The Talkies/Poetry in Motion
Bawer, Bruce
America's sovereign victory horn. Himalayan military leadership. You shatter the world's indolence-sleep. Pentagon! Pentagon! Pentagon! Earth's brightest, bravest, Power Dawn. Winchester claims...
...A lot of people say the earth is dying, that rain forests are being destroyed...
...C ome viewers of Dead Poets Society will be reminded of Muriel Spark's 1961 novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (which, it will be remembered, was made into a 1969 film starring Maggie Smith...
...You'd react— and that's what's happening with the planet...
...Look back a hundred years, we had no radios, no televisions, no compact discs, no acid rain, and we never had these environmental problems...
...atently, director Peter Weir (whose previous films include Gallipoli, The Year of Living Dangerously, Picnic at Hanging Rock, and Witness) and screenwriter Tom Schulman want us to love Keating...
...Which brings us to the title of the movie: through an old Welton yearbook, the boys learn that Keating once belonged to a mysterious student club called the Dead Poets Society...
...and then Weaver himself bounded onto the stage...
...Why did you decide to work for Greenpeace...
...Set in 1959, it's about a group of sensitive, intelligent, teenaged boys at the hundred-yearold Welton School, "the best preparatory school in the United States," whose enthusiastic young English teacher, John Keating (Robin Williams), teaches them not just to appreciate but to love poetry...
...The crowd egged him on...
...The audience was deeply moved...
...Neil defies his father (who wants him to concentrate on schoolwork) by acting in a local production of A Midsummer Night's Dream...
...The day's closing speaker was Dennis Weaver, the star of "Gunsmoke," "McCloud," "Gentle Ben," and other television shows...
...Seize the day, boys...
...He went on in this vein for some time...
...It's an irritating scene: for one thing, Pritchard's straw-man introduction is too ludicrous to be credible, and Keating's opposition to it absurdly facile...
...Keating declares dramatically, and bids his charges look closely at the faces of the Welton students of a century ago— innocent, hopeful faces not unlike their Bruce Bawer is The American Spectator's movie reviewer...
...we don't feel as if we know him, and when fate deals him his hand at the end of the film we haven't got a clue as to what that fate means to him, practically, emotionally, or spiritually...
...Passion—that's the ticket...
...We're like snowflakes, you know," Weaver said, "all different, but we come out of the same snowbank...
...Who knows what's in my life...
...The lesson is plain: strive, seek, find, don't yield...
...It's reacting to what we have perpetrated...
...The story of Neil and his dad, to be sure, has a certain poignancy, and is helped considerably by good performances in challenging roles...
...for another, whether intentionally or not, the episode comes off as a rude dig at Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, the editors of the classic textbook Understanding Poetry, whose intelligent and responsible critical method bears no resemblance to that of the fictitious Dr...
...The few personal touches about him feel arbitrary: we're told that he's taught previously in England and that he has a girlfriend in London—none of which has any apparent bearing on the story...
...Weir and company would have us believe that getting young people to care for poetry is just a matter of inculcating a romantic sensibility...
...We have a change in the reality around us, which is always motivated by a need...
...Pritchard...
...We don't read and write poetry because it's cute," Keating tells the boys, "we read and write poetry because we're human, and humans feel passion...
...Make your lives extraordinary...
...It was the best "maybe yes, maybe no" answer I'd ever heard at a Washington conference—final proof, as if any were needed, that politics and the New Age are meant for each other...
...Once again, Indy's on the trail of a religious relic—this time, the Holy Grail, the quest for which leads him, in the year of our Lord 1938, from a genteel American university campus all the way to the exotic republic of Hatay (which would seem to be somewhere between Morocco and Iran...
...Intrigued, several of the students secretly revive the society—and, in various ways, act upon Keating's philosophy...
...the difficulty is in getting them to read Thomas and Whitman and Shelley, to understand the poets' work, to recognize the poetry's affinity to their own lives— and, above all, to comprehend why the "barbaric yawp" of Thomas and Whitman and Shelley is more valuable than that of this week's Top-Forty Billboard sensation...
...He was introduced by his wife, Geri, who explained that Weaver had recently been building his dream house...
...Nor do you have to encourage teenagers to seize the day: the trick is getting them to think in terms of tomorrow...
...These boys are now fertilizing daffodils," whispers Keating (himself a Welton alumnus) as the camera examines one of the old photographs in extreme close-up...
...Then why, one wonders, did he hire him in the first place...
...I don't think I'm going to have that urge, but I don't want to limit myself...
...Thoreau, he exclaims, wrote that "most men lead lives of quiet desperation": don't let that happen to you...
...Certainly, in this age of sex, drugs, rock-and-roll, and other forms of instant gratification, "seize the day" is among the last messages teenagers need to hear—which may be why Dead Poets Society is set not in an inner-city high school in 1989 (where a John Keating would merely be contributing to the reigning chaos) but in a stuffy late-fifties prep school, a numbingly reactionary environment in which teaching methods like Keating's can actually be made to seem plausible and sympathetic...
