essay about the dead poets society

Essay about Dead Poets Society: Film Analysis

Anyone can prepare themselves to become a stronger writer. It takes practice and self motivation to proceed in the process to get better. It’s not easy, but with determination it can be accomplished. In the film, Dead Poets Society, a new English teacher, John Keating, uses atypical methods of teaching to reach out to his students at an all-boys preparatory academy. Through his lessons, his students learned to overcome the pressures from their families and school and tried to pursue their dreams.

In “Part 3” of Cal Newport’s, How to Become A Straight-A Student, Newport provides tips on how students can prepare themselves to write powerful essays. The film can translate well into the book written by Newport because students can use the themes presented in the movie to help them overcome obstacles in the writing process. Writing has roadblocks like life, we have to conquer it to improve. While the objective from Dead Poet’s Society differs from “Part 3” of Cal Newport’s, How to Become a Straight-A Student, it can be implied that the power to becoming a strong writer is to overcome obstacles.

Sometimes it’s hard to keep an open mind for new ideas, but exploring and discovering different perspectives can help benefit the grade you receive on your paper. It will spark the audience’s interest because of the engagement of a divergent outlook. In the film, Keating says, “I stand upon my desk to remind myself… that we must constantly look at things in a different way. The world looks very different from up here… Just when you think you know something you have to look at it in another way… When you read, don’t just consider what the author thinks, you must consider what you think” (Weir, Dead Poets Society).

He stands on the desk to emphasis how looking at things from another viewpoint can change a person’s perspective. There isn’t only one way to look at ideas and objects. For your paper, try and find a unique perspective of your own and write your thesis. If you need help, don’t be afraid to ask. Sometimes a seed is needed to help you get started. Ask for opinions from your friends and professors. As stated in the text, “[They] will help you identify pieces of your structure that are unclear or unnecessary” (Newport 185). A perspective can be compared to a thesis.

It will change and evolve as you continue in the paper-writing process (Newport 157). It’s inevitable, just like how it’s inevitable for perspectives to stay the same. Don’t wait too long to get started, find your own standpoint and just write your thesis. Your thoughts matter. Once a standpoint is found, your voice needs to be heard. Building up the courage to express oneself through words will be beneficial and helpful in the process of becoming a strong writer. In the film, Keating is teaching his students that they do not need to be resigned to what the author thinks.

He tells his students, “You must strive to find your own voice. Because the longer you wait to begin, the less likely you are to find it all” (Weir, Dead Poets Society). This quote conveys that it’s best not to wait too long to find the courage to find your own voice and express it. This is similar to “Part 3” when Newport quotes a straight-A student saying, “I don’t believe in sitting in front of a blank screen and just starting to write, hoping it will come to you” (Newport 141). Waiting for ideas to come to you will waste your time.

You have to do whatever it is necessary to get the creative juices flowing. To become a powerful writer, a student must prepare to present their ideas in their own voice. You don’t get better overnight. Newport writes, “the hard truth is that the only way to get better at organizing and presenting your thoughts is through practice” (Newport 175). You get better as you practice. Writing may be intimidating, but taking the time to practice can help you improve. Making the most of the present time can help your paper become extraordinary.

In the film, on the first day of class, Keating takes his students out to have their lesson in the hallway, instructing them to observe the pictures on display because, even though they’ve passed it many times, they haven’t really looked at it. He tells his students, “Seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary” (Weir, Dead Poets Society). His message was to make the most of their lives, leave behind a legacy, because eventually death will come. When you are writing, you should limit your distractions and focus on the task at hand.

Making the most of your time will result in more work being completed. In “Part 3,” Newport states, “The key to effective paper writing is breaking down tasks into manageable units” (Newport 144). He is conveying that breaking down the writing process will be more organized and efficient than rushing to get it done. Once you’re done with the draft of your paper, come back to the thesis. “Don’t be afraid to leave room for ambiguity” (Newport 157). Be vague with the thesis. In life, students may not know how to become extraordinary and it’s okay to not know.

There is a broad list of opportunities. They will get there, but they have to take the steps towards that goal or find a way to get there. Writing a great paper doesn’t come to a person all at once, creating productive steps can help get to that level of work. However, if steps are made and there is no time being spent to complete them, it’s useless. Use your time wisely and your paper can become extraordinary. You don’t need to be a superhero to become a strong writer. The power is already in you, you have to find it and bring it out.

Don’t be afraid to think outside the box for ideas, it will help bring attention to your paper. Once your ideas are found, use your own voice to express it in your writing. You don’t have to be resigned to a certain way of thinking. Make sure to spend time on writing your paper. Ideas will only be ideas if you don’t do the work. It may seem impossible to write an amazing paper right off the bat, but make it possible by practicing. You become a strong writer as you overcome the roadblocks. It’s only impossible if you don’t make it possible.

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Dead Poets Society

By peter weir.

• Dead Poets Society Summary

In 1959, shy Todd Anderson begins his senior year of high school at elite boarding school Welton Academy, a prep school in the Northeastern United States. One of the most promising students at Welton, Neil Perry , is assigned as Todd's roommate and Todd is quickly initiated into Perry's circle of friends, including mischievous Charlie Dalton , romantic Knox Overstreet , high-flying overachiever Richard Cameron and best friends Gerard Pitts and Steven Meeks. On the first day of classes they are surprised to find that their new English teacher, Mr. Keating , is both entertaining and unorthodox, himself a Welton alumnus whose innovation in the classroom brings English class alive. He encourages his students to make their lives extraordinary and summarizes this sentiment with extorting them in Latin "carpe diem" (seize the day). Unfortunately this is in direct contrast to the ethos of the school where living a traditional and conformist life is preferred to living an extraordinary one.

John Keating's inspirational classes also include standing on his desk at the front of the classroom as an illustration to his students that they should try to look at life from a different perspective, and telling them to rip out the introduction section of their poetry books which explains a mathematical formula used to rate poetry. He also encourages them to create their own style of walking across the courtyard to encourage them to be individuals. Individuality is the antithesis of Welton's ethos, and not surprisingly, his teaching methods come to the attention of Gale Nolan, the strict and archaic headmaster.

Neil Perry discovers that Mr. Keating was once a member of the secret and unsanctioned "Dead Poets' Society" when he was a student at Welton. Neil restarts the club and each night he and his friends leave campus without permission and go to a cave where they read poetry, and write and recite their own compositions as well. As the school year goes on, Mr. Keating's classes and their involvement with the Club continue to inspire them to live life on their own terms; Knox Overstreet pursues Chris Noel, a girl who is dating a football player and whose family is friends with his. Neil Perry discovers a passion for acting and wins the lead role in a local production of A Midsummer Night's Dream , despite the fact that his cold and domineering father wants him to attend medical school not pursue a carter in the theater. Mr. Keating also helps Todd come out of his shell and takes him through an exercise in self-expression to help him realize his potential. The exercise culminates with Todd spontaneously composing a poem in front of the class.

Unfortunately, Charlie Dalton's inspiration leads him to go too far, and he publishes an article in the school newspaper under the byline of the Dead Poets Society , demanding that girls be accepted to Welton. Headmaster Nolan uses corporal punishment to try to force Charlie to tell him who else is a member of the club, but he refuses. Nolan also warns Keating that he must discourage his students from questioning authority or else face consequences of his own.

Neil's father discovers he is performing in the play and demands that he quit on the eve of his first performance. Neil is devastated and turns to Keating for advice; his teacher advises him to stand his ground and stand up to his father to demonstrate his seriousness about acting. The following day Keating asks if he has spoken to his father and Neil lies, saying that he had, and that he will be permitted to pursue an acting career provided his schoolwork does not suffer. The lie is discovered when Neil's father unexpectedly appears at the performance, taking his son home and then forcing him to go to military school so that he can go to Harvard and study medicine. Terrified of his father and at a loss for what to do, Neil commits suicide.

Gale Nolan, the headmaster, begins an investigation into the suicide at the request of the Perry family. Attempting to escape punishment for his own membership in the Dead Poet's Society, Richard Cameron tells Nolan that Neil's death is entirely Keating's fault. He names Overstreet, Meeks, Pitts, Anderson, Dalton and Perry as his fellow members. Charlie confronts him, but Cameron urges the others to put the blame on Mr. Keating. Charlie refuses and punches Cameron, which causes him to be expelled. Each of the boys is called to Nolan's office to sign a letter attesting that Cameron's version of events is true. When it is Todd's turn he does not want to sign but does so when he sees that the others have signed already.

Keating is fired and Nolan takes over teaching his class. Keating interrupts class to collect some personal possessions from his desk, and before he leaves Todd stands on his desk and salutes Keating with the words "Captain! My Captain!" Knox, Steven, Gerard and over half the class does the same. Todd shouts that they were forced to sign the letter and that Neil's death was not his fault. Deeply touched by this gesture, Keating thanks them.

Dead Poets Society Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Dead Poets Society is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

What’s the theme of dead poets society rip it out

Do you mean the scene where Keeting asks his class to rip out the Pritchard text? He wants them to avoid conformity by ripping a text that treats poetry like a math equation.

Explore Keating's influence on his students and how his encouragement of originality and "carpe diem" affect them.

I can't write your essay for you but can make a general comment. One of Keating’s main, overarching lessons for the boys is the idea of “seizing the day”—that is, making the most of the time they have now and taking advantage of the opportunities...

According to Pitts, all of the girls go for “jerks”. Do you agree with his assessment? Why or why not?

