Dead Poets Society (1989)

directed by Peter Weir

Ellie Poole

“That the powerful play goes on, and that you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?”

Above are the words to which I latched my near-depleted emotional energy supply at the age of 17, and have since returned to year by year whenever I needed a reminder of just that—the ability of a life to have a purpose.

*

It started out like a typical day of my senior year of high school; I was tired. Very tired. I had been “tired” and “better” for alternating phases since my sophomore year. When I was tired, I actively contemplated all of the millions of other mental places my brain had made for me that I would rather have been than this earth. That day was no different up until eighth period, twelfth grade English honors, which was essentially a competition among by classmates for who could care about the class the least.

We had a substitute that day, and as soon as the words “your teacher told me to play this movie” were out of their mouth, about 85% of the classroom pulled out their phones. Because I was bored, and because my parents refused to get me a smartphone for a few more years, I decided to give the movie a chance, figuring it might be terrible in that macabre way you can laugh at due to the word “dead” in the title.

After the basis of the premise ran its course and Robin Williams came on screen, I was enthralled. Mr. Keating directly telling a student, who quite obviously presumed himself worthless, that he was not, felt like a message spoken directly to me. I saw myself in Todd, and I saw myself in Mr. Keating telling the students that they did not (literally) all have to walk in line, and could walk both (again) literally and figuratively through life as they wanted, giving a big, righteous middle finger to conformity. I had always felt a little different from others, for reasons that I could not yet explain at that time, and Robin Williams showing that difference could be beautiful and fun and not just painful and other-ing was novel and refreshing to my angsty teenage soul.

And it was the way I was different but could not yet explain that made me become most attached to Robert Sean Leonard’s character, Neil Perry, who also palpably knew he was different but could not quite articulate how. As someone who has been a teenager with undiagnosed bipolar disorder, I can confidently say that Neil Perry is an incredible representation of a teenager with undiagnosed bipolar disorder.

He initially presents not unlike Mr. Keating, as a male version of the manic pixie dream girl trope that is Todd’s god-given tour guide to a happier, more confident life. But as the movie progresses, he reveals himself to be the student most desperately in need of Keating’s teachings, and is not nearly as happy and fulfilled as he originally seems.

On the outside, his struggles seem that of your average, run-of-the-mill angsty teenage protagonist. He wants to be an actor, his dad wants to ship him off to medical school as soon as he graduates, to secure him a stable future. It’s the sort of conflict of interest that brought us the ever iconic “but you’re a playmaker, not a singer, right?” / “Did you ever think maybe I could be both?” exchange from High School Musical that continues to be ever-so-slightly slightly repackaged for every teen-targeted drama.

(I’m looking at you, Riverdale.)

However, this conflict is more complicated than Troy Bolton missing basketball practice for a musical rehearsal, because Neil Perry is far more internally complicated than Troy Bolton. Troy is a boy who needs an artistic outlet; Neil is a boy whose entire sense of self worth and tenuous rope to passing as mentally well is tied to acting and performance.

I reject the idea that all people with bipolar disorder aren’t actually afflicted with an illness but given the gift of limitless and eternal, raw, and unbridled creativity. It trivializes our suffering, and laughs at those who have lost a loved one to suicide, addiction, or feeling so unfamiliar that seeing them is like meeting an entirely new person. This idea brought me hot, righteous rage when it was expressed after Robin Williams’s passing.

We are not here to be put into a box to make you feel more comfortable with our mental and emotional realities—we are here to try and hold on, as all of us do in this life.

Some of us just like to write, or paint, or act, or sing. Not all of us look to a creative outlet, but we all have to look to something to try and decompress from the sheer intensity of the emotions that we feel sometimes. It’s not the stereotypical picture of wild, unpredictable mood swings, it’s monsoons when in other gardens it’s sprinkling, and loving the tornadoes that others are scared of. They’re dangerous and destructive, but you want to chase them because it’s so thrilling and because their power inspires you.

