How Taylor Swift’s Tortured Poets Connects to Dead Poets
Right after Taylor Swift announced that the name of her newest album would be The Tortured Poets Department, there was allegedly over a 500% spike in search interest for Dead Poets Society, the well-regarded 1989 drama with a similar name.
That percentage comes from the sort of SEO/trend-baiting study that gets commissioned by shady websites who then send out press releases on the off chance that, if the study gets written up, the shady website will get mentioned as the source. (Because I do not think any Consequence readers are in deep need of the Fresh, Exclusive No Deposit Casino Bonus Codes this website provides, I’m omitting said website’s name.)
However, I wanted to mention that fact up front, because it speaks to the culture that surrounds a massive event like a new Taylor Swift album. Everyone looks for an angle in the lead-up to a release like this, a way to be a part of what remains of our monoculture, and so any potential clue as to what’s coming (and what people will be talking about) feels important.
Thus, the renewed interest in Dead Poets Society makes a lot of sense. Sure, the actual album title might have been a lot more inspired by Swift ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn having a “Tortured Man Club” group text. But then Swift leaned hard into the connection between the two with the release of the video for “Fortnight”, featuring Dead Poets stars Ethan Hawke and Josh Charles as mad scientists experimenting on a bound-up Taylor Swift in her lab.
Hawke and Charles are both looking great 35 years after the release of Dead Poets Society, and the original film itself holds up remarkably well: A complicated emotional stew of contending with parental expectations and societal demands for conformity and maybe being a little bit in love with your roommate and getting the giggles when your English teacher does an impression of John Wayne performing Shakespeare. (Rest in peace, Robin Williams.)
Peter Weir’s nuanced directing adds so much to the story of privileged young men waking up to the power of poetry, but beyond the whole maybe-being-in-love-with-your-roommate thing there’s not much in the way of subtext — which perhaps brings it right in line with Swift’s own artistic endeavors this spring.
