CREWE Being There

The Rorschach Candidate FINDING MEANING IN BEING THERE DAVE CREWE

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‘I

like to watch.’

That’s unquestionably the defining line from Hal Ashby’s Being There (1979). If you’ve seen the film, you’ll remember it as a punchline. It’s twice delivered by protagonist Chance (Peter Sellers) in response to being propositioned – once by a man at a ritzy Washington gala, then by Eve (Shirley MacLaine), the wife of political ‘kingmaker’ Ben Rand (Melvyn Douglas) – and is interpreted as an admission of and invitation to voyeurism. In the latter case, it culminates in the famously funny scene of Eve writhing around the floor racked with performed self-pleasure as Chance, perched on the bed above her, remains oblivious to her efforts.

Chance has no perverse intent when he declares that he likes to watch. He’s simply professing his fondness for television; hence, he disregards Eve’s histrionics and instead mimics the television program before him. This scene arrives at the tail end of the film; at this point, Chance, a sheltered simpleton who has only ever known life as a gardener, has ensconced himself in the upper echelons of Washington society thanks to a comical series of misunderstandings. He now goes by the name of ‘Chauncey Gardiner’, and has the respect of foreign dignitaries, talk-show hosts and even the US president (Jack Warden). Despite this dramatic ascent, Chance’s fundamental qualities – his polite passivity and his unquenchable love for television – remain unchanged.

www.screeneducation.com.au

The Rorschach Candidate FINDING MEANING IN BEING THERE DAVE CREWE

Screen Education 97 I © ATOM

88

‘I

like to watch.’

That’s unquestionably the defining line from Hal Ashby’s Being There (1979). If you’ve seen the film, you’ll remember it as a punchline. It’s twice delivered by protagonist Chance (Peter Sellers) in response to being propositioned – once by a man at a ritzy Washington gala, then by Eve (Shirley MacLaine), the wife of political ‘kingmaker’ Ben Rand (Melvyn Douglas) – and is interpreted as an admission of and invitation to voyeurism. In the latter case, it culminates in the famously funny scene of Eve writhing around the floor racked with performed self-pleasure as Chance, perched on the bed above her, remains oblivious to her efforts.

Chance has no perverse intent when he declares that he likes to watch. He’s simply professing his fondness for television; hence, he disregards Eve’s histrionics and instead mimics the television program before him. This scene arrives at the tail end of the film; at this point, Chance, a sheltered simpleton who has only ever known life as a gardener, has ensconced himself in the upper echelons of Washington society thanks to a comical series of misunderstandings. He now goes by the name of ‘Chauncey Gardiner’, and has the respect of foreign dignitaries, talk-show hosts and even the US president (Jack Warden). Despite this dramatic ascent, Chance’s fundamental qualities – his polite passivity and his unquenchable love for television – remain unchanged.

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FILM AS TEXT

Being There is a multifaceted film. It’s a lilting farce at times, a savage satire of contemporaneous politics and society at others.

Screen Education 97 I © ATOM

Being There is a multifaceted film. It’s a lilting farce at times, a savage satire of contemporaneous politics and society at others.

It’s often outrageously funny, but Ashby’s aesthetic imposes a sombre, even elegiac tone throughout. Adapted from Jerzy Kosiński’s 1970 novel, the film feels more indebted to works from two decades prior in its depiction of television and its effects. It views television through the same critical lens as in Ray Bradbury’s 1953 book Fahrenheit 451, as an anti-intellectual force; and, like Douglas Sirk’s 1955 film All That Heaven Allows, it regards television as synonymous with loneliness. Chance certainly cuts a lonely figure, more drawn to screens than people.

Four decades later, who among us can’t relate? Television might have been subsumed into an entangled array of screens – computers and laptops, smartphones and tablets – but the notion, presented part way through the film, of a public figure preferring to receive their news from television than books or newspapers feels quaint in an era of Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Among Being There’s many pleasures is how much of it centres on watching someone watching: that kind of passive blankness is so common in everyday life yet so rarely depicted on screen (outside, admittedly, the likes of recent ‘innovations’ like TV series Gogglebox).

Much of the film is spent watching Sellers vacantly staring at a screen. But thanks to Ashby’s careful direction – and the collaboration of editor Don Zimmerman and cinematographer Caleb Deschanel – it’s always executed with a fierce understanding of the power and versatility of images: both the images of Chance and the images he consumes.

Take the opening ten minutes. We silently observe Chance as he awakens, as he gardens, as he eats his breakfast. A television is ever-present. First-time viewers might regard Chance

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as the characters in the film do – as a sophisticate, as a man of culture – due to his distinguished appearance, prosperous surrounds and the orchestral performance playing on his set. Those assumptions are quickly punctured when Chance changes the channel to a children’s cartoon and enjoys the program without discernible expression. That same first-time viewer might question their assumption: is it fair to assume Chance is an idiot from a scene of him watching cartoons? How different would we look if someone were to shove a camera in our face as we, say, watched our favourite reality-TV show or scrolled through our social-media feed?