Well, this is a pretty subjective answer from personal experience. Many many years ago I was captain of the chess team in high school. Lets just say girls were not clamouring to wear my jacket. The hockey players,they used to throw pucks at our...

Study Guide for Dead Poets Society

Dead Poets Society study guide contains a biography of director Peter Weir, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Dead Poets Society
• Character List
• Director's Influence

Essays for Dead Poets Society

Dead Poets Society literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of the film Dead Poets Society directed by Peter Weir.

• Authority Against Individualism: Dead Poets Society and The Rabbits
• Dead Poets Society: The Powerful Thought of Individuality
• Identity in Dead Poets Society and Frost's Poetry
• Exploring Transitions: Educating Rita and Dead Poets Society

Wikipedia Entries for Dead Poets Society

• Introduction

Dead Poets Society

N. h. kleinbaum, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Welcome to the LitCharts study guide on N. H. Kleinbaum's Dead Poets Society . Created by the original team behind SparkNotes, LitCharts are the world's best literature guides.

Dead Poets Society: Introduction

Dead poets society: plot summary, dead poets society: detailed summary & analysis, dead poets society: themes, dead poets society: quotes, dead poets society: characters, dead poets society: symbols, dead poets society: theme wheel, brief biography of n. h. kleinbaum.

Historical Context of Dead Poets Society

Other books related to dead poets society.

• Full Title: Dead Poets Society
• When Written: 1988-89
• Where Written: Los Angeles, California
• When Published: Fall 1989
• Literary Period: It’s especially hard to classify the novel as belonging to any literary period, since it’s a novelization of a film. However, it’s interesting to note that the Dead Poets Society novelization fits in with the decade-long “wave” of novelizations and other movie tie-ins. Throughout the 1980s, film studios invested more money in marketing movie tie-ins, from board games to toys to books. To the extent that Kleinbaum’s novel fits in with any artistic era, perhaps that “era” is the movie tie-in boom of the 1980s.
• Genre: Coming-of-age novel, period piece, boarding school novel
• Setting: Welton Academy, Vermont, 1959
• Climax: Neil’s death
• Antagonist: Headmaster Nolan, Richard Cameron, Mr. Perry, and the abstract spirit of conformity that dominates Welton Academy itself could each be considered the novel’s main antagonist.
• Point of View: Third person omniscient

Extra Credit for Dead Poets Society

Novelization Nancy. Dead Poets Society isn’t the only novelization Kleinbaum wrote—she’s also penned novelizations of such 80s films as Dirty Dancing and D.A.R.Y.L.

Seize the day! The most famous line, both from the Dead Poets Society film and Kleinbaum’s novelization, is “Seize the day, lads. Make your lives extraordinary.” Twenty-five years later, the line is still widely quoted, inspiring all sorts of people to take risks and be great.

Movie Reviews

Tv/streaming, collections, great movies, chaz's journal, contributors, dead poets society.

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"Dead Poets Society" is a collection of pious platitudes masquerading as a courageous stand in favor of something: doing your own thing, I think. It's about an inspirational, unconventional English teacher and his students at "the best prep school in America" and how he challenges them to question conventional views by such techniques as standing on their desks. It is, of course, inevitable that the brilliant teacher will eventually be fired from the school, and when his students stood on their desks to protest his dismissal, I was so moved, I wanted to throw up.

Peter Weir's film makes much noise about poetry, and there are brief quotations from Tennyson, Herrick, Whitman and even Vachel Lindsay, as well as a brave excursion into prose that takes us as far as Thoreau's Walden. None of these writers are studied, however, in a spirit that would lend respect to their language; they're simply plundered for slogans to exort the students toward more personal freedom. At the end of a great teacher's course in poetry, the students would love poetry; at the end of this teacher's semester, all they really love is the teacher.

The movie stars Robin Williams as the mercurial John Keating, teacher of English at the exclusive Welton Academy in Vermont. The performance is a delicate balancing act between restraint and schtick.

For much of the time, Williams does a good job of playing an intelligent, quick-witted, well-read young man. But then there are scenes in which his stage persona punctures the character - as when he does impressions of Marlon Brando and John Wayne doing Shakespeare.

There is also a curious lack of depth to his character compared with such other great movie teachers as Miss Jean Brodie and Professor Kingsfield. Keating is more of a plot device than a human being.

The story is also old stuff, recycled out of the novel and movie " A Separate Peace " and other stories in which the good die young and the old simmer in their neurotic and hateful repressions. The key conflict in the movie is between Neil ( Robert Sean Leonard ), a student who dreams of being an actor, and his father ( Kurtwood Smith ), who orders his son to become a doctor and forbids him to go onstage. The father is a strict, unyielding taskmaster, and the son, lacking the will to defy him, kills himself. His death would have had a greater impact for me if it had seemed like a spontaneous human cry of despair, rather than like a meticulously written and photographed set piece.

Other elements in the movie also seem to have been chosen for their place in the artificial jigsaw puzzle. A teenage romance between one of the Welton students and a local girl is given so little screen time, so arbitrarily, that it seems like a distraction. And I squirmed through the meetings of the "Dead Poets Society," a self-consciously bohemian group of students who hold secret meetings in the dead of night in a cave near the campus.

The society was founded by Keating when he was an undergraduate, but in its reincarnate form it never generates any sense of mystery, rebellion or daring. The society's meetings have been badly written and are dramatically shapeless, featuring a dance line to Lindsay's "The Congo" and various attempts to impress girls with random lines of poetry. The movie is set in 1959, but none of these would-be bohemians have heard of Kerouac, Ginsberg or indeed of the beatnik movement.

One scene in particular indicates the distance between the movie's manipulative instincts and what it claims to be about. When Keating is being railroaded by the school administration (which makes him the scapegoat for his student's suicide), one of the students acts as a fink and tells the old fogies what they want to hear. Later, confronted by his peers, he makes a hateful speech of which not one word is plausible except as an awkward attempt to supply him with a villain's dialogue. Then one of the other boys hits him in the jaw, to great applause from the audience. The whole scene is utterly false and seems to exist only so that the violence can resolve a situation that the screenplay is otherwise unwilling to handle.

"Dead Poets Society" is not the worst of the countless recent movies about good kids and hidebound, authoritatian older people. It may, however, be the most shameless in its attempt to pander to an adolescent audience. The movie pays lip service to qualities and values that, on the evidence of the screenplay itself, it is cheerfully willing to abandon. If you are going to evoke Henry David Thoreau as the patron saint of your movie, then you had better make a movie he would have admired. Here is one of my favorite sentences from Thoreau's Walden, which I recommend for serious study by the authors of this film: " . . . instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them." Think about it.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

Dead Poets Society (1989)

130 minutes

Robin Williams as John Keating

Robert Sean Leonard as Neil Perry

Ethan Hawke as Todd Anderson

Josh Charles as Knox Overstreet

Gale Hansen as Charlie Dalton

Dylan Kussman as Richard Cameron

Directed by

Produced by.

• Steven Haft
• Paul Junger Witt
• Tony Thomas
• Tom Schulman
• William Anderson

Photography by

• Maurice Jarre

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A Reflection on the Movie “Dead Poet’s Society”

History constantly witnesses the never-ending struggle between tradition and innovation. As an old adage goes, “the only constant thing in this world is change” and it is indeed true. The society that we have today is a by-product of continuous changes changes that generations before us believed to be for the better. Thus, history serves as a “storehouse” of information that can help us understand change and how the society we live in came to be. The definition of History as a “natural tension between tradition and Innovation” Is best represented in the movie Dead Poet’s Society.

Set in 1959, the movie is the story f students at the respected “Walton Academy”, an all-boys preparatory school In Vermont. Such schools were (and often still are) very conservative institutions that serve as high schools for parents who Insist on sending their children to the best universities. The story is an all-common scene in our history. A traditional way of living and doing things is initially present. Almost everyone is conforming to that tradition since it is the “best” way people know on how to do things.

Not everybody may be happy but the familiarity that the tradition brings provides comfort and security. Then come long a different (either good or bad) Idea to change how things are originally done. The traditionalists will resist and even condone the change while the proponents of Innovation will try to prove that the change Is for the better. The changes may persist in a particular society, and as the time goes on, these changes will be embedded on the culture until it becomes the new tradition, which new changes will, again, try to contest.

And again, the whole cycle begins. In the movie, the tradition is represented by the educational system where students memorized and translated the central works of the distant past, learning ancient engages, rhetoric, and simple mathematics by rote. Professors emphasized accuracy and not comprehension. Conservative and conformist, Walton, like any other early colleges had little Interest either In expanding knowledge or in Inciting critical thinking. Lessons were infused with a deeply religious vision of the world and of the duties both as a citizen and as a family-member.

The colleges saw themselves as bulwarks against change, training the pastors, doctors, and lawyers of the next generation. Largely driven by a sense of tradition, the school Imposes out-dated teaching techniques on both its teachers and its students. The students are encouraged to mindlessly take in facts and regurgitate them on command. The teachers are expected to teach according to a rigid set of rules. But change arrived regardless, driven by the needs of a growing society. The innovation in the movie is represented by John Keating, the newest professor at other professors at the academy, Keating actually speaks to the students.

So unique and out of the ordinary are his words that the students are awe-struck, and uncertain how to respond. Whereas other teachers merely lecture and delegate, Keating pushes his students to be involved, to think, to use their minds. He believes that education requires the student to think for himself. He emphasized that the students must be free to question and to learn in the way that they learn best. He also wants to ensure that they really learn to experience life, to “suck the marrow” out of it.

