This week, the podcast is a conversation with a political friend on the great American trouble these days, & about how our times are a lot like the ‘70s. Which is helpful in one way, because they made great movies then & we both love cinema. Chris Rufo joins me to talk about Hal Ashby’s 1979 movie Being There, starring Peter Sellers, Melvyn Douglas, & Shirley MacLaine. This was a success at the time & made a good profit, $30 million at the box office against a budget of only $7 million; it was also a critical success, it won Douglas his second Oscar, earned Sellers his third nomination, & both men were dead within a year of Being There coming out—they went out on a high note; within a decade, Ashby died, too, & soon afterward the novelist who adapted his work for the screen, Jerzy Kosinski; Shirley MacLaine is still alive, at 89, by the way; & nowadays, of course, you cannot make political satires anymore, never mind the existential concerns underlying the satire.
It’s helpful in another way, too, because if you look at the ‘70s, you learn a lot about America. There’s a lot of cynicism in Being There, mockery of the president, the rich people influencing politics, the press, the D.C. social scene, to say nothing of the deep state surveilling all of the above. It seems like artists are the last cleareyed observers. Art with guts. But much more than other satires from the era, like Network, an even more influential movie, Being There is very sensitive about the unhappiness & inauthenticity of life at the top of America, as well as critical of the fake world created by TV sloganeering, which replaces education, which is primarily about reading & conversation, even in the case of politics. We get popularity without democracy & powerful men who might not be human. Suspicion, impotence, infertility are a problem in the movie & you might think about whether that’s our world today.
Chris brought in Heidegger & his French heirs, for example Lyotard, who was talking about post-modernism at that time, the condition of confusion & skepticism about the remarkable successes of modern technology & democracy. We talked about this American loss of innocence without gaining needful experience & the attempt to rethink innocence & ignorance, success & understanding. & we ended up comparing that to the gerontocracy we enjoy, the zombie medical miracle that is Joe Biden, our helplessness just now. I should add something we didn’t get a chance to talk about, the poster recalling Magritte’s Son of man. But there’s never enough time, since Adam & the apple…