Dead Poet Society, Motivation, and Me

I really liked Dead Poet Society. It hit the spot in terms fuel for motivation. There’s something about motivational movies that bothers me.

In the Dead Poet Society, we have a prep school that stands for conformity using the rose tinted word “tradition”. Robin Williams plays the newly hired English teacher John Keating. In his time at the same school, he was the top of his class. He was the captain of some sports team and the editor of some journal. He  is an unconventional teacher who tries to teach his students the importance of poetry. That is, he teaches them the importance of living.

Neil Perry, played by Robert Sean Leonard, is one of the students in the class. He wants to be an actor. No, he doesn’t just want, he needs to be an actor. Up until he learns to live, up until he learns to “seize the day”, he has followed the plan set before him by his domineering father. He was supposed to go to prep school, then go to medical school, then become a doctor.

Neil finds an open casting call for a rendition of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. He forges a letter of permission and gets the leading role. Not surprisingly, his father finds out. Instead of standing up for what he believes, Neil tries to deceive his father again; he performs in the play. He receives a standing ovation and, following the play, Keating says, “you have the gift.”

This brings me to what I want to discuss. Why did Neil have to do so well? I ask you, wouldn’t it be nice, if they tweaked it a little bit to fit something you or I might expect to experience? Imagine a Dead Poet Society where, instead of getting a standing ovation, he just kinda stumbled his lines. Maybe Neil didn’t even get the leading role, but a side character. When you think about it, that be even more inspirational.  He is finally beginning to live so what difference does it make if he does it “poorly”? Just being on that stage is a life changing victory. I think it would mean a lot more to someone watching it too. What happens when you watch a motivational movie? You try something new, right? Did you rock the house the first time?

Exactly.

I’d be willing to bet that it’s because we, the audience, don’t want to see a “failure”. We want to see someone who breaks from the mold and succeeds. You remember Cool Runnings? It’s the movie starring John Candy about the first Jamaican bobsled team. At the end of the movie, in their final run, the bobsled crashes. The team stands up, picks up the nearly 1,400lbs bobsled and walks across the finish line. Did that happen? Negative, Ghost Rider. In their Olympic debut, the team finished twenty-fifth. “Oh come on”, you might say, “it’s just a movie.” I know it’s just a movie but it would be nice to balance some more reality with.

Now, after this scene, his father pulls him out of school and orders him to go to military school. Neil proceeds to commit suicide. So, yeah, I know it doesn’t have a happy ending but there is something different about this type of sadness. It is the type of obligatory sadness that’s “all part of the show”.

If you’ve ever watched a Disney movie, you’ll know that there is a set plot structure. In a nutshell, it goes: sad, happy, happy, happy, sad, happy. Consider The Little Mermaid. She is a mermaid and falls in love with the human prince (sad), she becomes human (happy), she gets to be with the prince (happy), the prince falls in love with her (happy), Ursela, the sea-witch attacks (sad), she marries the prince (happy).

So, granted, Neil kills himself but, somehow, it feels like it was a necessary casualty. In a way, he had to die to illustrate the importance of seizing the day. The real question, though, as my fiancee pointed out, is the role of innate ability. Does it mean that Neil is meant to act because he is good at it? Is he good at it because he wants it so badly? Perhaps, he didn’t fail not because we only want to see success, but it would hurt our support of him. If he got on stage and bombed, then we might be willing to side with his father on the grounds of security. Neil’s suicide may very well be a way for the film to avoid addressing this issue. It’s a romantic sentiment that he “just couldn’t live without acting”, but realistically, he had other options. He could’ve left home to become an actor, for example.

To summarize, it would’ve been nice if Dead Poet Society or any motivational movie could present a situation in a more realistic fashion. Not only would be easier to relate but it would be even more inspirational.

Before I posted this, a friend commented on the review for Dead Poet Society. He mentioned Good Will Hunting. I haven’t seen all of that movie but I know it is a good one. It does, however, suffer from the same tendency as Dead Poet Society. Matt Damon’s character is a janitor at MIT but he is also a brilliant mathematician. I could never relate to that because, one, I’m not a brilliant mathematician and, two, I am not a janitor (yet anyway). It because it isn’t that I am rejecting what I love, I’m just not particularly good at it.