Epea Pteroenta

It’s the zeitgeist, I tell you.

Perhaps listing Dead Poets Society as one of my favourite movies of all time is doing it a disservice. It’s not the ‘favourite’ part that gets me every time I watch it (even though I have pretty much memorised the dialogue). It’s the fact that it crashed into my life at precisely the right moment. A couple of years before or after, and it wouldn’t have had half the impact.

When the movie came out, in 1989, I was exactly the age of its young protagonists and in largely the same predicament. Sometimes I think I’d have taken the stuffy boarding school over the deprived day school I attended, which squeezed six lesson periods a day into five hours and forced me to go to prep classes in the evenings in order to have a snowflake’s chance in my university entry exams. Everything was very utilitarian; perhaps not because the people lacked imagination, but because circumstances didn’t allow for any.

My parents weren’t much better; they weren’t going to lock me up and force me to go to law school and become a judge or diplomat (mainly because they couldn’t, if I didn’t pass the exams), but the biggest fear of their lives was that I’d have my head turned by artistic ambitions and choose to pursue an ideal instead of a career, so they had actively discouraged me from any artistic pursuits, even as hobbies. There had never been piano or ballet lessons for me – I would never have abandoned them like most other girls my age did, by the end of primary school.

Then my father died unexpectedly, in the autumn of my final year in high school, and cold hard necessity removed any chances I had to get such education for myself, once out of school. I had to get into university, graduate on time, and work for a living. It was a very bleak time.

That was the frame of mind I was in when I first went to see Dead Poets Society. I had two wonderful young teachers that year, substitutes teaching history and philosophy, that lightened the oppression of the general climate. None was as inspirational as Mr Keating (I had to wait almost two years, until my second semester in university, to meet that one), but they did encourage thinking out of the box, and the philosophy one actually organised an after hours class trip to see the movie together.

I didn’t cry in the last ten minutes. I still don’t – I’m too numb – but I stand up and applaud, blurry-eyed, with the rest, until the credits roll, even if I’m alone in my living room. And I still don’t know if I identify more with the one who removes himself or with the one who finds his voice in the middle of tragedy. More likely with the general population of the class, who all get marked, if not so spectacularly. Robin Williams deserved the Oscar for this, so much that it’s not even funny.

A few months later I failed my entry exams and went through another year of private prep before resitting three out of the five subjects and passing with flying colours. In university I learned to appreciate the craft of writing, as opposed to enjoying the reading that I’d done so far. I met, early on, a professor who spurred me on, and the movie, instead of fading in the distance, became more and more pertinent.

I still have no music or dance training (at least of the kind I wanted then), but I write a lot. Whatever happens around me (and life is once again bleak), I have a creative voice that can’t be silenced. Funny how much can start with a simple trip to the movies.