The summer sun was so hot that it bleached the orange linoleum floor of our kitchen. It baked the color right out, leaving only washed-out ridges and rims of flowers for me to run my fingers over. I’m sitting on the floor in front of a vintage 1938 standing radio. I’m not allowed to touch it. It doesn’t work but serves as a glorified tv stand for a cheap 28-inch flatscreen. Watching from almost directly below makes the colors wild and the picture warped. I’m not afraid, though, when Neil Perry takes off his shirt and opens his snowy bedroom widows, placing his crown of branches on his head with a gentle hand. I’m not afraid as he walks through his darkened house into his father’s office, and I’m not afraid when his father finds him on the floor. I’m not afraid. I only feel the dread and then sadness.
“The powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?” Robin Williams in the form of English teacher John Keating asks his class and me.
It’s a question that seems to gain more and more weight every time I watch Peter Weir’s 1989 film “Dead Poets Society.” Set in a 1950s preparatory school in Vermont, “Dead Poets Society” is the angsty autumnal boys-boarding-school-movie of your dreams. It deals with beauty, mortality and those pesky parental expectations we can never seem to live up to.
Neil Perry, one of the students, will never be the doctor that his father wants him to be. Neil just wants to be an actor. It’s a common narrative of a parent living vicariously through their kid. A lot of these stories end in reconciliation, but this one doesn’t.
It is one of the few movies that made me feel so very seen as a kid in my relationship with my mother. She was a dancer, so from a time before I could walk, I’ve been in dance classes. My mom never made it big, but I was supposed to. I could win the competition she hadn’t; I could travel with the shows she never got to travel with. Like Neil, my life was decided for me. So, sitting on my kitchen floor seeing this movie for the first time, I wasn’t surprised by the ending. I knew what Neil was feeling.
There’s a moment near the end of the movie where Neil, arguing with his father, says that he never listens to how he feels. His father counters, demanding to know, then, how exactly does Neil feel? Mr. Perry gives Neil the floor: it’s open, it’s everything Neil ever wanted. Except that it’s not. Neil is silent and desperate and pained, and he quietly lowers his head and sits back down. He can’t speak. It’s that moment of seeing the human spirit so absolutely crushed and tamed that hurts me the most. Neil’s life isn’t his; he’s just an extension of his father, and he feels that is all he’ll ever be.
Carpe Diem, says the captain: seize the day. It’s hard to seize the day when none of your days seem to be in your own possession.
“We are food for worms, lads,” Mr. Keating said. “Believe it or not, each and every one of us in this room is one day going to stop breathing, turn cold and die.”
I can see why many people would find “Dead Poets Society” to be a downer of a film. My roommate doesn’t like it, and I can’t blame her. I keep coming back, though. For the poetry and for the parents and for Neil.
The same intense, orange sunlight pours into my dorm room this afternoon, and I am no more the champion dancer my mother wanted than I was when I sat on my kitchen floor so long ago.