Through this encouragement, he was able to reach his students like none of the teachers before him did, though few schools accept the basic premise of his teachings and Walton Academy is no exception. Coming into conflict with John Seating’s motivating speeches about finding one’s own voice are years of tradition, involving both the academy and the families whose hillier attend the academy. These two irrepressible forces (Seating’s innovative way of teaching and Welter’s traditional system of education) are destined for a collision, which is brought about by this age-old conflict of traditional compulsion versus freedom and flexibility.

Keating rejects tradition and refuses to teach by the old methods. The school refuses to accept change. And so the battle begins. Seating’s first act of business is to ask one of the students to read the first four lines of Robert Hayrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” the most famous “carper mime” or “seize the day” poem in English: “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may: / Old time is still a-flying; / And this same flower that smiles today, / Tomorrow will be dying. ” Keating follows this up with a reminder that we are “food for worms. This is a somewhat unorthodox invocation of the time-honored adage about life being too short. It is certainly appropriate for a teacher to use this perhaps unusual but highly effective method to drive home the point that young people are only young for a “short” time and that they should thus make the most of their time by seizing the day, thus making their “lives extraordinary. The fact that all this takes place in front of a class picture of a long-ago student body on the wall (the members of which are by that time probably all dead) Just delivers the point Keating is making with that much more relevance and effectiveness.

In the scene where Keating asks the students to tear the pages out of their textbook, we witness the second major scene involving Seating’s ingenious and most effective teachings methods. Part of the secret of Seating’s success with his students is, of course, the fact that he levels with them, that he tells them (and occasionally shows them, too) what he firmly believes is the truth. The essay, “Understanding Poetry,” by J. Evans Pritchard, Ph. D. , is indeed “excrement” (to use Seating’s own characterization of it).

The “greatness” of a poem is not to be grafted onto horizontal and vertical lines where the first represents the “perfection” (as to rhythm, meter, and rhyme) and the second the “importance” (as to theme) of a given poem. As Keating tells the students after they have torn the offending pages from the book, “we don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the engineering, these are all noble pursuits, and necessary to sustain life.

But poetry, tatty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. ” It is in the next classroom scene that Keating performs his famous stunt of standing upon the desk to remind the students that – as he puts it – we “must constantly look at things in a different way. ” “Just when you think you know something,” he tells them a moment later, “you have to look at it in another way. ” He urges them to think when they read “not Just what the author thinks. Consider what you think” as well. He urges them, too, to find their own voices.

There is no time to waste. The more habitual their thinking becomes, the more difficult it will be to change it later on. It is interesting to reflect in this connection on the fact that both George McAllister, a fellow teacher, and Mr.. Nolan object (the first mildly, the second vehemently) to Seating’s attempt to make 17-year-olds think for themselves. On the other hand, the case of Neil (one of Seating’s students) and his father represents an altogether different standpoint on how we can view tradition and innovation.

It is a tradition during that time for a child to follow his parents (father, in particular) regardless of the child’s personal preference. In the movie, Nil’s relationship with his father is a case of misunderstanding and lack of immunization. Mr.. Perry wanted what was best for his son, which led to extremely high expectations. Neil wanted to find out who he was and what he wanted to do. Neil was unable to discuss his opinions and options with his father, and Mr..

Perry was unwilling to look at Nil’s outlook on life, as it did not appear as Neil had a concrete idea of what he wanted to do. This cyclical pattern led Neil to conclude that suicide was the only way to gain control of his life and stand up to his father. Mr.. Perry was a traditionalist, which unfortunately meant he had a difficult time expressing affectionate emotions. He also had a large number of expectations because like any parent, he ultimately wanted the best for his son, a 16-17 year old with a bright future ahead of him.

Unfortunately, Neil never really saw or understood that his father only wanted what was best for Neil. He only saw the tyrant-like authority figure who constantly demanded that Neil achieve greatness in academia and who obeyed him unquestioningly. In this situation, the father and son were like strangers, each with a specific perception of the other, but neither really knew who the other was. This perpetuated the cycle of misunderstandings between the two and eventually played a major role in Nil’s suicide.

At that moment, it is evident that Neil is not happy with the traditional way his father treats him. He wanted a change, but he never really stood up to his father. There were times he tried, like when Mr.. Perry told Neil he should drop some extracurricular activities, but he did so in the presence of others, which created a hostile environment between the two. The story of Nil’s life would have been different if he was Just brave and innovative enough to think of ways on how he an positively affect his father’s belief without antagonizing him.

It would have been what Neil wanted and what they could do to compromise. Nil’s situation is an example where change is inevitable. But the inability of the characters to cope with these changes led to their own destruction. In general, we can say that while we have held fast to our common values as a society and as an individual, the one true constant in this world has been that of creative change. If our institutions hope to remain relevant to our society and to our state, this tradition of adaptation and evolution must continue.

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Dead Poets Society

53 pages • 1 hour read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-5

Chapters 6-10

Chapters 11-15

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Describe Todd Anderson’s character arc as it relates to the theme of finding your voice . In what ways does Mr. Keating help him? In what ways does Neil?

Compare and contrast the characters of Charlie and Cameron. Be sure to track their growth or regression throughout the novel and focus on their relationship to the rules of Welton.

In Dead Poets Society , Welton is a symbol for the isolation that comes along with striving to maintain certain traditions and standards. Pick one character that experiences isolation in the novel and explain how they escape (or don’t escape) that feeling of loneliness.

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Dead Poets Society Is a Terrible Defense of the Humanities

The beloved film's portrayal of studying literature is both misleading and deeply seductive.

I’ve never hated a film quite the way I hate Dead Poets Society . I expect that them’s fighting words, at least in some quarters; at least I hope they are. Because I’m trying to pick a fight here.

I was in the last year of my English literature Ph.D. program in the summer of 1989, when Dead Poets Society was released. My younger brother Scott, who really didn’t have the money to spare, slipped my wife, Robyn, and me a 10-dollar bill (these were simpler times) and told us he’d watch our kids so we could go out to see it. No one in my family quite understood what I wanted to do for a living or, having finished my bachelor’s degree, why I’d spend seven more years in school to do it; but having seen Dead Poets Society , Scott believed he finally had an idea of what I wanted to do with my life, and more important, why.

We went to the movie and watched, often swept up in the autumnal New England beauty of Welton Academy (the real-life St. Andrew’s School, in Middletown, Delaware). But I walked out horrified that anyone would think that what happens in Mr. Keating’s classroom—or outside of it, because so many of his poetry-derived “life lessons” are taught outside the classroom, after all—had anything to do with literary study, or why I was pursuing a graduate degree in English. I think I hate Dead Poets Society for the same reason that Robyn, a physician assistant, hates House : because its portrayal of my profession is both misleading and deeply seductive. For what Keating (Robin Williams) models for his students isn’t literary criticism, or analysis, or even study. In fact, it’s not even good, careful reading. Rather, it’s the literary equivalent of fandom. Worse, it’s anti-intellectual. It takes Emily Dickinson’s playful remark to her mentor Thomas Higginson, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry,” and turns it into a critical principle. It’s not.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m all for passion in the literature classroom. Harvard poetry professor Helen Vendler uses two lines from Wordsworth’s The Prelude as the title for an essay about teaching: “What we have loved, / Others will love …” That second line concludes, “and we will teach them how.” That’s how I teach, or hope to teach: with my heart on my sleeve, perhaps, but with my brain always fully engaged. I’m fortunate to do what I love for a living, and I know it. That’s how I was taught, in high school especially. I’m an English professor today because I had Mr. Hansen in ninth grade, and Mr. Jackson in eleventh.

But passion alone, divorced from the thrilling intellectual work of real analysis, is empty, even dangerous. When we simply “feel” a poem, carried away by the sound of words, rather than actually reading it, we’re rather likely to get it wrong. We see Mr. Keating, in fact, making just this kind of mistake during one of his stirring orations to the boys of Welton. In a hackneyed speech about resisting conformity that he seems to have delivered many times before, Keating invokes that oft-invoked but rarely understood chestnut, “The Road Not Taken”: “Robert Frost said, ‘Two roads diverged in a wood and I / I took the one less traveled by / And that has made all the difference.’”

Wha—? Has Keating actually read the poem from which he so blithely samples? For Robert Frost said no such thing: a character in his poem says it. And we’re meant to learn, over the course of that poem, that he’s wrong—that he’s both congratulating and kidding himself. He chooses his road ostensibly because “it was grassy and wanted wear”; but this description is contradicted in the very next lines—“Though as for that, the passing there / Had worn them really about the same,” and—more incredibly still—“both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black.” He wants to claim to have taken the exceptional road, if not the spiritual high road; but he knows on some level that it’s a hollow boast.

Keating hasn’t actually read “The Road Not Taken” in any meaningful sense; rather, he’s adopted it, adapted it, made it his own—made it say what he wants it to say. His use of those closing lines, wrenched from their context, isn’t just wrong—it’s completely wrong, and Keating uses them to point a moral entirely different from that of Frost’s poem. (In a like manner, how often has Frost’s “The Mending Wall” been quoted out of context in debates about immigration reform? “Good fences make good neighbors,” indeed.)

