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.
In The Mosquito Coast (1986), Weir turns the same theme on its head when Allie Fox (again played by Harrison Ford) tries to rigidly impose his own vision of order on the primal chaos of the jungle, battling a world he cannot tame.
In The Truman Show, the main character (Jim Carrey) gradually realizes that what he thinks is his life actually takes place inside the artificial, and totally controlled structure of a reality tv show that is being filmed and shown worldwide—all the people he knows being actors.
The ivy-clad, rule-bound walls of Welton Academy in Dead Poets Society, similarly represent a world within which the young students’ lives are pressed into molds of tradition and societal expectation.
Mr. Keating and the Power of Transformation
At Welton Academy, the world is organized around “Four Pillars”: tradition, honor, discipline, and excellence. Into this perfect order comes Mr. Keating (Robin Williams), whose methods and ideals are passionate, and quietly radical. He encourages his students to ask questions, to feel deeply, and to live deliberately, and thus he becomes the disrupter of this restrained world, leading his students toward a new awareness of life’s deepest potential.
Weir’s direction captures the beauty of Welton’s autumnal landscape and Keating’s poetic teachings, and an awakening is stirred within his students, challenging the confines of Welton's order and urging them toward lives of authenticity.
An Invitation to Live Deliberately
Dead Poets Society and John Keating’s teachings hold up a mirror to each and every one of us, inviting us to explore who we might become if we were to challenge boundaries and expectations.
In the weekly podcast episodes in Stories Cafe this November, we will be diving into the life lessons contained in Dead Poets Society . Each episode will examine the film’s themes of courage, individuality, and self-expression, and how they resonate with our own life journeys.
So keep an eye out and join me each Wednesday in November as we explore the timeless insights of Dead Poets Society one lesson at a time. And I invite you to let these reflections inspire you to embrace your own deeper voice during this season of change.
