Posted on 02/19/2014 1:54:25 PM PST by Borges
I’ve never hated a film quite the way I hate Dead Poets Society. I expect that them’s fighting words, at least in some quarters; at least I hope they are. Because I’m trying to pick a fight here.
I was in the last year of my English literature PhD program in the summer of 1989, when Dead Poets Society was released. My younger brother Scott, who really didn’t have the money to spare, slipped my wife Robyn & me a ten-dollar bill (these were simpler times) and told us he’d watch our kids so we could go out to see it. No one in my family quite understood what I wanted to do for a living or, having finished my bachelor’s degree, why I’d spend seven more years in school to do it; but having seen Dead Poets Society, Scott believed he finally had an idea of what I wanted to do with my life, and more importantly, why.
We went to the movie and watched, often swept up in the autumnal New England beauty of Welton Academy (the real-life St. Andrew’s School, Middletown, Delaware). But I walked out horrified that anyone would think that what happens in Mr. Keating’s classroom—or outside of it, because so many of his poetry-derived “life lessons” are taught outside the classroom, after all—had anything to do with literary study, or why I was pursuing a graduate degree in English. I think I hate Dead Poets Society for the same reason that Robyn, a physician assistant, hates House: because its portrayal of my profession is both misleading and deeply seductive.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Various discussions at various times.
This one is well worth reading the full article. It is a great essay, as few are these days.
For later
FWIW, Hotshots was a good movie about The Navy.
Well, sure. A lot of people said so when the movie came out. This article is too much too late.
It was written to mark the films 25th anniversary which is coming up this summer.
Long article. Can you just give us the cliff notes?
Dead Poets society was weird. A bunch of college guys go to a cave to... read poetry?
Don’t any of them have girlfriends?
i wonder what he thought of, “The Emperor’s Club,” with Kevin Kline...
One of my sons was an extra in the movie. He’s in the scene coming out of the movie theater.
I get the jist of what he’s saying but every dramatization of every profession is this way... the writers and actors must exercise their craft after all and not merely represent reality... where would be the escapism in that after all ;)
[ Long article. Can you just give us the cliff notes? ]
They resisted conformity by conforming to the whims of their non-conformist loony teacher....
It wasn’t college kids, it was prep school kids. That being said, the part that bothered me the most was the borderline glorification of suicide.
I have always been an unconformist.
There is nothing rational that is the product of Robin Williams. Everything he touches is diseased and should be rejected.
I loved that article. I used to hate poetry without really knowing why. I later realized that I hated all the touchy-feely sentimentality that surrounded it, and the inane, unrhymed, unmetered drivel that often passes for poetry these days. When I spent more time learning how to analyze poetry, when it became more than feelings and reactions, when it blossomed for me in all its glory, I was finally able to appreciate it. Some of it, anyway. The humanities are not weak or soft, but our treatment of them today sadly usually is.
He did a good turn in “Insomnia”. But then he had a great director (Christopher Nolan) and he didn’t play himself.
So, it shouldn't have been written? I think some reminding is in order.
I don’t know which is worse, this pompous, preachy, self indulgent movie... or that this guy has obsessed and navel gazed for a quarter century over it.
He’s real pHD material alright.
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