Still thinking about My Dinner With Andre…
The movie depicts a private conversation in a public space. I think the setting is centrally important and revealing. It made me consider the politics of our time, this relationship between the public and the private. One of the hallmarks of our times, because of the intrusiveness of social media and the internet, is that the boundary between the public and the private has been largely erased. As the film suggests, I began to think of the way so much of politics nowadays is so excessively performative and based on matters like identity, gender and sexual-orientation that were once considered private. I am thinking about how for my kid’s generation everything is public. Every unformed, inane thought and feeling must be shared, and with very little consideration for how to share it appropriately or respectfully.
Admittedly, when the boundary between public and private began eroding about 20 years ago, I wasn't sensitive to the possible ramifications. Someone, I think it was my older brother (who was always smarter and more insightful than me) warned about it. He said people aren't seeing how precious their privacy is, and they will pay for their blindness dearly. My brother was thinking mostly about the dangers of identity theft. But his instinct for peril was on target. I began to grasp how profoundly our privacy was being impacted after watching the must-see documentary film The Social Dilemma. It expounded on how the ubiquitous devices that we all carry around 24/7 and rely on for so many decisions that we make every day were brainwashing us and manipulating our behaviour. The algorithms were designed to get us addicted and make us adopt extreme and intolerant world views. I understand now that what they were describing was essentially the consequences of the obliteration of the boundary between public and private space.
My kids think it cute when I recount nostalgically about a time when people kept their thoughts, feelings and experiences mostly to themselves. How in those days they didn't photograph their meals before eating them. They simply ate, and enjoyed the fleeting experience of consumption privately while it lasted. I tell them how people experienced special times with family and friends, not as occasions for documentation and publication, but as special moments to relish, and sometimes to photograph and put in an album so that it could be remembered privately later on. I tell them that I've learned in the last 10 years or so that the most unexpectedly precious commodity - something that has been assaulted to the point where their generation has abandoned it completely to their detriment and not even realized the consequences - is privacy. Understandably, they have no idea what I mean. This is our generation gap. It ain't sex, drugs and rock and roll, like with our parents.
There used to be a fascination with exhibitionists and voyeurs as a kind of fetishism. Movies were made about it. Now we are all exhibitionists and voyeurs. In my Dinner With Andre the audience is meant to be eavesdropping, the intention being to give a taste of the main course of the subject matter on the menu ie. whether we are watching a public performance or a private exchange of ideas and feelings. The question of the boundary between the private and the public must still be asked, only the stakes are much higher now. Performance as an everyday part of life has become the norm and engrained to a level the companions in My Dinner With Andre could not have anticipated. I mentioned the movie to my daughter who did a degree in Fine Arts. She immediately understood what I was talking about, having taken university courses that focused on the performative aspects of identity and gender. What she couldn't grasp was the possibility that there was an alternative. I said that I thought a person's happiness depended on their ability to nourish and protect their privacy, which is the foundation of their sense of authenticity. She said she thought that everyone was putting on a public act all the time. The question, I said, is whether it was by choice or habit. She said that at this point, for most of the people she knew, she couldn't say.
2 comments:
Coincidentally, we re-watched "My Dinner with Andre" about six months ago, and were surprised on how well it stood the test of time as a film. I remember how cool it was when it came out in the early 80s. It's still pretty cool. And Wallace Shawn is so likeable with his angst and his nebbishness. Admittedly I fell asleep through part of it on the most recent viewing, but most of the time, the conversation was actually quite riveting. And, as you point out, the whole concept of "listening in on a conversation" is still very compelling.
I find Wallace Shawn’s nebbishness annoying. But ultimately I find him more persuasive than Gregory, who seems a bit overly dramatic and triumphant, as if he has come to some Olympian realization. At least Shawn’s position is modest and with humility. I just watched A Face In The Crowd. Have you seen it? Written by Budd Schulberg. Absolutely brilliant. Prescient for our political times beyond belief.
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