{"id":28643,"date":"2014-08-14T01:10:48","date_gmt":"2014-08-14T01:10:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=28643"},"modified":"2015-12-10T21:49:15","modified_gmt":"2015-12-11T02:49:15","slug":"outgrowing-dead-poets-society","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=28643","title":{"rendered":"Outgrowing Dead Poets Society"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I suspect that I&#8217;ve outgrown <i>Dead Poets Society<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>I watched it Monday night.  The occasion was, sadly, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/blogs\/thetwo-way\/2014\/08\/11\/339656142\/actor-comedian-robin-williams-dies-at-63?utm_campaign=storyshare&#038;utm_source=facebook.com&#038;utm_medium=social\">Robin Williams&#8217; death<\/a> at the too-young age of sixty-three.  My selection of Williams&#8217; films at hand is small (<i>The Fisher King<\/i> may be the only other one I own on DVD), and I&#8217;m fonder of <i>Dead Poets<\/i>, so <i>Dead Poets<\/i> it was.<\/p>\n<p>I won&#8217;t say that I didn&#8217;t enjoy it or that I wasn&#8217;t moved by it.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\"><p><script async src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>&quot;Thank you, boys. Thank you.&quot; The last line of Dead Poets Society made my television all blurry.<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Allyn Gibson (@allyngibson) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/allyngibson\/statuses\/499028612352593920\">August 12, 2014<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>But I was left unsatisfied and unfulfilled by it.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll start with my reason for watching the film Monday night &mdash; Robin Williams.<\/p>\n<p>A number of commentators, Roger Ebert notably, took Williams to task for his performance, largely because of his character&#8217;s lapses into Williams&#8217; comedy schtick of impressions and voices.<\/p>\n<p>That, frankly, has never bothered me.  Honestly, there&#8217;s nothing about Williams&#8217; performance in <i>Dead Poets Society<\/i> that bothers me.<\/p>\n<p>No, what does bother me is how he&#8217;s billed as <i>the<\/i> character in the film, when he&#8217;s anything but.<\/p>\n<p>Williams&#8217; John Keating is barely a character!<\/p>\n<p>He has no arc.  We learn next to nothing about John Keating.  (We know he attended Hellton back in the day, we know that he taught in London and has a significant other there.)  What&#8217;s his motivation?  Why does he love teaching?  What&#8217;s his story?  What is he hoping to achieve from his unorthodox teaching methods?  What does <i>he<\/i> learn?<\/p>\n<p>Oh, and this observation &mdash;<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\"><p>These boys in Dead Poets Society cannot possibly be Mr. Keating&#39;s only class. What kind of class load does he carry?<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Allyn Gibson (@allyngibson) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/allyngibson\/statuses\/499010244782325762\">August 12, 2014<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Keating is the catalyst for the growth in the students, yet he remains a cypher.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s frustrating.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s frustrating because answering these questions would have been simple, and answering these questions would serve to explain the film&#8217;s great unanswered mystery &mdash; why was the school administration determined to destroy Keating?<\/p>\n<p>The scene in the attic between Cameron and the other boys has never made any sense to me.  &#8220;They&#8217;re not after us, they&#8217;re after Mr. Keating,&#8221; is what I think Cameron says.<\/p>\n<p>I guess we&#8217;re supposed to make the inferrence that Welton&#8217;s administration wanted a scapegoat for Neil&#8217;s suicide and Keating was a convenient target.  If so, that&#8217;s a brave decision on the part of the filmmakers; they&#8217;re sending the message that no good deed (like teaching) goes without getting totally fucked over by the system.<\/p>\n<p>Now that I think about it, what good did <i>anything<\/i> in this film achieve?  Keating is fired, Neil is dead, Charlie Dalton is expelled, the rest of the Dead Poets are <i>probably<\/i> expelled.  And for <i>what?<\/i>  In that light, this film is about as uplifting as <i>Alien 3<\/i>.<\/p>\n<p>(And I love <i>Alien 3<\/i>, by the way.)<\/p>\n<p>The problems with characterization aren&#8217;t limited to John Keating.  The film&#8217;s antagonists are just as cypherific.  Why is Mr. Perry such an unfeeling asshole?  Why is the school administrator even <i>there?<\/i>  They come across as implacable, unfeeling antagonists, utterly bereft of feeling or reason.  