They imbued them with life and infused them with soul. While Tom Schulman deservedly received an Oscar for the script, Williams and his fellow actors are the medium through which those themes were delivered. “Sucking the marrow out of life doesn’t mean choking on the bone” – Keating Regardless of whether they were over-egged, as some critics have argued, when they hit you as a teenager you don’t have the same weary years of experience as those critics. The main themes of the movie – seize the day, suck the marrow out of life – resonated with me. Therefore I was a teenager coming of age, like the boys at the heart of Dead Poets Society, when I first saw that film. In Britain in the late 1980s, we had to wait at least four years for a movie to appear on one of the four terrestrial television channels if we missed a film in the cinema and had no video player. The line is the title of a Walt Whitman poem made famous to a new audience in the 1989 Oscar-winning movie Dead Poets Society, in which Williams starred. With that in mind, I make no apologies for my first thought being “O Captain! My Captain!” upon hearing that actor and comedian Robin Williams had died. For sure, our sadness is unlikely to match the levels of grief experienced by the family and friends of the departed, but we can lament the passing of someone who told stories that had resonance in our own lives. So when a storyteller passes on, their departure may kindle sadness in those who have been touched by the stories they told. At other times they can act more like storm waves on the coast, potentially altering the very landscape of the viewer, reader or listener. Sometimes the stories drip off us, having as much impact as rain on granite. Whether it is in cave paintings or in oral history passed from elder to younger, the ballads of wandering minstrels or the celluloid works of Hollywood, stories are told. Stories have been at the heart of human civilization for as long as there has been civilization. When Harold Ramis died earlier this year, an old friend of mine complained that his social network feed was filled with comments about the writer, actor and director. While I can understand where my friend is coming from in terms of public outpourings of grief for people we do not personally know, the fact remains that Ramis and others can touch our lives through the movies they make, the stories they tell. O Captain! My Captain! The classic scene from Robin Williams’ 1989 film Dead Poets Society
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