Was Neil gay?
I saw Dead Poets Society for the first time, last Sunday at a Robin Williams tribute screening. I didn't connect with the movie, finding it endlessly tedious. Then out of nowhere, one of the boys commits suicide.
The suicide was so out of nowhere that I was laughing at the contrivance. But was there a reason for it?
This film is subtle in some ways. It's set in the '50s yet never makes any direct or overt reference to the time period. At first you could assume it was set in the decade it was filmed. Only after many small touches of costume and behaviour does the '50s setting become clear, and even then it's a guess. I wasn't sure whether it wasn't late '40s or early '60s until I read about the movie later.
Was Neil's plight equally underplayed? He had a domineering father and was being forced to give up things he loved to follow the path chosen by his father. Suicide seems such a bizarre reaction to that situation. He couldn't stand up to his father so he chose to defy him instead. Surely running away to start his own life was preferable to defiance through suicide? He was less than a year from legal independence and he was almost done with high school.
But if Neil was gay, then there was a much deeper issue. His father wouldn't accept his career wishes, or his passion for acting. One can imagine the reaction if Neil had told his father he was gay.
Being secretly gay gives a much more plausible motive for suicide. It wasn't a matter of waiting until he was 18, or finishing medical school in 10 years. It wasn't a matter of doing a job he didn't like instead of one he had passion for. It was about denying his true self for the rest of his life.
Neil's father could be seen as symbolic of wider 1950s USA society. There was nowhere to run, nowhere he would be accepted for who he was. Or at least, it must have seemed that way for a naive 17 year old.
In Neil's final moments, he strips naked in front of his open bedroom windows, feeling the winter night on his skin. He touches Puck's wreath from the play, a totem of the one night where he lived his passion and felt alive. It seems to me these are actions of a person desperate to be themselves, and feeling cornered by loved ones and a wider society that will never accept who he really is.
Faced with the three choices:
- a life of emotional and sexual repression
- rejection for being his true self
- suicide
his choice is more understandable. Even now, many gay teenagers commit suicide from despair of ever finding acceptance. In the social setting of Dead Poets Society, Neil's being gay seems the only thing that adequately explains Neil's choice.
A couple I know are getting married...
...the fools