CINEMATIC SINS: DEAD POETS SOCIETY AND "ASSUMING THE POSITION"

Ethan Hawke as prettyboy prep school crybaby

by Andy Nowicki

Film is like music in its ability to transfix and captivate its audience. Both the visual and the aural are mediums through which a hypnotic effect can take hold, causing the participant in the medium to “lose himself” temporarily and engage entirely with that which what spills into his ears and assails his eyes.

Of course, film needn’t be exploitative, and filmmakers needn’t be bent on propagandistic manipulation. One of my favorite movies, “Stranger Than Paradise” by Jim Jarmusch, steadfastly avoids quick-cut and assault-of-the-senses gimmickry for favor a series of long scenes, each of which consists of exactly one shot. The camera never cuts to a close-up, nor even zooms in on any aspect of the scene, though it does occasionally pan ever so slightly from right to left or left to right. Musical interludes are kept to a minimum and are non-intrusive. The story is a wryly understated, bare-bones narrative (rendered in stark black and white) about the seemingly aimless trek of three young people across the east coast of America. While at times extremely funny and even moving, Jarmusch’s direction never strains to achieve either humor or pathos.

But “Stranger Than Paradise,” and other similarly low-key films of varying quality (such as the “mumblecore” genre that enjoyed a brief vogue among independent filmmakers a few years ago) are exceptions which prove the rule, namely that, as a medium, film does tend to lend itself to manipulation, and as such, frequently traffics in it. 

Of course, some manners of cinematic manipulation are more egregious than others. Some, in fact, are almost completely benign: a “cute meet” scene between two romantic leads might be underscored with a gentle little ballad to play up the adorableness of the interaction, or a montage sequence could be used to effectively, if somewhat lazily, to display developing camaraderie between teammates, and so forth.

However, certain manipulations are far more glaring, amounting as they do to a wholesale warping of the mind of the credulous viewer to provoke a particular emotional response from him. One of the very worst culprits on this front is the 1989 film “Dead Poets Society,” directed by Peter Weir and starring the compulsively comedic, tediously-schticky, (now sadly late) Robin Williams.

In the film, Williams plays Mr. Keating, a boys prep school English teacher who implores his students to fight against reactionary traditionalism and conformism, encouraging them instead to be avid sensualists who “suck the marrow out of life” and regularly indulge in “barbaric yawps,” as per the command of  Keating's hero, the flamboyant sensualist poet (and pre-“Beatnik” bisexual) Walt Whitman. 

Enthused by their teacher’s spirit, the boys form the “Dead Poets Society,” and begin to meet in secret in a cave. At these meetings, they read inspiring poems, adopt exotic pseudonyms, and generally challenge each other to suck copious marrow and yawp barbarically in all facets of their lives.

All of this marrow-sucking and barbaric yawping eventually, of course, leads to conflict with authority, and finally, to tear-jerking tragedy.

**************

The film is notable in how flagrantly it “stacks the deck” in a patently dishonest, thoroughly manipulative manner, removing all complications and ambiguities, in order to soak the viewer in outrage, sadness, and finally a climactic sense of triumph. The boys’ teacher is a wonderful, caring, gracious man with no discernible flaws, while the school’s headmaster Mr. Nolan is an arrogant, one-dimensional, sinister “elderly rich WASP guy” cypher, seemingly motivated by little more than a propensity for tyrannical sadism, who seeks to crush precisely that creative spirit that Williams wants to nurture in his students.

The authority-figure bad guy

This is bad enough, as manipulation goes, but then the ante is upped; one particularly adorable and admirable boy (Robert Sean Leonard) is relentlessly bullied by his overbearing father (played by the always glowering, huge-foreheaded Kurtwood Smith, later “Red” on “That 70s Show”) into committing suicide.

Williams’s character is of course scapegoated for the boy’s death, and what is more, a traitor emerges from the group. With a villainous, rat-faced sneer, this turncoat—himself a cypher, his motivation never explained--- gives away that the students have been meeting in a secret hideaway; for this, he blames Keating’s bad influence, thus insuring that this plaster-saint English instructor will get canned by the hateful and ungrateful administrators of the school.

In the movie’s final scene, Keating’s boys stage an emotional protest, standing on their desks and hailing their “Captain,” as the glowering, sinister WASP headmaster impotently screams for them to cease their distasteful, desk-(grand)standing impertinence. The audience is invited to congratulate themselves for standing with the adorable underdog students and hating the one-dimensional authority-figure bad guy.

************* 

I recall how angry I felt when I saw “Dead Poets Society.” 

My anger was in some ways a meta-fury; I was angry for having been manipulated into being angry.

This meta-fury was triggered because I knew that my mind and heart were being messed with. It wasn’t that the manipulation didn’t work on me; rather, it very much did work: indeed, I had successfully been led to hate the glowering, sinister authority-figure bad guys as much as everyone else in the audience, but I was also quite aware that, in so doing, I had been “played,” and this awareness infuriated me.

The film was thoroughly shameless in its dishonest narrative deck-stacking and general aversion to nuance or subtlety, yet everyone else in the packed theater seemed to be eating it all up. Women in attendance were weeping, and men were fuming, as if on cue. They had all been played, yet unlike me, they seemed not to notice, or care.

Afterwards, when it became clear that I was the only one among my group of friends to feel the way I did, my anger turned to dismay, and eventually to contemplation. People, including my friends, had seemingly developed a reflexive affection for the movie the way a boy might develop a crush on a beautiful but devious girl.

For some, the film’s crass manipulations were justified, since (as discussed above, with respect to my dismally maudlin graduation music) they were rooted in emotion, which  therefore ostensibly lent them “authenticity,” or something... For others, the movie’s central message of “seizing the day” and “sucking the marrow out of life” was seen as paramount (“Carpe Diem” T-shirts were soon afterwards printed), outweighing all other considerations, like believable plot, compelling characters, and honest storytelling.

*************

Those who claim to like “Dead Poets Society” on the basis of its supposed anti-authoritarianism should note that the film is ultimately utterly disingenuous in this regard, since it basically bullies the viewer into buying into its supposed endorsement of nonconformity. 

One instructive moment in this regard is the scene in which the ruthless, yet quite geriatric headmaster forces a miscreant student Charlie (Gale Hansen) to “assume the position” before beating his rear end repeatedly with a paddle.

There is much in this scene to induce queasiness in the discerning moviegoer. It strains credulity, for one thing, that such punishment would be meted out in a prep school setting upon a post-adolescent boy, even while allowing that the past was a less litigious time in which corporal punishment was generally favored. The sadomasochistic and homoerotically fetishistic overtones of the scene are undeniable, and they only serve to heighten the humiliation of the boy, with whom we, the audience, are asked to relate.

There is another striking detail of this scene, more subtle, but well worth scruntiny. Note how the smack of paddle against bum is racheted up to a grotesque level on the film’s soundtrack, further lending the moment a disproportionately prurient effect. 

The scene is instructive, in that it essentially depicts the relationship between the film and the viewer. “Dead Poets Society,” like Headmaster  ­­­­Nolan, preens as a paragon of virtue, but has a deep-seated mean streak; in effect, it demands that the viewer “assume the position” before beating him senseless.

That much of the audience emerged enjoying getting so pummeled by the heavy-handed dreck that is “Dead Poets Society” testifies to the flagrant commission of cinematic Stockholm syndrome. They little care about being lied to, manipulated, misled, and generally treated with contempt, so long as they can be convinced afterwards that they had an authentic emotional experience. They “assume the position,” pull down their proverbial pants, and debase themselves, enthusiastically taking their abuse.