The Good, the Bad, the Ugly
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makes to deal with these problems is to try to discuss them with parents
on Parents Night. It never occurs to these two teachers to insert
themselves into the personal lives o f their students; the classroom is a
boundary line. A new theme emerges in this film. Miss Barrett wants to
rescue her potential dropouts from the life she believes they will lead if
they don’t eam their diploma, “me” from loneliness, and the juvenile
delinquent from the streets. Thus this film marks the beginning o f a
theme that has come to dominate most later films that have high school
English teachers as protagonists: the English teacher as rescuer.
The rescue theme becomes more explicit in Dead Poets Society.
This film is about an English teacher working at an exclusive New
England prep school in the late 1950s. The school, an all-boys school
named Welton, is rigidly traditional and expects the protagonist, Mr.
Keating, to prepare his students for College entrance exams and
university English courses. But Mr. Keating, the only protagonist in
these films with some teaching experience, believes this educational
objective endangers his students, so he tries to rescue them from the
demands and expectations o f the privileged lives they were bom into that
he believes will stifle their individuality to the extent that it will impair
the quality o f their lives. He holds up W alt Whitman and the Romantic
poets as examples o f how life should be lived. He successfully
encourages several boys to act on their desires, but the school’s
headmaster interprets their independence as rebellion. W hile Keating
does not directly insert him self into the personal lives o f his students, he
does try to help one Student cope with a domineering father who wants
his son focused only on his studies. The Situation ends in tragedy when
the Student, in utter despair o f ever being free fforn parental demands,
commits suicide. Mr. Keating is held responsible and fired. We are
supposed to see him as a victim o f education’s tradition.
By 1995, however, good English teachers have moved beyond
being merely rescuers; they have become saviors who “offer salvation to
students lost in a culture o f poverty and despair” (Bulman 257). This
change is evident in two relatively recent films, Dangerous Minds and
Freedom Writers. In these films, the extraordinary English teachers are
willing to make whatever personal sacrifices are necessary to save their
students from the personal problems and social ills that threaten to
destroy their fiitures. In these classrooms, the students’ problems are also
the teacher’s problems, and the classroom has become a Staging area
rather than a boundary.
These two films have essentially the same dramatic structure as