How do I like unusual methods of teaching?
The movie «Dead PoetsSociety» is about an inspirational, intelligent, and well-read English teacher,Keating, and his students and about the great affection students had to thisteacher at the end of a course in poetry. He taught them with the help of suchmethods as standing on their desks, ripping up some pages from their books andimitating Marlon Brando and John Wayne declaiming Shakespeare. Having readabout «Dead Poets Society», a society of poetry admirers that was founded byKeating when he was an undergraduate students were so impressed and inspiredthat made the same society.
Of course Keating’scolleagues couldn’t value such his behavior and the brilliant teacher wasdismissed by the school administration. More over one of his students killedhimself because of a conflict with his father who forbade him to go onstage andit makes Keating the scapegoat for this suicide. To protest his dismissalstudents stood on their desks.
I found the wholescene utterly false, as the movie itself. I felt like I was wasting my timeduring the movie, because I had seen this artificial plot about authoritarianolder people and good kids a hundred times before. There was nothing new forme, young peers were full of neurotic complexes and imaginary problems andRobin Williams played good and honest guy with the kindest eyes as usual.
That’s why it’sdifficult for me to talk seriously about unusual methods of teaching. Butanyway of course it would be great if at least a half of the teachers were likethis Mr. Keating i.e. unconventional and rather brave to resist the opinion ofsociety. To be a friend to the entire classis very important too but no one should forget about system of seniorityotherwise pupils wouldn’t respect the teacher. A good teacher must give anystudent a say and give an opportunity to express himself/herself. Banging onabout some subject is the worst way to win students’ favor and tune them onworking mood.
“DeadPoets Society” is a collection of pious platitudes masquerading as acourageous stand in favor of something: doing your own thing, I think. It’s about an inspirational,unconventional English teacher and his students at «the best prepschool in America» andhow he challenges them to question conventional views by such techniques asstanding on their desks. It is, of course, inevitable that the brilliant teacher willeventually be fired from the school, and when his students stood on their desksto protest his dismissal, I was so moved, I wanted to throw up.
PeterWeir’s film makes much noise about poetry, and there are brief quotationsfrom Tennyson, Herrick, Whitman and even Vachel Lindsay, as well as a braveexcursion into prose that takes us as far as Thoreau’s Walden. None of thesewriters are studied, however, in a spirit that would lend respect to theirlanguage; they’re simply plundered for slogans to exort the students towardmore personal freedom. Atthe end of a great teacher’s course in poetry, the students would love poetry;at the end of this teacher’s semester, all they really love is the teacher.
The movie stars RobinWilliams as the mercurialJohn Keating, teacher of English at the exclusive Welton Academy in Vermont.The performance is a delicate balancing act between restraint and schtick.
For much of the time, Williams does a good job of playing an intelligent, quick-witted,well-read young man. But then there are scenes in which his stagepersona punctures the character — as when he does impressions of MarlonBrando and JohnWayne doing Shakespeare.
There is also a curious lack of depth to his character compared with such othergreat movie teachers as Miss Jean Brodie and Professor Kingsfield. Keating ismore of a plot device than a human being.
The story is also old stuff, recycled out of the novel and movie “ASeparate Peace” and other stories in which the good die young and theold simmer in their neurotic and hateful repressions. The key conflict in the movie is between Neil (RobertSean Leonard), a student who dreams of being an actor, and his father (KurtwoodSmith), who orders his son to become a doctor and forbids him to goonstage. The father is a strict, unyielding taskmaster, and the son, lackingthe will to defy him, kills himself. His death would have had a greaterimpact for me if it had seemed like a spontaneous human cry of despair, ratherthan like a meticulously written and photographed set piece.
Other elements in the movie also seem to have been chosen for their place inthe artificial jigsaw puzzle. A teenage romance between one of the Weltonstudents and a local girl is given so little screen time, so arbitrarily, thatit seems like a distraction.And I squirmed through the meetings of the “DeadPoets Society,” a self-consciously bohemian group of students who holdsecret meetings in the dead of night in a cave near the campus.
The society was founded by Keating when he was an undergraduate, but in itsreincarnate form it never generates any sense of mystery, rebellion or daring.The society’s meetings have been badly written and are dramatically shapeless,featuring a dance line to Lindsay’s «The Congo» and various attemptsto impress girls with random lines of poetry. The movie is set in 1959, butnone of these would-be bohemians have heard of Kerouac, Ginsberg or indeed ofthe beatnik movement.
One scene in particular indicates the distance between the movie’s manipulativeinstincts and what it claims to be about. When Keating is being railroaded by the schooladministration (which makes him the scapegoat for his student’s suicide),one of the students acts as a fink and tells the old fogies what they want tohear. Later, confronted by his peers, he makes a hateful speech of which notone word is plausible except as an awkward attempt to supply him with avillain’s dialogue. Then one of the other boys hits him in the jaw, to greatapplause from the audience. Thewhole scene is utterly false and seems to exist only so that theviolence can resolve a situation that the screenplay is otherwise unwilling tohandle.
“DeadPoets Society” is not the worst of the countless recent movies about good kids andhidebound, authoritatian older people. It may, however, be the mostshameless in its attempt to pander to an adolescent audience. The movie payslip service to qualities and values that, on the evidence of the screenplayitself, it is cheerfully willing to abandon. If you are going to evoke HenryDavid Thoreau as the patron saint of your movie, then you had better make amovie he would have admired. Here is one of my favorite sentences fromThoreau’s Walden, which I recommend for serious study by the authors of thisfilm: “… instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buymy baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them.”Think about it.