Dead Poets Society Is a Terrible Defense of the Humanities

The Atlantic ^ | 2/19/2014 | KEVIN J.H. DETTMAR

[Borges]

I’ve never hated a film quite the way I hate Dead Poets Society. I expect that them’s fighting words, at least in some quarters; at least I hope they are. Because I’m trying to pick a fight here.

I was in the last year of my English literature PhD program in the summer of 1989, when Dead Poets Society was released. My younger brother Scott, who really didn’t have the money to spare, slipped my wife Robyn & me a ten-dollar bill (these were simpler times) and told us he’d watch our kids so we could go out to see it. No one in my family quite understood what I wanted to do for a living or, having finished my bachelor’s degree, why I’d spend seven more years in school to do it; but having seen Dead Poets Society, Scott believed he finally had an idea of what I wanted to do with my life, and more importantly, why.

We went to the movie and watched, often swept up in the autumnal New England beauty of Welton Academy (the real-life St. Andrew’s School, Middletown, Delaware). But I walked out horrified that anyone would think that what happens in Mr. Keating’s classroom—or outside of it, because so many of his poetry-derived “life lessons” are taught outside the classroom, after all—had anything to do with literary study, or why I was pursuing a graduate degree in English. I think I hate Dead Poets Society for the same reason that Robyn, a physician assistant, hates House: because its portrayal of my profession is both misleading and deeply seductive.

[CharlesWayneCT]

Well, one of the actors (Robert Sean Williams) in Dead Poet’s Society was also an actor in House (Wilson). That ties the two shows together.

I loved Dead Poet’s Society, but certainly not because I thought it was a realistic portrayal of anything. I mean, maybe there were parents who would want to beat their kid for performing in a play......

[Unknowing]

“Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson.

[WayneS]

I became a nonconformist in order to fit in.

[MrEdd]

Nonconformist?
Thats how all the conformists say it.
I’m an unconformist.

[WayneS]

;-)

[laotzu]

I’m an unconformist

That's unpossible.

[x]

So, it shouldn't have been written?

You said it, not me.

It isn't that hard to come up with a defense of scholarship and academic criticism against Robin Williams's movie. When a professor does so at great length, though, he runs the risk of becoming everything the movie attacks. I didn't like the movie, and I've always hated Robin Williams, but the article made me think a little better of the film (though not of Robin Williams).

Williams is sort of a Sixties guy. We can rage against the Sixties and the changes they brought and the leftover Sixties people, but over the years some of that spirit has become a part of us. We can cringe at literary fandom or the popular teacher who builds a cult around himself, but the dryasdust professor who's always publically taking offense at such things also wears out his welcome pretty quickly.