...what's more, one might justifiably be disturbed by Spielberg's consistently glib appropriation of profound religious images and ideas (which brings to mind his equally slick treatment of war and its casualties in Empire of the Sun...
...Then came the clincher...
...You see more earthquakes and tornadoes...
...But for the most part, Last Crusade does exactly what this sort of film should do: it moves along (as did Raiders of the Lost Ark) at a breathtaking clip, keeping you on the edge of your seat nearly without letup...
...This is a complaint that has been made against Pentagon bureaucrats for years...
...We're in a shift of consciousness," Weaver said...
...As befits a good bureaucrat, he had a chart...
...But the father-son conflict feels rather cursory at times, bringing us too close for comfort to TV-movie territory...
...As for the sequences about Knox and his girl, they're so trite and familiar that they might almost have been edited in from some inane coming-of-age movie set in the late fifties—or, for that matter, from "Happy Days...
...It's the boys, in fact, who are at the film's center...
...We are food for worms, lads...
...the entire middle part of the film—which abandons Keating for extended periods in order to shuttle back and forth between glimpses of the boys' extracurricular lives—feels directionless, unmoored...
...Second, they give the two most prominent boys, Todd Anderson and Neil Perry (Robert Sean Leonard), frosty and tyrannical dads...
...None of these ways, unfortunately, is very interesting...
...But their characters' tribulations simply aren't that compelling, and the closer Weir gets to them the less certain he seems about where he wants to direct emphasis...
...but surely anyone who has tried his hand at teaching poetry to high school or college students knows that teenaged boys already think like Dylan Thomas and Walt Whitman and Percy Bysshe Shelley...
...All of which is a shame, because Robin Williams (who convincingly demonstrated his capabilities as a serious actor in The World According to Garp) turns in a splendidly modulated performance as Keating...
...He also accepts credit for exposing the procurement scandals last year through meditation...
...its members, Keating explains to them nostalgically, were "romantics" who regularly gathered in a cave and read to each other from an anthology called Five Centuries of Verse...
...0 40 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1989...
...and Kurtwood Smith turns in a forceful performance as the father, who is at once genuinely loving and cruelly inflexible, so determined to see his son become a doctor that he is unwilling, even for a moment, to take the boy's own aspirations seriously...
...He feeds them a purely Romantic conception of things: the poet as savage, as redskin...
...Love—you know, that's really the answer to every problem on the face of the earth...
...The average Pentagon worker, he said, starts his career with a flat "awareness baseline...
...indeed, I can't think of a recent film with more promising work by actors of this age...
...Do you think the New Age will ever take place...
...own...
...a boy named Knox Overstreet screws up the courage to ask a pretty girl out for a date...
...and it gives you a hero you can root for, while every so often (but not too often) laughing along with you at the implausibility of it all...
...Instead he conducts unorthodox exercises: during one class period, he has the boys take turns standing on his desk (so that they can see things from a different perspective...
...In his talk, Winchester tried to explain...
...I supported Greenpeace because there was an urging within me to heal the planet...
...All in all, it's an entertaining roller-coaster ride...
...Leonard (despite a tendency to overexercise his winsome smile) does a credible job of creating a character whose self-possession dissolves completely in his father's presence...
...and when the most unassertive boy in the class, Todd Anderson (Ethan Hawke), proves to be too bashful to compose and read aloud a poem of his own, Keating drags him in front of the class and agitates him into inventing one on the spot...
...though he seems always to be on the go— bounding tirelessly about the classroom like a Donald O'Connor, constantly pouncing on one student or another to make a point—his exuberance never gets out of control, and his restraint (when called for) is impressive...
...We also get to see Indy as a boy—specifically, a Boy Scout in 1912 Utah—who, in a wittily conceived sequence, leads a corps of bad guys on a chase through a circus train...
...How callow, how sentimental, this film is about its subject...
...If Robert Sean Leonard is very fine, moreover, Ethan Hawke is even finer, making Todd's painful shyness so palpable and touching that one all but squirms along with him...
...On the first day of class, Keating orders the boys to tear this introduction out of their books, and passes around the wastepaper basket while fulminating against the "armies of academics" who engage in "measuring poetry...
...He has a boy recite the closing lines of Tennyson's "Ulysses," with their description of "heroic hearts,/Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield...
...As before, our hero is archeology professor Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford), who—what with his life-or-death chases through Austrian castles, German countryside, and Middle Eastern deserts, and his hair's-breadth escapes from Nazi zeppelins, fast-sinking ships off the Portuguese coast, and blazing, rat-infested Venetian catacombs—spends even less time in the classroom than John Keating...
...Some of this," Winchester said with a shrug, "may sound like nonsense...
...Meditation, however, causes the bureaucrat's mind to leap into the "field of Universal C," C being the "coherence factor," a "measure of spiritual force," that produces the "Peace Shield effect...
