Sorry, I am a few days late posting this, and I will just let you know I don’t know when the next time I will post one of these. Thursday (6/24), I will be driving east to live on the east coast. My life will be different; I will be living isolated from everything I know. I’m not sure if I want to keep writing these anyway, I don’t have many readers on these and no feedback other than my mom likes them.
What I Watched
My Dinner WIth Andre (1981) – The first time I watched this movie was in the late 90s, and it was a recorded VHS that had bad tracking, but I was enthralled with just two people sitting down at a restaurant and talking. This was when I was in my early 20s. Hence, all conversations needed to be spiritual experiences or emotional upheavals – I also didn’t have a TV on purpose, so these two guys arguing about the meaning of life was a life-changing experience.
I watched it again the other day. I remember it being one of my favorite films, but sometimes a favorite film from my early 20s doesn’t translate to my mid-forties. In the case of My Dinner With Andre, it most certainly did.
The movie is Wallace Shawn (the inconceivable guy from the Princess Bride), a struggling actor and playwright who goes and has dinner with Andre Gregory, director and an old friend from the theatre world that has drifted away for the last few years. They are playing versions of themselves.
The first half of the movie is Andre Gregory talking about these intense experiences he has had over the last few years where everything he thought he knew becomes questionable. He starts to lack the will to think any creative output is of any value. Shawn listens with wonder and awe but keeps Gregory talking as the experiences are strange and surreal. At one point, on a Halloween night, Gregory even talks about being blindfolded and put in a wooden box and buried.
At the end of Gregory’s stories, he explains how he should be tried for war crimes for attempting to create art. He thinks he shouldn’t try anymore and that it is meaningless.
At this point, Wallace Shawn argues with Gregory about the importance of art and especially the theatre. While Gregory had not had to worry about finances, Wallace does but talks about the struggle to create something to spark people into creating a better society.
Gregory feels that you can’t create something that will remind people that the world is messed up. He points out that people are going to the theatre to escape that world. Gregory thinks that media and entertainment are an escape from reality, therefore, not good. He sees the masses becoming brainless robots who stare at screens to escape their realities – this movie came out in 1981.
Shawn seems exasperated with Gregory and says that he is happy to get up and drink coffee and read the newspaper. He likes simple things. Shawn says he doesn’t need the focused psychic experiences that Gregory kept having and continues to crave. Simplicity is good sometimes.
The two never tread into an outright argument, but you can see Shawn’s feeling of inadequacy and Gregory’s commitment to his stand.
The whole movie felt like my own internal struggle with the meaning of life. Do I strive to make myself as uncomfortable as possible and see how I come out on the other side? Or do I try and live a simple life and try and make those small rituals mean more?
I wake up fully nihilist sometimes. It isn’t something that I want. I don’t think nihilism is romantic anyway, but I open my eyes and see no reason for any of this. I want something to wake me up from this meaningless way of thinking.
Then I make a mistake and peruse the world of the internet and see the way people put meaning in things that aren’t meaningful, and I retreat even further into my nihilistic shell. Nothing makes me more nihilistic than people who insist on confusing identity with personality.
Other days I wake up, and I want to have a quote-unquote everyday life. I want to buy a house, have a vegetable garden, and maybe smoke a cigar by a firepit on Friday nights. Of course, this doesn’t make me any less nihilistic, but I want to turn my back on horrible things about this world.
Then other days, I wake up, and every bit of news I consume wracks my insides and makes me want to give up. The world is terrible, the people in it are just awful, and nothing can be done about it, so stop telling me what to do.
None of this makes me interesting at all, but then I torture myself at creating. I want to make things that make the world a better place. So I don’t waste my time on this blog telling the few readers I have how stupid the world is, but try and share what is nice about it and what helps make it better – at least I try. Unfortunately, when I feel nihilistic, I can’t seem to get the drive to create anything.
Gregory suggests that if Shawn wants to shake the audience, he will have to do something huge and drastic because the audience is asleep and won’t notice the lessons or call to action. He wanted to use a real dead body in a play to shake the audience, but of course, the theatre wouldn’t let him. Of course, this irritates Shawn since he thinks the reason to do what he does is to make the world a better place, but Gregory asks if the audience can do this.
It is like the memes about how terrible Jeff Bezos is. Everyone hopes he doesn’t come back from space, but they are complaining on Instagram and other social media sites that Amazon uses to target advertising to you, and it seems to work. Don’t buy and use Amazon. I fixed that problem, but most people will use it because it is too convenient, affordable, and even an automatic response to wanting something like an animal instinct. I need thing; Buy-it now.
We all know the world is messed up. I don’t need any more infographics, witty tweets, or memes to fucking tell me. But, if you think for a second that knowing the world is stupid will make a bunch of people into revolutionaries, I feel sorry for you. Knowledge is what is turning people into escapists.
This movie is still relevant. Shawn and Gregory were talking at the dawn of cable television. I feel like anyone could get some insight into their psyche watching this film. Two people are sitting down to a nice dinner and talking about life. Shawn and Gregory don’t dismiss each other, nor do they keep from standing their ground. The lost art of conversation.