Gary Hentzi, "Peter Weir and the Cinema of
New Age Humanism"
in: Film Quarterly, vol. 44, 2/1990, p. 2 - 12
Der Autor analysiert und kommentiert mehrere Filme von Peter Weir ("The Witness", "Picnic at Hanging Rock", "Gallipoli", "The Year of Living Dangerously", "Dead Poets Society") und stellt dabei besonders "the motif of hidden (homo)sexuality in Weir’s films" hervor, das er insbesondere in "Dead Poets Society" erkennen zu können glaubt. Hier erscheint nur der Teil, der sich mit dem letztgenannten Film beschäftigt.
The Australian-born director Peter Weir is something of an anomaly. A
professed loner who comes to Hollywood with an art house reputation, he
is nevertheless thriving in the relentlessly commercial world of American
cinema; and he is doing so not by using his technical skill to realize
whatever project is thrown his way but by making films that return again
and again to a relatively fixed set of concerns. The explanation can only
be that Weir's concerns are also to an unusual degree the concerns of
our culture, and as a result his films have some interesting things to
tell us about ourselves at this moment in our history. Moreover, they
offer a few curious subtleties, which have largely escaped the attention
of reviewers.
Consider, for example, the director's persistent interest in homosexuality,
a subject that is at least implicitly present in several of his major
films. It becomes a key part of the mystery in Picnic at Hanging Rock
(1976) when one of the school girls who are shortly to disappear without
a trace raises eyebrows by calling her companion "a Botticellian
Venus." As elsewhere in Weir's films, the exclusive, single-sex boarding
school functions here as a kind of gay topos, alerting the viewer to the
existence of possibilities beyond the immediately visible. Less overt
but no less suggestive is the relationship between the young protagonist
of Gallipoli (Mark Lee) and his friend (Mel Gibson), who travel together,
join the army, and are finally separated by death in a bitter image of
martyred youth and misplaced ideals, the camera lingering over the extreme
physical beauty of the actors all the while. And in The Year of Living
Dangerously Weir underlines the ambiguity of the relationship between
the handsome foreign correspondent (again played by Mel Gibson) and his
dwarfish photographer-informant by actually giving the latter role to
a woman (Linda Hunt).
The most elaborate of these gestures comes, however, in the recent Dead
Poets Society; and it is also perhaps the most interesting because of
the extent to which the entire subject is submerged beneath the ostensible
concerns of the narrative. Again we are in the world of an upper-class
prep school, this time in fifties New England; again Weir has filled the
screen with images of strikingly attractive young men; yet no mention
is made of illicit love. Rather, the plot involves the rebellion of a
group of straightlaced students against the rigid conformism of their
milieu. Under the influence of an unconventional English teacher (Robin
Williams), they slip out of their dorm rooms at night to read poetry,
act in a play in defiance of parental injunction, and generally irritate
their puritanical elders. This is, admittedly, rebellion on the order
of demanding ice cream instead of porridge, as any number of reviewers
gleefully pointed out; however, one may come to feel that something else
is going on here besides an unexpected surge of interest in Shakespeare
and Whitman. In fact, the plot of Dead Poets Society makes better sense
as an array of veiled references to situations that could not be openly
represented without endangering the film's profits. The meetings of the
society, for example, are deliberately given an air of innocence, which
is supported by the thin device of backdating the action some thirty years;
nevertheless, the spectacle of a group of boys sneaking off to a cave
at night to sit in a circle and read poetry inevitably suggests less elevated
adolescent rituals. And while the nominal point at issue between the hero
and his autocratic father is the young man's desire to act in a play (as
a fairy!), the suggestion in these final scenes of a teenager coming out
of the closet is so strong that at least one reviewer was led to remark
that the film would have been more intelligible had this in fact been
its subject.
At the same time, and notwithstanding these overtones, it is apparent
that Weir is not simply offering a more decorous version of the kind of
gay film-making represented by such notable recent efforts as Looking
For Langston or the films of Derek Jarman. On the contrary, it would be
closer to the point to say that the motif of hidden sexuality in his films
is itself a figure for a larger and considerably more ambiguous set of
issues to which he has returned again and again, though with less ponderous
obtrusiveness in recent years. For it is not gayness as a way of life
that interests him, nor is it the discrimination that homosexuals have
traditionally suffered. Rather, it is the fact that "the love that
dare not speak its name" is a taboo subject in so-called genteel
society, and, as such, exists in near kinship with ideas of the sacred
- another invisible and irrational force that cannot be accommodated within
polite discourse. This is the theme that remains closest to Weir's heart;
and even a film as traditional-looking as Dead Poets Society has its mystical
moment when the charismatic (in all senses of the word) Mr. Keating draws
an introverted student into an effort of spontaneous creativity by muscling
him around in front of the class, as if exorcising some sullen teenage
demon, until the boy finally delivers a stream of oracular gibberish.
...
© 1990 by the Regents of the University of California. Reprinted from Film Quarterly Vol.44, No. 2, (Winter 1990), pp. 2-12, by permission.
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