Dead Poets Society: an umpteenth rewatch

"I was good. I was really good" 

This film is the visual embodiment of poetic tragedy, the personification of an unrelenting grief. Throughout its orange hued duration, the film preaches a heartfelt sentiment. A sentiment prioritising the self. It proposes the siren-like allure of deliberate living. It subtly condemns an existence dictated by societally approved passions. Yes, no doubt they are noble pursuits, but are they what we live for? 

The deliverance of this notion mimics the visual splendour of the film. It appears through the glorification of the arts, through the placement of the field on a respectable pedestal. It emphasises the humanity that permeates within it. This is contrasted with the robotic tendencies birthed by the neglect and/or rejection of artistic pursuits. The consequences of an unfulfilled life are presented through the narratives of the young men enduring a systematically mundane lifestyle. Here, mundane is not peaceful, it is a bite forced upon them, leaving them no choice but to swallow, pretending it was always by their own hands. The audience is compelled to rejoice when they break free from their moulds. One roots for them, even when their act of defiance is the simple pleasure of resurrecting a poetry club, for rebellion is rebellion. 

However, a dull orange, too, merges into a dried blood red. Amidst the exhilaration of nonconformity, there is a lingering awareness of its ephemerality. 

The film and its audience, in tandem, recognise a delusion in perceiving this euphoric bubble to be eternal. It cannot be. The world would never allow it. The final sequence of the film operates as a front for this recognition. 

Perhaps Neil did not take his life impulsively. Perhaps it was not an emotional response. Perhaps it was not anger. Perhaps it was the eventual enactment of a longterm subconscious thought. Perhaps that night simply paved the way for him to exercise what he had harboured for far too long. A thought he had kept close. An old distorted comfort. This presumption adds a further devastation to the final sequence. A curtain call for his happiness. 

The play was his moment to live as he pleased, to do what his heart yearned for most. He reached for what had been withheld from. At arms length, a taunting distance. Neil, too, knew he could not hold onto it. So, he, in protest, sought to make his death mean something. To stand for something he himself believed in. In those few short moments, where he is in costume, where he smiles and where the audience smiles back, showering him in applause, he makes his departing presence memorable. 

Neil Perry's father may have killed him, but in his burglarised youth, he did what he wished to do most: suck the marrow out of life.