Few films split opinion the way Dead Poets Society does. On one side, Douban holds it at 9.2, rated by over a million people, a permanent fixture on the Top 250, a film countless schools screen on the first day of term. On the other, critic Roger Ebert gave it two stars, called it a collection of pious platitudes, and said that when the students stand on their desks at the end, he felt like vomiting. The same film, and a gap this wide. I went through the behind-the-scenes accounts and the reviews of the time, trying to work out where the problem lies.
The story is set in 1959. Welton Academy, an all-boys boarding school in the northeastern United States, has four words for its motto: tradition, honor, discipline, excellence. Behind the school’s back, the boys swap in another set: travesty, horror, decadence, excrement. The new English teacher, John Keating, is an old boy of the school. In his first lesson he takes the students to the hallway where photographs of old alumni hang, tells them to lean in and listen, listen to the dead. The men in the photographs once had passions and ambitions too; now they are food for worms. He teaches them a Latin phrase, carpe diem, seize the day. Some students discover that when Keating was a boy here he belonged to a secret club called the Dead Poets Society, whose members slipped out at night to a cave to read poetry to one another. Several of the boys quietly bring the society back to life.
Off screen, this film nearly failed to get made, twice. The screenwriter Tom Schulman had attended a boys’ school in Nashville, and Keating was modeled on teachers he once had. The script was first picked up by director Jeff Kanew, who wanted Liam Neeson for the lead; the studio insisted on Robin Williams. Williams kept refusing to commit, and when he failed to show up on the first day of shooting, production shut down and the sets that had been built were burned. Later Dustin Hoffman wanted to direct and star himself, but left when they could not agree on a start date. Peter Weir finally took over. In an early draft of the script, Keating was to die of Hodgkin’s disease; Weir cut that storyline. On set, Weir had the young actors live together and study the magazines and footage of the 1950s. The cave where Keating reads poetry was built out of latex. Williams improvised heavily; by one estimate, fifteen percent of his lines came on the spot.
After its release in June 1989, the film’s worldwide gross climbed to $235.86 million, against a cost of just $16.4 million. France was the biggest overseas market, one country contributing $36.9 million. At the 62nd Academy Awards it was nominated in four categories and won one. Best Picture went to Driving Miss Daisy, Robin Williams lost to Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot, and the statuette that stayed was Tom Schulman’s, for original screenplay.
Back to the film itself. Keating teaches in the exact opposite of the school’s way. He has the students tear out the textbook’s introduction that teaches them to grade poems. He has them stand on their desks, telling them to look at things from a different angle. In the courtyard he makes them walk however they please, until everyone falls unconsciously into the same stride, and then he tells them that conformity is far harder to resist than being yourself. Medicine, law, business, engineering, he says, are all noble pursuits that sustain life; but poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.
Two students take two different roads out of that sentence. Neil loves theater, and against his father’s will plays a sprite in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The night of the performance is the brightest moment of his life. His father decides to withdraw him from the school and make him a doctor. That night Neil picks up his father’s gun. Todd is the other direction: the most timid boy in the school, pushed by Keating into improvising a poem in front of everyone, he shouts out lines he himself can barely believe. There is also Charlie, who publishes an article in the school paper in the society’s name demanding the school admit girls, is beaten, refuses to sign a confession, and is expelled. Cameron does the opposite: he gives up the society and gives up Keating, in exchange for being allowed to stay.
So why did Ebert want to vomit? His criticism boils down to two layers. One is that the film is all platitudes, and that Williams occasionally slips into the mode of a stage comedian. The other is that the film talks endlessly about poetry and never touches poetry itself. Among Chinese viewers there is a similar voice: Keating lit the fire but did not teach the boys how not to get burned. I agree with half of that. Awakening has no way out inside this school, and Neil’s death is the bill. The film makes the fire beautiful and pays the bill brutally; it does not look away.
The ending returns to the desk. Keating, dismissed, comes back to the classroom to collect his things, and Todd, the boy who is least likely to speak up, is the first to stand on his desk and call out: O Captain, my Captain. One student after another climbs up, the headmaster bellows from below, no one comes down. Ebert said this scene made him sick; the million-plus users of Douban keep rating this film 9.2. I stand with the latter. Standing on the desk changes not a single rule of the school. Keating still has to leave, and Neil will not come back. But something has already shifted. Thoreau wrote that most men lead lives of quiet desperation. For the rest of their lives, these boys will remember that they once stood on a desk and saw the classroom from another height.