quoted are selected to embellish Mr. Keating's preachings of non-conformity. Predictably, one of these poems is Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken", even though it is not at all clear that this poem actually celebrates non-conformity the way so many people immediately assume it does. (More on that here.) Further, many of Mr. Keating's school lessons are so bizarre that they seem to have little, if anything, to do with poetry at all. What is the point of the scene where the boys line up, shout a line of poetry and then kick a ball? or the scene where they are marching about in the school courtyard? I guess these "lessons" are intriguing in themselves, but I kept wondering: if Mr. Keating is such a teacher of poetry, then why is it these kids never seem to develop a fascination with poetry? That's what a good teacher does: he or she makes the student interested in something that they had never been interested in before, or at least he teaches them something about it that they never forget.

The best teacher I had in high school was my geometry teacher, even though she was a very prickly soul and few people would ever describe her as pleasant. (Imagine the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld reincarnated as a high-school geometry teacher, and you've got her.) Why do I consider her the best teacher, then? Because I still remember things from her class, to this day. I remember something about geometry, and I still tend to think along the lines of the proofs she required us to do, over and over again.

Mr. Keating's students, though, never come to love poetry or develop an attachment to it, a need for it. They only come to love him. Watching DPS, I never get the feeling that these boys are learning anything.

Second, the characters. You name the stereotype from a movie set in academia, and it's represented here. There's the nerd who is constantly worrying if every utterance by the teacher will end up on a test; there's the kid whose dreams are being trampled by the overbearing father; there's the youngster who is terrified to open his mouth; there's the rebel-wannabe; there's the strict headmaster; et cetera. We are shown a school dominated by a faculty of white-haired old men, and a single brown-haired young teacher.

But worse, the characters don't even really stay in character if the script does not call for them to do so. Mr. Keating counsels young Neil Perry to talk to his father about his passion for acting, but we are shown time and again that Mr. Perry has no regard at all for young Neil's feelings. So, in a scene toward the end when Neil finally, desperately shouts, "Let me tell you what I feel", the last thing that should come out of Mr. Perry's mouth is "Okay, tell me what you feel." But this is precisely what he says, and not only is this completely out of character, but it dooms the entire story-arc concerning Neil Perry. Given his opportunity to speak his mind, Neil clams up and says nothing; his next act is to get his father's gun and kill himself. Neil's suicide, then, shifts from being about Neil's dreams being hopelessly stifled to being about Neil's cowardice. In the end, Neil turns out to be the real coward of the film. Perhaps this was intentional, but I don't think so -- nothing in the film is subtle, so I have a hard time accepting subtlety here in the film's seminal event. I think we're really supposed to feel sorry for Neil and his plight, but as he sits alone in the study after his father leaves the room, I'm thinking, "You gutless twerp."

Finally, the falsity of the ending is as stupefying to me as ever. We're clearly supposed to know that Mr. Keating is being unfairly railroaded, but an air of cluelessness surrounds him, so as the film's last twenty minutes or so play out I can't help but wonder how he hasn't seen any of this coming. We get the obligatory scene where one of the boys sings to the administration like a stuck pig -- a handy, convenient villain in a story that in the hands of better writers would have had no real villains -- and then the horrid last scene, where Mr. Keating's former students salute him after his firing by standing on their desks and calling him "O Captain! my Captain!" for the last time -- in front of the headmaster, to boot. Rebellion wins out, and in some small way the boys do the right thing in the end, and we're allowed to believe that Mr. Keating has made a difference, or something like that.

But the problem here is, the boys do their desktop climb after they've all signed the letter that gets Mr. Keating fired. When presented with the administration's whitewashed version of events, they say "Yep, that's how it happened, we're sorry, sir"...and only when everyone is safe do they climb atop their desks. Well, I can't buy that. What the boys are really saying here is, "Gee, Mr. Keating, we had a chance to do the right thing but we didn't do that, so here's a nifty consolation prize." If they had to end the movie with the boys standing on desks, then it should have been done this way: The boys are brought to the classroom, where the headmaster waits with the boys' parents, Mr. Keating, and the Trustees or whomever. There the boys are confronted with Mr. Keating on the one hand, and their families and everyone else on the other; and there they are each given a copy of the letter containing the administration's version of events and a pen. They're all told to sign it, and Mr. Keating is already packed because he's about to be fired. Then Ethan Hawke can climb atop his desk and tearfully say "O Captain! my Captain!", followed by the other boys. Sure, they'd all be expelled; sure, Mr. Keating would still be fired on some half-assed pretense; but the boys will have done the right thing. They'll have struck a genuine blow for Integrity and Truth and Justice and the American Way, instead of the pretty much useless gesture they strike otherwise. The way the film ends as is, only one of the boys actually stands up for his principles; only one of the boys is given the chance to save his own neck and decides not to do so. That's Charlie ("Nuwanda"), who gives the turncoat boy a bloody nose and gets expelled for his troubles.

Basically, Dead Poets Society is a very watchable movie -- wonderful photography and acting, nice music -- but it's also a very false one. These themes were explored to much truer effect in The Man Without a Face, a film of complex relationships in which there are no easy villains and no false gestures. If you want to see a film about the complexity of the relationship between a good teacher and a good student, watch that film and leave Dead Poets Society on the rental shelf.