Hi Victoria and Platt,
Thanks for the good posts about the movie "Dead Poets Society". I agree with
your protrayal of the Robin Williams character as a teacher of the dynamic and
romantic side of quality.
However, I am struck by a dark side to this that appears in earlier movie on
the same theme - "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie", in which Jean Brodie (played
by a young Maggie Smith) is trying to teach her girls to live life and
appreciate quality. The movie is set in England of the 1930s.
The dark aspect is this - one of the things Miss Brodie is romanticizing about
is a "new" dynamic political movement that has arisen in Italy, let by a
certain Bennito Mussolini. As the movie develops, she encourages one of the
girls volunteer as a nurse in the Spanish Civil War. The girl has learnt the
lesson about the dynamic/romantic well, but unfortunately didn't learn the
"static/classical" aspects of the situation (the "facts"). She is killed
serving not Franco, but the Republican forces. IMO, the lesson of this older
movie is more complete than the lesson of the "Dead Poets Society".
Jonathan
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:01:27 BST