Hal Ashby: Being There

Hal Ashby: notes on Being There

(United States, 1979)

The late Hal Ashby had a brilliant stretch as a director through the 1970s - and Being There was a career-capping peak, following an eight-year run of thoughtful successes which also included The Landlord, Harold & Maude, The Last Detail, Shampoo, Bound For Glory and Coming Home.

Starring Peter Sellers and Shirley Maclaine, this sublime philosophical and political satire revolves around Chance the gardener (Peter Sellers), a mentally handicapped man who knows only gardening and what he sees on TV. He is inadvertently thought to be a genius when he accidentally stumbles into political fame - his very honest and unpremeditated responses to what he sees (or to any of the oft-amusing conversations he ends up having) are interpreted by the self-appointed VIP's around him as brilliant, Zen-like wisdom. The dissonance between appearances and reality throughout the film deserve note - here we have a simple-minded and enigmatic manual laborer, who is taken to be an important person, simply because he accidentally ends up near the center of their inner circle.

The film's title itself plays on this disconnect - Chance (he somehow becomes Chauncey Gardner amid the myriad other misapproriations) seems to be, in many senses - living in the moment, and doing so in a fashion that is pure and uncontrived. In this, the gnomic Chance becomes something of a mirror to other characters in the story (save for one): rather than see this simple-minded man as what he is, he becomes a tabula rasa, upon which varied characters project their own desires, hopes and ambitions. Given the varied agendas expressed through the behavior of other characters as they make of Chance what they will, Being There lends itself to vague spiritual interpretations (built specifically upon minor characters) - I've run across specifically Buddhist and Christian readings of this film, and both are approriate. The film's famed closing scene brilliantly literalizes what had been suggested through the film's entire length.

But there is more to this film than the spiritual. Ashby's 70's films are all filled with a creeping sense of unspecified unease. This background quality situated beneath specific narratives is reflective of a certain collective cultural dread that lingered through a sizable chunk of the 1970s: all of Ashby's 70's work seems to be shaking off a Vietnam/Watergate/Civil Rights/Sexual Revolution hangover of a sort. The quesion of "What happens next?" is always suggested, though never explicitly asked.

In this, and in other ways, Being There ties many of Ashby's thematic concerns together. This film is literally autumnal, but this is a symbolically prescient quality as well: the film sweeps us through glimpses of machiavellian political games, class politics, inner-city decay, and sexually liberated individuals who turn out to be needy in critical fashion. As seen in this film, those qualities (and the characters who carry them) are essentially dead-end extensions of narratives surfacing in earlier Ashby films. Chance, meanwhile, simply blends the haphazard enlightenment of Elgar (The Landlord), the nonchalant transgressiveness of Harold (Harold & Maude), the innocence of Larry (The Last Detail), and at least the potential of some the childlike - and childish - anarchism of George (Shampoo).

At the finale, the film would seem to turn explicitly towards the spiritual, or a quiet satire of it. This is definitely a valid interpretation of things, but there's something darker as well: each of Ashby's 70's films, end with the key character, walking off and out of the film in a sense. With this, a question is posed: "Has this individual - unprepared in some critical way for life in an unpredictable society - been transformed meaningfully, in ways that will matter?" The question posed in these films is implicitly directed at us all.

Without doing so explicitly, Being There is the first of Ashby's films to hint at an answer, which is yes, but there's no guarantee that the result will be anything great. It's basically an accident of timing that this film appeared 12-18 months before an enormous shift to the Right occurred in American politics and culture, but in Chance's transparent aphorisms once could catch a glimpse of a coming reality: an era of telegenic social and political leaders whose vapid, meaningless charm became their most marketable attribute.