The clips from the movie "Dangerous Minds", and Dylan Thomas' poem "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night", a poem about a man encouraging his dead father to fight for his life, shows that literature and film are often correlated. In the "Dangerous Minds" clips, Ms. Johnson, an English teacher at a high school tries to help save her students from the outside world. Ms. Johnson teaches in an area where it is easy for her students to fall into peer pressure and do the wrong thing. In one instance, while watching the clip, Ms. Johnson breaks off a fight one of her students, Emilio is going to participate in. She tells Emilio that he is smarter than both of the students he is arguing with. In this scene, the audience can see that Ms. Johnson is like the narrator of the poem "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night" because she is encouraging her students to stay out of trouble and learn. In return, the students in her classroom are like the dying father in Dylan's poem since they are fighting to learn and succeed in an environment where education is not the main priority and it is the norm to slack off and get into trouble.
8 months ago
Your connection between Ms. Johnson and the poem's speaker is interesting as is the parallel between fighting off death and avoid trouble.
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