Dead Poets Society

Dead Poet’s Society is pretty much an identical story to One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest .  It may be the only story – good against evil.  The quest for meaning and spiritual growth, contained inside another film.  It can be dangerous to take lessons on life from fiction, but the film clearly illustrates the persecution of truth and love which is easily observed in real life.  It is worth going over it here.
Like Cuckoo’s Nest, Dead Poet’s Society is set in an austere conformist establishment, this time a private school in America with a regime of old-style strictness and rules.  And like the cruel hospital regime in Cuckoo’s Nest, the organisation is supposed to nurture its pupils but its cold climate in reality stifles the spirits of the boys boarding there.

Into this conservative, backward institution comes the new teacher Mr Keating, played by Robin Williams.  Like Jack Nicholson’s character, Mr Keating is an unconventional maverick.  He doesn’t do the chalk and blackboard teaching, he breaks he boundaries, has boys standing on tables to see a new perspective, tells them to rip out a bullshit analysis of poetry from their text books, has them reading poetry during football training.  His passion for literature blows the boys’ minds, they’ve never been taught like this before.

In the opening scenes, Keating sets the lesson of the film.  The boys are taken to look at some old school photographs of pupils from a century before.

“We are all food for worms”, he says.  The boys look into the sepia faces while Keating gets across the message that those boys were all as fresh faced and hopeful as Keating’s new class.  But now they are all dead.  Carpe Diem. Seize the day.  He drips the message into their receptive minds.  He is giving love to the boys.  He knows the greater scheme of life which the conformist school has up until then over-looked.  We all only get one chance, and Keating ignites their minds.

In Cuckoo’s Nest Nicholson’s character is the loving rebel.  Without realising it he nurtures the spirits of every other patient, and with his love their mental illnesses become cured, they become happy and the patients start to grow spiritually towards what they can be.

Same with Robin Williams’ character.  At first the boys think of poetry as effeminate.  When Mr Keating explains how poetry woes women, the boys become more open-minded.  The boy who craves the girl summons up the courage to call her, repeating his new mantra “carpe diem, carpe diem”.  He does the poetry and gets his girl.  Keating then focuses on the shy boy who is too scared to recite a poem to the class.  Keating gives him love, makes him dream poetry up there and then in front of his class-mates, taps into the child’s innate beauty hidden behind the nervousness.  The boy grows, the poetry of his soul comes out there and then, and thereafter he has the courage to believe in his own ability.  Keating’s love creates change, spiritual growth and