I’ve already written a bit about the film version of Being There, but it has stuck with me to the point that I think I need to write more about it. Yesterday, a day after watching the movie, I read the short novel by Jerzy Kosinski.

Being There really struck a chord with me, and I’m not entirely sure why. It feels like there is something more to it, lurking beneath the surface. There are obvious things — the ending, the whole “I understand” thing that I only vaguely caught when I watched it — that show the movie to be something more than just one long joke, but I think there is more to it. I had hoped that the novel would help me understand the movie better, but I was wrong.

Being There is the one movie/book combo that I’ve come across where the film actually completely removes the need for the novel. Maybe that is how Jerzy Kosinski wanted it, and when you read the novel after watching the movie, you do get the clear feeling that the novel was purely an outline of what was to eventually come. There is nothing in the novel that elaborates on the movie. In fact, the movie consistently improves upon the novel in every way. If you land on this post wondering if you should bother reading Being There, then I say to you: no, there is no reason for you to read it. Just watch the movie.

I’ll even write my own summary. Being There follows Chance, a simple-minded — retarded, if you will — gardener who has never known anything outside of the garden he works in. One day the master of his house dies, and with no record of him ever even existing within the household, and not knowing anything of his family or where he came from, he wanders the streets. Eventually he is picked up by the wife of a wealthy financier after her driver accidentally crushes one of his legs between parked cars. She takes him home and somehow through the simple things he says about gardening and himself, everyone from the financier to the President himself get the impression that he is a genius and before long he is famous within all types of circles and even attracts the romantic attention of the financier’s wife.

It’s a simple concept, and one that almost doesn’t seem original at all, but the movie takes this simple concept and elevates it to something so much more than it is. If I was to take a wild guess at why I can’t get Being There out of my head, it’s that: there is so little to this movie, so little meaning to hold onto, that the one thing it is trying to say it says with such potency that I can’t help but dwell on it.

If the things that Chance says were in some way actually stupid, you could say the film is a biting satire of politics and the gullibility of the American people, but they’re not. He doesn’t say anything offensive to an intelligence observer. The only way the film fumbles is in that Peter Sellers portrayal of Chance is almost too simple, and I find myself wondering that if I met him without knowing him, would I really not get the feeling that I was talking to someone mentally handicapped? But overlooking that one gaffe, the idea that the film is actually mocking politics or just people in general is almost entirely removed.

The ending, I think, and I am going to go to great pains to not spoil anything for anyone who watches, gives away the point of it all to me. Chance’s beauty, Chance’s grace, even, comes from the fact that his perception of the world actually crafts the world around him. The ending isn’t some symbol of divine inspiration, though the aforementioned “I understand” might allude to that, it’s a symbol of the words spoken over it when it happens, “Life is a state of mind.” Chance isn’t able to do what he does because of some special power he has, unless you decide to call the inability to know the world as others do a special power. Chance has probably never even seen a body of water like that before! When you consider the ending from that perspective, it becomes somewhat clear. Perhaps Chance’s ability to win people with his words comes from the simple fact that he doesn’t know that other people treat mentally handicapped individuals differently than normal people.

Life is a state of mind, indeed. Perhaps I am just seeing what I want to see in Being There. I already believe that your mental state helps shape your reality around you, and my interpretation of Being There completely supports that. It’s probably safe to say there is someone out there who sees something divine in Chance, or someone who sees Chance as the antithesis to what the common American thinks of himself and interprets his infiltration into the highest of American institutions as scathing satire.

Regardless, I was beginning to feel that my ability to truly appreciate film has all but disappeared, but Being There has shown me that it is still possible for me to absolutely love a film, and if only for that I am thankful I watched it. You should watch it, too.

I almost feel like I’ve been on a kick of watching satirical films from the 70’s at this point. Admittedly two movies does not a trend make, but I wonder if my subconscious has been leading me in this direction for a while. With my recent ranting about the internet and my general feelings about the isolation and near-celebration of stupidity I feel is becoming epidemic among everyone and everything, how funny is it that I am watching films from 30 years ago that cast a harsh light on all these things?

