“Chased by Walt Whitman” Or, Why Did Neil Perry Kill Himself?
An analysis of Peter Weir’s Dead Poets Society through a lens of homosexuality, repression, and gender expression, to find out why it had to end the way it did.
A mother stares out the window. It is winter, and snow is still falling. She turns to face the camera, and it is clear she is waiting for something, strained and worried. Finally, her husband and her son, the protagonist, Neil Perry, enter through the door. The tension in the room is palpable. The two are returning home from a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which Neil starred as Puck, something he has wanted to do his whole life, and something that was explicitly against his father’s orders. Tom, the father, turns on Neil, and after a swift chastisement, announces that he is to be withdrawn from the boys boarding school which he currently attends and enrolled in military school, effective immediately. Neil is terrified. He retorts, their argument escalates, and finally he exclaims, “I’ve got to tell you what I feel!” Tom is terrified. Tension. Both parents yell over each other until, “What? What? Tell me what you feel!” Silence. Neil can’t. They both know he can’t. All three are on the brink of tears. All three know that their worst fears have been realized. All three can’t accept what they know. “Nothing.”
The sequence that follows is excruciatingly drawn out. No words, music underscoring a sequence of rituals. Neil does not go to sleep as his mother suggested. Instead, he approaches the window. He stares out at the snow. He places the crown he wore as Puck back upon his head. A close up shot: his hands fall to his sides and his eyes shut in a final moment of tranquility. Neil has reached a point of resolve. He travels through his house, silently entering and retrieving something wrapped in cloth from his parent’s locked drawer, and then returns to the original room. We know what is about to happen. We may not have at first, but over the course of this silent sequence we slowly become painfully aware. Neil places the object on the desk before him. A long silence, and the camera shot switches. Tom jolts out of bed, startled by a noise. We do not know what the noise is, but we do. Neil’s parents search the house, they finally reach the room; they see the smoke, the gun, the outstretched hand. We as the audience are not allowed the privilege of looking away. Instead, we hear starkly the painful cries of parents in denial, parents who are at fault, parents whose fears have done nothing but create more terror.
Why did Neil Perry kill himself? On the surface, it is because he disobeyed his father, and can’t stand the thought of living out ten more years in school, a harsh school, away from his friends. Perhaps, digging further, it is because Neil’s passions do not coincide with his father’s vision for his future; Neil loves acting, Tom wants him to be a doctor. But with some investigation it becomes quite clear that there are more factors at play here.
In his essay for the online film analysis magazine Bright Wall/Dark Room, titled “In Defense of Dead Poets Society,” Christopher Cantwell analyzes many aspects of the film, but especially focuses on the suicide of the protagonist. He details how he had forgotten which actor’s character, Robert Sean Leonard’s “Neil Perry” or Ethan Hawke’s “Todd Anderson,” ends up dying. Cantwell explains, “I wanted to disprove my subconscious knowledge that it was Robert Sean Leonard. I honestly don’t know why. I’ll take a stab, but I feel like it will make more sense to you than it does to me. To me, it still feels like I’m grasping at straws.” He then delves into a personal anecdote, about a boy he knew in high school whose story eerily reminds him of the protagonist. This boy was heavily involved with theatre, committed suicide as an upperclassman, and was “[n]ot out, but certainly gay.” Cantwell then comes to the conclusion that “it’s clear to me that Robert Sean Leonard’s character Neil is certainly gay.” This might come across as reading too deeply or as heavy speculation. But, if this all was simply about acting, mightn’t it have ended differently?
“If this were just a story about Neil wanting to be an actor, he would’ve been cast as Hamlet and his father would’ve seen him and there would’ve been one of those scenes where afterward he’s blown away by his son’s skill (“I was wrong”) and then a happier ending.”
Instead, Neil is cast as Puck, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and he kills himself.
Throughout the movie, there are multiple elements which point towards Neil’s queer coding and the idea of this film as an allegory for a struggle between a gay child and their terrified parent. First, there is evidence to be found in the suicide scene itself. Tom announces that he is withdrawing Neil from Welton, his boarding school, and instead enrolling him in Branden Military School. This is clearly in an attempt to instill traits of masculinity and strength in his son. A quick fix for a son who is not fitting in the strict gender binaries of the late 1950s. When Neil stands and asserts himself one last time, standing up and saying “I’ve got to tell you how I feel!” his parents immediately begin yelling over each other. Their reaction to this relatively simple statement is really quite extreme when one looks at it objectively. They do not want to hear it. They know how he feels, and it terrifies them. Neil is quickly intimidated back into silence, resigned to the fact that it’s “nothing.”
Now, even if this allegorical queer reading is valid, Neil’s sexuality is not something he seems to actively address or understand himself; he may act on it in subtle ways but is largely repressed, chiefly due to the nature of his culture and upbringing. Rural, elitist America in the late 1950s was not exactly a place where being anything other than heterosexual was allowed, or even heard of.
In her article on psychcentral.com, Traci Pederson defines “repression” as “a psychological defense mechanism that occurs when a person consistently pushes away a particularly painful or disturbing thought, memory or desire in an attempt to keep his or her mind in a more pleasurable, less anxious state.” Jack Drescher contextualizes this in its relationship to homosexuality in his article “The Closet: Psychological Issues of Being In and Coming Out.” He discusses dissociation mechanisms, specifically “selective inattention,” and explains, “Clinical presentations of closeted gay people may lie somewhere in severity between selective inattention … to more severe dissociation — in which any hint of same-sex feelings resides totally out of conscious awareness.” It is quite likely that Neil experiences what some circles of psychologists would call “latent homosexuality,” or “A sexual tendency toward members of the same sex that is not consciously recognized or not expressed overtly.”