You could more reason with a hurricane than these two, which is why I usually feel this way by the end of the film:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\"><p>I&#39;m not prone to violence, but damn, I would take a pipe iron to Mr. Perry and Mr. Nolan in Dead Poets Society and beat them bloody<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Allyn Gibson (@allyngibson) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/allyngibson\/statuses\/499034054508171264\">August 12, 2014<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Characterize your antagonists.  Make the audience understand them if not sympathize with them.  Make it clear that, even if they&#8217;re wrong, they have reasons for doing what they do, and make sure the audience understands those reasons.  It&#8217;s not enough for them to say, like Eric Cantor, &#8220;No!&#8221;<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\"><p>I forgot how much the Knox Overstreet plotline felt like filler in Dead Poets Society<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Allyn Gibson (@allyngibson) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/allyngibson\/statuses\/499016190799642624\">August 12, 2014<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Let me be clear.  I like Josh Charles as an actor.  Of the boys in the film, he&#8217;s probably in the top three in terms of consistency of performance.  When I thought about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=5017\">a sequel to <i>Dead Poets Society<\/i><\/a> a few years ago, it would have centered on his character.<\/p>\n<p>However.<\/p>\n<p>His storyline is <i>terrible<\/i>.  It has little, if anything, to do with anything related to Keating&#8217;s class or the film&#8217;s themes of rebellion.  It&#8217;s an unrelated story of &#8220;boy falls in love with girl that&#8217;s already taken&#8221; that just so happens to take place at Welton.  It&#8217;s <i>Dead Poets Society<\/i>&#8216;s equivalent of a <i>Star Trek: The Next Generation<\/i> B-plot.  You could excise the entire plot and not lose <i>anything<\/i>.  It&#8217;s filler, plain and simple.<\/p>\n<p>What would I have replaced it with?<\/p>\n<p>The film gives us multiple options.  What is Charlie Dalton&#8217;s story?  Why does he want to rebel <i>so<\/i> hard?  What&#8217;s the story of Cameron, the film&#8217;s secondary antagonist?  Why is he such an opportunist, and shouldn&#8217;t the seeds of his opportunism be planted earlier?  Even Todd, whom we spend a great deal of time with, needs more development; we need to see more of how he comes into his own.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps that&#8217;s what&#8217;s so unsatisfying about the film &mdash; it poses questions about the characters and their world that it is unprepared or unable to answer.  When it works, it&#8217;s effective.  When it doesn&#8217;t work, it&#8217;s disappointing.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s a saying that you never want to know sausage is made, because if you did know you would never eat it again.  (Not an issue with me; I don&#8217;t like sausage a whole lot, so I&#8217;m not going to eat it.)  Neil Gaiman has said that he finds it difficult to read for pleasure because he understands too well how stories are put together.  Because I write &mdash; and I write <i>about<\/i> writing &mdash; I found myself enjoying <i>Dead Poets<\/i> Monday night for its acting and its direction and its cinematography while at the same time tearing it apart narratively.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s why I feel like I&#8217;ve outgrown <i>Dead Poets Society<\/i>.  It&#8217;s entertaining, it&#8217;s enjoyable, it&#8217;s quotable &mdash; &#8220;Dr. J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D.!&#8221; &mdash; but it&#8217;s ultimately unsatisfying.  I expected more.<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" lang=\"en\"><p>&quot;Damn it, Neil, the name is Nuwanda.&quot;<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; Allyn Gibson (@allyngibson) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/allyngibson\/statuses\/499016707596619776\">August 12, 2014<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Oh captain, my captain.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I suspect that I&#8217;ve outgrown Dead Poets Society. I watched it Monday night. The occasion was, sadly, Robin Williams&#8217; death at the too-young age of sixty-three. My selection of Williams&#8217; films at hand is small (The Fisher King may be the only other one I own on DVD), and I&#8217;m fonder of Dead Poets, so<a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=28643\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">&#8220;Outgrowing Dead Poets Society&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28644,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[3960,3959],"class_list":["post-28643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-film-media","tag-dead-poets-society","tag-robin-williams","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28643\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/28644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}