Dead Poets Society

The Pursuit of Authenticity

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. (Mr. Keating)

The warm brownish hues and the themes of introspection and awakening make Peter Weir’s iconic Dead Poets Society a perfect movie to watch during the long evenings of November. Like so many of Peter Weir’s films, its main dramatic tension concerns a perfect, orderly surface against a deep call to something passionate and imperfect.

The Disruption of Rigid Order

Peter Weir was one of the most prominent voices of the Australian New Wave cinema in the 1970s. A deep recurring theme in his films has been the invasion of a perfectly civilized (but rigid and potentially stifling) order by a more authentic, unruly passion (which is also potentially disruptive and dangerous. 

In his breakthrough film Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), an idyllic, tightly regulated girls' school in Edwardian Australia is devastated when several of the young girls are allured by the mysterious influence of the wild landscape and disappear into a hidden crevice in Hanging Rock.

In Witness (1985), John Book (Harrison Ford), a police detective disrupts the insular, peaceful Amish community he enters, challenging its cultural boundaries and quietly altering the lives of those within it.