Dead Lit Society

The death of reading is an apocalypse

If only the writing were on the wall: at least, in that case, there would be evidence of literacy.

In a world dominated by imagery, where the most text one can ask for is the caption, there is no warning given, no legible alert, of impending fallout.

That is to say, when the literacy apocalypse happens—and it seems like every day one sees this or that indication of it already having arrived—it shall come as a huge surprise: how did we get here and why didn’t we get a warning?

Answers from the experts, along with the few Cassandras with standards, will fling far and wide an array of explanations. One side will blame DEI. The other the deregulatory state. One side will decry too much Foucault. The other too little investment in the DOE. One side will blame politics. The other, ethics.

Yet, both sides will be guilty of brandishing the fashionable. For today it is just as trendy to demand that literature syllabi read like a course in neocolonialism as it is for a politician in Florida to valorize a philistine dismissal of critical thinking. In both cases, depending on the crowd, and no matter how they say otherwise, the issue ain’t about literacy.

I discovered literacy in, of all places, a movie, when I saw Dead Poets Society for the first time in the early ‘90s. Peter Weir’s filmic celebration of poetry supplied me with a lifelong affect, the earth-toned vestiture of Ivy League chic, which I dutifully emulated as best I could throughout my brief time as a wannabe scholar in the Princeton area.

Later enrolling at NYU as a Philosophy major, the ostensible coronation of my scholarly passion, led me down an alternate route: I abandoned my burgundy and tweed cosplay to be an East Village Goth and hipster clad in black and attached to a pack of cigarettes. I had no idea this route would serve as the mise en scene for a career centered on sensualism and aesthetics, given that from the nightlife scavenging of my mid-twenties I would end up helping form a successful rock band. But life is strange this way.

Yet, what seemed to be a final mold, this ensconcement in a rocker pantheon, turned out to be a temporary detour. It would be my initial infatuation with “O-captain-my-captain” Mr. Keating and his Byronic acolytes who would to this day leave an arguably firmer impress on my affect and values than the dingy basements of the nightclub demimonde down which I descended for fifteen years following my baccalaureate.

I had no idea that, when I first watched the movie, while tears streamed down my face as Ethan Hawke and the rest mounted their desks in the final scene (I still get misty even just from reading the script), this film would stay with me even up to today.

But an understanding of the uniqueness of this film’s cultural moment, how it straddled, in perfect balance, the divide between two systems of mediation, reveals how those of us lucky enough to have been exposed to it at its timely release would so easily latch onto its promise of a literary future.

It’s difficult to think of a movie more phobic of pop culture, more opposed to the personal computer, more antagonistic to spectacle—all things that have by now claimed a hegemonic grip on our collective psyche—than this bildungsroman forged in the heat of a dawning technological era. Set in another transitional era, the late 50s, the movie is a protectionist tract in the service of the humanities, with all the skepticism towards technology and distraction one would expect from such a venture. With the Cold War coming to a close at its release, the film posits a paper-only vision of the life of the mind, where the hopes of a greater society are hinged on the ability to stay with the written word. The written word’s power of inspiration has distinct enemies in the film, the patriarchal orders of pedagogues with their beliefs in the word, not as a site of liberty, but as a tool for social control; but these may be read as proxies for the word’s true enemies at the time of the film’s release, the technologized world of spectacle.

In this sense, Dead Poets Society is an expression of anxiety: in restaging the age-old tension between STEM and the humanities as a war between social conformity and personal freedom, fought out for the hearts of boys, the movie makes the now quaint postulation that poetry and theater are the sites of true individuation. The casting of the late, great Robin Williams as the enlightened instructor in charge of unlocking the mechanism intended to safeguard his charges from the corruptive dynamics of (egad, of all things!) Byron and Blake, an actor who would go on to a typecast career playing one sentimental version of bearded, avuncular holiness after another, forges the movie’s claim that personal power issues from the belief in the written word’s distinct capacity to foster an Emersonian “self-reliance.”

Such universalist designs, in the wake of the informational diaspora of our 2020s, now sound and appear utterly old-fashioned, as hoary and dusty as the puritanical patriarchs who in the film at every step thwart Keating’s project of the creation of self-determinate souls, an ironical development to say the least.

Our modern collapse of literacy comes necessarily in the wake of a previous collapse, implied by how old-timey this movie now reads, namely, the destruction of the canon, its rebranding as an unforgivable colonialist enterprise, and, with it, the last shreds of a universalist proposition. Watching this film today is to watch a curious moment, when the collapse had not yet been written in the stars, when the threat to the humanities had already gained steam, but when there still seemed to be avenues to rout the danger. Poetry and theater, a return to the crisp, papyral texture of rumination with text, is what Dead Poets Society avers towards a solution.

In this way, Weir’s movie reads as merely an installment in the ongoing agonies of Generation X. Smushed between the two generational Goliaths of Boomers and Millennials, my generation has always needed to express its middle-child anxieties in the media forms of our time, television and film, and so it isn’t surprising that, of all things, it would be a movie, that channel of imagistic indoctrination, that would foist for me in particular the literary imperatives of a lifetime.

Setting aside the now dated conflict between young and old, conservative and liberal, and conformist and rebel, which this movie wholeheartedly traffics in, one still finds a precious gem within the sumptuous autumnal sweeps of its orange lawns and brick clad edifices, the utter sanguinity of the belief in the humanities as a site of personal emancipation. In the same way that political change in democratic life without protected speech is a pipe dream, so is the “hope for change” which characterizes so much of our discourse completely impossible without a belief in this emancipatory potential of the humanities.

It was an affect for me, until it wasn’t. That literature and history would come to me mediated in the modern forms of my generation, that I would adopt its style before really understanding its substance, did not vitiate against my lifelong love affair with the written word. If anything, it introduced me to it. I did not get good marks in high school and I was the first in my family to go to college. In other words, I wasn’t reading very much to begin with.

Yet, I find it almost impossible to imagine a thirty-second TikTok meme accomplishing the same thing for someone in similar shoes today. I hope I’m wrong about that, but I’m not optimistic. “O, Captain, my Captain,” doesn’t make sense unless you’ve started from the beginning of the film.