So when we’re struggling, we demand not just a way to unwind, but a way to feel normal and connected to those unafflicted, and to feel something so strongly that it distracts from the high or low that we are feeling so strongly.

For Neil, this is the idea of leaving something behind after his passing, and to stir emotion in those hearts that watch him on stage, in a way that he may feel moved and worthwhile himself. He is conflicted and sad and angry and cluttered within for the entire duration of the film, but he is also very munch on an upswing, the sort of which that my bipolar self recognized, even if I could not recognize it for what it truly was.

When you go up, you eventually come down, and we go down as low as how high we get when we’re manic. Whatever magical-seeming ideas we have that we clung to during the mania will always show themselves for what they really are—be it truly unfeasible or maybe more complicated and harder to bring to fruition than once believed—and this is devastating. Our reprieve from our opposing beliefs—that we are worthless and hopeless and a burden on our loved ones—is once again pulled out from underneath us.

For Neil, this is his belief that his love and passion for acting will somehow allow him to transcend the circumstances of his life, and break free from how much control his father has over him. When his father sees him in the play and does not do a total one-eighty, instead becoming firmer in his vision for Neil and planning to ship him off to military school, Neil’s brain is faced with an objectively bad situation and turns it into a life-ending one.

Even his suicide is self romanticized and tied up in the logic of the mania. He does not just shoot himself, but opens the windows, takes off his shirt, and dawns the crown that he wore when playing Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Art is not just a part of Neil’s life, and ultimately his death, but it is his life, and he is art as well. His death scene feels more like a ritual in which he’s partaking than someone fully grasping the devastating weight of his actions.

But when you’re a teenager, especially a teenager with bipolar disorder, it’s so easy to think that the way things are is the only way that things will ever be. The only slice of semi-adult life you have is marked with suffering, and if you’re undiagnosed it’s hard to separate your symptoms from yourself. You do not know you are suffering from an illness, you have no professional helping you set apart fact from your brain’s fiction, and the ideas in your head about being a worthless lost cause aren’t just ideas, but irrefutable truths.

However, despite Neil’s untimely demise, this movie has always rung hopeful to me. Todd clearly appears to have mental health issues of his own, be it a diagnosable mental health condition or troubles stemming purely from his circumstances, and he is not cured by the lessons Mr. Keating instills in him. He feels freedom and joy from what he’s learned, but it’s not everlasting. He still has his sadness and social anxieties, and he struggles to recognize his own worth.

And that is okay, because he learned one thing from Mr. Keating that Neil did not.

It’s not about continuously and constantly escaping pain and stress, or using one’s times of joy to negate the times of suffering, but knowing that joy continues to exist no matter how you are feeling, and that it will always be waiting for you when you’re ready for it once again.

When Todd stands up on his desk and proclaims the famous, “O Captain, My Captain!” it is a signal that he knows that while Mr. Keating may be physically taken from him, the hope and magic and creativity he gifted him with cannot be taken.

It shows that he can be scared and sad a lot of the time but still be the person who laughed in exhilaration, who created a masterful poem off the top of his head, who smiles and finds the pockets of joy in everyday life, even if those moments feel fleeting.

Neil may have never learned this lesson but all the boys who stood up on their desks at the end of the film have.

I have learned this lesson too—not solely because of Dead Poets Society, but it certainly introduced me to the concept, and provided, and still provides, hope for me. I got diagnosed, am on medication, and finally feel like I hold at least one of the reigns to my life, but just like Todd, I am not cured.

But when I am depressed, and devastated, and torn apart, I know that I am still the girl who goes outside just to play in the rain, still the girl who makes people laugh when they’re sad, and still the girl with the strength to be kind when things are difficult.

And no matter how inconsequential I might feel in any present moment, I know that I, too, may contribute a verse.

Ellie Poole is a humor writer in northern Virginia with a penchant for soft core nihilism. Trump vs. Hillary was the first presidential election she was old enough to vote in and that explains a lot about why she writes what she writes.