Thread by @ploughmansfolly

Dead Poets’ Society isn’t the movie you thought it was—it is in fact a brutal critique of boomer liberalism and a cautionary tale against the perils of hippie rebellion. Mr. Keating is its villain; the other teachers and Neil’s father are the would-be heroes of this tragedy.

The film takes place at a *preparatory* school in the AngloCath style (not one of these ghey Puritan schools like Andover or Exeter where kids have been offing themselves for more than three centuries). The term itself prompts the question: preparing for what? Preparing how?

In the opening scene, at the school year’s opening convocation, we see the “Light of Knowledge” (a candle carried by an old man in a church procession) as it is passed, candle by candle, to each student. Insinuation is clear: empty-headed will have their minds filled, enlightened

The implications of these images are quite interesting: it is essentially as if, until they are fully educated, the boys are not even in possession of their own lives. Their parents live for them. Their daily activities are determined almost entirely by the adults around them.

And all of these activities are oriented towards THE FUTURE. In the present, the boys must suffer under the extremely high expectations placed upon them by their parents, teachers and advisors. (Actually back then teachers would’ve been called “masters”… based).

Enter Mr. Keating, played by Robin Williams. In his famous first scene, he takes the boys to look at photos of dead alumni of the school. He imagines out loud that these dead are singing out in unison the same refrain: CARPE DIEM! Seize the day!

Obviously, “carpe diem” as a life philosophy is a wholesale rejection of everything for which a “preparatory school” stands. In this same scene, Keating emphasizes the deadness of the dead, describing them as “food for worms” and “fertilizer for daffodils.”

In so doing, he rejects also the Christian doctrine of the afterlife, which is of one pattern with the prep school model: current suffering/self-denial for future reward. In the words of St. Jerome: “let us learn those things on earth, the knowledge of which continues in Heaven.”

Next we witness the first in-classroom lesson. Keating has a student read aloud from the intro to their poetry text, wherein is described a Cartesian graph on which any given poem can be plotted (x-axis: beauty & craft; y-axis: importance of the theme).

Shockingly to the boys, Keating instructs them to tear out the introduction. He wants them to reject poetry as something rigid and mathematical, and to embrace something like the free verse mentality of his hero, Walt Whitman. He tells them they ought to “savor language.”

The next scene contains one of the most telling lines: at lunch with another teacher, Keating ad libs a poem: “only in their dreams can men be truly free, ‘twas always thus, and always thus shall be.”

What kind of retard lib nonsense is this???

DOES THIS SOUND FAMILIAR, ANON??

Keating is motivated by the idea that his students should be taught not “what to think” but “how to think.” Again, does this sound familiar? The phrase “free thinkers” comes up repeatedly. But what happens when you learn “how to think” without ever learning *what to think*?

We catch a glimpse of the answer in the next scene, where the boys, at Keating’s encouragement, sneak into the woods at night in order to re-establishment the long-defunct DEAD POETS’ SOCIETY. They have heard Keating describe the meetings of old as some sort of bacchanal,

Wherein “poetry dripped from our tongues, like honey,” and hot babes abounded. The scene that follows is a sad imitation: one guy shows the others a playboy pin up nude, & it ultimately descends into troglodytic chatting of some sort of Congolese hymn, the boys dancing in a ring.

Eventually, Keating GROOMS Neil enough that Neil defies his father’s wishes, joining an acting troupe in the abutting town in their production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When Neil’s father realizes that he has been disobeyed, he chimps out, enrolling Neil in military school.

Neil’s reaction is to commit suicide, martyring himself for Keating’s cause. The school blames Keating for Neil’s death and fires him. This is supposed to be viewed as a great injustice, against which the boys symbolically rebel by standing on their desks in the final scene.

This movie, like boomer liberalism in general, is quite unaware of itself. Isn’t it funny how Keating encourages his acolytes to “listen to the dead”, while at the same time spurring them to reject tradition? What is tradition if not the democracy of the dead, as Chesterton says?

It is also funny that Neil’s quest to “find himself”, to “be authentic” and so on, involves his devotion to the trade of ACTING—the art of pretending to be someone else! And that he sublimates this desire through none other than SHAKESPEARE, The Kronprinz of the Kanon!

The movie tells on itself: the scenes in the cave, where the boys recite their horrendous, musicless poetry, and end up conga-lining like some precultural tribe, and when Knox kisses sleeping Chris on the couch, steeling himself as he goes in with the familiar prayer: CARPE DIEM!

What kind of chaos can be descended into when “free thinking” is encouraged before you have anything to think about or any basis upon which to opine. The point of prep schools—of education!—was to provide that basis. You were welcome to rebel—but only after you had graduated.

We live among the fruits of an entire generation of Keatings. The gr00mers you can see every day on @libsoftiktok are his heirs. He pries his students from their families’ wishes in much the same way: with the promise of freedom and self-actualization. In one scene,

The students have to read a line of poetry and then punt a soccer ball. The lines are all from Whitman, who is the John the Baptist of Keatingism. The most telling is Charlie’s:

“TO INDEED BE A GOD!”

It has always been a cult of self-deification by lassitude and indulgence.

The movie is summed up in the final scene. The headmaster takes over Keating’s class, asking where they had gotten to in the textbook.

“We skipped around a lot, mostly the Romantics and post civil war (Whitman).”

“What about the Realists?”

“I believe we skipped them, sir.”