The Tar Pit

My Dinner with Andre is, well... let's try to do this one differently, namely by sourcing from the shitwisdom of randos on the interwebs:

You’re supposed to make up your own opinion on it. Neither Andre or Wally are portrayed as right or wrong, you might think Andre is a pretentious, privileged douche who never had any real problems to deal with or you might think Wally is a coward who’s too afraid to question anything and is fine living a normal, boring life.

It’s basically a proto-podcast. It’s just two people having a conversation, there’s no symbolism or metaphors, it’s just laid out all in front of you. I like it a lot.

Of course, the rando in question is acting like the proverbial doctor who only saw the patient's arm¹: it hadn't even crossed my mind to think of Andre as a pretentious douche, nor did I think of Wally as a coward, that's some of the author's own opinion inserted right after the suggestion that the Redditor make his own opinion, disguised as "example".

That aside, he's sorta right in the second paragraph, in that My Dinner with Andre really is a sort of proto-podcast, or rather an acted play on a proto-podcast. I suppose today's kids can't really appreciate the effort required to make a movie centred around nothing else but a conversation². Sure, that's all too pompous and artsy-fartsy for the recipe-driven "podcaster" nowadays, which kinda brings us to the central point of the film: that it is centered around a conversation on, well, life! and mainly on that old issue of perception/belief that I've beaten into a pulp on my blog thus far; otherwise put as the question of why people are so fucking stupid and can't really see what's lying in front of their eyes. Meanwhile I've moved on to other things, but it was quite nice to revisit the discussion taken from the intermingling points of view of: a struggling playwright on one hand, and an a nutty professor of theater on the other.

Andre is, and I believe the modern term is redpilled. He has seen that there's more to life than New York and for some reason he chose to reinterpret his perception of alien worldviews from afar within the Western framework. That alone is nothing new, Watts has already done it in the Anglo world and, well, what do you suppose folks understood of Watts? Andre is a modern-day Zarathustra, only he hasn't yet reached the point of realization that there's really no way to teach such things, per se. One can't simply wake up from the eternal slumber just like that, and few ever do anyway. Most people will go through life just like the proverbial duck through the pond; they'll be alive, but they'll never live live. That's a pretty... trite observation, isn't it?

Now Wally, on the other hand, he's sophisticated yet simple at the same time. He's the 1980s nerd I suppose: he lives his life through reading and not much else seems to disturb him. He most certainly Trusts the Science(tm) and so he can't find any meaning in things that are beyond it³; but moreover he's a sort of an archetype for the "industry" man of the late twentieth century, who sees his trade getting torn to pieces. The really concerning part about him is that he recounted his discussion with Andre to Debbie and that's pretty much where the film ends. No life-changing events came out of this or anything, which left me wondering whether the whole thing was indeed just a podcast. Or I suppose I could put this in the same category as some pointless ending in an Asian movie.

Other than that the discussion is intellectually stimulating for the most part, which makes me think that I would have liked to read the discussion rather than viewing it. Sure, theatrical representation is supposed to bring other things to the table, the most important of all being a clear view of the characters' emotions. But there's not that much of that in My Dinner with Andre -- the whole thing feels like a Socratic dialogue put into a trite play; while Andre himself often speaks passionately about his experiences, nobody interrupts the other guy and indeed, it feels like Andre is in fact holding a monologue in the first part of their meeting. For fuck's sake, I couldn't stand someone talking to me for ten whole minutes without giving me the chance to interject somehow. Maybe this is a lost form of dialogue that I might be unaware of, but my friends can attest that I never really held a monologue longer than four minutes, unless I was holding a lecture or something -- and even then! Anyways, I get it that Andre and Wally haven't seen each other in a long while, and that they're not exactly two former friends or anything. But the overall the structure of the dialogue feels constructed, even though its logical flow makes perfect sense.

This feeling is further amplified by the following problem: some transitions are a dead giveaway of the fact that the movie wasn't shot in sequence. That's fine, this is how movies are normally done, except this brings us back to the Reddit comment and my take on it, namely that packaging this discussion into a movie isn't as easy as one may believe. It's not that difficult to package it as a play, I'll give them that; but that's the problem, the play is live, while this was shot in multiple takes. And while some takes -- say, the scene centred on Wally, with Andre seen from the mirror -- are absolutely marvelous taken alone, they seem disjoint when taken together. And this disjointment is present mainly at the point of dialogue, not in the background stuff: sometimes Wally doesn't even seem like he's responding to the matter addressed by his partner, it's pretty obvious they had to put in some filler to remind us he's also there. I'm not sure whether this is a problem with the writing, the production or with post-prod; I'll let the experts decide, but it is a problem.

Still, I will say that My Dinner with Andre touches a few important points in this age's problems; and to my eye the most important of them all isn't that "the Matrix" exists, nor that it is possible or impossible to escape from it, nor (lol!) whether the humanity will be extinguished in the process. The Roman Empire went through the exact same process and lo! humanity survived just fine, just maybe not where you live. No, the most important aspect of the dialogue in My Dinner with Andre is that our conversationalists do indeed lack the language to express what they're going through. And I hope it won't come as a shock to you to observe that most people do, nowadays, for any value of "nowadays" you may think of.

Now, what do you suppose, say, Newton thought of the Matrix? Was the world a geometrically-consistent place during his time and then did it start going nuts all of a sudden during the 1700s? Or did he have bigger problems than "ohnoes, reality is so complicated, I don't understand what's going on"? Well, what can I say... that's why he was a philosopher.

P.S.: I guess My Dinner with Andre feels like some conversations that I've had with friends, involving lots of alcohol and touching dialogue along the lines of "Steve Jobs was a pretty competent guy, wasn't he?" "Yeah, but then again, he died of cancer." "Oh. Yeah." I suppose I enjoy these from time to time, given enough alcohol.

Filed under: food for the soul.
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