Queerness and Elitist Drawbacks in Dead Poets Society
on twinky white boys and milquetoast academia
Peter Weir's film “Dead Poets Society” (1989) illustrates itself as a rite of passage from boyhood to manhood in the popularised "coming-of-age" teen movie formula. It holds an easily aestheticised albeit surface level exploration of American-centric romantic poetry against rigidity and conservative ideals…
“Tradition, Honour, Discipline, Excellence”.
What would a 20 something, lesbian, non-male teen know about the agitational and rebellious nature of the teenage boy? The importance of an older, kind, father figure to adolescent males?
Unfortunately for myself, it is common knowledge in my regional country town in so-called Australia, that the uniforms in Dead Poets Society are based off my old school uniform. Peter Weir filmed his second feature film “The Cars That Ate Paris” less than 50km from where I live. It is safe to say the parallels between Dead Poets Society and my school do not end with just the uniform. As poor kid on a scholarship to a private school- I watched the film for the first time at 17 and was enthralled.
Even if I didn’t know it, there were queer younger boys at my school like Neil and Todd, kids who felt safe under the wings of academic validation like Cameron, rebels who had interesting takes on native culture like Charlie…. (a topic I’d love to write about one day.) I found considerable similarities between myself and Neil Perry, a drama kid… the golden child of the family… theatrical… a smile that most of the times never met the eyes… hell, I was even in a production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” myself (as Oberon, however, I hadn’t quite reached my peak androgynous Lesbian status for Puck… I was a few years off from that). In short, the film was bait for a teen like me, perfect for a dark academia mood-board on Tumblr, someone who just read “The Secret History” for the first time… but also as a queer kid who saw the love that went mostly ignored by Weir between Neil and Todd.
There were many who latched onto the words of the American Transcendentalists in my English class, I was once one of them. The academic inflation of solipsism is evident in the poets the boys appraise, ranging from Walt Whitman; Henry David Thoreau and Robert Frost… you pair this with the classical influence of the catchy and easily bastardised Latin aphorism "Carpe Diem" or "Seize the Day" and you find a recipe for juvenile idealism, something that feels so easy to believe when you are a young, white male with an penchant for words. You make your own destiny… you only rely on yourself… right? Do what you can to survive, to exist.
But we are more than just our individual selves. We are not just an individually orientated, solipsistic state of mind, ala Descartes revered dictum “I think, therefore I am’, but the acknowledgement that we are part of a web of people1 who shape and cultivate new-found identities, cultures and ways of communicating, of loving, of existing.
It is such surface level, scholarly influences that provide a baseline for a tragedy instilled by the boys’ fruitless attempt at confronting the schools rigid, repressive and monolithic institutional system.
Now. Let’s address the obvious gay undertones.
Tradition and nonconformity can be interpreted as a metaphor of heteronormativity and homosexuality/queerness:
“If this were just a story about Neil wanting to be an actor, he would’ve been cast as Hamlet and his father would’ve seen him and there would’ve been one of those scenes where afterward he’s blown away by his son’s skill (“I was wrong”) and then a then a happier ending”2
It is the “symbolic annihilation” of the self that is the films ultimate tragedy. The concept that begrudgingly attaches itself to queer and non-heterosexual connotations.
Of course, the introduction of Keating, his captivating oratory skills promise an eternal nirvana of sorts… to “carpe diem, even if it kills me.” Surprisingly, this is a common gay teenager experience. Finding an eccentric English teacher (who you think is queer until you find out their ‘partner’ is their ‘wife’) that changes your worldview… it has been parodied in media since the film’s release… (Community, Saturday Night Live, Derry Girls, Big Mouth…)
Keating’s out-of-the-box thinking inspires the boys… allows them to think not just for the education system, but for themselves… however, his words are not substantial, nor radical enough to create broader systemic change and shift the conservative thought process that Keating attempts to have these students interrogate.
Pallid academic references and dead language one-liners are not enough to keep Neil alive. It is not enough to allow the Dead Poets Society to remain intact as it was. The film does criticise the overly stoic, heterosexual masculinity of the past, allows the boys to divulge in lines of poetry, have lyric drip off their tongue like honey, find the meaning of being alive through iambic pentameter, recite topics of love, of sexuality the (pastoral white) sublime… but it perishes the day that Todd falls in the snow.
