{"id":15429,"date":"2020-11-23T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-11-23T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=15429"},"modified":"2024-03-02T21:17:31","modified_gmt":"2024-03-03T05:17:31","slug":"mona-lisa-smile-dead-poets-society-and-the-subtle-sexism-of-how-we-view-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/mona-lisa-smile-dead-poets-society-and-the-subtle-sexism-of-how-we-view-movies\/","title":{"rendered":"Mona Lisa Smile<\/i>, Dead Poets Society<\/i>, and The Subtle Sexism of How We View Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

If you attended high school at any point in the last 30 years, your English teacher probably wheeled one of those boxy TVs to the front of the classroom and announced \u201cToday is going to be a little different\u201d before hitting play on Dead Poets Society<\/em>, Peter Weir\u2019s 1989 drama about an unconventional teacher at an elite, all-male prep school in 1950s New England, who encourages his students to \u201cseize the day\u201d and not fall prey to the dangers of conformity. It\u2019s less likely your English teacher decided to show you Mona Lisa Smile<\/em>, Mike Newell\u2019s 2003 drama about an unconventional art history professor at the prestigious, all-female Wellesley College in 1950s New England, who encourages her students to \u201chave it all\u201d and not fall prey to the dangers of conformity. The two films are similar enough to raise eyebrows, yet it\u2019s the one centered on men that garnered more acclaim and earned a permanent spot on your high school English syllabus, while ironically, the one centered on women has become semi-forgotten with time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can certainly argue that Mona Lisa Smile<\/em> is derivative of Dead Poets Society,<\/em> if only because it arrived 14 years later and both films fall squarely into the inspirational teacher genre. But they are tonally different, highlighting how we tend to view issues affecting men versus women. Dead Poets Society<\/em> is solemn and earnest\u2014even Robin Williams is (mostly) subdued as Mr. Keating\u2014quoting heavily from important male writers like Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau. When tragedy strikes in the form of star student Neil Perry\u2019s (Robert Sean Leonard) suicide, the mood turns somber. This is a Serious Movie about Serious Things and every element of the film\u2014from Maurice Jarre\u2019s tranquil and triumphant score to the gorgeous, silent, snowy shots of the school grounds\u2014works to emphasize it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mona Lisa Smile, <\/em>on the other hand, is romantic and stylish\u2014full of color and charisma, like the modern paintings Katherine Watson (Julia Roberts) shows her students. The shifts from comedy to drama are handled so gracefully by Roberts and the rest of its star-studded cast, the viewer is swept up without realizing it. The film has an unmistakable buoyancy, but it doesn\u2019t lack depth; it just doesn\u2019t linger so heavily on its dramatic elements. Mona Lisa Smile<\/em> is no less serious in its dramatic aims than Dead Poets Society<\/em>, but history\u2014including popular culture\u2014often tends to trivialize issues affecting women while simultaneously elevating those affecting men, and the film\u2019s lighter tone and emphasis on relationships likely did it no favors in the still very cishet male-dominated film industry (including criticism), who have always undervalued women\u2019s stories and box office power.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It\u2019s not only the tone where these two films differ, but how they each define \u201cconformity\u201d within the context of 1950s America. For the women of Mona Lisa Smile<\/em>, conformity is less about stamping out vague idealism and more about enforcing concrete misogyny and gender roles. Whether it\u2019s firing the school nurse (Juliet Stevenson)\u2014who also happens to be a lesbian\u2014for illegally handing out contraception to students, encouraging antiquated campus traditions surrounding marriage like the hoop race while discouraging advanced degrees (like law school for Julia Stiles\u2019 brilliant Joan), or publishing sexist screeds against Katherine in the school newspaper because of her subversive views on work vs. domesticity, there are very real consequences for not conforming to expectations of womanhood in 1953. \u201cIt\u2019s brilliant, really. A perfect ruse,\u201d Katherine rants at one point, \u201ca finishing school disguised as a college! I thought I was headed to a place that would turn out tomorrow\u2019s leaders, not their wives!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is not to say that conformity of thought, which Keating rails against in Dead Poets Society<\/em>, is not also damning. But men have always had more advantages and freedom in society than women\u2014especially freedom of choice. The exception here is Neil Perry, who is presented as responsible, high-achieving, sensitive, and passionate. Though the film never states it outright, there\u2019s plenty of subtle evidence to suggest Neil is gay, which is perhaps why he feels so \u201ctrapped\u201d\u2014as he confides to Keating\u2014by his domineering father (Kurtwood Smith), who enrolls him in military school after witnessing his less than traditionally masculine performance as Puck in A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/em>. The film presents this more as a conflict of ideals, but it\u2019s also about Neil\u2019s subtle rejection of traditional, toxic masculinity, which his father emulates, and the consequences are far more akin to the ones faced by the women of Wellesley than his classmates at Welton. Perhaps Neil sacrifices his life for art and poetry, but his desperation to be free of his father\u2019s control and accepted by him on his own terms hints at something far more personal than just ideology, which makes his death all the more tragic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Still, the threat of conformity in Dead Poets Society<\/em> is far more existential in nature. All of the young men at Welton Academy\u2014even the more rebellious, like Charlie Dalton (Gale Hansen)\u2014will go on to become doctors, lawyers, businessmen, politicians etc., who have privilege, protections, and real power regardless of how they speak or what they do. This doesn\u2019t mean the crises these young men face feel less dire, only that the consequences are, in reality, much more so for women who don\u2019t comply with patriarchy. It doesn\u2019t matter how much Katherine tries to make her students believe they don\u2019t have to choose between marriage and a career in Mona Lisa Smile<\/em>, because there\u2019s simply too much pressure from all sides and evidence to the contrary. Many reviews rightly point out the clumsiness of and inconsistencies in the film\u2019s feminist messages<\/a> (perhaps due in part to its male screenwriters and director), but another found it \u201clacking in conviction<\/a>\u201d and finished with, \u201cDead Poets can rest easy,\u201d which is, frankly, a bit unfair. Its heart is in the right and even the same place as Dead Poets Society<\/em>, but the latter had the benefit of being first and centered on men.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s hard to say for certain whether Mona Lisa Smile<\/em> would have been treated better if it had arrived prior to Dead Poets Society, <\/em>but the disparate treatment of both by audiences, critics, and awards ceremonies reinforces a vexing truth right out of one of Katherine Watson\u2019s fiery lectures: history works against women whether in the classroom, the movie theater, or society. Men are valued based on their own merits while women still only have value as they relate to men. If, as student Giselle Levy (Maggie Gyllanhaal) puts it, \u201cthe context the art comes from affects the way we view it,\u201d perhaps it\u2019s not so much that one film is better than the other, but that our<\/em> whole context for comparison is rooted in the same misogyny the women of Mona Lisa Smile<\/em> are pushing back against and the men of Dead Poets Society <\/em>unknowingly benefit from. In viewing Mona Lisa Smile, <\/em>or any other woman-centric story, only in relation to its male counterpart, we\u2019re erasing its individual merits. Until we absorb the lessons of both films, we\u2019ll never see things differently \u2014<\/em>whether we\u2019re standing on a desk or in front of a Pollock painting. \"\"\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When \u2018Mona Lisa Smile\u2019 arrived in theaters in 2003, many critics wrote it off as a lesser \u2018Dead Poets Society\u2019 \u2013 which is wildly reductive to both the film and its themes. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":614,"featured_media":15434,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1381,1399],"tags":[1422],"class_list":["post-15429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies","category-looking-back","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/614"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15429"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22657,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15429\/revisions\/22657"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}