Being There

Capsule Film Review #45

This is the forty-fifth in a series of short pieces (max. 250 words) about films. They appear weekly, in addition to my regular essays.

This one also happens to be my one hundredth piece overall. If you’re interested in the other ninety-nine (including essays, aphorisms, and poems) you can find a guide to everything here.

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John Cleese has been quoted as saying that every young comedian plays the character he dreads becoming. Very often this seems to be true: many of the comic characters most ingrained in our culture seem to be nightmare distortions of their actors’ personalities; if those actors live long enough, they become the thing they once laughed at.

Cleese himself, for instance, became famous for playing bourgeois Englishmen seething with repressed rage and… well, no comment. Ricky Gervais played giggling wannabes; Hugh Laurie played handsome, intense heroes; Stephen Fry played pompous and yet loveable professors.

It is tempting to use this thought to try to figure out just what on earth was going on in the head of Peter Sellers, who seemed to be playing everybody and therefore, perhaps, dreaded becoming—or revealing himself to be—somebody.

Few today read the novel Being There by Jerzy Kosiński, partly at least because of the scandals that surrounded its author, another nobody. Kosiński didn’t write it for Sellers, but he may as well have. The film Being There (1979, d. Hal Ashby) is quite as remarkable—as profound and unprofound—as the book, and as its star.

‘There used to be a me,’ Sellers was quoted as saying, ‘but I had it surgically removed.’ Who exactly was he pretending to be, he must have wondered, when he said that he was always pretending to be someone else?

Chance the Gardener was one answer: released from the dream of the self, he entered the dream of the no-self.

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