The film’s anti-intellectualism is both quite visceral and quite violent. When his students first sit down with their new poetry anthology, Keating tricks a student into reading aloud a few sentences from the banal introduction written by Dr. J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D.—a cartoonish version of academic criticism that opens with a split infinitive!—before instructing them to tear those pages out of their books. (Though generic-sounding, the essay’s title, “Understanding Poetry,” mischievously nods to the most influential poetry text of the 20th century, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s Understanding Poetry [1938].) Although he employs mock-heroic terms, Keating makes it clear that they’re fighting for their spiritual lives:

This is a battle. A war. And the casualties could be your hearts and souls. Armies of academics going forward measuring poetry. No! We’ll not have that here: no more Mr. J. Evans Pritchard. [Notice how he’s just been stripped of his professional credential.] Now in my class you will learn to think for yourselves again. You will learn to savor words and language. No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.

Their textbook now purged of any taint of critical thought, the students are freed to enjoy an unmediated encounter with poetry in the raw.

This style of working with poetry—what’s sometimes termed poetry “appreciation,” as distinct from poetry criticism—is the m.o. of the Dead Poets Society, Welton’s bookish version of Yale’s Skull and Bones. Mr. Keating explains the purpose of the group to his inner circle of students in a conspiratorial whisper:

The Dead Poets were dedicated to sucking the marrow out of life. That’s a phrase from Thoreau we would invoke at the beginning of every meeting. A few would gather at the old Indian cave and read from Thoreau, Whitman, Shelley, the biggies—even some of our own verse—and in the enchantment of the moment we’d let poetry work its magic … We were Romantics. We didn’t just read poetry, we let it drip from our tongues like honey.

(“We would invoke ”? “Our own verse ”? Who’s writing this stuff?)

If the Welton School officials and parents suspect that Mr. Keating is leading his students astray, Pied Piper-like, there is at least something to that charge. Or rather, he’s sending them astray, without ever really leading them. The first meeting of the reconvened society ends with one of the students reciting Vachel Lindsay’s notorious 1919 poem “The Congo,” a text whose racial politics are ambiguous at best; about it, W.E.B. DuBois wrote, “Mr. Lindsay knows little of the Negro, and that little is dangerous.” Whatever the poem’s real or intended politics, the spectacle of an all-white clique of prep-school boys capering out of a cave into the night while chanting the poem’s refrain (“THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK, / CUTTING THROUGH THE JUNGLE WITH A GOLDEN TRACK”)—well, shudder . Shades of “What Makes the Red Man Red?” from Disney’s Peter Pan . The setting, after all, is the “old Indian cave.”

For all his talk about students “finding their own voice,” however, Keating actually allows his students very little opportunity for original thought. It’s a freedom that’s often preached but never realized. A graphic example is presented in one of the film’s iconic moments, when that zany Mr. Keating with his “unorthodox” teaching methods suddenly leaps up onto his desk. Why? “I stand on my desk to remind myself that we must constantly look at things in a different way,” he helpfully declaims. How bold: He’s standing perhaps two and a half feet off the ground. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay “Nature,” had made the same point rather more radically, suggesting that one “Turn the eyes upside down, by looking at the landscape through your legs.”

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Keating then has the boys march up to the front, of course, and one by one and two by two they mount his desk and they, too, “look at things in a different way”—exactly the different way that he has. After each has experienced this “small alteration in [his] local position” (Emerson), he steps or leaps off the desk, as if a lemming off a cliff: Keating’s warning, “Don’t just walk off the edge like lemmings!” unfortunately serves only to underscore the horrible irony of this unintended dramatic metaphor. Even when the students reprise this desktop posture at the film’s close, in a gesture of schoolboy disobedience (or perhaps obedience to Keating), we realize that while the boys are marching to the beat of a different drum, it’s Keating’s drum. Or they’re dancing to his pipes.

One of the strangest things about watching the film again, 25 years on—for while I’ve long loathed it, until now I’d never actually revisited it—is that I now find myself sympathizing not primarily with the plucky and irreverent John Keating, but to a surprising degree with his “old fart” colleagues whom I’m clearly supposed to find benighted. (It’s also a revelation to watch a young Ethan Hawke, before he could really act—and a young Robert Sean Leonard [Dr. Wilson on House ], before he couldn’t.) Smarmy to the end, Keating, when interrogated about his teaching antics by the school’s headmaster, quips, “I always thought the idea of education was to learn to think for yourself.” The film gives us no evidence that he’s done this for Neil, Todd, Knox, and Charlie. And while too cynical by half, the headmaster’s response is one with which I sympathize a good deal more now than I did back then: “At these boys’ age? Not on your life. Tradition, John. Discipline. Prepare them for college and the rest will take care of itself.” On some level, Keating is a Lost Boy who refuses to grow up. It’s hard to forget, in this connection, that Williams went on to play Peter Banning/Peter Pan two years later in Steven Spielberg’s parental guilt-fueled remake of that story, Hook .

Why does all of this matter? In part, because Dead Poets Society might well be the most enduring and beloved picture ever made about teaching the humanities. While many English professors dislike and distrust the film, there’s another large contingent, even among those who teach literature in high school and college, that loves it. And I’m not deaf to its charms. Compared to his colleagues, Mr. Keating is a thrilling teacher, a breath of fresh air, and rightly beloved. The rote repetition and memorization taking place in adjoining classrooms makes his teaching seem quite vibrant.

But while avoiding the pitfalls of dull pedagogy, Keating doesn’t finally give his students anything in its place besides a kind of vague enthusiasm. Next door, Mr. McAllister’s students are declining Latin— Agricolam, Agricola, Agricolae, Agricolarum, Agricolis, Agricolas, Agrilcolis ; out in the hallway, in front of the trophy case and faded photographs of old Weltonians, Keating preaches it. “Carpe diem,” he entreats, during their first class period together.

With its 25th anniversary nearly upon us, the enduring popularity of Dead Poets Society —voted the greatest “school film” ever made, and often named by viewers as one of the most inspirational films of all time, according to a 2011 piece in The Guardian —has a great deal, I believe, to tell us about the current conversation concerning the “crisis in the humanities.”

Certainly it has been an interesting few years for humanists. Since the economic downturn of 2008, enrollments in humanities courses across the country have declined; at the same time—the flip-side of the coin—colleges and universities are seeing a sharp increase in students majoring in those disciplines which, rightly or wrongly, are thought to ensure better employment prospects at the conclusion of one’s studies. This titanic (if cartoonish) battle, often characterized as STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) versus humanities—Big Science, little man—has been splashed across the higher-education and broader popular press, and has clearly captured the public imagination. The headlines in the Chronicle of Higher Education suggest the contours of the “crisis”: “ The Humanities’ Value ” (“Why should society support the humanities when so many people are suffering from the effects of the economic crisis?”); “ In the Humanities, How Should We Define ‘Decline’? ” (“Colleagues nationwide were stunned to learn a few weeks ago that a French department and four other humanities departments at SUNY-Albany were being sacrificed for their ‘underperformance’”); and even “ It’s Time to Stop Mourning the Humanities ” (“As we are forced to sell out to corporate models of higher education, let’s at least be sure to sell high”).

In the conversation about the fate of the humanities, these disciplines are often caricatured to the point of being unrecognizable to those of us in the component fields. The most alarming version—one, I’m arguing, that has been propagated by Dead Poets Society —is what I’ve taken to calling “sentimental humanities”: humanities content stripped of all humanities methodology and rigor. This is a feel-good humanities—the humanities of uplift. The film is of no help as we try to find our way out of our current standoff—and to the degree that it unconsciously stands in for humanities pedagogy and scholarship, it does real damage. I believe, in particular, that there are two fundamental problems with allowing this Dead Poets Society, sentimentalized version of the humanities to serve as our model for what it means to be deeply and passionately engaged in the study of music, art, language and literature, history, philosophy, religion—of human culture. Call them resistance and acceptance.

Though few will say so publicly, there are those with a stake in the debate who resist granting a greater role in contemporary higher-ed curricula to the humanities. When they resist, it’s often the sentimental humanities that they’re resisting: the conception that the humanities, as a group of disciplines, is more about feeling than thinking. That the humanities is easy, a soft option; that the humanities doesn’t train thinkers. Or more often, and more explicitly, that the humanities don’t train employees. North Carolina governor Pat McCrory made headlines last year by telling the state’s high-school seniors, “If you want to take gender studies that’s fine. Go to a private school, and take it. But I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job.” Even our president, with a social science degree (political science) and two years at a liberal arts college (Occidental), has repeatedly trumpeted the importance of technical education and vocational training. Though he’s since apologized , humanists across the country groaned when Obama quipped, at a General Electric plant in Wisconsin on January 30, that “folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art-history degree.”

Oh: and that it’s the refuge of narcissists. No matter the text that he’s ostensibly engaged with, Mr. Keating, like Hamlet in Stéphane Mallarmé’s wonderful description, is forever “reading in the book of himself.” This is what Keating’s namesake John Keats (referencing Wordsworth) called the “egotistical sublime.” Recently, some pioneering work in neuroscience has begun to suggest what English teachers have long known: that the power of literature is the power of alterity, creating the possibility of encountering the other in a form not easily recuperable, not easily assimilable to the self. “Imaginative sympathy,” we used to call it. To read literature well is to be challenged, and to emerge changed.

