The Dead Poets Society Sellout Test

The other day, I was talking with a friend who mentioned he had recently rewatched Dead Poets Society for the first time since high school. Even if it’s also been years since you’ve viewed the film, you probably remember the story well: unconventional teacher John Keating urges a group of boys at a buttoned-up prep school to live with passion and individuality — leading the conservative faculty and the students’ controlling parents to push back.

My friend loved the movie as a teenager, but as a middle-aged man, he thought it no longer held up. He was more irked than inspired by some of the film’s schmaltziness. He noticed more plot holes that didn’t make sense. The whole narrative just didn’t resonate as it once did.

Plenty of people have had that experience when revisiting Dead Poets Society. Professor of English Kevin Dettmar is one. Writing in the Atlantic, he noted that “One of the strangest things about watching the film again, 25 years on . . . 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.”

Criticisms of the film vary. Dettmar objects to Keating’s use of poetry as fodder for feelings-based inspiration rather than material for intellectual study. Some criticize the movie for being emotionally manipulative, promoting reckless idealism, and portraying its villains in a one-dimensional way. Still others point out basic inconsistencies, such as Keating’s carpe diem speech, where he refers to former students in old photographs as "food for worms," despite the fact that those students, having graduated in 1900, could easily still have been alive in 1959, when the film is set.

Some of that criticism is fair. And yet, when I decided to rewatch Dead Poets Society myself, to see what the middle-aged version of me would think of it decades after my last viewing, I have to say, I still very much enjoyed the film.

It still stirred me.

And, it got me thinking: perhaps one’s grown-up reaction to the movie serves as a good litmus test for how much you have, or haven’t, sold out in becoming an adult.