Kevin J.H. Dettmar loathes the film. As an English professor, he’s especially unimpressed with the antics of Mr. Keating, the boisterous poetry teacher played by Robin Williams:
For all his talk about students “finding their own voice,” however, Keating actually allows his students very little opportunity for original thought. It’s a freedom that’s often preached but never realized. A graphic example is presented in one of the film’s iconic moments, when that zany Mr. Keating with his “unorthodox” teaching methods suddenly leaps up onto his desk. Why?
“I stand on my desk to remind myself that we must constantly look at things in a different way,” he helpfully declaims. How bold: He’s standing perhaps 2½ feet off the ground. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay “Nature,” had made the same point rather more radically, suggesting that one “Turn the eyes upside down, by looking at the landscape through your legs.”
Keating then has the boys march up to the front, of course, and one-by-one and two-by-two they mount his desk and they too “look at things in a different way”—exactly the different way that he has. After each has experienced this “small alteration in [his] local position” (Emerson), he steps or leaps off the desk, as if a lemming off a cliff: Keating’s warning, “Don’t just walk off the edge like lemmings!,” unfortunately only serves to underscore the horrible irony of this unintended dramatic metaphor. Even when the students reprise this desktop posture at the film’s close, in a gesture of schoolboy disobedience (or perhaps obedience to Keating), we realize that while the boys are marching to the beat of a different drum, it’s Keating’s drum. Or they’re dancing to his pipes.
Jason Bailey sighs:
[Dettmar’s] catalog of woes and complaints reads less like criticism and more like a therapy session. “I think I hate Dead Poets Society for the same reason that Robyn, a physician assistant, hates House,” Dettmar writes, “because its portrayal of my profession is both misleading and deeply seductive.” Ah, yes, a movie that gets someone’s profession wrong, how novel. They say that you can’t watch a movie that was filmed in your house because you’ll never be able to get past how they changed the wallpaper; likewise, every time a film of note is set within a particular profession, out come the armchair experts to tell you how they get it all wrong, as if that actually makes any difference to the casual viewer, merely looking for a good story or an emotional experience.
The point is, it doesn’t matter one iota to the general movie-going public if Citizen Kane gets the newspaper world right, or L.A. Confidential is an accurate representation of police work, or Tootsie nails the day-to-day workings of a daytime drama. And though it might matter very much to (respectively) a newspaper editor, a cop, or a soap actor, that doesn’t mean we have to listen to them, and when Dettmar bemoans Dead Poets’ lack of representation for “the thrilling intellectual work of real analysis,” you just want to gently take him aside and explain to him how drama and movies work.
Update from a reader:
I think Dettmar misses in his critique of Dead Poet’s Society. The Mr. Keating character is taking his students along a process of changing their conformist ways. They are students of some wealth and social stature (mostly) in 1959 boarding school where their careers are already decided for them. At least that is conveyed in the movie. This is set up to be as conformist a setting as can be for the student characters. Now the scene Dettmar laments is where everyone changes their current perspective to that of Keatings on the desk. So what, it’s just one step along the process of breaking a mold. Why does Dettmar not point to a later scene when the students are out walking in the courtyard? In that scene they all fall in step while walking and Keating forces them to each walk their own way. One character, Dalton, takes it upon himself to take the point further and not walk at all (YouTube link here). This to me is the scene where Keating really gives his students the forum for “finding their own voice” as Dettmar put it, and not just repeating his voice. All part of the process.
The Dish 