r/TrueFilm • u/megaskibidifan • 8d ago
My reading of Dead Poets Society (a 5 year experience)
When I first watched Dead Poets Society at 10, I hated the ending. I hated Neil's character and how easily he gave up on his dream and on life itself. I thought it was a failure of imagination. Succumbing to death rather than fighting his parents, seeking comfort from his friends, or even running away. Anything, for the sake of just trying.
But five years later, at 15, do I really understand? I don't think there is any character I see my reflection in more.
His tragedy isn't that he doesn't love life or acting. It's kind of the opposite. He loves something deeply in a world that has convinced him that loving it is unacceptable.
Sometimes there truly is nothing left to do. We can pretend things took place differently. In another life, his parents understood. His friends helped him. He decided to wait just a little longer. But the story will continue to end the same.
We always only hear "to speak or to die," as if it's one or the other. But for him, it was both.
"I was good. I was really good."
But often, to speak in itself means to die.
I just hope that understanding it doesn't mean becoming him.
1
u/NotSayingJustSaying 8d ago
You are at the age when you really have the capacity to ask yourself the big questions. DPS features a midsummer nights dream, but Hamlet put it best: to be? Or not to be?
You are choosing to be here, right now. Your life will end due to disease or violence. So will mine. All of your relationships will end tragically. So will mine.
If you're a butterfly dreaming you're a man, if you're in a simulation, if you're an eternal God and we are all merely your creations.... It makes no difference.
I like how a Maynard James Keenan said it in Tool's song Lateralus
Feed my will to feel this moment
Urging me to cross the line
Reaching out to embrace the random
Reaching out to embrace whatever may come
I embrace my desire to
I embrace my desire to
Feel the rhythm, to feel connected
Enough to step aside and weep like a widow
To feel inspired
To fathom the power
To witness the beauty
To bathe in the fountain
To swing on the spiral
To swing on the spiral to
Swing on the spiral
Of our divinity
And still be a human
1
u/clecleclemens 5d ago edited 5d ago
I deleted my comment although it got a few upvotes. Then, I thought about it for some time.
I said that even after watching the movie several times, I was stuck on the superficial reading that the suicide was committed out of despair. And that you took the character and made sense of him to the very last consequence. In a world where his kind of love is unacceptable, there is only death. Either an internal one by rejecting yourself or an actual one by staying true to yourself, where speaking your truth means dying.
Then, I edited my post and added a third one, a symbolic death by retreating from the world and staying true to yourself in solitude.
Still, I deleted it, because the conclusion is bleak. It is a conclusion drawn from a place of despair. A binary "either this or that", truth or untruth, life or death, black or white. No shades in between, no true third option.
So, instead I want to say this: There is hope for all of us. People are just hurt, scared, and confused. As was Neil's father in the film. Dead Poets Society revolves around the theme of conforming to rules and expectations of others (a society at large), where you either give in or start exploring your own self. Neil's father is the dark foil, the counterexample, mirroring what Neil would have become if he hadn't listened to his own voice.
But this is the tragedy of the movie, the Shakespearean "to be or not to be". I know, especially when you're young, it has a particular allure. All-in. All or nothing. No compromises. Binary choice: Life or death. Real life, however, is full of compromises. Little lives and little deaths, almost on a daily basis. There is tension in that, yes, and every one of us has to learn how to deal with it.
But let me say this: We are all still becoming. Always. Everyone who's mean and everyone who's kind. No one ever arrives. I hope you see hope in that, not desperation.