This isn’t accidental. While Ashby and Sellers are trying to establish Chance as a beatific simpleton, they’re also playing with their audience’s perceptions and assumptions. That’s underlined when Chance, after learning of the death of his unnamed employer, visits the man’s bedroom to survey his corpse. As we watch Sellers sit silently by the body, we can’t help but read into his unmoving face emotions of sadness and contemplation. And then – with precise comic timing – he switches on the television and reveals there’s nothing beneath the mask.

While that apparent emptiness will be complicated in the film’s closing minutes, Being There leverages its protagonist’s blankness to explore the meaning we find in and impose upon images. After pilfering his dead boss’s wardrobe, Chance appears the epitome of the bourgeoisie. He’s well dressed, well groomed, polite. And white. The screenplay – credited, somewhat controversially, to Kosiński rather than Robert C Jones, who by most accounts wrote the thing1 – makes a point of underlining Chance’s ethnicity. When he first wanders out into the world outside his dead employer’s house, the neighbourhood is predominantly black, and we see graffiti reading, ‘America aint [sic] shit cause the white man’s got a god complex’. When his cultural ascent sees Chance interviewed on a prime-time talk show, Louise (Ruth Attaway), the black maid who worked for Chance, blurts out: ‘It sure is a white man’s world in America […] Yes, sir. All you gotta be is white in America to get whatever you want.’

Whiteness plays no small part in Chance’s elevation to political pundit du jour. His inane observations about the basic tenets of gardening are interpreted – by Ben, by the president, even by the general public – as sophisticated analogies for weathering a political and economic crisis. As a critic geared to mine every sliver of meaning from texts, I noticed this struck a nerve; for instance, I spent quite a while trying to connect Chance’s simplicity to a commentary on social awkwardness, even autism. It soon became clear that, like Chance’s peers, I was looking for meaning where there was none. He’s not a human defined by realistic psychology, but a literary construction.

Being There is a parable, and an unapologetically political one. Ben is a central figure in the film’s proceedings, a political playmaker rendered with an aura of benevolence and thoughtfulness that clashes with his Machiavellian influence (his terminal illness might be partly credited for this; one gets the impression throughout the film that Ben used to be far more ruthless than the gentle man we see here). However, his immediate attraction to and fascination with Chance parodies the paucity of political thought; if this man, wielding such influence, can be so easily swayed by an empty-headed peer in a nice suit, what hope does the average person have of making smart decisions? By the end of the film, Ben is dead and Chance seems to be firming as the pick for the presidency … and we’re even convinced that he could win.

It’s perhaps not surprising, then, that modern-day critics have been quick to link Chance’s character to sitting US President Donald Trump. This reading appeared frequently when the film was released on Blu-ray by The Criterion Collection in March 2017 in the wake of Trump’s election. As one example, the Chicago Reader described the film as ‘grim and topical’, observing that audience members ‘will want to discuss what a Chance the gardener administration might look like and whether it would be preferable to the one that’s currently running the country’.2 Similar sentiments can be found in many of the reviews of the Criterion disc.3 I’m not entirely convinced that the analogy lands as precisely as these critics believe (though, to be fair, analogies to Trump were incorporated into many film reviews for the year or so following his election). Yes, there are trivial connections: Trump’s rise is intimately linked to television, given his role as host of The Apprentice, and it’s not hard to draw a line between his idiotic pronouncements and Chance’s similar lack of intelligence. But there’s a purposeful populism to the success of Trump (and fellow politicians of his ilk) entirely absent from Chance’s vague tales of soil and seasons.

‘Make America Great Again’, ‘Drain the Swamp’, ‘Build the Wall’ and other such attention-grabbing slogans4 are diametrically opposed to the view of politics portrayed in Being There.

Indeed, from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, Being There’s depiction of political discourse appears remarkably

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It’s not hard to draw a line between [Donald Trump’s] idiotic pronouncements and Chance’s similar lack of intelligence. But there’s a purposeful populism … entirely absent from Chance’s vague tales of soil and seasons.

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old-fashioned. I find it hard to imagine a president thoughtfully restating a parable about gardening to calm fears over an impending economic crisis, for instance. Being There, of course, predates the rise of Ronald Reagan, along with the weaponisation of images and performance taking priority over policy. The film feints at these ideas – Chance’s success comes from what he appears to represent, rather than any serious substance – yet isn’t prophetic enough to envision what the future might hold when it comes to politics.

And yet Being There endures. In part, that can be credited to its craft. The film marks the end of Ashby’s stunning run of artistic success that began with The Landlord in 1970 and Harold and Maude the year after (his subsequent decline is generally credited to rumours of cocaine dependency5). But it’s the most impressive entry in his filmography for me; his earlier films were defined by their skittish, countercultural energy, but his ability to combine a classical, wintery aesthetic with still-hilarious humour is even more impressive here than in his excellent work on the likes of The Last Detail (1973) and Coming Home (1978). Ashby’s inno­ vations with music are evident – the latter showcases a neverending soundtrack of pop songs, while Being There memorably references 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968) by using a jazzy version of Richard Strauss’ ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’ to convey Chance’s alienation from modern society.