That paragraph confuses even me.

Network and Being There are both long, slow, and subtly hilarious films about one joke. Network’s joke is that you can mock the degenerate nature of television endlessly and insult people directly through the medium itself and they will eat it up. Being There’s joke is that you can put someone completely and unabashedly retarded within important political and financial institutions and the people within them, and outside of them, wont know the difference.

Being There: In director Hal Ashby’s Oscar-winning satire, illiterate gardener Chance (Peter Sellers) is run over by wealthy Eve (Shirley MacLaine) and suddenly becomes educated gent Chauncey Gardiner, thanks to Eve’s misunderstanding of his mumbled introduction. Taken in by Eve’s family, Chance simply regurgitates what he’s heard on TV — from gardening instructions to economic predictions — and Washington’s political elite hail him as their next star.

Being There succeeds where Network fails, as Being There doesn’t try to reach outside of what it meant to achieve. Being There is comfortable with its one joke and it doesn’t try to elaborate. Sure, the situations “Chauncey Gardiner” get himself into become more and more important, but as a character, and as a message, he never changes. Being There doesn’t even try to make itself out to be a film with a message, as its heart it is just a subtle comedy executed flawlessly. You can read into it all you want, but you’re going to come up with a lot of dead ends. There’s no real message in Being There, there doesn’t need to be, because as a film it is simply enjoyable.

Peter Sellers, whose work I am unfortunately almost entirely unfamiliar with, is amazing in his role, and you only come to understand why he nails it so perfectly when the credits roll and there is an unexpected “blooper” sequence of him, as Chauncey, trying to repeat a message given to him by a young black man. He can crack up, laughing hysterically, and within seconds he is back within the skin of Chauncey Gardiner. Right at the end he delivers it flawlessly, and the entire set cracks up. People in the background double over in laughter, the camera shakes with the laughter of the camera man, and Sellers himself wipes tears from his eyes. Sellers, in this somewhat brief moment, taken out of character for the first time out of the two hour run time of Being There, retroactively causes you to realize how fantastic, and hilarious, the film really was.

Also, as a side note, the ending is brilliant and warrants a couple paragraphs all on its own, but I wont tackle it here. I think I get it, and maybe the novel fleshes out the reason for it a little more and can tell me whether or not I’m right. I’ll find out, and maybe write about the novel.

Network: Paddy Chayefsky predicted today’s rash of trash television and shock-laden news broadcasts. The writer of Marty created network news anchor Howard Beale (Peter Finch), who loses his mind on the air. Unfortunately, his outrageous rants boost the ratings and intrigue cutthroat network executives Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall. William Holden contrasts their avarice as an old-school TV journalist hopelessly out of step.

Network, on the other hand, starts out very strong, but then dwindles into something that isn’t funny or biting anymore, just unsettling and confusing. Roger Ebert covers this. The first hour of Network is excellent, and could have stood as a film all on its own, but then it gets into some weighty subject matter. Where the protagonist of the film starts off as a likable, understandable, and even powerful character, it becomes clear that there is something seriously wrong underneath the surface and by the near-end he is no longer the protagonist but a just pawn being relentlessly molested by a group of people composed almost entirely of unlikable characters.

The almost intolerable state the film finds itself in after the halfway point is summed up by the “romance sequence” that occurs between Faye Dunaway and William Holden where all throughout the course of their torrid love affair, she never stops speaking of work. Not once does she ever relent in her constant dialog about her job, even while undressing and making love. Network itself is kind of like that, in that it never relents, not once, in trying to convey to you just how corrupt and broken the television industry really is.

Network kind of winds along this sad path where at the beginning you saw hope for a film bent on tearing into the television industry, but by the end you realize the film is actually waving the white flag, saying, fine, you know what, television is the future and it is a sick sad future that is completely unavoidable. The reason the end of Network is biting is the exact reason the film itself is so sad: it depresses us, and by the end of it we, too, just want to shut it off and walk away.

