On Dead Poets Society and writing Chapter 18

My relationship to Dead Poets Society is exactly what I attributed to Joe. I never cared for the movie. But I get restless late at night, and end up watching a lot of HBO, even when I'm trying to work on this project.

Dead Poets Society happened to be airing. It was probably ten years since I'd seen it. What struck me right away is that the Robert Sean Leonard seemed very plausibly gay, for all of the reasons that I put in the story. By the end, it seemed blazingly obviously, and the only coherent explanation for the movie.

It also hit me that this seemed like a movie that a person like Chris Riis would love. Chapter 18 was extremely difficult to construct. There were plenty of scenes that I'd been working through my head for at least a year -- Matt's embarrassing speech performance, Joe's walking away, the ensuing fallout, the farewell e-mail and Joe's reaction. The party with Kevin Berger: that actually was going to be its own chapter. At various points, I thought about constructing it like The Hangover, and for most the planning, I thought that Joe and Kevin would hook up. But that no longer seemed consistent with the characters' motivations, and you might have noticed that this story is a little protracted, so another long party sequence at this point in the story probably wouldn't have been a good use of our resources.

But for having mapped all of this out, writing it in a way that built tension, and where the characters' emotional peaks and valleys felt credible, was very, very difficult. I found myself omitting information and buildup because it was unwittingly taking the characters too far. As articulate as Joe and Matt are, they're not going to be at ease in confronting and talking about their emotions for each other. Trying to pull that off: extremely difficult.

I'd had in mind that I was going to alternate passages about The Divine Comedy with Joe's narrative, and then Dead Poets Society clicked. Poetry became the chapter's unifying thread. When I finally had a finished draft, I was watching James Franco's Howl, and threw in an Allen Ginsberg line. Did anyone catch it? Then it hit me: What I should have done is bury all kinds of lines by gay poets -- Michelangelo, Whitman, Frank O'Hara, Ginsberg, Auden -- throughout the chapter. If I weren't writing this in a serial format, I could have moved on to the next chapter, and over the course of months, tracked down and inserted suitable lines. Having waited so long to post a new chapter, though, a plan like that seemed self-indulgent.

I've floated my Dead Poets Society observation to a couple of friends (both gay) who immediately dismissed it. I'm going to guess that's only because they haven't watched it as adults. Here's a wonderful write-up on the theory, which goes beyond the movie to touch on how we're haunted and affected by the formative movies of our adolescence. I didn't grow up with that kind of connection to the movie, but I have something like it now.