Alexis Manese Fortunato Sir Dindo Lagasca

Based English III EL 114 – Survey of Afro Asian Literature Contemporary

Movie Analysis

In reality, "Dead Poets Society" is a series of religious platitudes that pass for a brave defense of
doing your own thing. It is about an amazing, outspoken English teacher and his students at "the
top prep school in America," and how he pushes them to challenge accepted ideas by using
methods like standing on their desks. The talented teacher will undoubtedly lose his job at the
school at some point, and when his students stood up from their desks to oppose the decision, I
was so moved that I felt sick to my stomach.

The poetry is a major theme in Peter Weir's film, and there are brief quotations from poets like
Tennyson, Herrick, Walt Whitman, and even Vachel Lindsay. There is also a bold foray into
prose that brings us all the way to Thoreau's Walden. However, none of these authors are
examined in a way that would respect their language; rather, they are simply robbed for
catchphrases to exhort the students toward more individual freedom. The students would have
loved poetry at the end of a wonderful instructor's poetry course, but by the end of this teacher's
semester, all they have truly loved is the teacher.

Robin Williams plays the erratic John Keating, an English instructor at Vermont's elite Welton
Academy. The show is a complex exercise of balance between constraint and expression.

Williams does a wonderful job portraying a young man who is smart, witty, and well-read for the
most of the film. However, there are other situations where his stage persona undermines the
character, such as when he impersonates John Wayne and Marlon Brando while performing
Shakespeare.

Additionally, his character seems to lack depth when compared to other outstanding movie
professors like Miss Jean Brodie and Professor Kingsfield. Keating is less of a person and more
of a story device.
The narrative is also a rehash of "A Separate Peace," a book and film, as well as other tales in
which the good perish young and the elderly stew in their neurotic and cruel repressions.

The main tension in the film centers on Neil (Robert Sean Leonard), a student who aspires to be
an actor, and his father (Kurtwood Smith), who instructs his son to pursue a career in medicine
and prevents him from performing on stage. The son kills himself because he lacks the will to
resist his severe, unrelenting taskmaster father. It would have affected me more if his passing had
appeared to be a real cry of desperation rather than a carefully staged and captured scene.

Other aspects of the film likewise appear to have been selected for their position in the made-up
jigsaw puzzle. Given such little screen time and with such arbitrary placement, a young romance
between a student at Welton and a local girl comes off as a diversion. Additionally, I squirmed
through the meetings of the "Dead Poets Society," a group of self-awarely bohemian kids who
meet in secret in the middle of the night in a cave close to campus.

Despite the fact that Keating formed the organization as an undergraduate, it lacks all of these
qualities in its current incarnation. The society's gatherings are poorly written and lackluster in
terms of dramatic structure; they include a dance line to Lindsay's "The Congo" and numerous
tries to get the attention of women with illogical lines of poetry. Despite the fact that the film is
set in 1959, none of these would-be bohemians have ever heard of Kerouac, Ginsberg, or the
beatnik movement.

Particularly in one moment, it is clear how far the film's deceptive tendencies go from its stated
subject matter. One of the kids plays the fool and gives the old fogies the information they want
while Keating is being railroaded by the school administration (making him the fall guy for his
student's suicide). Later, when confronted by his peers, he delivers a hate speech in which not a
single word is credible other from an odd attempt to give him villain language. As the audience
roars in approval, one of the other boys strikes him in the jaw. The entire sequence is completely
made up, and it appears to exist just so that the violence may end a problem that the screenplay is
otherwise not going to settle.

"Dead Poets Society" is not the worst of the innumerable recent films about nice youth and
haughty, authoritarian elders. It could, however, be the most blatant in its attempt to appeal to an
adolescent audience. The film makes empty claims about traits and principles that, as the
narrative itself demonstrates, it is willing to gleefully shun. You had better make a movie that
Henry David Thoreau would have admired if you're going to name him the patron saint of your
film. Here is a quote from Thoreau's Walden that I think the writers of this movie should
seriously consider researching: "Instead of studying how to make it worthwhile for men to buy
my baskets, I studied rather how to make it worthwhile for men to buy my baskets." This is the
other way in selling them. So all of us must think about it.