How Dead Poets Society Unlocks Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Department
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The post How Dead Poets Society Unlocks Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Department appeared first on Consequence.
Right after Taylor Swift announced that the name of her newest album would be The Tortured Poets Department, there was allegedly over a 500% spike in search interest for Dead Poets Society, the well-regarded 1989 drama with a similar name.
That percentage comes from the sort of SEO/trend-baiting study that gets commissioned by shady websites who then send out press releases on the off chance that, if the study gets written up, the shady website will get mentioned as the source. (Because I do not think any Consequence readers are in deep need of the Fresh, Exclusive No Deposit Casino Bonus Codes this website provides, I’m omitting said website’s name.)
However, I wanted to mention that fact up front, because it speaks to the culture that surrounds a massive event like a new Taylor Swift album. Everyone looks for an angle in the lead-up to a release like this, a way to be a part of what remains of our monoculture, and so any potential clue as to what’s coming (and what people will be talking about) feels important.
Thus, the renewed interest in Dead Poets Society makes a lot of sense. Sure, the actual album title might have been a lot more inspired by Swift ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn having a “Tortured Man Club” group text. But then Swift leaned hard into the connection between the two with the release of the video for “Fortnight”, featuring Dead Poets stars Ethan Hawke and Josh Charles as mad scientists experimenting on a bound-up Taylor Swift in her lab.
Hawke and Charles are both looking great 35 years after the release of Dead Poets Society, and the original film itself holds up remarkably well: A complicated emotional stew of contending with parental expectations and societal demands for conformity and maybe being a little bit in love with your roommate and getting the giggles when your English teacher does an impression of John Wayne performing Shakespeare. (Rest in peace, Robin Williams.)
Peter Weir’s nuanced directing adds so much to the story of privileged young men waking up to the power of poetry, but beyond the whole maybe-being-in-love-with-your-roommate thing there’s not much in the way of subtext — which perhaps brings it right in line with Swift’s own artistic endeavors this spring.
Now that the album is out, we have a fuller picture of how Swift is using Dead Poets (along with countless other references) for her latest creative output. Understanding her meaning on a lot of these tracks does not require Sherlock Holmes-level sleuthing or even a decoder ring, as the subtext is very much text: Swift’s own analysis of “Fortnight” sets up the opening track as one that encompasses “a lot of the common themes that run throughout this album… There are lots of very dramatic lines about life or death. ‘I love you, it’s ruining my life.’ These are very hyperbolic, dramatic things to say. It’s that kind of album.”
That’s actually a vibe very much in line with Dead Poets Society, a movie which is fundamentally all about being 17 years old and certain that the events happening to you at that exact moment in time are the most important and dramatic events to ever take place in human history. The brilliance of Weir’s direction is in how he captures that spirit without mocking the pure intensity of those emotions, honoring what it means to have all these big teenage feelings while also maintaining an adult perspective on what those feelings mean.
On Twitter, Swift called out the casting of Charles and Hawke as the deliberate reference it is, saying “tortured poets, meet your colleagues from down the hall, the dead poets.” “Tortured poets,” in the context of the album, seems largely to be an almost mocking description of Swift’s ex-boyfriend Matty Healy — in invoking the spirits of young men past and present, there’s a sense that Swift is spotlighting that sort of adolescent male passion, maybe even to the point of mocking it just a little bit…
As appreciators of art, we always want to seek out whatever deeper meaning we can find in these properties, but sometimes that’s not all that possible — because the deeper meaning isn’t there. The above is me doing the best I can to contextualize Swift’s references in a way that gives them more power, but that’s about as deep as the analysis can really get, before moving onto the next Swift-centric lyric.
It’s a symptom of the album’s issues throughout — as Mary Siroky writes in her full album review: “On her 11th studio album, though, she seems more concerned with unpacking, rewriting, and defending her personal life. She rips apart and revamps her own lore, getting more and more specific in her self-destruction. To repurpose some of her own favorite imagery, it feels like a snake eating its own tail.”
Yet I suppose there’s one other Dead Poets connection to be made: What stands out upon this most recent rewatch is that none of these boys are actually much good at writing poetry — their fumbling attempts featured on screen are amateurish, with no instant savants emerging. Williams’ Professor Keating is nothing but encouraging, though, because he doesn’t want his students to be brilliant poets; he wants them to use poetry as a way of unlocking and exposing their inner selves.
Self-expression is the end goal, which is enough of a struggle for a group of fictional teenage boys. Really, self-expression on any level isn’t the easiest thing, and perhaps that’s the true lesson Swift has taken for Tortured Poets: “I do not give lectures or a little charity/ When I give I give myself,” as Whitman wrote and Keating read. Like the dead poets before her, Swift is truly singing the Song of Herself.
[Editor’s Note: Check out our official Taylor Swift podcast, Good For a Weekend.]
How Dead Poets Society Unlocks Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Department
Liz Shannon Miller
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