Dead Poets Society: a few thoughts upon revisiting the opening shots
I'm writing about Dead Poets Society for my upcoming book. I watched the first few minutes again, and it provoked a rush of thoughts.
I pressed play on Dead Poets Society this morning while drinking my coffee, just to refresh my memory on some details about the opening shots. I’m writing about it for my upcoming book, and I need to make sure the reality of certain scenes matches my memory.
And I ended up watching a lot more than I’d planned on. It’s that Peter Weir magic. I forget how much his films resonate with me as they play. They feel so right. They’re so easy to slip into, like it’s autumn and you’re putting on your old overcoat and you think, “Why don’t I just wear this all year round?”
I don’t know how to explain it, but those opening shots stabilized me in the midst of a turbulent week.
The very first shot gives us a uniformed young boy being told by his mother how to stand up straight. “Put your shoulders back.” Then we see other boys assembling their musical instruments, lining up raising banners, getting ready for a formal procession that marks the beginning of the new school year, a ceremony in which new students learn about the legacy of the community they’re joining. Submit to our ideas of how you should be. Conform.
As the banners proclaiming the school’s values in all-caps are raised and carried into the sanctuary of the assembly, I feel strangely grounded, as if I’m returning to a world I once knew.
I did not attend a prestigious prep school for boys, but my conservative Christian school was big on the same ideals that are solemnly celebrated here as the “Four Pillars”: Tradition, Honor, Discipline, Excellence.
Because I know the story Weir is going to tell, and because I have lived a variation of that story, I am more painfully aware than ever of what values are not being raised in this Parade of Values: Imagination, Curiosity, Freedom, Humility, Love. Those who devalue such things end up bound by law, turning inward or (worse) backward), trapped within a world they’ve walled themselves within, suffocating for lack of discovery.
Nevertheless, those who reject the first four pillars entirely are cynical, smug, sophomoric (like the literal second-year students in the opening scenes). They live in an equal but opposite extreme of dysfunction.
But there’s Mr. Keating, being introduced in the ceremony as the new English teacher. He dutifully nods to acknowledge his formal welcome to the faculty in front of the assembly and then, blends in with the line of conformists again. But if we know this story, we know he’s just biding his time, waiting for his opportunity to challenge the status quo.
Keating is the Christ come to reconcile all things, to restore what was lost and refresh what has become stale. If I may reference a much more recent film in a very different genre, Keating is like Brother Aidan in The Secret of Kells, who challenges Abbot Cellach for investing so much attention on walls of self-defense against the marauding barbarians. He aims to point beyond the walls of Tradition, to create a crack by which the light gets in. Or, to point to a much older film: The crystal of the academy has been broken, fractured. And rather than aiming to disregard the crystal, Keating aims, like Jen in The Dark Crystal, to restore its missing shard of glass, heal the crystal, and bring a polarized community into unity and harmony again them all.
Form and structure enable us to communicate meaningfully and to pass on what we’ve learned. But when the form and structure of that learning are valued too much, at the expense of new discoveries and necessary change, they become a prison.
Being that imitation of Christ who wants to restore our right relationship with Law and with Grace, our right posture between the poles of Order and Chaos, Keating is doomed. Of course he is. He will be sacrificed on the altar of the administration’s fear and power. They don’t like the idea of curiosity or discovery. Those necessitate change, and change robs them of their illusions (and delusions) of power.
Letting in the light, Keating exposes the institution’s fear-based policies, their systemic cruelties, their arrogance, their failures of imagination.
Thus, Keating will be the one the students remember with gratitude and passion. He rises and rises again. In the future work of his students. In anyone who discovers that laws and tradition are meant to give passion a meaningful shape, not to suffocate it. And only those laws and traditions that leave room for grace, which will make change and evolution inevitable, are doing anybody any good.
Same as it ever was.
Why do I feel so grounded, so weirdly healthy, when I watch a Peter Weir film? Perhaps it’s because he sees so clearly what good things have been amplified beyond their proper proportion, which does damage to the world. And he also sees what is being suppressed to the harm of all involved. Then he throws a sort of “chaos agent” into the mix, someone who challenges the system by reminding us of what we are meant to be at our best. Drama and damage ensue. But in that struggle, we catch a glimpse of true north, of the way we need to go to be saved.
On an entirely unrelated note, a student in my class last night noticed a rainbow against a blue sky out the classroom window. I overheard a quiet joke about how it felt rebellious, stopping a Seattle Pacific class session to appreciate a rainbow. I mean… it wasn’t in my lesson plan for the evening. But it may have been the most exciting moment of the class.