Review of Dead Poets Society, Directed by Peter Weir
It has been my growing conviction of late that high school English is a waste of time at best and destructive to the human spirit at worst. These classes foist brilliant literature on kids before they’ve grown mature enough to enjoy it, and as a result it turns them off to the joys of great writing for the rest of their lives.
Sometimes, however, there are exceptions. Dead Poets Society shows us English as it’s meant to be. It’s the English I fell in love with all too late into my time at college after taking an Existentialism course. It’s the English that makes me wish I could go back through school to study it again and study it better.
To this I suppose the beloved teacher John Keating would say “Well go back to school then!” Perhaps I should, but I digress.
Dead Poets Society pits the values of the elite Welton Academy – honor, tradition, discipline, and excellence – against a zealous individualism and the artistic impulse. The rift starts not-so-subtly in Keating’s lectures, as he tells his students to tear out the entire “Introduction to Poetry” section of their textbooks and hence eschew any sort of concrete formula for evaluating poetry. In the end, he grabs the hearts of his students because his lectures are real, confronting life in its fullness. During his time as a student at Welton, Keating was part of the “Dead Poets Society,” a group of boys who would gather late at night in a cave off campus to live out carpe diem – seize the day. “Spirits soared, women swooned, and gods were created,” Keating says wistfully. After hearing this, his own smitten students, of course, decide to resurrect a “Dead Poets Society” of their own.
What shall we say about this Society? Given its makeup of teenage boys, it has a healthy dose of the taboo and the naïve – namely, cigars, Playboy cutouts, and facepaint. Beneath the frivolity, however, dwells the seed from which great men are made. The meetings conjure dim reflections of the Inklings in Oxford, where C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien came into their own, or of Hemingway and Fitzgerald and the expat community of interwar France.
But did Keating stretch his students too much? When his most impressionable student, Neil, commits suicide, Dead Poets Society steps away from the happy, sentimental conclusion of “I got the girl” or “I got the part in the play and reformed my parents,” and becomes a serious film. Keating’s lectures go awry in the hands of his students in large part because art isn’t safe. Poetry is fire – hot and vibrant and alive. It can force a man into tragic shortsightedness and foolishness. It can make him impatient if he embraces carpe diem in a vacuum without considering that sometimes discretion is the better part of valor. Keating suggests as much to Neil when he comes for advice for dealing with his restrictive parents. In this tragic naiveté, along with how many of the other boys handle the notion of carpe diem, the film shows its greatest weakness in that aside from Keating himself it lacks strong, compelling examples of his lessons applied in real life.
“The unexamined life is not worth living,” said Socrates. That holds true for the ignoramus as well as those of status and privilege – even the inherently smart – who mindlessly conform to the well-worn paths of the Ivy League. What does it profit a man to gain a business, or medical practice, or political office if he neglects the matters of the soul? What good does it do him if he spends his life laboring and twisting to fit into the patterns of society while neglecting to live as an individual?
Between the conformity of the Welton Academy and the radical individualism of Keating’s class, I believe Christianity provides us with a third way that unites the two schools of thought before a personal, authoritative, unfathomable God. The Christian ethic calls us to a radical submission to the ultimate authority – the very God who decrees what is good and speaks matter and being into existence. Before God, we are called to surrender everything, to lose ourselves by denying our sinful passions, conforming to a standard of teaching, and submitting to certain authorities. Our faith calls us to honor, as we serve the King of the universe. It calls us to tradition, continuing to affirm the same gospel message we received from Christ and the apostles. It calls us to discipline, as we recognize and fight against the wicked impulses of our own hearts. And it calls us to excellence, as we seek to live above reproach because at all times we are accountable to God.
Yet the Christian’s rulebook is perplexingly simple: love God and love your neighbor as yourself. In his infinite wisdom and creativity, God calls each person to play a unique part in a grand story. Each Christian must therefore respond to the golden rule in his own, individual fashion, unlike anyone else before or after him. Guided by his own conscience and, most important of all, a love for God, he must find his own divinely ordained ways to love, his own gifts, his own ministries, his own song. To paraphrase a line from Whitman (which Keating quotes in the film), God’s great play goes on, and he has chosen you to contribute a verse.
Yes, Christians are called to seize the day. “Salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed,” says the Apostle Paul, “The night is far gone; the day is at hand.” The knowledge that our lives are a mist burning away before the rising sun of eternity spurs us out of complacency. With a hope anchored in the life to come and an identity anchored in adoption as sons of God, Christians are free to make the most of life’s time and opportunities because their happiness and purpose is not contingent on what happens to them in this world. No matter what happens, they can live life to the fullest.
G.K. Chesterton summarizes beautifully: “The more I considered Christianity, the more I found that while it had established a rule and order, the chief aim of that order was to give room for good things to run wild.”
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