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Musings Report 2021-28 7-10-21 Have You Had Your Dinner with Andre?
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Have You Had Your Dinner with Andre?
Longtime correspondent Michael M. forwarded a clip of the 1981 film My Dinner with Andre which has been making the rounds of social media recently, and it sparked my curiosity to see the film again after 34 years (I first saw it in 1987 in a makeshift storefront art-house theater in Berkeley, California, in which battered folding chairs provided the seating).
You can see the entire film here, at least until it's removed by YouTube: My Dinner with Andre.
The film has a certain cultural fame as "the movie that's all two guys talking over dinner."
This deceptively simple setup is actually a complex film directed by famed French director Louis Malle.
The look of the film is dated, harkening back to the 1970s decay of New York City that was just beginning to reverse. (One can easily imagine an updated version with two women of color tracking the same narrative thread but with more contemporary stories.)
The structure could easily support any casting: the hard-working, just-getting-by actor/playwright played by Wallace Shawn is nervous about having dinner with an old friend from the theater--an innovative, successful director who had suddenly dropped out--with whom he'd lost touch.
All he knew was that this friend (Andre), who was known to "have money from somewhere" (i.e. an inheritance or family money), had been wandering the Earth accumulating strange experiences for the past few years. To reduce his anxiety, Shawn decides to just ask Andre questions about his experiences.
His discomfort increases when he enters the posh French restaurant in his working-class coat and tie, and he doesn't understand the French menu. In contrast, Andre is completely at ease, asks how a dish is prepared and orders a pate de poisson (fish) and quail.
The first hour has Shawn asking a few questions and listening intently to Andre's rambling, colorful descriptions of his adventures: wandering the Sahara in an attempt to write a script based on The Little Prince (the classic book by Saint-Exupery), being mock-buried alive in an eerie enactment that seemed to mimic the Nazi death camps, and all-night reveries in the Polish woods with actors and non-actors, none of whom spoke English.
Andre has a Japanese Buddhist monk live at his home with his wife and two children for months, mentions having tea in a Tibetan village, visiting India, and so on, all clear signs that he is on a classic voyage of self-discovery in search of the meaning that has suddenly drained from his coveted, admired, successful life in New York theater.
Befitting a conversation of two intellectuals--one struggling financially, the other, apparently without any financial cares--the conversation is peppered with references (Walt Whitman, Schopenhauer, etc.) that reflect a refined cultural awareness.
Despite his animated telling of his experiences and honest expressions of emotional turmoil, there is no evidence that Andre has "discovered the secret of life" or reached some profound state of being, and in the second half of the film, Shawn presents his own pragmatic view of life which revolves around being busy with work and enjoying small pleasures of ordinary life such as a leftover cold cup of coffee in the morning. He dismisses Andre's evocation of Jung's synchronicity as mere coincidences and defends a scientific, rational view of life.
Andre listens with equal attentiveness to Shawn's critique and makes a few comments that re-establish common ground. The film ends inconclusively, with the restaurant staff patiently waiting for Shawn and Andre--the two last patrons--to leave, and Shawn treats himself to a taxi ride home, remarking on the many memories the passing buildings and storefronts evoke.
You can find many analyses of the film, from Marxist (Shawn is the working class, etc.) to political (the many references to fascism) to psychological, but the most salient point is the most basic: this is a conversation between friends, if not close friends, friends nonetheless, a relationship of sufficient trust to share intimate revelations and emotions and disagree with each other without malice or hurt feelings.
Contrast this with the lonely world explored in the 46-minute NHK (in English) documentary, Dying Out of Sight: Hikikomori in an Aging Japan.
Hikikomori means "pulling inward, being confined"; the clinical term is acute social withdrawal.
Starting with the collapse of Japan's economic bubble in 1990, some of the people (mostly men) displaced from their jobs were unable to find other work, and in their extreme shame and sense of failure, withdrew into their bedrooms as complete recluses.
Through the following 30 years of economic stagnation, more men fell out of the economy and ended up as Hikikomori.
Feeling that they did not deserve society's support, few Hikikomori reached out for social services or psychological counseling.
Their parents, siblings and Japanese society at large were ashamed by their failure to live up to Japan's often-excessively rigorous demands of workers, and so shame piled on shame, further isolating the individual Hikikomori.
Now that their aging parents who have supported them for years are dying or being transferred to care homes, the older Hikikomori are dying as the meager money left by their parents runs out and their isolation hardened into unbreakable walls.
These men (only men were profiled in this documentary, though some Hikikomori are female) have no Andre to have dinner with, no friends to unburden themselves to, no friends with whom they can entrust their fears and scars.
The Hikikomori are literally alone, as their families and society at large have no understanding of the depths of their despair and sense of worthlessness and hopelessness.
In some ways I can relate to the Hikikomori's existence on an island "normal people" can't reach. Those of us who have burned out completely--our energy, life force, willpower, ability to get things done and be social, our joie de vivre, all burned to the ground--no one else can understand our experience except those who have burned out just as completely. No one else can really understand us, even as we are struggling to fully understand our own experience.
In the documentary, one social worker discovers a means to reach the Hikikomori in his area: he arranges to pick them up in a van and bring them to a place where they can meet each other and work on small, useful projects (cleaning books that will be donated, etc.) and establish no-pressure, no-hierarchy social relations for the first time in years or decades.
Just as the past is a foreign country, so too are experiences far outside our own. We can learn and begin to relate if we listen attentively, but this requires a very high level of trust, a level provided by friendship, which unlike the hierarchy of social-worker and Hikikomori, is peer to peer.
I was deeply moved by this documentary, for it crystalizes the purpose of my CLIME system: to provide positive social roles for everyone, roles that serve the community but also make room for each individual's skills, experiences, interests and character traits.
There is a workplace for everyone, but only if we have a system set up to makes community service and positive social roles its primary purpose and directive. Everyone wants to contribute, to belong, to be useful, valued, needed, part of something larger than themselves. It wouldn't be that difficult to set up a system that enabled this in ways that served the unmet needs of each community.
Such a system are what my books A Radically Beneficial World and A Hacker's Teleology explore.
Have you had your dinner with Andre? If so, count your good fortune in having a friend.
My Dinner with Andre clip (2:58 min)
"I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing that they've built--they’ve built their own prison--and so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result they no longer have--having been lobotomized--the capacity to leave the prison they've made or even to see it as a prison."
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"No justice or freedom is possible when money is always king." Albert Camus
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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