But for Keating, it’s the text (like Frost’s poem) that is changed, not the reader. He does the same thing to the Whitman poem “O Me! O Life!” that he recites to his students. Used as the voiceover for a recent iPad ad , Mr. Keating’s pep talk quotes the opening and closing lines of the poem, silently eliding the middle: “Oh me! Oh life! / of the questions of these recurring, / Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish, /… / What good amid these, O me, O life? // Answer. // That you are here—that life exists and identity, / That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” He’s quoting from Whitman, he says, but the first line he omits is telling: “Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?).” Go back and add that line to the quotation and see how it alters the whole. For Keating—and one fears, examining the scant evidence the film provides, for his students—every poem is a Song of Myself. This, then, is what’s at stake in Keating’s misreadings—I’m not interested simply in catching a fictional teacher out in an error. But he misreads both Frost and Whitman in such a way that he avoids precisely that encounter with the other, finding in poetry only an echo of what he already knows—what he’s oft thought, but ne’er so well expressed.

And when advocates for the STEM fields do make room at the table for the humanities, it’s too frequently this toothless, much-diminished variety they have in mind. Keating says, “We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute.” But I fear that too often, when we do find a place for the humanities in the curriculum, we do so precisely because they are. Cute. Because they make us feel all warm and fuzzy.

The last time our country experienced a “crisis in the humanities,” it coincided precisely with the rise of (largely Continental) literary theory in U.S. English and comparative literature departments in the 1970s and early ’80s. David Richter cleverly calls his classroom anthology of these theoretical readings Falling into Theory , for there’s a fully developed narrative of Edenic purity and postlapsarian cynicism that lies just beneath the surface of the public backlash against the ascendancy of literary theory.

So if, by one logic, the humanities is dismissed as too lightweight, in another they’re banished unless they bear themselves modestly, “come / on little cat feet.” The humanities fell from grace, then, as an unfortunate consequence of its politicization and turn to theory. In this narrative, the “crisis” in the humanities is wholly of its own making: It’s our own damn fault.

In the humanities, unlike the other branches of higher learning, any amount of analysis is liable to be dismissed as “paralysis by analysis” (in the way Keating dismisses Dr. J. Evans Pritchard’s critical method as “measuring poetry”). Those making such a charge might invoke these lines from Wordsworth’s “The Tables Turned”: “Our meddling intellect / Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:— / We murder to dissect.” These lines (especially the last) are much more familiar than the poem from which they’re taken. But I’ve pulled a Keating on you: I’ve taken them out of context, for the first line of the quatrain is, “Sweet is the lore which Nature brings.” Wordsworth suggests that we murder not literature, but nature, with our “meddling intellects” (in order, paradoxically, to create literature in the first place). If Wordsworth and the Romantics sometimes argue for an anti-intellectual (or merely non-intellectual) relationship to nature, they never offer this as a theory of reading, as Keating consistently does.

But many people like misreading “The Tables Turned,” and like their poetry, as the Car Talk guys would say, “unencumbered by the thought process.” There’s a reason there’s no Dead Novelists Society: for poetry, in the public imaginary, is the realm of feeling rather than thinking, and the very epitome of humanistic study. To understand how preposterous and offensive this stipulation is, turn it around. Imagine what would happen if we suddenly insisted that physics professors were ruining the beauty and mystery and wonder of the natural world by forcing students memorize equations. Or if we demanded that the politics department stop teaching courses in political theory.

The resistance to the humanities: In one of its guises, that of Dead Poets Society, it finally comes down to a preference for fans over critics, amateurs over professionals. Everyone engaged in the debates swirling around the humanities, it seems, is willing to let humanists pursue their interests as amateurs, letting “poetry work its magic … in the enchantment of the moment.” Some of those who wish us well—so long as it doesn’t cost them anything, in terms of faculty lines, or course enrollments, or research funding—enjoy a fan’s relationship to the humanities themselves, and at best hope for the same for their students.

Scholars and teachers of the humanities, however: We will insist on being welcomed to the table as professionals.

The Case Against ‘Dead Poets Society’

“Dead Poets Society” (1989) is a beautifully filmed and affecting movie that was nominated for several Academy Awards and won the award for best original screenplay. The film, which stars the late Robin Williams as an energetic and innovative English teacher named John Keating, is set in the late 1950s at an elite boys’ boarding school in New England: the fictional Welton Academy.

At Welton, boys are offered a rigorous and traditional education. They are drilled in Latin verbs; they solve advanced math problems; they memorize historical facts. In what was by 1989 a reductionist and ideological rendering of a 1950s educational setting, Welton students are never explicitly encouraged to find joy in any of their scholastic pursuits. Or, really, in anything.

Mr. Keating and his real-life counterparts now dominate secondary and post secondary education. That’s a problem.

That is, until Williams’s young Mr. Keating—himself a Welton graduate, a well-regarded English teacher and a student of romantic poetry—arrives on the scene.

At Welton, Keating’s first class consists of walking his pupils into the school’s hallway to peruse framed photographs of Welton alumni. There, Keating tells the students that they may henceforth address him not as Mr. Keating but as “O Captain, My Captain!”—a reference to Walt Whitman’s 1865 poem about the death of President Abraham Lincoln. Then, maintaining the class’s focus on the photographs of Welton students of yore, Keating recites the first line of Robert Herrick’s 1648 poem, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”: “gather ye rosebuds while ye may.” The boys must, Keating tells them, “seize the day,” because mortality looms. “We are food for worms, lads,” says Keating, so live for the moment. Carpe diem .

Keating’s second lesson for the Welton students involves literally ripping out of their poetry books an essay by a scholar named J. Evans Pritchard titled “Understanding Poetry.” This essay purports to offer a graphing formula by which one can ascertain any given poem’s so-called greatness by plotting its “artfulness” on one axis and its “importance” on the other. The exercise conveys Keating’s conviction that the pedagogical and academic theory called New Criticism, which emphasized close reading and aesthetics (and which dominated instruction in literature from the 1940s until the late 1960s), is in fact “excrement.” In his class, Keating tells his pupils, there will be no “armies of academics going forward, measuring poetry…you will learn to think for yourselves.”

Keating’s semantic brilliance make his philosophy go down like the coolest, sweetest beverage on a hot summer day.

It’s all very heady stuff. The boys begin meeting in a cave at night to read poetry to one another in an attempt to resurrect the forbidden Dead Poets Society, in which Mr. Keating participated as a Welton student. The teens are mesmerized and inspired by Keating, just as generations of viewers have been mesmerized and inspired by the film of the same name. I confess to having been so myself when I first saw the film at age 15. Especially for those of us who came early to a love of literature, Keating’s semantic brilliance and theatrical self-assurance make his philosophy go down like the coolest, sweetest beverage on a hot summer day.

The problem? The film’s fictional Keating and his real-life counterparts—who now dominate secondary and post-secondary education—mostly poison the young people whose intellectual and spiritual thirst they mean to quench.

Healthy Order and Healthy Disorder

Before Keating exerts his influence, Welton is a place where many boys are thriving. We see boys sneaking transistor radios into dorms, boys contemplating how to steal the girlfriends of public-school athletes, boys forming regular study groups and occasional cheating alliances, boys bustling with the restless physical energy that, more than any other characteristic, defines male youth.

That is, we see boys pushing against the boundaries that their parents and teachers have set—exactly as healthy teens should.

Are those boundaries overly narrow and constraining, and therefore due for reform? In some cases, absolutely—and tragically so. Animated by class anxiety and therefore deeply concerned about his son’s academic performance and professional trajectory, Mr. Perry, the father of a boy named Neil, forces his son to withdraw from a position as assistant editor of Welton’s yearbook so that he can focus exclusively on his course work. Worse, given Neil’s deep penchant for acting, Perry forbids his son from participating in a local production of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Neil defies his father by participating in the play anyway and ultimately commits suicide when his parents fail to understand the depth of his commitment to the theater and continue to insist that he become a doctor.

Before Keating exerts his influence, Welton is a place where many boys are thriving.

In the wake of Neil’s death, the Welton administration dismisses Mr. Keating, blaming his unorthodox instructional methods and the Dead Poets Society for the tragedy. This is, of course, unfair to the well-intentioned Keating, who was trying to help Neil explain to his father just how much he loves acting.

Still, as anyone who has spent any time around teenagers (especially teenage boys) knows, their primary limitation is not an inability to seize the day; it is an inability to plan for the future. Indeed, teens’ impulsivity and recklessness is best met with exactly the kind of regimentation, order and authority that Welton as a whole was attempting to provide.

This is the same kind of regimentation, order and authority with which adults of every race, religion and class engaged with teenagers until the 1960s. And, of course, it sometimes had its excesses. Any claim to mathematically measure the “greatness” of poems is self-evidently asinine. More important, a father’s attempt to make significant life decisions for his healthy and self-aware teenage son, without his input, was bound to be counterproductive in every possible way.

But these excesses of the 1950s educational order, as depicted in “Dead Poets Society,” are made-up exceptions that prove the overwhelming rule: Healthy teens need order if they are to court and create developmentally healthy disorder. Being without boundaries to push and structures to push against leads to exactly the type of solipsistic, faux introspection that gives rise to the existential angst for which teens have been known ever since we accepted as a cultural rule that, in the words of Bob Dylan, “mothers and fathers throughout the land” should not “criticize what you can’t understand.”

As anyone who has spent any time around teenagers knows, their primary limitation is not an inability to seize the day; it is an inability to plan for the future.

But, of course, mothers and fathers can understand just fine. The only thing more anti-intellectual than some self-important college professor presuming to quantify the greatness of Shakespeare is some self-important English teacher presuming to teach impressionable boys to think for themselves by using them to unquestioningly validate his own credulous and oversimplified relationship to romantic verse. Keating demanded, remember, that his students rip out “Understanding Poetry” by the fictional foil, Pritchard—not that they develop arguments for refuting it or, forbid the thought, for agreeing with it. Keating does not want the boys to think for themselves—not really. He does not want them to think at all, in fact. He wants them to feel as he does.

