Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company From the Inside Out by Sean Griffin

Author:Sean Griffin [Griffin, Sean]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Gay Studies, Social Science
ISBN: 9780814731239
Google: id1MiOWqirgC
Amazon: 0814731236
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2000-02-01T08:00:00+00:00

The first in this string of films was Dead Poets Society (1989), the first Touchstone picture ever to be nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award and a surprise summer box-office hit. While Robin Williams, as an unconventional English Literature professor at an all-male college preparatory during the 1950s, is the film’s ostensible star, most of the story focuses on a group of his students. Amongst these students are roommates Todd Anderson, played by Ethan Hawke, and Neil Perry,

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played by Robert Sean Leonard, both of whom are dealing with problems of self-worth. Todd is shy and quiet, while Neil is more outgoing (but pressured by his domineering father to follow a strictly laid-out plan for his future adult life). Mr. Keating (Williams) shocks his class when he encourages them to think independently and to follow the proverbial “beat of a different drummer.” He demands that his students

“look at things in a different way” and “consider not just what the author thinks, consider what you think.” Excited by these concepts, Neil soon convinces Todd and his buddies to recreate a secret organization that Keating belonged to when he was a student at Welton, the “Dead Poets Society,” committed to “sucking the marrow out of life.”

As this last quote from Thoreau points out, Keating’s choice of texts for teaching his life lessons are filled with implications. The first words he speaks in his first class are “Oh captain, my captain,” penned by homosexual poet Walt Whitman. Keating prefers that the students address him in such a fashion, quotes Whitman often, and a portrait of the poet hangs in the front of the classroom. In one of the key scenes of the film, Keating forces the shy Todd to improvise a poem in front of the class based on this portrait. As the camera circles vertiginously around the pair, Keating actually lays hands on Todd, covering his eyes and, like a preacher, wills the poem about “a sweaty toothed madman” out of the boy. Such a focus on Whitman invites comparisons between the poet’s recurrent motif of “‘frail and endangered male’ adolescents, . . . pale and solitary young men” and this film’s own preoccupations with male youth.53

Certainly, the film’s increasing focus on the downward spiral of Neil’s life parallels Whitman scholar Byrne R. S. Fone’s assertion that “if the death of a beautiful woman was for Poe the most poetic subject, the death of a handsome youth was for Whitman as highly charged.”54 Influenced by Keating, Neil excitedly realizes his calling to be an actor instead of a lawyer, though he knows his father will be dead set against it.

Consequently, when Neil lands the role of Puck in a local production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream, he decides to hide it from his father. Eventually, though, the secret comes out, and, supremely displeased at this seeming act of disrespect, his father demands that Neil quit the play.

Neil seeks Mr. Keating out for advice.

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