Being There

I just watched the movie Being There, starring Peter Sellers. It's a real fantastic movie, one of the most profound statements on death, language, and TV that I've seen in a long time. The story revolves around this gardener whose name is Chance Gardner, who has grown up in an estate that he's never been allowed to leave. His only source of knowledge of the outside world has come through TV, which he watches constantly, while eating, sleeping, and talking to people. The movie opens with the death of his boss, the owner of the estate, and Chance is simply dumped out on the means streets of DC, completely out of place, an autistic baby man.
By the end of the movie the movers and shakers our great capital want him to run for president of the United States of America. How did this happen? I don't want to go into the details because what I'm really interested in is the relations to language, image, and The Other. In Lacan, the master signifier, while truly ruling the world of discourse, is primordially dumb, both in the sense that it’s most powerful when it's silent, and that it is in essence ridiculous, absurd, stupid, meaningless. The master signifier is not a word, but it is the Word. And it is not only the Word that determines our lives (perhaps a phrase that we misunderstood when we were three years old) but the Word that created the universe. How absurd that at the end of analysis we see that our desire is compelled by a misunderstanding, by a slip of the tongue, and that tongue was not even ours--we can't even claim the mistake as our own. Like at the end of The Death of Ivan Ilyich where everyone gathers around the bedside of the pitiful dying Ivan, and when they see the end has come, say "it is over." But Ivan Ilyich hears in his eternal fall, "Death is over." His ear fails him as he gains the ranks of the blessed.
But back to the movie, where we must take into account the name of our Gardener, that is, Chance. The master signifier is arbitrary, aleatory, pure chance, pure gamble, as is the Word--why does God speak to Israel, to Abraham, and Moses? Why does he choose the dunce, Peter, and all those greedy and cowardly tax collector types? We cannot know but we must believe, like Adam in Paradise Lost, which makes us end up sounding pious and ignorant, a label that we will never completely shake. . . . We should notice too that his last name is problematic as well—we never know if people call him Gardner because he is one or because that’s his name. Does not the Master Signifier name hold all the confusion that is related to trying to distinguish a name from a proper name, trying to distinguish Adam from Man, Jesus from the archetype laid down by Joshua.
As Chance finds himself in the middle of big money and big politics in Washington all of a sudden we realize people are calling him Chauncey; they have misheard him, there was some confusion, and he doesn't take any pains to clear it up. Is it Chance or Chauncey? Is he a gardener, or is Gardner simply his name? In avoiding the signifier Chance are they betraying their disavowal of the arbitrary nature of the Word, the kind of fear we feel when we read that, "God hardened the heart of Pharaoah"? How could heaven and hell be so arbitrary? But beyond that, how could Christians accept such an arbitrary God? Pascal said that we must simply wager on the truth of God's reveleation! Gambling? with God? Its ridiculous. Could even be a fraud.
How does the film represent this? By showing that everything Chance does he learned from TV, the ultimate source of dumb (even with all that talking!) if there ever was one. He shakes hands like prime ministers do, he kisses like fake lovers, he does yoga and aerobics simply because he sees it on the screen—and everyone says that he is the most authentic, the most real, person they have ever met. He is the only one who doesn’t lie in Washington, and yet everything he does comes from that buzzing talking box. Now this isn’t completely true because we must remember that he is one who works in the garden, and who knows the life and death of trees and shrubs. He becomes famous overnight for saying on a talk show that economics must be like gardening, having a time to grow and a time to die. We should also note that he is illiterate.
The women adore him, want to sleep with him, the men idolize him (some of them also want to sleep with him, especially when he tells them he just “likes to watch [TV!]”). He gets adopted by an extremely rich “king maker” and his wife: Ben and Eve. Ben is dying and Chance sees what everyone else does, but doesn’t mince words. He simply looks at Ben and says, “You’re dying, aren’t you?” Which makes Ben trust him with all his being and soul. So the master signifier, the Word, is not only dumb, but it makes friends with death. It sees death as simply another episode on television, a child’s view of death, mixed with an unassuming resurrection (watch Ponette). And we love nothing more than those who are close to death. And those like Yeltsin we can love only after they are dead.

When Eve, who is falling in love with him, attempts to kiss him, he can’t take his eyes off the TV, luckily enough there is a love scene at the moment on the screen and so he can imitate that with Eve and have a moment of “sexual relationship”--but the channel changes and his body goes limp. He says to her “I like to watch”; she is confused, but then falls to the floor, writhing. Is she masturbating? Is she coming? It's hard to tell. Chance is not really interested, as he’s attempting to imitate the yoga posture on TV at that moment. The next morning she says to him that because he did not take her, did not take advantage of her, she was finally able to take advantage of herself, and she was opened, purged, renewed. Is this a sexual relationship? I would say yes, a Lacanian, non-sexual relationship, relationship. They are truly in love because they give to each other what they do not have. He, as the final Word, has no desire, and thus cannot not desire her, cannot make love to her. But he has given her desire back to herself, and she finally sees her own self-love. Is she just a narcissist? Perhaps, but she has finally seen herself as one. Will they ever make love again? Will he become the president? These questions are absurd, which is why the final scene in the movie shows him walking on water, while Ben’s funeral goes on behind him. Here the narrative breaks down, well, the movie is over for one, but our ability to look into the future of these characters is nullified, for they have no future. Their exposure to the Word has un-sutured their lives, and they have become like mad Peters, walking on water in spite of themselves.