Dead Poets Society Keating example essay topic

The main philosophy I saw in the movie was that which I call the anti-romantic romanticist, which will be explained in greater detail within this site. To truly understand romanticism and realism as I am defining them, you MUST read my section on romanticism, realism, and DPS. The purpose of this site is to present a series of case studies on the different characters in this movie in terms of their views on life. I believe that Todd is the main character - the only 'anti romantic romanticist' - while Neil, N wanda, and Knox are symbolic of what romanticism is, and while Neil's father, the school, and Cameron are symbolic of realism. Anyway, I hope maybe because of this page, you " ll look at this movie with a new perspective, or at least you will think about whether or not the movie truly embraces the 'Carpe diem' philosophy of romanticism. I personally believe the true philosophy of 'Carpe Diem' in the movie stems not from a romantic view, but from an existentialist view.

I chose to describe it from a romantic point of view because I believe the movie constantly combats romanticism with realism, & existentialism isn't really touched upon. (I do, however, think Peter Weir did an excellent job with the Truman Show by portraying 'Carpe Diem' in an existentialist philosophy. I personally think that movie is much more thought provoking than DPS, and emphasizes to a greater extent, living life to the fullest instead of limiting yourself to a minimal existence. Of course, the movie also is the ultimate case of paranoia which was actually real; it was a leap of faith to discover truth rather than accept deception; it was a play on the power of the media, and what people will do for money; and it gave a picture of what God may be like. I could go on and on... ) Dead Poets Society (1989) By Jim Emerson Hopelessly riddled with paradoxes and contradictions, Peter Weir's Dead Poets Society is a numbingly conventional commercial formula picture that, incongruously, pretends to celebrate non-conformity.

It's a film by the extraordinary Australian director Peter Weir (Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave, The Year of Living Dangerously, Witness, The Mosquito Coast, among others) that neatly trims its edges to safely and snugly into the Touchstone Pictures factory mold. The only thing surprising about this movie is that Weir has made something so bland and unadventurous. Nevertheless, Dead Poets Society features Robin Williams' most convincing and restrained screen work -- effectively muting his compulsion to skip from one shtick to another, rather than limit himself to playing a single character -- even though those were the very anarchic impulses that made him a unique star in the first place. And, although Williams' name appears above the title, he's not really in it very much. So, another paradox: It's Williams' best movie work because he's the least like himself and he isn't onscreen long.

Consequently, he doesn't have the opportunity to rip holes in the fabric of the movie with his familiarly distracting, manic attention-grabbing tricks. Unfortunately, in the case of Dead Poets Society -- a sort of Stand and Deliver about wealthy, male, teenage Anglo-Saxons -- these paradoxes (except for the ones involving Williams) don't serve or enrich the movie, they just cause it to collapse upon itself. Americans have traditionally maintained a romantic, love-hate relationship with the notion of nonconformity. Deep down, we each cherish an iconoclastic image of ourselves.

American movies and literature are full of rebel heroes and heroines who reinforce that image, from Melville's Bartleby the scrivener and Hawthorne's Hester Prynne to Joseph Heller's Yossarian and John Irving's T.S. Garp. At the same time (as these characters attest), we sure do resent it when other people don't behave the way we think they ought to -- that is, 'like everybody else. ' 'Carpe Diem, lads! Seize the day! Make your lives extraordinary!' new teacher John Keating (Williams) preaches to his pink-cheeked English lit students at Vermont's exclusive Welton Academy in the fall of 1959. Every school has (or ought to have) a John Keating.

He's the outgoing, insurrectionary teacher who opposes the numbing, by-rote brainwashing methods of so much institutional book-learning and encourages his kids to follow their passions, to think for themselves -- his way, of course. When a stuffy introductory essay to a poetry anthology proposes a ridiculous method that reduces literature to a mathematical formula, whereby a poem's 'greatness' quotient can supposedly be plotted on a graph, Keating denounces it as rubbish and commands his students to rip the introduction from the book. He's fun. He cares. He half-jokingly (but only half-) tells the boys that literature was invented to woo girls. He does quicksilver impressions of John Wayne and Marlon Brando.