Neil’s homosexuality, therefore, manifests itself in subtle ways. At the top of the movie, Neil is paired with new student, Todd Anderson, as his roommate, and the two quickly form a unique bond. Neil helps coax Todd out of his shell, and Todd is the soft counterbalance to Neil’s larger-than-life personality. In one pivotal scene, Neil bursts into their room and announces his plans to audition for the local production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, no matter what his father says. He raves about how he has finally found what he has been searching for his whole life. However, Todd is nervous, the moral reasoning in the relationship, and the two escalate into their first real fight. Neil changes the subject to their next Dead Poets Society meeting, and encourages Todd to come and read a piece, which is resisted. Todd is exasperated: “You say things and people listen. I’m not like that … there’s nothing you can do about it, so you can just butt out. I can take care of myself just fine.” Neil won’t have it. “No.” “What do you mean, ‘no’?” “No.” He snatches up Todd’s paper and begins reading his poem, causing the two to chase each other around the room, bounding on and off beds, grasping at the paper and falling over each other, until they are ultimately interrupted by Cameron, a fellow student.
In 1981, Barbara Kruger finished an artwork she left Untitled, bearing a black-and-white image overlaid with bold text, as is characteristic of her art. The image depicts a group of men jokingly wrestling and fighting each other, and the words read: “You construct intricate rituals which allow you to touch the skin of other men.” This piece is a commentary on repressed homosexuality, and conveys the idea that people who can not (for one reason or another) express their sexuality overtly, will find (consciously or unconsciously) a reason to make physical contact with members of the same sex. Neil grabbing Todd’s paper in an attempt to get him to chase him, resulting in prolonged contact, is an example of one such “intricate ritual.”
Meanwhile, in class, the students are being taught by their new English teacher, Mr Keating, about poetry and finding the beauty in the world. From what we see of their class, they seem to focus quite heavily and specifically on the poet Walt Whitman. In one of his most iconic speeches, Keating quotes from Whitman’s poem “O me, O life.” He references “Oh Captain my Captain” in their first class, and encourages his students to refer to him as “my captain.” When Keating challenges Todd with creating a poem in class, he is asked to turn to a portrait of Whitman on the wall for inspiration. In the aforementioned scene, when Neil and Todd are stumbling over each other, Neil exclaims, “I’m being chased by Walt Whitman!” All this is notable because Whitman was a gay man who wrote many poems about his sexuality and relationships. This fact was certainly well-known, at least in literary and academic circles, by the time Dead Poets Society was made. The fact that he is an integral figure in the plot, and someone whose ideology and work Neil specifically looks up to, is purposeful and serves to support the queer coding of this film.
So, why do the filmmakers do all this? Why not make Neil’s sexuality overt and clear in the story? Why make him so repressed? Part of the issue is because movies created at this time were still feeling the repercussions of the Hays Code, a code of “moral conduct” for films introduced in the 1930s. It outlawed, among other things, the display or mention of non-heterosexual characters. A medium.com article by Sophie Cleghorn, titled “Film: The Hollywood Production Code of 1930 and LGBT Characters,” explains: “For decades after LGBT characters were allowed to appear in films, their sexuality and gender was shrouded in thinly-veiled innuendos and visual cues.”
Therefore, Neil is resigned to being a repressed character. He forms a bond with his roommate that he barely understands himself, but he knows he must always look out for him, he always thinks of his needs before anyone else, and he finds ways to subtly maintain emotional and physical closeness with him. Even though Todd is the one who has known Neil for the least amount of time by the film’s conclusion, he is the one who the rest of Neil’s friends go to to tell last, and all together. He is, by far, the most injured by it, and we have the beautiful wide shot of Todd, freshly wounded by the news of his partner’s death, running and falling down the great lawn into the snow. Neil’s father is able to sense all this, and his son’s performance in Midsummer, playing the most effeminate male character in the show, is his final straw. In 1959, if your son was behaving this way, it was to be feared, and to be brutally corrected. And so Neil commits suicide.
At its core, this is a film about learning to open your eyes and break out of the rigid rules set by higher-ups. It is about thinking for yourself and learning to appreciate beauty in the world, right in the thick of a time period that is all about rigid academics, gender binaries, and post-WWII hyper-masculine nationalism. Neil is the one who takes the most to Keating’s teachings and ideas, constantly searching for freedom, even if he is barely sure what from. Ultimately, however, this is not allowed to happen, and we, the audience, must watch the repercussions of a young man who wants nothing more than to be free existing in a society that wants nothing more than for him to be silent.
Sources:
Cantwell, Christopher. “In Defense of Dead Poets Society.” Bright Wall/Dark Room, 22 Sept. 2018, www.brightwalldarkroom.com/2016/04/04/in-defense-of-dead-poets-society/.
Cleghorn, Sophie. “Film: The Hollywood Production Code of 1930 and LGBT Characters.” Medium.com, Medium, 6 Nov. 2017, medium.com/@sophiecleg/how-did-the-hollywood-production-code-of-1930-shape-the-representation-of-lgbt-characters-in-film-93e92a4fec62.
Drescher, Jack. “The Closet: Psychological Issues of Being In and Coming Out.” Psychiatric Times, 1 Oct. 2004, http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/cultural-psychiatry/closet-psychological-issues-being-and-coming-out.
Kruger, Barbara. Untitled (You Construct Intricate Rituals). Boston: Museum of Fine Arts. 1981. Print.