No comedy is complete without a capable cast, either, and Being There packs some heavy hitters. Douglas certainly earned his Oscar for his work as Ben, lending a character that could’ve been a toxic satire of Washington self-interest an endearing humanity, without ever undercutting his fundamentally craven nature; while MacLaine is excellent as ever, combining the screwball energy that made her a star with the pathos that cemented her as one of the best actresses of her generation. Sellers’ acclaimed performance is the standout, though. Earning him an Academy Award nomination that he infamously failed to campaign for (and, subsequently, lost to Dustin Hoffman), it’s a showcase of impeccable comic timing and an uncanny ability to grant an almost-imperceptible warmth to a character primarily defined by mimicry and the absence of thought. Chance needs to read as not just a holy fool, but a truly likeable character, and Sellers deftly threads the needle.

It’s not only the calibre of those working on the film that grants Being There its durability. While contemporary politics may have moved on from the sensibilities being satirised here, the film’s final minutes elevate it beyond a straightforward satire with a pair of curve balls. The first comes by Ben’s deathbed. Chance is uncharacteristically overwhelmed by his benefactor’s passing, tears welling up in his eyes, and his dialogue is purposeful in a way it’s never been before. ‘I love Eve very much,’ he admits to Ben’s doctor (Richard Dysart), a man who’s come to realise Chance’s true identity. For once, it feels like an honest admission of emotion rather than a parroting of a line from television.

Just as we’re coming to terms with Chance’s unexpected depth, Ashby brings matters to a close with one of the most memorably enigmatic finales in mainstream cinema. As President ‘Bobby’ delivers a eulogy for Ben – ‘Life is a state of mind,’ he concludes – Chance wanders off into the surrounding woodland.

Curiously, he walks out across the water of a lake, pausing only to dip his umbrella into the liquid beneath him.

It’s a fascinating, unexplained moment that has inspired reams of analysis. Though Jones’ (uncredited) screenplay originally intended to conclude with a warm encounter between Chance and Eve – framing the film as a sort of unconventional

Dave Crewe is a Brisbane-based secondary teacher and critic. SE Endnotes 1 See Debra Kaufman, ‘Robert C. Jones: 2014 ACE Career Achievement Award Honoree’, CineMontage, 1 March 2014, <https://cinemontage.org/robert-c-jones-2014-ace-career -achievement-award-honoree/>, accessed 12 December 2019.

2 Ben Sachs, ‘Being There: Still Funny, but Newly Grim and Topical’, Chicago Reader, 30 March 2017, <https://www.

chicagoreader.com/Bleader/archives/2017/03/30/being -there-still-funny-but-newly-grim-and-topical>, accessed 28 October 2019.

3 See, for example, David Blakeslee, ‘David Reviews Hal Ashby’s Being There [Criterion Collection Blu-ray Review]’, CriterionCast, 26 March 2017, <https://criterioncast. com/reviews/blu-ray-reviews/being-there>, accessed 12 December 2019.

4 See Heather Digby Parton, ‘Trump’s Swamp People: Shockingly, the Administration’s Vetting Process Was a Total Mess’, Salon, 24 June 2019, <https://www.salon. com/2019/06/24/trumps-swamp-people-shockingly-the -administrations-vetting-process-was-a-total-mess/>, accessed 12 December 2019.

5 See Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, ‘The Shallow Hal Skims the Career of the Director Behind Harold and Maude and Being There’, The A.V. Club, 4 September 2018, <https://film.avclub.com /the-shallow-hal-skims-the-career-of-the-director-behind -1828730787>, accessed 12 December 2019.

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romance – this conclusion is even more inexplicable. Is it de­ monstrative of the magical qualities of Chance’s ignorance? Is he able to walk across water simply because he doesn’t know he can’t? Or is this intended as an allusion to another Messianic figure known for this ability? Chance as a Christ metaphor is an obvious reading, but an unsatisfying one if you’re expecting to find Christlike qualities in his characterisation – Chance is driven, fundamentally, by his selfish desire ‘to watch’. I don’t know if Ashby had any particular reading in mind when he filmed this scene. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that it was mischievously constructed with no particular deeper meaning: a subtle bit of provocation with which to conclude matters. It certainly works, and I think the film’s endurance can be credited in large part to the sequence’s ambiguity.

However, my interpretation of Being There’s final shot is that it’s just another example of Ashby exploiting his audience’s tendency to impose meaning upon images. The introduction exploits our tendency to imbue a white man’s silence with thoughtful reflectiveness; the final image conversely challenges us to find meaning in an unexpected image. Perhaps it’s a critique of Christianity, or any notion of great men – a sly dig at the faithful who commit their lives to their interpretation of one man’s actions – but I tend to think that Ashby is merely reminding us to think more deeply about the images we consume. We all like to watch; how often do we truly see?

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