This lecture discusses the uses and abuses of poetry in two recent, popular American and British films. Poetry can be demonstrated to function as a device which both highlights difference (a major component in identity construction is to show how we are all different individuals), and universality of emotion (a major component of identity construction is to show how we are all alike in our shared humanity).
In films such as 4
Weddings and a Funeral we all share a common tear at the death of
one of the minor characters, especially when his male lover recites a
W.H. Auden poem at his funeral. Despite the fact that the characters
are queer, and the poem obviously homoerotic, even straight audience
members find a commonality in the universality of the characters’ and
the poem’s grief. The difference of sexual orientation is further
overlayered by a national specificity in the characters’ Scottishness,
but even the non-Scots among us may feel downright tartan’ed at the end
of the scene.
In contrast a film such as Dead
Poets’ Society is extremely American in its use of Walt Whitman as
a poetic beacon, whose poems and life are suggested as a model for the
young protagonists to follow in their quest for individuality and
self-realisation. Whitman was of course as queer as Auden, but this
fact remains a very deeply buried subtext in this movie (no doubt also
a reflection of the film’s setting in an educational environment). The
contrast between how queerness and poetry are handled could be
suggested to have something to do with national differences in not only
movie-making, but also the wider cultural climate surrounding sexuality
as a marker of respectable individuality.
Thus, local differences of
sexuality and ethnicity are smoothed over by the American film, whereas
the British film highlights, yet brackets them. The lecture will offer
an analysis of difference discourse hierarchies in an effort to explain
why.
[Dead Poets Society Screenplay]
[Four Weddings and a Funeral Excerpt
at Amazon.com]