Despite the film’s homoerotic, subversive connotations, its elitist, euro-centric setting, context, cast and creators lead to “both powers” (Keating and Welton) still seeking “to reinforce male authority", as written by Mike Hammond in his essay, “The Historical and the Hysterical: Melodrama, War and Masculinity in Dead Poets Society.”3 Keating speaks on poetry, beauty, romance, love being just as valuable and needed as medicine or engineering.
What is the central “love” represented in Dead Poets Society? An archaic and extremely concerning romance arc featuring Dead Poets member Knox Overstreet and (one of the only female characters) Chris Noel. Knox kisses Chris at a party while she is asleep (this is sexual assault), and eventually ends up “getting” the girl, all the while no character bats an eye at his predatory behaviour, besides Chris’ (now ex) boyfriend, who rightfully beats the crap out of him. “Carpe diem” also includes wearing a woman down till she says yes, you know, Knox, I think Bukowski would approve!
In the classic fandom fashion, the candid and poetic representation of Love between Neil and Todd is what many watchers gravitate towards instead. Its fleeting nature, it is an ephemeral rain cloud of societal constructs and social norms that eventually wreaks havoc. His father’s hand at the destruction of his connection with his friends through his military school future and self finally leads to the tragedy of Neil’s suicide, seemingly over-dramatic and hyperbolic if not investigated further- specifically through a queer lens.
“I’ve got to tell you what I feel!"
Sally Robinson writes that the film “masculinises poetry […] by framing it as a privileged expression of heterosexual courtship and male virility”4, and it is such masculine, emotive expressions of poetry that essentially acts as an epiphany and gateway for privileged private school boys’ own individual wants, to grasp their own "barbaric yawp", their drive to pursue a career in arts, to “love”, to write and express themselves in spite in a prestigious private school uniformity and at the behest of traditional parents. Something I have seen time and time again, through myself, my high-school friends, and stories told by new chosen, queer family.
The film itself uses the symbol of desk sets as developing stages of reaction to parental indifference and authority. Todd and Neil throw away a regifted desk set as a birthday gift from Todd’s parents in their last individual scene together, solidifying their bond. Neil’s father’s office is a site of paternal authority, a tool of academia which holds the weapon that ultimately leaves to Neil's death. The scene in which Todd is made to sign a paper which indicts Keating for Neil's death is marked by extreme closeups, the desk and pen an almost noxious transference of phallic power to Mr Nolan, the Headmaster. It directly contradicts Keating's standing on his desk to implore his students to look at the world differently but also through his classes taught outdoors, both scenes earlier, such is pointed out by Hammond. It is integral to understand the characters who are shown to be hurt by the patriarchy the most, out of all the Dead Poets boys, are Neil and Todd… not heterosexual Knox, or any of the others, but Neil and Todd, once attached to the hip, a dark-academic Dan and Phil of sorts… friends or lovers… perhaps a secret third thing?
It is Keating’s own direct request for not only his students- but the audience, that you should “not just consider what the author thinks, but what you think” that shapes my queer understanding. The film’s intertextual references are filled to the brim with publicly queer or historically gay icons of art. The “madman” himself, Walt Whitman, the tune which Keating commonly sings comes from Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who has, with the acknowledgment of letters, plausibly believed to have been gay. The films central metaphor is easily supplicated for the “coming out” storyline popularised in the small number of media the LGBT+ community has presently. However, in Reagan era Hollywood, overtness, in all ways, was not tolerated. There is new gossip and talk that waltzed around parental and teacher circles of Welton and beyond of a “subversive” new English teacher, indicting their straight, well-behaved sons into an unpatriotic dissidence.