When Keating is confronted by Welton’s headmaster, Mr. Nolan, and questioned about his unorthodox teaching methods, he replies that he “always thought the idea of educating was to learn to think for yourself.” What Nolan says in response includes what are meant to be the most villainous and regressive lines of the film: “At these boys’ ages! Not on your life. Tradition, John. Discipline. Prepare them for college, and the rest will take care of itself.”

All reductions to absurdity and excesses notwithstanding, the fictional Nolan has it right.

‘Lean on Me’

If only all the real-life Keatings had listened to voices like the fictional Nolan’s for the past several decades instead of—with some notable exceptions, many of them Catholic—systematically eradicating schools’ embrace of tradition and discipline, which once served as the necessary counterweight to teens’ natural drive to embrace the idea of carpe diem .

If they had, then another 1989 film about education, “Lean on Me,” would not remain so sadly relevant. Released just three months before “Dead Poets Society,” “Lean on Me” chronicles the drastic measures taken in 1987 by a real-life principal, represented in the film by the character Joe Clark (played by Morgan Freeman), to rescue an inner-city New Jersey high school. His task: to transform a “cauldron of violence” in which about one-third of the students could pass the New Jersey Minimum Basic Skills test into a safe, positive environment in which more than three-quarters of students demonstrated basic skills.

By the mid-1970s, the educational philosophy espoused by Mr. Keating in “Dead Poets Society”—that is, the hegemonic rejection of tradition and the emphasis on enthusiasm over discipline—had become normative in schools of education in American universities. Hence, ideologically motivated educational philosophies from out-of-touch academics had trickled down into the nation’s primary and secondary schools, particularly those serving the neediest urban students.

When Clark arrives at Eastside High, he finds rampant violence, chaos and underachievement. He recognizes instantly that these elements of disorder have one common cause: the Eastside High teachers’ unwillingness to claim discipline and order as values, and to enforce those values through legitimate authority.

When Clark arrives at Eastside High, he finds rampant violence, chaos and underachievement.

By the 1980s, too many such educators had been influenced by real-life Mr. Keatings. So when Clark yells that “discipline is not the enemy of enthusiasm,” his colleagues are deeply skeptical. When he assumes total authority, in deference not to the niceties of an abysmally failing status quo but to the demands of a reality he hopes to create in which “the minds of the young are set free,” his colleagues find this unilateral wielding of (legitimate) power jarring.

This is unsurprising, since by the time Clark gets to Eastside, the chaos has become so intractable that he must expel 300 “incorrigible” students to protect the other 2,700. He chains school doors (in violation of the fire code) to keep drug dealers out; and, despite the overwhelming popularity of his approach among the mostly minority parents in the Eastside community, he is under constant threat from a politicized school board and a self-interested mayor.

Leading up to 1989 and through the years that followed, when it would have been difficult (but not impossible) for us as a nation to do the hard work of heeding Mr. Clark and reforming our public schools accordingly, we chose to adopt Mr. Keating’s self-reverential, feel-good style instead—and to do so where we could least afford it.

We have little desire to break with conventional unwisdom. Like the boys of “Dead Poets Society,” we are too busy feeling to think.

Absent strict boundaries and consistent discipline, privileged teens like those in “Dead Poets Society” might develop the kind of sophomoric self-importance that causes themselves angst and others annoyance. More urgently, though, for underprivileged teens like those in “Lean on Me,” the consequences of discarding time-tested rigor in favor of misguided tolerance have been truly dire.

Today, about one-third of American fourth graders overall are proficient in reading. In 2019 (before Covid-19 measures took an even further toll), in one of the poorest large cities in the nation, my native Philadelphia, exactly 20 percent of high school students proved proficient in algebra. Meanwhile, the school superintendent in a socioeconomically depressed Philadelphia suburb that has been experiencing a rise in student-perpetrated violence and bullying pleaded with district parents to “please speak to your children about appropriate conduct on their way to and from school and in school.” The district, he said, is “putting our staff, our emergency responders, and other students in potentially unsafe situations.”

The fictional Clark, by contrast, after expelling 300 troublemakers, tells the remaining students, “You will not be bothered in Joe Clark’s school” and upbraids his fellow faculty members: “This is an institution of learning, ladies and gentlemen. If you can’t control it, how can you teach?”

This kind of swift, certain and consistent discipline—this insistence that socioeconomically disadvantaged students will not be subjected to victimization in their own schools—turned the real-life Eastside High around in the 1980s. With teachers rather than students in charge, Eastside was able to offer its students both academic rigor and supportive community. Similar reforms could yield similar results—even today.

But we have little desire to work that hard or to break with conventional unwisdom. Like the boys of “Dead Poets Society,” we are too busy feeling to think—for ourselves or at all.

So across the country, we as a society do tragically little that would require authoritative, honest and unsparing action over a sustained period of time to improve the lives and prospects of the students and families who need it most. Because that would be unpleasant, plodding work and would not feel good—and who wants that, what with each of our self-serving days on earth numbered?

Carpe diem , indeed.

Correction : A previous version of this piece incorrectly referred to the boarding school in the film as Dalton Academy. The school is called Welton Academy.

Elizabeth Grace Matthew is a visiting fellow at Independent Women’s Forum and a contributor to Young Voices. Her writing has appeared in USA Today, The Hill, Deseret News, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Law and Liberty, Real Clear Books & Culture and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

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Dead Poets Society | Main Themes

Dead Poets Society is a timeless masterwork that still impacts readers’ mind. This essay examines the deep issues present in this literary masterpiece, providing readers with an insight into the thought-provoking concepts that enthrall readers of all ages.

Table of Contents

Main Themes

Seize the day – carpe diem:.

The core idea of this work is carpe diem, encouraging people to enjoy each moment. In today’s fast-paced world, this theme’s encouragement to live truthfully and seize life’s opportunities is still applicable. The novel’s characters struggle to follow their genuine inclinations and break away from societal expectations.

Conformity vs. Individuality:

A major subject that emerges throughout the story is the conflict between individuality and conformity. Readers are encouraged to consider the significance of remaining true to oneself as the characters negotiate the strict expectations of society and their families. Despite social pressure, this topic is a potent reminder to accept individuality.

Poetry and Literature’s Transforming Power:

This work highlights the transforming Power of poetry and Literature. Students learn how words can inspire, question, and stir thought from their lively English teacher, Mr. Keating. This theme invites readers to recognize the enormous influence that Literature may have on influencing viewpoints and promoting personal development.

Legacy and Influence:

The novel’s narrative is deeply entwined with the idea of legacy. The thought of making a lasting impression weighs heavily on the characters, and they start to doubt the direction others have set for them. This subject encourages readers to shape their futures by getting them to consider their own goals and the legacy they hope to leave behind.

Questioning Authority:

Dead Poets Society, questions the idea of deferring to authority without question. Motivated by Mr. Keating, the students challenge social norms and pose questions to those in positions of authority. This subject fosters a sense of autonomy and the bravery to question the current quo by challenging readers to assess the institutions around them critically.

A group of students at an all-boys prep school forms the Dead Poets Society under their English teacher’s influence, challenging traditional norms and exploring the power of poetry.

Carpe Diem,” or “Seize the Day,” is a famous line from this work, emphasizing the importance of living in the moment.

The melancholy in this work stems from the conflicts between the students and societal expectations, culminating in a tragic event.

The moral story of this work revolves around individuality, challenging conformity, and the impact of inspiring teachers on students’ lives.

N. H. Kleinbaum wrote the novelization of the movie, but the original screenplay for Dead Poets Society was penned by Tom Schulman.

In summary, “Dead Poets Society” offers a timeless examination of the human condition through its underlying themes. These themes, which include the appeal to seize the moment, the conflict between originality and conformity, and the transformational potential of literature, are relevant to all age groups.

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Everything We Know About Taylor Swift’s New Album, The Tortured Poets Department  

By Kase Wickman

Welcome to Planet Earth (Taylor’s Version). We’re just days away from the release of Taylor Swift ’s 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department , and thanks to a trail of bread crumbs and Easter eggs left by Swift herself, there’s already plenty to talk about and speculate upon, even leading to analysis of songs that nobody has even heard yet.

Swift announced the existence and release date of the Midnights follow-up album in perhaps the flex-iest way possible: onstage , as part of her acceptance speech for best pop vocal album at the Grammys 2024 .

Taylor Swift onstage at the Grammy Awards on February 4, 2024.

Though fans had long speculated that she was gearing up to announce her latest rerecording (only her debut album and 2017’s Reputation remain on the Taylor’s Version to-do list), Swift, 34, had something else in mind.

“I want to say thank you to the fans by telling you a secret I’ve been keeping from you for the last two years,” she said. “Which is that my brand-new album comes out April 19. It’s called The Tortured Poets Department. ”

So where do we enroll?

Ahead of the release of Swift’s new album, here’s everything we know so far.

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When is The Tortured Poets Department coming out?

The Tortured Poets Department will be released on April 19, 2024.

What’s that title, The Tortured Poets Department, in reference to?

The short version of that is a big shrug. The longer, more speculative version? It may or may not be a deliberate echo of the now infamous “Tortured Man Club” group chat that Joe Alwyn shared he’s part of on WhatsApp with Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal .

By Bess Levin

By Savannah Walsh

What will the songs be about?

