Yesterday I wrote about how Dead Poets Society, despite its support for poetry, still doesn’t give poetry enough credit and that Keating is the coin side of J. Evans Pritchard. Whereas Pritchard wants to graph literary excellence on a Cartesian plane, Keating (at least in the scenes we see, which are all we have to go on) teaches poetry as though it’s just an immersion in sensation.
Okay, that’s not entirely fair. He also tries to get the boys to think for themselves and his efforts are rewarded when Todd stands up on his desk at the end of the film. But we don’t really see him teaching the boys how to reflect upon literature.
Am I quibbling with the movie? After all, how cinematic would it be to show students trying to understand, let alone interpret, a Shakespeare passage? It takes work to comprehend old texts. It’s more fun to watch Robin Williams performing Macbeth with John Wayne gestures and accent. “Is this a dagger I see before me?”
But when, in a movie about literature’s life-changing abilities, our favorite character commits suicide, we have to ask what goes wrong and whether there’s anything more the teacher could have done. And whether literature can come through at crunch time. Here’s the situation.
Neil has a father who is so authoritarian, so bent on seeing Neil become a lawyer or a doctor, that he won’t let him do anything that smacks of the humanities. He won’t let him edit the yearbook and he certainly won’t allow him to act in a play. Neil does so anyway, landing the role of Puck in Midsummer Night’s Dream, at which point his father prepares to withdraw him from the school and enroll him in a military academy. Neil responds by committing suicide.
Reflecting on Midsummer Night’s Dream might have caused Neil to realize he had other options.
Think about it. The play has a character, Hermia, whose father, Egeus, is just as tyrannical as Neil’s. If she doesn’t follow his orders and marry Demetrius, Egeus will have her put to death (King Theseus gives her a third option: she can also be imprisoned in a convent for the rest of her life.) So she and Lysander run away.
Running away isn’t the only solution offered by the play. In response to tyrannical laws, the play offers the anarchy of nature and the imagination. People that try to impose their will on others discover that life responds in crazy ways. Oberon orders Puck to bring order to the passions of the lovers and Puck botches it wonderfully. Neil, who is playing Puck, has before him a vivid image of how authority can be subverted.
And then there is the image of hope that the play provides. In the play’s comic ending, the rule of law is superseded by the rule of love and conflict gives way to reconciliation. While Neil can’t see, in his own life, anyone who will overrule his father the way that Theseus overrules Egeus, it is an image that he could hold on to. The world of the imagination has helped many endure oppressive conditions.
Instead, the most resourceful and sane student in the film acts like someone who has no resources against tyranny and who melodramatically takes his own life. Peter Weir presents this to us as a higher vision—Neil is depicted as a combination of Dionysus and Christ—but the death just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
What if, in addition to teaching his students to respond passionately to poetry, Keating had also coached them to be thoughtful about it? What if, knowing that most boys have major issues with their fathers, he had led a class discussion in which, say, they had talked about Hermia’s situation and her responses? What if they had talked about the healing power of comedy?
For that matter, what if they had read, say, Antigone, in which Haemon quarrels bitterly with his intransigent father Creon and then commits suicide–and then talked about what it means to be a young man that feels stretched to the max? It’s not just that, in Creon and Haemon, Neil could see a father softening up towards his son (albeit too late). It’s that Neil, through literature, would feel less alone in his suffering, would realize there are authors out there who understand him. They might have answers and, even if they don’t, they have made the world appear a richer and more complex place. A good reflective discussion about these issues would help Neil see beyond his situation. It might even lead to a powerful private conversation with his teacher where they would talk about options. Instead he folds in on himself.
Literature, even when it’s about suicide, is antithetical to the narcissistic tunnel vision of the suicide. How can a film about the healing power of literature have the character who loves literature the most kill himself? Do the filmmakers believe what they’re preaching?
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