Queerness hid behind curtains- tinted through years and years of gay subtext that only those looking, would find. There is a deliberateness in choice of A Midsummer Nights Dream, the choice of Neil playing Puck. A “fairy” commonly played inside and out of traditional gender and sexuality roles and presentations, a supernatural, genderless being unconfined to mundane social constructs and roles of humans… something something what fools these straights be… “Neil’s father stands in the back of the theater during the play and watches his son dance around and afterward takes him home and tells him he’s going to military school.” 5
It is integral to keep in mind the era in which this film is set. The fear mongering of the McCarthy era was less than half a decade before, where communists, socialists, queer people in government service careers, and general “subversives” were tracked down by the government and were not only legally punished, but socially ostracised. To be outed was not only social suicide, but completely blacklisted you from potential careers, legal services and other people. LGBT+ people had learnt to turn to subtext, to be discrete, hold plausible deniability.
Barbara Kruger’s Untitled 1981 work, “You construct intricate rituals…” exemplifies this. “Neil grabbing Todd’s paper in an attempt to get him to chase him, resulting in prolonged contact, is an example of one such “intricate ritual.” [to] express their sexuality overtly, [to] find (consciously or unconsciously) a reason to make physical contact with members of the same sex.6
The film is undeniably about the two boys’ journey of self-expression, how they come to blend and mould a deeply intense and personal relationship. The reaction to Neil’s death is widely shown, among his parents, friends, the school and Mr Keating. Todd’s outweighs the other’s screen-time vastly. His reaction is the most intense, visceral, human. The emergence of bodily fluids, tears, bile or other, remind us of our baseness as human beings. Behind the well-crafted prose, public images, witty and charming responses… we are human.
The film’s foreshadowing initial reference in Keating’s first class discussing life and death fails to prepare the boys for the heightened tragedy they to experience at such a pivotal time in their lives, and Neil’s tragic suicide is spun into an allegedly unexplained, tragic lesson in subservience. An unfortunate, common tale for many closeted teenagers, who die dutiful children, who turn to the annihilation of their own selves after an attempted reckoning of their sexualities or gender identity. They recieve drawback from their family or friends in coming out, and their complex story remains untold. Neil’s death is far deeper than a distaste for medical school and a burning desire for acting, whether Neil himself was subconsciously aware of his deeper desires or not.
It is ultimately Neil's inability to achieve solid identification with the most important male figures in his life: his repressive and cold father, or the "liberal” (an unswervingly heterosexual) Keating that leads to his "symbolic annihilation". Through melodrama and the almost martyred status Neil collects with his death, he allows Todd and the other Dead Poets to find their voices. “Todd's barbaric yawp being “Neil!” (Hammond).”
The restoration of this corrupted, institutional power is given one last symbolic send-off through the final scene and the continued motif of desk sets. Todd and Neil's forbidden love is given eternal life and remembrance through death, their deviancy from "unswervingly heterosexual manhood" acting as both the films turning point through emotive poetry antithetical to authority and its stifled nature becoming its central tragedy.
Through a queer lens that both examines the tragedies and repressive nature of sexual deviancy in 1950s America and the privileges all it’s character face at an all-white, male, elite private school, we can create our own meanings and resonances through classic American poetry, the film’s love letter to such and “pluck the day” ourselves. Dead Poets is undeniably flawed but has provided the basis of a story about our purest most poetic desires.
The Hon Wynter, Sylvia, “Towards the Sociogenic Principle, in National Identity and Sociopolitical Change”
Bright Wall/Dark Room. (2016). In Defense of Dead Poets Society. [online] Available at: https://www.brightwalldarkroom.com/2016/04/04/in-defense-of-dead-poets-society/.
Hammond, Michael (1993) The historical and hysterical: melodrama, war and Dead Poets Society. In, Kirkham, Pat and Thumim, Janet(eds.) You Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies and Men. London, GB. Palgrave Macmillan.
Robinson, S. (2000). Marked Men White Masculinity in Crisis. Columbia University Press.
Bright Wall/Dark Room. (2016). In Defense of Dead Poets Society. [online] Available at: https://www.brightwalldarkroom.com/2016/04/04/in-defense-of-dead-poets-society/.
Anderson, A. (2020). ‘Chased by Walt Whitman’ Or, Why Did Neil Perry Kill Himself? [online] Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/@adelynnanderson/chased-by-walt-whitman-or-why-did-neil-perry-kill-himself-9d4fdcdf2c49.