In the lead-up to the release of The Tortured Poets Department, Swift shared five playlists of her own songs on Apple Music, seemingly curated according to the five stages of grief. There’s denial (I Love You, It’s Ruining My Life), anger (You Don’t Get to Tell Me About Sad), bargaining (Am I Allowed to Cry?), depression (Old Habits Die Screaming), and finally, acceptance (I Can Do It With a Broken Heart). Swift recorded voice memos to accompany each playlist, saying of the final collection, for example, “These songs represent making room for more good in your life—making that choice—because a lot of time when we lose things, we gain things too.”

This, along with the “last two years” timeline she mentioned when announcing the album—the last gasps and ultimate ending of her relationship with Alwyn—has us guessing that the album won’t not be about the breakup.

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce

Will we see Travis Kelce stuff on there?

Love takes time, and so does recording an album. It’s possible that her newish relationship with Kelce, which kicked off sometime in the summer of 2023, influenced tracks, but not terribly likely. When Swift began working on the album, right after she released Midnights, she hadn’t met Kelce.

Is it going to be good?

Listen, Travis Kelce has heard the album, and he says it’s “unbelievable.” Considering he attended the Eras Tour of his own accord, it’s safe to assume that he’s a true-blue Swiftie and can be trusted, romantic bias or no.

Florence Welch

Who is she collaborating with?

Post Malone and Florence Welch (of Florence + the Machine) are both credited on the album’s track list.

What’s on the track list?

Swift released the official track list for the album in an Instagram post in February. They are listed as:

1. “Fortnight” (feat. Post Malone)

2. “The Tortured Poets Department”

3. “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys”

4. “Down Bad”

5. “So Long, London”

6. “But Daddy I Love Him”

7. “Fresh Out the Slammer”

8. “Florida!!!” (feat. Florence + the Machine)

9. “Guilty as Sin?”

10. “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”

11. “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)”

13. “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”

14. “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”

15. “The Alchemy”

16. “Clara Bow”

She has also announced bonus tracks “The Manuscript,” “The Albatross,” “The Bolter,” and “The Black Dog.”

Post Malone

Shouldn’t there be an apostrophe in the title?

No . It’s fine. The department doesn’t belong to the tortured poets, it’s a department of tortured poets. Find something else to worry about.

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Taylor Swift Songs Return to TikTok One Week Before “The Tortured Poets Department” Drops

A ll of the 14-time Grammy winner's music had been removed from the app on Feb. 1 due to a failed licensing agreement between TikTok and Universal Music Group

Taylor Swift is back in action on TikTok.

On April 11, TikTok users were happy to see that the singer’s catalog had returned to the app, with songs ranging from her most recent album, Midnights , to her rerecorded albums, including 1989 (Taylor’s Version) and Red (Taylor’s Version) . The only albums not included are 2017’s Reputation and her debut, self-titled album from 2006, both of which fans still eagerly await the rerecordings for. 

Since Feb. 1, her songs, along with the work of many other chart-topping artists, have been missing from TikTok after Universal Music Group (UMG) and the app failed to come to a licensing agreement. According to a statement released by the label, TikTok was unwilling to “strike anything close to a market-rate deal” in order to fairly compensate artists and also failed to “meaningfully address its obligations as a social platform” on hot-button issues like the rise of AI. The agreement expired on Jan. 31, prompting the removal of all UMG artists’ catalogs from the app the following day. 

The statement said that UMG was abiding by their “responsibility to our artists to fight for a new agreement under which they are appropriately compensated for their work, on a platform that respects human creativity, in an environment that is safe for all, and effectively moderated.”

Related: Taylor Swift Is Officially a Billionaire Thanks to Eras Tour, Song Catalog and Real Estate Portfolio: Report

Swift’s catalog is the first to return to TikTok, more than two months after its removal. 

Of the 13-time Grammy winner’s collection, some of the most frequently used songs on the app include Folklore 's “cardigan,” which has been used in over 1.3 million videos, as well as Lover 's “Cruel Summer,” and “Style (Taylor’s Version)” from 1989 (Taylor’s Version) . 

The return of the 34-year-old’s repertoire on the app comes just one week before her 11th studio album , The Tortured Poets Department , is set to premiere. Earlier this week, Swift teased some lyrics from the forthcoming album in honor of the solar eclipse on March 8.

On her Instagram Story, she shared a link to preorder the album as well as a video of a typewriter typing out a set of what seemed like lyrics off a new song: “Crowd goes wild at her fingertips/Half moonshine, Full eclipse.”

Related: Taylor Swift Is Getting a Whole SiriusXM Channel Dedicated to Her — and It's Channel 13, Obviously

Days earlier, Swift had surprised fans once again by sharing a set of curated playlists on Apple Music, sorting many of her most loved songs into the five stages of heartbreak : denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

For denial, Swift created a collection of songs like “Lavender Haze” and “Style (Taylor’s Version),” calling the playlist I Love You, It’s Ruining My Life Songs , and telling Apple Music the songs were about "getting so caught up in the idea of something that you have a hard time seeing the red flags, possibly resulting in moments of denial and maybe a little bit of delusion.”

On You Don’t Get to Tell Me About Sad Songs , Swift tackles anger with songs like "Bad Blood (Taylor's Version)" and "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together (Taylor’s Version)." She told Apple Music that she’s learned that the “healthiest way” to manifest her anger is to “write a song about it, and then oftentimes, that helps me get past it.”

With Am I Allowed to Cry? Songs , Swift dives into bargaining with tracks like "Soon You'll Get Better" and "This Is Me Trying." She explained that these songs embrace the act of "trying to make deals with yourself or someone that you care about."

Swift tackles depression with Old Habits Die Screaming Songs , which features songs like "Champagne Problems" and "Forever Winter (Taylor's Version)," and dives into "the feelings of depression that often lace their way through my songs."

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The final playlist is I Can Do It with a Broken Heart Songs , which represents acceptance and features songs like “You’re On Your Own, Kid” and “Long Story Short."

Swift said the final collection of songs "represent making room for more good in your life, making that choice because a lot of time when we lose things, we gain things too."

For more People news, make sure to sign up for our newsletter!

Read the original article on People .

Home — Essay Samples — Psychology — Obedience to Authority — Obedience In The Movie Dead Poets Society

Obedience in The Movie Dead Poets Society

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Taylor Swift's Shares New 'Tortured Poets Department' Lyrics: Everything We Know About Album

Taylor swift announces 'the tortured poets department' album after winning 13th grammy, inside travis and jason kelce's wild 'new heights' live podcast, ‘fire country’: morena baccarin on mickey fox being ‘tougher’ than her other roles (exclusive), ‘days of our lives’ stars paul telfer and robert scott wilson dish on stripping down for 'playgirl', ‘deadpool & wolverine’ director shawn levy plays coy about taylor swift dazzler rumors (exclusive), jewel breaks silence on kevin costner dating rumors, amber rose and blac chyna on how they rekindled their friendship after falling out (exclusive), why channing tatum and jenna dewan are testifying against each other nearly 6 years after split, ryan gosling says his daughters know 'barbie' choreography better than he does, roberto cavalli, iconic fashion designer, dead at 83, anna paquin and stephen moyer recall 'true blood' sex scene | spilling the e-tea, madonna has rare night out with 5 of her 6 kids to celebrate son rocco's art show, ariana greenblatt reacts to her cinemacon rising star award after a decade of acting (exclusive), angelina jolie and daughter vivienne step out to celebrate their broadway show, lupita nyong'o and joseph quinn on how ‘a quiet place: day one’ is 'bigger and wilder' (exclusive), 'the golden bachelor': gerry turner and theresa nist are divorcing after 3 months of marriage, 'sister wives' star christine brown shares rare photo of ex kody with his late son garrison, amy poehler recalls raging ‘snl’ parties as series celebrates 50th anniversary (exclusive), why geena davis isn’t returning for ‘beetlejuice' sequel (exclusive), 'deadpool & wolverine's shawn levy on taylor swift dazzler rumors and travis kelce football game, kourtney kardashian says she drinks her breast milk when she's sick, the pop star timed up the release of the lyrics to monday's eclipse..

Taylor Swift  is only cryptic and machiavellian because she cares. 

On Monday, the 34-year-old singer perfectly timed up her Instagram Story -- complete with a link to download her upcoming 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Society -- with the solar eclipse to reveal one of the first lyrics from the highly anticipated April 19 release. 

In the video, a typewriter is seen with its keys typing out the words to the unidentified song, revealing three lines, including one with an on-the-nose reference to Monday's activity in the sky. 

"Crowd goes wild at her fingertips / Half moonshine, Full eclipse," the sheet of paper reveals. 

The Instagram Story comes as Swift is in the midst of the European leg of her record-breaking  Eras Tour  and less than two weeks out from the album's drop. 

As Swifties eagerly await the new drop, here's everything she's revealed about the project (so far). We'll continue to monitor as the new updates roll in. 

The Announcement

Swift dropped the news of her impending release onstage at the GRAMMY s on Feb. 4 while accepting her 13th trophy from the Recording Academy. The announcement came amid ongoing red herrings from the star, who many fans believed had been hinting at an imminent  Reputation (Taylor's Version) drop. 

"OK, this is my 13th GRAMMY, which is my lucky number. I don't know if I’ve ever told you that," Swift quipped while accepting the Best Pop Vocal Album award for her last original album,  Midnights . "I want to say thank you to the members of the Recording Academy for voting this way, but I know that the way that the Recording Academy voted is a direct reflection of the passion of the fans."

