How do I like
unusual methods of teaching?
Подготовила
ПГУ им.Ломоносова
Архангельск, 2005 г.
The movie «Dead Poets Society» is
about an inspirational, intelligent, and well-read English teacher, Keating,
and his students and about the great affection students had to this teacher at
the end of a course in poetry. He taught them with the help of such methods as
standing on their desks, ripping up some pages from their books and imitating
Marlon Brando and John Wayne declaiming Shakespeare. Having read about «Dead
Poets Society», a society of poetry admirers that was founded by Keating when
he was an undergraduate students were so impressed and inspired that made the
same society.
Of course Keating’s colleagues
couldn’t value such his behavior and the brilliant teacher was dismissed by the
school administration. More over one of his students killed himself because of
a conflict with his father who forbade him to go onstage and it makes Keating
the scapegoat for this suicide. To protest his dismissal students stood on
their desks.
I found the whole scene utterly
false, as the movie itself. I felt like I was wasting my time during the movie,
because I had seen this artificial plot about authoritarian older people and
good kids a hundred times before. There was nothing new for me, young peers
were full of neurotic complexes and imaginary problems and Robin Williams
played good and honest guy with the kindest eyes as usual.
That’s why it’s difficult for me to
talk seriously about unusual methods of teaching. But anyway of course it would
be great if at least a half of the teachers were like this Mr. Keating i.e.
unconventional and rather brave to resist the opinion of society. To be a
friend to the entire class is very important too but no one should forget about
system of seniority otherwise pupils wouldn’t respect the teacher. A good
teacher must give any student a say and give an opportunity to express
himself/herself. Banging on about some subject is the worst way to win
students’ favor and tune them on working mood.
"Dead Poets Society" is a
collection of pious platitudes masquerading as a courageous stand in favor of
something: doing your own thing, I think. It's about an inspirational, unconventional English
teacher and his students at "the best prep school in America" and how he challenges them to
question conventional views by such techniques as standing on their desks.
It is, of course, inevitable that the brilliant teacher will eventually be fired from the school, and
when his students stood on their desks to protest his dismissal, I was
so moved, I wanted to throw up.
Peter Weir's film makes much noise
about poetry, and there are brief quotations from Tennyson, Herrick, Whitman
and even Vachel Lindsay, as well as a brave excursion into prose that takes us
as far as Thoreau's Walden. None of these writers are studied, however, in a
spirit that would lend respect to their language; they're simply plundered for
slogans to exort the students toward more personal freedom. At the end of a great teacher's
course in poetry, the students would love poetry; at the end of this teacher's
semester, all they really love is the teacher.
The movie stars Robin Williams as
the mercurial John
Keating, teacher of English at the exclusive Welton Academy in Vermont. The
performance is a delicate balancing act between restraint and schtick.
For much of the time, Williams does
a good job of playing an
intelligent, quick-witted, well-read young man. But then there are
scenes in which his stage persona punctures the character - as when he does
impressions of Marlon Brando and John Wayne doing Shakespeare.
There is also a curious lack of
depth to his character compared with such other great movie teachers as Miss
Jean Brodie and Professor Kingsfield. Keating is more of a plot device than a
human being.
The story is also old stuff,
recycled out of the novel and movie "A Separate Peace" and other
stories in which the good die young and the old simmer in their neurotic and
hateful repressions. The
key conflict in the movie is between Neil (Robert Sean Leonard), a student who
dreams of being an actor, and his father (Kurtwood Smith), who orders his son
to become a doctor and forbids him to go onstage. The father is a strict,
unyielding taskmaster, and the son, lacking the will to defy him, kills
himself. His death would have had a greater impact for me if it had
seemed like a spontaneous human cry of despair, rather than like a meticulously
written and photographed set piece.
Other elements in the movie also
seem to have been chosen for their place in the artificial jigsaw puzzle. A
teenage romance between one of the Welton students and a local girl is given so
little screen time, so arbitrarily, that it seems like a distraction. And I squirmed through the
meetings of the "Dead Poets Society," a self-consciously bohemian
group of students who hold secret meetings in the dead of night in a cave near
the campus.
The society was founded by Keating when he was an undergraduate, but in
its reincarnate form it never generates any sense of mystery, rebellion or
daring. The society's
meetings have been badly written and are dramatically shapeless, featuring a
dance line to Lindsay's "The Congo" and various attempts to impress
girls with random lines of poetry. The movie is set in 1959, but none of these
would-be bohemians have heard of Kerouac, Ginsberg or indeed of the beatnik
movement.
One scene in particular indicates
the distance between the movie's manipulative instincts and what it claims to
be about. When Keating is
being railroaded by the school administration (which makes him the scapegoat
for his student's suicide), one of the students acts as a fink and tells
the old fogies what they want to hear. Later, confronted by his peers, he makes
a hateful speech of which not one word is plausible except as an awkward
attempt to supply him with a villain's dialogue. Then one of the other boys
hits him in the jaw, to great applause from the audience. The whole scene is utterly false
and seems to exist only so that the violence can resolve a situation that the
screenplay is otherwise unwilling to handle.
"Dead Poets Society" is
not the worst of the countless recent movies about good kids and hidebound, authoritatian older
people. It may, however, be the most shameless in its attempt to pander
to an adolescent audience. The movie pays lip service to qualities and values
that, on the evidence of the screenplay itself, it is cheerfully willing to
abandon. If you are going to evoke Henry David Thoreau as the patron saint of
your movie, then you had better make a movie he would have admired. Here is one
of my favorite sentences from Thoreau's Walden, which I recommend for serious
study by the authors of this film: " . . . instead of studying how to make
it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the
necessity of selling them." Think about it.