He stands up on his desk -- to get a different point of view on things -- and tries to get his students to follow his example. When the kids dig up Keating's old school yearbook and find that their charismatic professor used to belong to a mysterious cult called the Dead Poets Society, he lets them in on the secret: It was a group of students who met in the ancient Indian caves nearby and read poetry -- their own as well as Walt Whitman's -- thereby causing girls to swoon. Keating makes poetry attractive to these boys by presenting it as an age-old seduction technique. (Well, the impulses behind Shakespeare's sonnets weren't all chaste.) Naturally, the younger generation chooses to emulate their idol. An older, more experienced teacher questions whether 15- to 17-year-old kids are really ready yet to handle Keating's brand of freedom. 'Gee, I never pegged you for a cynic,' says Keating.

'I'm not,' says the other teacher. 'I'm a realist. ' This smells like the set-up for a promising battle of philosophies, but Keating's sympathetic intellectual sparring partner promptly drops out of the movie, reappearing only occasionally and then as a mere background figure. (To a lesser extent, this is also what happens to Keating, who recedes after a couple of classroom scenes.) So, the only forces opposing Keating's philosophy are rigid and towering ones, personified by Welton's stern, rigid, downright fossilized old headmaster, Mr. Nolan (Norman Lloyd), and the cruel, stubborn parent, Mr. Perry (Kurt wood Smith, who appears to be warming up here for his portrayal of Nazi war criminal Joseph Gobbles in an upcoming TV movie). 'After you " ve finished medical school and you " re on your own you can do as you damn well please!' the ruthless Mr. Perry lectures his son, one of Keating's prized students. 'But until then, you do as I tell you to!' So, who are you going to root for -- cuddly bear Robin Williams or a couple of fascistic cold fish?

The deck is as stacked as it can be. And yet, in the end, the movie indicates (despite itself) that maybe the cynic / realist from early in the picture was indeed right, after all. Although there's a carefully placed scene in which Keating tries to make the distinction between unfettered self-expression and self-destructive behavior, the principles behind the re-formation of the Dead Poets Society eventually lead to catastrophe. It becomes clear that at least some of the boys really aren't emotionally equipped to incorporate into their own lives the kind of freedom and nonconformism that Keating is selling. Now here's an idea for a movie with provocative conflicts and ambiguities -- a well-meaning, influential teacher who unintentionally becomes the catalyst for tragedy by encouraging his ill-prepared students to fly, Icarus-like, too close to the sun.

But you won't find that movie here. The picture is really about the boys, who get most of the screen time. And each of them is given a character trait, more or less. Noel Perry (Robert Sean Leonard), the bright kid with the Darth Vader dad, decides he wants to be an actor, despite the rigid plans his father has for him. (A couple decades ago, 'actor' in this context would have been Hollywood code for 'homosexual. ' ) Noel's roommate Todd (Ethan Hawke) is gonna be a writer, but right now he's too shy to express himself.

Charlie Dalton (Gale Hansen) is a fledgling beatnik who has a great passion for a local girl. And so on. The other guys aren't nearly as differentiated. Luckily, director Weir does seem to have learned that the best way to use Robin Williams in a movie is... sparingly. Either let him exhaust himself, and the audience, in an erratic flight of improvisation so that he bounces all over the place like a rapidly deflating balloon and then exits when he runs out of air; or keep him focused and down-to-earth so that he at least resembles a member of our species rather than some demented extraterrestrial mimic with a berserk radio receiver where his voice box ought to be. For the first time since 1982's The World According to Garp, Williams plays a recognizably human character who operates within the confines of the movie rather than threatening to tear it apart from the inside to make room for his stand-up act.

(The problem with Dead Poets Society is that the movie's generic strictures are too confining altogether.) Nor does he wallow embarrassingly in maudlin, Chaplinesque self-pity, begging the audience to have sympathy for poor, poor him, as he did so shamelessly in the syrupy Moscow on the Hudson and Good Morning, Vietnam. The best thing about Williams / Keating's classroom technique is the way he analyzes his students until he can determine their needs and see through their defenses. Keating sizes up the boys' attitudes and problems and then openly teases the kids about them. In the process, he disarms them, helps defuse their hang-ups. And in these moments, we see what makes him a valuable teacher.

