I read Jerzy Kosinski’s novella years ago, so I’m not entirely unfamiliar with Hal Ashby’s 1979 adaptation of Being There. I knew I was supposed to read it as a comic critique on American politics and business, the nature of the human mind to deal with anxiety by projecting what we think as the best of ourselves on certain things (in this case, a simpleton by the name of Chance the Gardener, mistaken for a “direct-talking” aristocratic businessman named Chauncey Gardiner),  a cultural landscape shaped into moronic acceptance of the superficial by television, etcetera, etcetera. And Ashby’s film does not disappoint with its use of such didacticism. I think I would probably have loved this film more when I was younger. But now I’m not so young anymore, and I see this — and all I’m thinking is: how terribly cynical this film is about human nature. And how unworthy to put in that element of the supernatural in the end with Chance inexplicably walking on water — enough to suggest something Christ-like about him. Is it because the story is itself a joke that ran on too long that it needed to have that extra jolt of magic realism/religious symbolism?  Have I grown too soft in my thirties?
Pop-upView Separately

I read Jerzy Kosinski’s novella years ago, so I’m not entirely unfamiliar with Hal Ashby’s 1979 adaptation of Being There. I knew I was supposed to read it as a comic critique on American politics and business, the nature of the human mind to deal with anxiety by projecting what we think as the best of ourselves on certain things (in this case, a simpleton by the name of Chance the Gardener, mistaken for a “direct-talking” aristocratic businessman named Chauncey Gardiner),  a cultural landscape shaped into moronic acceptance of the superficial by television, etcetera, etcetera. And Ashby’s film does not disappoint with its use of such didacticism. I think I would probably have loved this film more when I was younger. But now I’m not so young anymore, and I see this — and all I’m thinking is: how terribly cynical this film is about human nature. And how unworthy to put in that element of the supernatural in the end with Chance inexplicably walking on water — enough to suggest something Christ-like about him. Is it because the story is itself a joke that ran on too long that it needed to have that extra jolt of magic realism/religious symbolism? 

Have I grown too soft in my thirties?