...The part is nicely played by River Phoenix, who projects the same boyish earnestness that Ford does—and the same charming combination of resourcefulness and fallibility, savvy and naivete...
...Winchester claims that his meditators are responsible for the "breakthrough in the reunification process" between North and South Korea...
...Any chance of a political campaign...
...Like Jean Brodie, John Keating is a lonely, self-romanticizing egoist whose classroom style fosters a personality cult (he has the boys call him Captain, a name derived from Whitman's "0 Captain, My Captain" —a poem which, incidentally, few true Whitmanians would exalt...
...What does all this have to do with poetry...
...Keating's hero is Whitman, and he scrawls on the blackboard the famous line from "Song of Myself': "I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world...
...No Alexander Pope on this reading list...
...What would you do if someone poured acid rain on your head...
...Skimpily developed though Williams's character may be, it is only when he is on screen that the movie has energy, color, and dramatic tension...
...Before long, he's got his pupils sounding their own yawps...
...To this end, they load the dice grotesquely against the opposition— i.e., the other adults in the movie...
...during another, he leads them into a courtyard to try out various idiosyncratic ways of walking (so that they can learn not to be conformists...
...He boldly came out for love and against greed...
...The Indiana Jones films are, of course, a triumph more of special effects than of screenplay, more of stunt work than of great acting...
...And as befits the work of a good bureaucrat, the chart didn't make much sense...
...There were a few more questions along these lines, in answer to which Weaver revealed that he was a vegetarian and had been practicing yoga since 1959 (when America still knew him as the humble Chester on "Gunsmoke...
...One thing that's new here is that we get to see our hero with his fussy, abstracted dad (Sean Connery), whose lifelong Grail fixation gets Indy into this mess in the first place...
...Then the floor was opened up for questions...
...The poem isn't very good, needless to say, but it's peeled straight from the gut, and (as Keating makes clear) that's what counts...
...Throughout these peculiarly conceived lessons, poetry itself is reduced to the role which Philistines have always accorded it, that of rudimentary Source of Inspiration: Keating—hovering busily over his bemused, acquiescent, and increasingly adoring boys like a neuby Bruce Bawer rotically possessive mother—tosses off isolated lines from great writers as if they were fortune-cookie maxims or desk-calendar Thoughts for the Day...
...What accounts for the mysterious power of these Pentagon meditators...
...Why, everything, of course...
...How, you ask...
...as in the case of Jean Brodie, moreover, Keating's manipulation of his students has fatal consequences (which I won't reveal here...
...he said...
...If Ronald Reagan can do it," someone called out, "you can do it...
...Weaver paused, and gave the audience a beatific smile...
...For he certainly doesn't teach his students any other criteria for great poetry (not on screen, at least): there's no class discussion here, no exegesis, no explication de texte...
...Finally, they outfit Keating's class with a textbook entitled Understanding Poetry by some scholar named Pritchard, whose introduction solemnly outlines a fatuous pseudo-scientific method for determining a poem's greatness...
...She finished her introduction with a look into the future`If I don't show up next year, it's because Dennis is going to arrange to send me out on a UFO and not bring me back...
...But he was a jockey with lots to say...
...Though we see Keating transfigure the lives of his students, we aren't given much of a glimpse into his life...
...Dead Poets Society has been promoted heavily as a Robin Williams film, but it really isn't, strictly speaking...
...No matter what anybody tells you," he says, "words in meter can change the world...
...Seize the day...
...When he enters the Universal C, the meditating bureaucrat— or "spiritual warrior" —"has no consciousness...
...Fortunately, all three of these attributes abound in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the third entry in Steven Spielberg's highly popular actionadventure series...
...located in the plains of Colorado, it is made exclusively from garbage...
...q THE TALKIES POETRY IN MOTION Dead Poets Society is the kind of movie you want to like...
...He's got an architect called the 'Prince of Trash,' " she said, "and he's going to stack old tires up like bricks and stucco it with old aluminum cans...
...The planet isn't dying...
...There are long stretches of the film in which Keating doesn't even appear, and only a couple of brief moments when we see him apart from his students...
...First, they give Welton an unbelievably cold and intractable old headmaster THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1989 39 who prattles on snobbishly about "tradition" and who is deeply suspicious of Keating and his methods...
...Weir focuses not on Keating but on how Keating's way of thinking affects them...
...But whereas Spark recognized the selfishness of Miss Brodie's motives and the destructiveness of her influence, Dead Poets Society makes Keating into an outright hero, a dedicated teacher misunderstood and (ultimately) scapegoated by the establishment...
...A trim, fit man in his fifties, he wore a sky-blue shirt with red and purple panels that made him look like a New Age jockey...
...Here's how: on the first day of classes, he steers them into a corridor lined with photographs of earlier Welton graduating classes, and has one of the boys read aloud the first lines of the Robert Herrick poem "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time" ("Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,/Old time is still a-flying...
Vol. 22 • August 1989 • No. 8
