Watch the video: https://youtu.be/iafKQXrXcsE Dead Poets Society is famous for boys standing on desks, and it is also the story of a boy who never stands again. The familiar fork (seize the day against crushing tradition, poetry against conformity, the beloved teacher against the rigid father) is real, and it is not deep enough. Read with Soren Kierkegaard's The Sickness Unto Death, the film is a drama of despair: a sickness of the spirit when possibility and necessity tear apart. In this Mythic Mind Movies episode, Dr. Andrew Snyder (professor of philosophy and theology) speaks alone, expanding the earlier Mythic Mind Movies conversation rather than restaging it. He will not score the film as a culture war, and he will not worship Keating for liberating the young. The tone he wants is Kierkegaard's physician at the sickbed. Welton Academy, at its worst, drains out possibility and trains boys to be excellent at function: finitude's despair, the mass man, traditionalism turned into tyrannical order. Mr. Perry is not a cartoon. He loves Neil, but only through security, profession, reputation, and a decided future in medicine, and he wills a self for his son. Dr. Andrew Snyder compares that shape of love to the archetypal witch, who feeds children up so that she can feed on them. Keating, at his most intoxicating, is the other sickness. He tears out the dead utilitarian measurement of poetry, stands the boys on the desk, and at least in spirit takes them to the cave, so that language is the air the spirit breathes. He floods them with possibility and does not teach the return to necessity without a crash on the shore. Lazy readings give him sainthood or make him the scapegoat. Neither is the film. Neil Perry is the center of the reading. On stage he tastes a self that feels like his real life, then binds that self to one possibility, Kierkegaard's "either Caesar or nothing." When the father closes the theater and military school waits, necessity arrives as violence, not as a place where a self might still be formed. Neil stays in what Kierkegaard calls a poet-existence. He does not come home. He does not rest, repent, or endure. He wills to be rid of himself. The earlier conversation rightly refused a single villain: the father presses finitude's despair onto another life, Keating opens possibility without enough formation for the return, the school rewards spiritlessness and then needs a scapegoat, and Neil, still unfinished, fails the task that belongs to the individual. Todd's last stand is the contrast. He does not demand an overnight rewrite of his whole story. He takes one finite step, in the moment, and stands on the desk in public. Charlie (Nuwanda) wears rebellion like a costume, a theater of defiance rather than integrated selfhood. Knox lets desire race ahead of the real girl and the real limits. The film, to its credit and its limit, shows the dizziness of freedom (The Concept of Anxiety) more clearly than the orientation faith would give. Where, humanly speaking, there is no possibility, the movie goes silent. Kierkegaard does not: with God, everything is possible. Poetry, friendship, and carpe diem can wake a self. They do not by themselves cure despair. The opposite of despair is faith, willing to be the concrete self you are, limits included, before the power that established you. Topics include quiet despair that still looks successful, Headmaster Nolan and the false peace of an institution, spiritless boys trained as empty talking machines, the sin of poeticizing instead of being (a nod to Plato's cave, where the boys may only have changed shadows), and three questions for the watcher: where you are mortgaged to finitude, where you are drunk on infinitude, and what one concrete step would look like this week. Related Mythic Mind Movies: • Carpe Diem Unbounded: Dead Poets Society (ep. 28): https://youtu.be/I9N033zhmII Join the Mythic Mind Fellowship: https://mythicmindfellowship.com Listen to/watch the Mythic Mind podcasts: - Mythic Mind - Mythic Mind Games - Mythic Mind Movies #MythicMind #MythicMindMovies #DeadPoetsSociety #Kierkegaard #SicknessUntoDeath #NeilPerry #JohnKeating #Despair #FilmDiscussion #Philosophy #Theology
