I Just saw it for the first time yesterday and I'm still trying to take it all in. I thought it might be interesting to hear people's thoughts & opinions on this one.

I believe this was Peter Seller's last movie before his untimely death. I saw it in the theater when it came out, had to be around 1980. I know he is well known for the Pink Panther movies, but I thought Being There was some of his best work. If anyone has missed this movie, it is well worth the rental cost.

I didn't know much about it, but apparently making this movie was one of his goals for a while. I had an interesting discussion with my sister (who's really into movies) shortly after I saw it about how Seller's character exposed everyone else's motives by being a "nothing."

It is a movie version of an excellent book by Jerzy Kosinski. I loved the both the book and the movie. Despite being plagued by what Ken Wilber brilliantly describes as the "pre/trans fallacy", it is a great look at how people project thier own vison of reality on everything (and everybody) around them. Chance, the main character, is totally transparent and is supposed to be essentially desireless himself, so he becomes the perfect screen for others to use in their projections. In this sense he is "like a child" and the last scene of him walking on water I interpret to be an allusion to Christ and illustrating that Chance is "enlightened." Like I said, horribly flawed by the "pre/trans fallacy", but a great movie anyhow.

Since I mentioned it, and without going too much down a tangent, the "pre/trans fallacy" is that since both pre-rational or pre-conventional thinking and social development and trans-rational and trans-conventional thinking and social development are both "non-conventional", it is easy to confuse the two. This is where our ideas of the "noble savage" come from and thinking about (among others) Native Americans as "ecologically minded". As Wilber says, it is very, very different to not destroy the environment because you lack the *means* (primitive peoples), and *choosing* not to do it even though you have the means. That's another version: Pre-industrial vs. Post-industrial. Calls to solve the problems of industrialization, which are very real and serious, by *regressing* to a more primitive way of life are not the answer. We like things like dentistry too much. In fact, the problems of industrialization are created by solving the problems of primitive society. What we need is to move forward, not regress.

This is a bit off topic in your original post, but once I read Ken Wilber's thinking in these areas something fundamentally changed in me and I am unable to watch a movie like "Being There" and not see the intellectual flaw. It is just *amazing* how often we run against the pre/trans fallacy in our society. Once you're exposed to it, you see it everywhere -- especially on places like NPR. In the movie, Chance is, essentially, a sheltered and socially primitive, or pre-conventional person. We can't all be like Chance, or there would be no food to eat. The analogy just goes nowhere.

Enlightenment must be "post-conventional" if it is to exist at all. The pinnacle of human psychological development can't be a return to infantile fusion with the world. Again, Wilber says it best when he suggests that infants are not in a unknowing state of grace (heaven), but are instead in an unknowing state of suffering (hell). When they get older, they learn just how bad it is! The progression then, is not a return to the child-like state, but to go beyond the ordinary state. So: unknowing suffering to knowing suffering to knowing the end of suffering.

Whew! Sorry. I study this stuff and it interests me. I have some of the same issues with "My Dinner with Andre." If anyone is interested in this kind of thinking, I recommend Ken Wilber's "A Brief History of Everything." It is no exaggeration to say that it fundamentally changed the way I see the world. In fact, I'd love to hear what some of you think about it...

Jim

Thank you, I enjoyed reading that.

I see you have quite an understanding of these issues. Are you sure (and having just seen the movie I really can't say either way) that the directory/ author was portraying Chance as "enlightened"? Certainly there was the reference to the miraculous in the last scene, but I didn't take this as making Chance a Christ figure, only that he did something no one other than Christ ever had done because he was unaware that he couldn't (this scene actually brought to mind a favorite Garfield cartoon from my youth, but I digress).

If the movie is trying to be a satire on television, politics, etc. then it succeeded brilliantly. If it is intending to show people who they really are by demonstrating them against a white wall of "nothingness" (Chance), then again it succeeds brilliantly. If, however, it was an effort to show how Chance is a Christ figure it fails miserably. My own thinking was that Christ (at least as portrayed in the Bible) was very deliberate and knowledgeable in everything He did. Chance, however, is anything but deliberate, and not intelligent in the least.

In the end I felt the movie wasn't about Chance; instead it was intending to comment on everyone else. I don't see that falling into the "pre/trans fallacy" as you described it. If however, the point was to elevate Chance as something to which we should aspire, you are very much on target.

In literary terms, christ figures have little to do with Jesus beyond him being an archetypal example. A christ figure is a character who sacrifices himself for others, and the definition can be very all-encompassing, or, perhaps more accurately, in the scope of literary criticism, it's easy to force many different characters into that mold. For example, both Billy Budd from Melville's Billy Budd, a simpleton who sacrifices himself for his shipmates and his draconian commanders, and Joe Christmas from Faulkner's Light in August, a murderous indigent, are both commonly regarded as christ figures, but they have little in common with the specifics of Jesus' life. Interestingly, most christ figures appear as simpletons, probably because the standard mores of society would prevent them from being sacrificial.