Swift continued, "I want to say thank you to the fans by telling you a secret that I have been keeping from you for the last two years, which is that my brand new album comes out April 19th. It's called The Tortured Poets Department . I'm gonna go post the cover right now backstage. Thank you, I love you."

Moments later, Swift took to social media to share the main cover image for the album. 

Shot by Beth Garrabrant, the black-and-white pic shows Swift lying on a bed, surrounded by pillows. The second slide of her Instagram post featured a handwritten page of what appeared to be lyrics, which read, "And so I enter into evidence / My tarnished coat of arms / My muses, acquired like bruises / My talismans and charms / The tick, tick, tick of love bombs / My veins of pitch black ink."

At the bottom of the page, Swift wrote, "All's fair in love and poetry - sincerely, The Chairman of The Tortured Poets Department."

It was the first of four covers to be unveiled. On the album's back cover, the songstress looks forlorn as she rests her head on her hand. Text splashed across the image reads, "I love you, it's ruining my life."

The first edition is labeled "The Manuscript," as a reflection of the album's bonus track title. Swift has gone on to share additional versions of the LP including bonus tracks called "The Bolter," "The Albatross" and "The Black Dog." Each one features a cohesive black and white or sepia toned aesthetic. 

The Track List + Collaborations

Featured on the track list are collaborations with Post Malone  ("Fortnight") and Florence + the Machine  ("Florida!!!"). 

Check out the full list of songs below: 

SIDE A: 

• "Fortnight" feat. Post Malone
• "The Tortured Poets Department" 
• "My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys" 
• "Down Bad" 

SIDE B: 

• "So Long, London" 
• "But Daddy I Love Him" 
• "Fresh Out the Slammer" 
• "Florida!!!" feat. Florence + the Machine 
• "Guilty as Sin?" 
• "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?"
• "I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)"
• "I Can Do It With a Broken Heart" 
• "The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived" 
• "The Alchemy" 
• "Clara Bow" 
• "The Manuscript" OR "The Bolter" OR "The Albatross" (Bonus Track) 

The Timeline

When announcing The Tortured Poets Department  in February,   Swift teased that the project had been in the works for two years. Then, during a tour stop in Tokyo, Japan, Swift further elaborated on the timeline . 

"I've been working on  Tortured Poets  since right after I turned in  Midnights , " she told the audience at the Tokyo Dome, clarifying that albums are submitted "months in advance" so they can be finalized. 

Midnights   was released in October 2022, and went on to make history when it was selected as the Album of the Year winner at the 2024 GRAMMYs.

In the time since  Midnights  dropped, Swift has also notably released  two rerecorded albums :  Speak Now (Taylor's Version)  and the record-breaking  1989 (Taylor's Version) . 

"I've been working on it for about two years," she confirmed of  Tortured Poets . "I kept working on it throughout the U.S. tour and when it was perfect, in my opinion, when it was good enough for you, I finished it." 

She continued, "I am so, so excited that soon you'll get to hear it, soon we'll get to experience that together, and I'm just like, I'm over the moon about the fact that you guys care about my music. It still blows my mind. I love doing this, I know I keep saying that, but that's because it's true.'" 

Swift joked that she's been asked on numerous occasions, "Why do you make so many albums?" She replied, "Man, because I love it. I love it so much." 

She added, "I'm having fun, leave me alone." 

The Inspiration

While many fans expected Swift to announce a release date for  Reputation (Taylor's Version)  at the GRAMMYs, news that  Swift had already finished a completely original album  took many by surprise -- and sent Swiftie sleuths into overdrive to uncover clues about its origin and inspiration.

Quickly, a 2022 video of Swift's ex-boyfriend,  Joe Alwyn , resurfaced in which he revealed that he was in a group chat with friends  called "The Tortured Mans Club."   The former couple was in a relationship for six years before  ET broke the news of their split in April of last year. 

The track "So Long, London" also caught many eyes, with Swifties wondering if it might also be a reference to Alwyn, who is English.

The celebrated songwriter is, of course, well known for her deeply personal lyrics and storytelling. 

During a tour stop in Australia, Swift told the audience that creating Tortured Poets was a necessary outlet during a tumultuous time.

"This album, this new one, Tortured Poets ,   is an album that I think more than any of my albums that I've ever made -- I  needed  to make it," she said.

"It was really a lifeline for me, just the things I was going through, the things I was writing about," she continued. "It kind of reminded me of why songwriting is something that like actually gets me through my life." 

She added, "I've never had an album where I needed songwriting more than I needed it on Tortured Poets ."

It's not yet clear if any of the Tortured Poets songs will include references to her current relationship with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce . The couple first connected after Kelce famously called her out on his podcast, New Heights , in July  for refusing to meet him during her tour stop at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Missouri.   In a later interview with Time , Swift said she thought the move was "metal as hell." 

The duo went public with their romance in September, when the musician made her first of many appearances at her beau's NFL games.  The rest, as they say, is history

In an Instagram Story on April 8, she revealed some of the very first lyrics from the album as a tease from the album's upcoming release. 

"Crowd goes wild at her fingertips / Half moonshine, Full eclipse," she shared. It's unclear which song the lyrics come from. 

For more on  The Tortured Poets Department leading up to its April 19 release, follow  ET's latest Swift coverage here. 

Get the ET Newsletter

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Cannes Festival Unveils 2024 Lineup, Including a Francis Ford Coppola Film

Organizers on Thursday announced a lineup that also features new films from Yorgos Lanthimos, David Cronenberg and Paul Schrader.

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By Alex Marshall

Movies directed by Francis Ford Coppola, David Cronenberg and Yorgos Lanthimos will compete for the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the event’s organizers announced in a news conference on Thursday.

New films by Jacques Audiard, Paul Schrader and Andrea Arnold will also appear in competition at this year’s event, the festival’s 77th edition, which opens May 14 and runs through May 25.

The most eagerly anticipated film on the lineup is likely to be Coppola’s “Megalopolis” — the director’s first movie in over 10 years.

During Thursday’s news conference, Thierry Frémaux, Cannes’s artistic director, revealed little about that movie’s plot, but Coppola, the director of “The Godfather” trilogy and “Apocalypse Now,” has been talking about his desire to make it for decades. In 2001, Coppola told the The New York Times that “Megalopolis” was “about the future” and “a guy who wants to build a utopian society in the middle of Manhattan.”

Coppola, 85, has already won the Palme d’Or twice: in 1974 for “ The Conversation ,” and, in 1979, for “ Apocalypse Now ” (a prize that was shared with Volker Schlöndorff’s “The Tin Drum”).

The Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos will present “ Kinds of Kindness ,” starring Emma Stone and Willem Dafoe, who also worked together on Lanthimos’s most recent release, “ Poor Things .” David Cronenberg, the Canadian horror movie director, will premiere “The Shrouds,” about a widower who builds a machine to connect with the dead.

Among the other movies competing for the Palme d’Or are Audiard’s “Emilia Perez,” a musical crime comedy set in the world of Mexican drug cartels and starring Selena Gomez; Ali Abbasi’s “The Apprentice,” about Donald J. Trump’s early business career; and Andrea Arnold’s “Bird,” about a 12-year-old girl living in poverty in England.

The Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov will show “Limonov: The Ballad,” about a Russian poet living in New York, and Paolo Sorrentino, the Italian director, will be represented with “Parthenope,” which Frémaux said was about a beautiful woman who hopes to be known for something other than her looks.

Schrader, best known as the screenwriter behind “Taxi Driver,” will present “Oh Canada,” starring Uma Thurman and Richard Gere. Frémaux said the movie was a comedy about older people looking back on their lives and mistakes. Coralie Fargeat, best known as the director of “The Revenge,” will present a body horror — a gruesome horror movie subgenre — called “The Substance,” starring Demi Moore.

Before Thursday’s news conference, some movie critics had said they expected this year’s lineup to lack big movies from American studios because of the ongoing effects of last year’s Hollywood strikes. Frémaux said in the news conference that the 2024 selection “was not easy” because of the strikes, but that American cinema would “absolutely be present” at this year’s festival. Three of the 19 movies in competition are by American directors.

The details of a few high-profile movies appearing out of competition were already known long before Thursday’s news conference. Those include George Miller’s “ Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga ,” the latest installment in the action series; and Kevin Costner’s “ Horizon: an American Saga ,” set on the Western frontier during the American Civil War.

All of the entries will be scrutinized by a jury led by Greta Gerwig, the director and screenwriter behind “Barbie,” and it will announce the Palme d’Or winner at a ceremony on May 25.

At the festival’s closing ceremony, George Lucas, the creator of the “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” series, will also receive an Honorary Palme d’Or for his contribution to cinema.

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described George Lucas’s work on “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones.” He was a creator of the series but did not direct all of the films.

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Alex Marshall is a Times reporter covering European culture. He is based in London. More about Alex Marshall

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Even before his new film “Civil War” was released, the writer-director Alex Garland faced controversy over his vision of a divided America with Texas and California as allies .

Theda Hammel’s directorial debut, “Stress Positions,” a comedy about millennials weathering the early days of the pandemic , will ask audiences to return to a time that many people would rather forget.

“Fallout,” TV’s latest big-ticket video game adaptation, takes a satirical, self-aware approach to the End Times .

“Sasquatch Sunset” follows the creatures as they go about their lives. We had so many questions. The film’s cast and crew had answers .

If you are overwhelmed by the endless options, don’t despair — we put together the best offerings   on Netflix , Max , Disney+ , Amazon Prime  and Hulu  to make choosing your next binge a little easier.

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