On the death of a great artist.
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Robin Williams’ performance in Dead Poets Society (1989) inspired me to become a teacher. It also convinced me that I should not fear trying to become a writer.
That’s right. An actor, not another teacher, did it. I’ve written about my love of the film before. I went to see it as a teen, feeling more excitement and anticipation than I had for any film at that time in my life. In terms of the film’s significance to educators, I’m apparently not alone, not by a long shot.
I would not encounter a teacher I can call inspirational until I got to college. My Catholic primary school—I grew up in a town extending out of Chicago’s West Side—was, for a boy, meant to teach obedience. A natural love of books saved me from going the routes of my male classmates: the majority dropped out of high school and a few ended up in prison.
My (all boys) high school teachers were either authoritarian fools or intellectual cowards, terrified that too much information might collapse our myths. Worse, they were scared we might wake up to see the adults in our lives were mostly hypocrites. To keep us “from failing”, they did everything they could to ruin ambitions.
In that environment came Williams’ John Keating, the English teacher at Welton Academy who, on the first day of class, brings the teen boys face-to-face with death. Before he has them complete a single assignment, he takes them out into the hall to show them black and white photographs, memorials of Welton’s former students, all of them now fertilizing daisies. Looking over these pictures, Keating tells the boys to seize the day.
Right now. This one. Dear virgins, gather ye rose buds while ye may.
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Mork from Ork was playing this teacher. This was the same guy who played Popeye. He was Garp (porn for Catholic boys). He was crazy and erratic on the Tonight Show (which I watched nightly with my mother). Here in this film about authority and control, he was serious, sincere and intelligent, teaching poetry as rebellion.
I was transfixed, not only from the performance but also because of how different it seemed from anything else I had ever seen Williams do. The inspiration did not only come from Keating’s message about seizing the day, but also from Williams’ apparent ability to do anything.
Why shouldn’t it be possible to make someone laugh and cry in the same career? Why couldn’t a man be a comedian and an actor? Why couldn’t he play a teacher in Dead Poets and—I went to see it in college—a traumatized madman in The Fisher King? And so, why couldn’t I be a teacher and a writer and a dad and a husband? I was going to die, as were the teachers telling me I should be terrified of failure. Wasn’t it better to fail at what I wanted to do than to succeed at something they forced down my throat?
No teacher had ever had the guts to ask me that question. It came from a fictional character. And it completely changed my life.
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It breaks my heart to know that a multi-talented genius like Robin Williams, successful and beloved by so many, faced depression he saw no path through. I have seen the comments on social media, and while I’m confused by the people ready to throw stones, I’m deeply moved, once again, to find myself in a community of people who had been inspired by Williams. When I first saw Dead Poets Society, I felt I had discovered community where bookworms made films for the like-minded. A similar community has arrived again, as macabre as it is to wake up to it.
It floors me to realize, as I have over these past few days, that the narrative of Williams’ life is, like Dead Poets Society, a cautionary tale. We worship money and fame. Many of us also admire genius. It is so easy to dismiss the emotions of people we perceive as “having it all”, to say they have no right to sadness. We boss them into feelings we think they should be having. I have encountered bullies bossing Williams’ admirers around, asking them why they worship “self-hating and drugged-up” celebrity, a coward who couldn’t look on the bright side, or whatever.
Personally, I do not feel like a celebrity has died. I feel I have lost a mentor. He was among our most brilliant artists, true, but there was an energy to him that transcended his performances and seemed an invitation to something I fail to describe. Every time I watched him perform, even when the film was silly, I felt he was giving me something, like we had only had tea and conversation together. And now I must look at the wisdom I believe I gathered from Robin and face the tragic mystery of why it wasn’t bright enough for him. I must be reminded, again, of my mortality, and look cautiously at the fragility of the human mind, perhaps most fragile when it is sensitive and brilliant.
Photo by Candy Schwartz
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True Community runs each Wednesday. Gint Aras explores his experiences as an instructor in a community college that serves a lower-middle to lower class district in Chicagoland.
Previous True Community articles:
The Young Man With No Guests At Commencement
I Had To Kill A Guy At Work Yesterday
Top 3 Education Myths and How They Affect Men