I fucking hated Juno. I seem to be one of two people in the whole world who hated Juno, the second being Sarah, who sat beside me in the theater groaning along with me the whole time. From the very first couple of minutes of film, where it broke into that ‘cute’ animation with those ‘cute’ washed out pastels that unapologetically ape everything good about Wes Anderson films while leaving out all of the honest sentimentality and good writing, I hated it with all of my being. Then, the characters spoke, and the audience laughed at things I didn’t even think were funny. A teen utters, “Honest to blog?” and I groaned, involuntarily.At one point early on I turned to Sarah and I said, “The biggest, and only, laughs are the ones in the trailer.” The biggest laugh for me? “Oh, like in Alaska?” “No.” “Oh… k…” which, again, was in the trailer, but no one laughed at it in the trailer and I was the only person who laughed at in the theater. I guess I’m quirky, but I hoped the rest of the film would be full of subtle Arrested Development style humor (I mean, it’s got the two primary actors, right?) but instead what I got was a film full of characters who never, ever, not even once, talked like real people. The only honest character in the whole film was Jennifer Garner’s baby-crazed wife. Everyone else was some bizarre fun-house-mirror style characterization of… who? Who were they even based on? I’ve never known anyone like anything depicted in Juno, and it completely ruined the movie for me.

I wasn’t going to rant about Juno. I posted something to Twitter saying that it was the worst movie I’m sure I’ll see in theaters all year, and I saw it within the first week of the new year, but I have never been more certain of anything in my life. I wasn’t going to rant, but I stumbled across this movie.

Would you look at that poster! It’s actually the opening credits to Juno! I bet this film will be like Juno! Check out the trailer, which takes less than 30 seconds until you’re introduced to some random character who says something really edgy and unusual and, again, completely unlike reality! But, wait, let’s not ignore the most important thing…

Would you look at that! Notice the subtle use of washed out pastels! Look at that suit he is wearing, how unusual! His hair, even, is a relic of some by-gone era! Holy crap, I think, wait for it, this is an indie movie! IS IT? IS IT AN INDIE FILM?

You would think so, but I say no. Juno, this film, and others of the same ilk are all movies about boring, typical subjects (kids getting pregnant, kids being awkward in high school!) that are dressed up in new clothes. Those new clothes are this ridiculous slightly-removed-from-reality indie-sweetheart style shamelessly aped from, again, Wes Anderson, and even more disgustingly, Napoleon Dynamite.

I wonder if there is some sort of guidebook detailing for directors exactly what to do when they want to make a film like this. Cover the set in dust? Put your actors in clothes from the 70’s that don’t quite fit them? Score your film with either off-beat and unusual b-sides or forgotten album tracks by artists from the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s, and/or music by current artists no one has heard of but your college-bound niece who sits on the internet all day looking for twangy guitar tracks that accurately express the mood prevalent in her chipped toe-nail polish? Style their hair as if the characters themselves were trying to emulate Robert Redford from Three Days of the Condor but hopelessly fuck it up–and have the girls do this as well? I mean, what the fuck people, I want this playbook! This shit sells!

I’m done. I’ve had enough. You can only try to sell me so much bullshit wrapped in a coating that I enjoyed when it was done by the artists who pioneered it before I eventually lose taste for the coating and only experience the bullshit. I know that this post is just part of the cycle, something gets popular, something gets hated, but I just can’t take it anymore. If I see another goddamn film in this same bullshit style, I am going to go to the mall, rip off all my clothes, dive into the fountain, and be all like “ARG I’M A KRAKKEN FROM THE SEA!”

Fuck, I hate myself. Now even I am pandering to the typical moronic movie-going public by ripping off indie-style films.

It took me a long time to eventually become a fan of Blade Runner. I watched it when I was probably about fourteen, and I kind of liked the look of it but it was slow and somewhat boring, a trait I could appreciate in movies at that point, but in Blade Runner I found it kind of ridiculous since it seemed like a brainless movie about a dude killing some androids. To make matters worse, I read Philip K. Dick’s novel that it was “based” on and discovered that Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a deeply thought provoking novel with many well thought out characters and emotional undertones. From what I could see, Blade Runner had absolutely nothing to do with the novel outside of a few characters names and the idea of killing renegade androids. Finding out that Ridley Scott didn’t even read DADoES? made me furious and hate the film even more.