But Keating's noble ideas about passion and beauty are stifled as much by the movie that contains him as by the school that employs him. The simpleminded, formulaic rigidity of Dead Poets Society is, in its own conservative, commercial way, almost as suffocating as the atmosphere at Welton Academy itself. Cursed be the social wants that sin against the strength of youth! Cursed be the social lies that wrap us from the living truth!

- Alfred Lord Tennyson, 'Locks ley Hall' Perhaps adolescent students are often impervious to the appeal of literature because for them words do not represent keen sensuous, emotional, and intellectual perceptions. This indicates that throughout the entire course of their education, the element of personal insight and experience has been neglected for verbal abstractions. The history of criticism is peopled with writers who possess refined taste but who remain minor critics precisely because they are minor personalities, limited in their understanding of life. Knowledge of literary forms is empty without an accompanying humanity.

- Louise M. Rosenblatt, Literature as Exploration (1995 [1938]) The ceremonies that open the new school year of 1959-60 at Welton Academy in Vermont are reminiscent of a church service. There is, of course, nothing wrong with such ceremonies, nor can we find fault with the 'four pillars' of the school, 'Tradition, Honor, Discipline, Excellence. ' The immediate aftermath of the opening ceremonies continues the church-service feel. Mr. Nolan, the headmaster, stands in the doorway shaking hands with the parents of returning students who compliment him for the 'thrilling' or 'lovely ceremony' he has just performed. It is also here, during the opening ceremonies, that the new English teacher, John Keating, is introduced to the student body. As we witness the hustle and bustle of students settling in, certain students emerge from the nameless crowd as young men who will play a prominent role in the story.

Among these are Neil Perry and his new roommate, Todd Anderson. Though John Keating, their English teacher, is in some sense the hero of this film, the story really belongs, in a sense, to Neil and Todd. The other students who figure in an important way in the story include Knox Overstreet and Charles Dalton as well as Richard Cameron. Cameron quickly shows himself as possibly the most conformist among the circle of friends who occupy our center of attention, and Mr. Perry, Neil's father, also quickly emerges as the instigator of a conflict in the story that will ultimately have tragic consequences. Mr. Perry comes up to Neil's room (to the surprise of all the students present) and tells him that he has talked to Mr. Nolan and has decided that Neil has taken on too many extracurricular activities and that he is to drop his assistant editorship of the school annual.

It is clear from the beginning, therefore, that Mr. Perry is adamant about Neil's progress towards a future that only he, Mr. Perry, envisions for him. Thus Charlie Dalton's innocent-sounding question ('Why doesn't he let you do what you want?' ) is replete with ominous implications this early in the game. In what follows we get three quick glimpses into the routine of Welton Academy. We see, for a moment, students in the chemistry lab followed by a Latin class followed by a math class. The next class is English. And it is here that we get our first real introduction to John Keating.

He enters the class whistling a tune from Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, walks to the back of the room and goes out into the hallway. He sticks his head back into the classroom and invites the puzzled students to follow him. The first words out of his mouth are 'O Captain, My Captain,' the opening line of a Whitman poem about Lincoln's death (in light of what is to follow, this choice is more telling than its immediate significance - that is, as a possible nickname for John Keating himself). Keating's first act of business is to ask one of the students to read the first four lines of Robert Herrick's 'To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,' the most famous 'care diem' or 'seize the day' poem in English: 'Gather ye rosebuds while ye may: / Old time is still a-flying; / And this same flower that smiles today, / Tomorrow will be dying. ' Keating follows this up with a reminder that we are 'food for worms. ' This is a somewhat unorthodox invocation of the time-honored adage about life being too short.

It is certainly appropriate for a teacher to use this perhaps unusual but highly effective method to drive home the point that young people are only young for a 'short' time and that they should thus make the most of their time by seizing the day, thus making their 'lives extraordinary. ' The fact that all this takes place in front of a class picture of a long-ago student body on the wall (the members of which are by this time probably all dead) just delivers the point Keating is making with that much more relevance and effectiveness. The students seem delighted with Keating's ways. The only exception appears to be Cameron. When he asks 'Think he will test us on that stuff?' Charlie Dalton aptly replies 'Don't you get anything?' Later it will be Cameron again who will be most reluctant to tear out the pages from the textbook at Keating's request and who will later still have doubts about renewing the Dead Poets Society Keating was a part of when he was a student at Welton Academy at an earlier time.