It wasn’t until I took a humanities class and was forced to sit through the film again after all these years spent disliking it. Even before we got into a discussion on the meaning and significance of what happens in it, I understood. For some reason it just clicked in my head, and I saw Blade Runner for what it was: a subtle film about what it means to be human. I decided that, sure, it has nothing to do with the novel, and perhaps Dick was reading some other version of the screenplay when he said they compliment each other, but it is a good film that deserves attention. I think all of Ridley Scott’s other work is shit in some way, I just can never manage to enjoy it, but Blade Runner is good stuff.

It’s only been a year or two since that time and after enjoying The Director’s Cut many times, I got to watch The Final Cut on Matt’s super-awesome HDTV on HDDVD and, my god, that was an experience and a half.

First: I didn’t know Blade Runner looked like this. I wish I had gone and seen it in a theater when I had the chance, and now I am kicking myself over and over again for not going. I guess when they said the original DVD release of Blade Runner was a piece of shit, they weren’t kidding, because the Blade Runner I grew up watching was washed out, muddled, and just kind of dirty. I assumed the film was meant to be that way, that it added to the tone in some way. No, not at all. Blade Runner is sharp, vibrant, and so full of detail that my head spun within the first five minutes. The opening shot of fire bellowing out of the smokestacks is breathtaking and the film just keeps getting better looking from there. Here’s a pullquote for you: If there is one film that single-handedly demonstrates the need for a high definition movie format, it is Blade Runner.

However, I expected something more than just The Director’s Cut with more violence, “father”, and Deckard’s eyes being open during the unicorn vision. I guess I can’t say I was disappointed, but I really expected something to be different between the versions and, in short, nothing was. I suppose after George Lucas has repeatedly bastardized the original Trilogy (and there is only one), I should be thankful that Ridley Scott didn’t feel the need to ruin Blade Runner, but he could have probably done anything and not subtracted from what a great film it is.

But, and this is a huge but, Blade Runner is not the film I thought it was. I’m such a die-hard fan of the book that even though the Director’s Cut tries really hard to make it obvious that Deckard is a replicant, and Ridley Scott says Deckard is a replicant, I refused to believe that within the film, Deckard is a replicant. I can’t stomach it. Harrison Ford couldn’t stomach it and I am very disappointed that, according to Scott on Wikipedia, that even Ford has “given up hope” on Deckard not being a replicant.

The entire philosophical content of the film hinges on the fact that Deckard is not a replicant. The emotional tone of Batty and Deckard’s final confrontation felt hollow and silly when I watched it this time with the understanding that Deckard is a replicant. The question of whether or not the man is more monster than the monster is man is completely lost, and the emotional complexity of the story is destroyed. What made Deckard a man was his willingness to love Rachel even though he knows what she is. What gave the story depth was the clear image at the end of Batty being more man than Deckard was at that point, and Batty being the catalyst that made Deckard realize that he is, indeed, a monster and has no right to destroy Rachel.

When you paint Deckard as a replicant, it becomes clear that he is just an emotionless killing machine, and that the feelings he develops for Rachel are just a symptom of his design, just like how Batty had feelings for Pris. It’s ridiculous on so many levels, and opens even further conflicts when you consider that the unicorn origami was folded by the same guy who told Deckard, “It’s too bad she won’t live!” when he should have already known at that point that Deckard himself was a replicant. It just doesn’t make any fucking sense, and it ruins everything I ever liked about the film.

So, thank you Ridley Scott for giving me the most beautiful version of the film I’ve ever seen, but fuck you for making Deckard’s eyes glow, for the unicorn vision, and for that origami unicorn. Fuck you for absolutely ruining a film that could be perfect if you just didn’t go back on what you and Harrison Ford originally agreed on.