In the scene where Keating asks the students to tear the pages out of their textbook, we witness the second major scene involving Keating's ingenious and most effective teachings methods. Part of the secret of Keating's success with his students is, of course, the fact that he levels with them, that he tells them (and occasionally shows them, too) what he firmly believes is the truth. The essay, 'Understanding Poetry,' by J. Evans Pritchard, Ph. D., is indeed 'excrement' (to use Keating's own characterization of it). The 'greatness' of a poem is not to be grafted onto horizontal and vertical lines where the first represents the 'perfection' (as to rhythm, meter, and rhyme) and the second the 'importance' (as to theme) of a given poem. As Keating tells the students after they have torn the offending pages from the book, ' [w] e 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. Medicine, law, business, engineering, these are all noble pursuits, and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. ' With Neil's discovery of Keating's senior annual, the old Dead Poets Society that Keating was involved with when he was a student at Welton (Hell ton, by nickname) rears its head.

The students, who are naturally curious, ask Keating about it. He tells them how a group of them used to get together at the 'old Indian cave' and 'in the enchantment of the moment... let poetry work its magic. ' When Knox has doubts about a bunch of guys just 'sitting around reading poetry,' Keating claims that they were not just a 'Greek organization,' that they 'were romantics,' that they 'didn't just read poetry' but 'let it drip from [their] tongues like honey. Spirits soared, women swooned and gods were created, gentlemen. Not a bad way to spend an evening, eh?' That evening, under Neil's leadership, the boys 'reconvene' the Dead Poets Society.

As usual, the only student who worries about this 'underground' activity is Cameron. Neil honors tradition by opening the new 'chapter' of the society the way Keating and his classmates used to open it, by reading from Henry David Thoreau's Walden the passage about 'going to the woods' in order to 'live deliberately,' to 'live deep and suck out the marrow of life,' so that when they came 'to die' they would not 'discover' that they 'had not lived' at all. This first meeting of the renewed society is a tremendous success. The boys really get into reading poetry, reciting it with gusto, including the concluding lines from Tennyson's 'Ulysses,' which Neil reads and which, in the context of the movie as a whole, conjures up a special significance Come, my friends. ' Tis not too late to seek a newer world for my purpose holds To sail beyond the sunseand tho " We are not now that strength which in old days Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are -One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. It is as if the splendor of these words, spoken by an aged Ulysses in the poem itself, performed a double function by reflecting both on Keating's generation of the past and that of Neil and his classmates in the present.

There is indeed 'tradition, honor, discipline, and excellence' in this student-led initiative to revive the Dead Poets Society, in spite of the fact that (as Keating himself puts it) the school's 'present administration' would not 'look too favorably upon' it. It is in the next classroom scene that Keating performs his famous stunt of standing upon the desk to remind the students that - as he puts it - we 'must constantly look at things in a different way. ' 'Just when you think you know something,' he tells them a moment later, 'you have to look at it in another way. ' He urges them to think when they read 'not just what the author thinks. Consider what you think' as well. He urges them, too, to find their own voices.

There is no time to waste. The more habitual their thinking becomes, the more difficult it will be to change it later on. It is interesting to reflect in this connection on the fact that both George McAllister, a fellow teacher, and Mr. Nolan object (the first mildly, the second vehemently) to Keating's attempt to make 17-year-olds think for themselves. The 'magic' of Keating's teaching soon begins to show results.

It encourages Knox to 'woo' Chris (who is engaged to a 'jerk' of a football player) to 'seize the day' and not give up prematurely (we should recall in this connection, too, that - as Keating tells the students at one point - language was invented not in order to let us communicate, but in order to 'woo women'), and it enables Neil to let his own hidden ambition to become an actor come forth. Once Neil decides upon trying out for a role in Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, he bubbles over with joy and enthusiasm:.