Presidency left to chance

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A review of the film 'Being There' by Elizabeth Crighton Bloc. and 'Chance' is forced to But his move to the West has confront the reality of US not dimmed his critical faculties imperialism in the epoch of as was the case with religious crisis and decay.

Kosinski's work exudes a the house, we are at once struck quiet contempt for imperialism by its savage contrast with the The most powerful gardener in the world utcliffe aX LL 1971 IVITIES LONDON BUSINESS 'necessary'.

This ruthless process goes under titles like "rationalisation". or "reducing overmanning."

But some of the firms-an increasing number today, as can be seen in Diagram 3-don't make it.

They are forced to close down altogether and go into liquidation or at least to shed a i ter somations and IT TO ISTE of falling profits on unerpay. ment.

Diagram 4 shows that announced redundancies have doubled The whole economy Production industries Manufacturing industries Mining Metal manufacture Mechanical and electrical engineering Vehicles Gas, electricity Thougand Company Liquidations 0981 1961 gram 20plus minus minus minus minus minus minus minus • TABLE 1 The Decline in Employment IRTMI 1975 If you happen to be American then part way through Being There' you might feel the chilly paws of recent history creeping up your spine as the discussion begins to focus on the problems of the presidency.

Faced with the current choice between a geriatric cowboy and a remedial peanut farmer you might even feel inclined to opt for the film's contender, an illiterate gardener obsessed with television.

Particularly since-unlike the real life contestants-he has no 'past' to tarnish any lingering credibility. But there is much more to 'Being There' than that.

The film is based on a novel emigre who as a dissident wrote under the name of Joseph Novak.

Kosinski's earlv novels. particularly 'Steps' reek of his hatred of Stalinism and the double standards of the Eastern demagogues like Solzhenitsyn. with its pompous superficiality and its studious inequality.

'Being There' is the book which paints Kosinski's picture of imperialism most clearly. The opening scenes of the film show Peter Sellars as Chance the gardener-a part which he is able to play to great effect since it demands no more than caracature; walking in isolation in the only world he knows, the small garden behind the house he has lived in all his life.

He has never been beyond these walls. Chance has lived quarantined from all the dynamics of social and economic change and crisis.

It is almost as if Kosinski has transformed idealism as a mode of thought into a material form.

The world in the head translated into four walls. Yet in practice all social life is changed and inevitably, the world invades the peace and solitude of the garden.

The old man, his patron, dies When Chance emerges from landscape of smashed cars, street gangs, garbage, graffiti and crumbling ghettos which are on the outside of the neatly ordered garden.

Moreover, to underpin this we are all the time reminded that Chance's only experiences of this real world are through the cosmetic images of the US television networks.

He knows only what the TV has taught him, which in practice is nothing. Chance is literally a stranger in a foreign land.

No real name He has no home, no idea of how food is obtained, and no real name. But more importantly, for the film he has no knowledge of carefully structured rules of relationships 'within capitalist society, with their false hierarchies of deference rooted above all in fear of loss of status. Chance has no status.

The obsessive fears and deception of the bourgeoisie are the centrepiece of the film.

We are introduced to a ruling class seeking desperately for solutions to problems it cannot begin to comprehend.

Chance is given a name by the wife of a wealthy industrialist whose car runs into him. She fears a legal action for millions.

Her husband, Rand, spends his life being given transfusions of fresh blood to keep his decaying body going from day to day.

Meantime in the absence of death he continues to advise the President-terrified by impending economic catastrophe and the need to cut spending.

It is to this mad circus that 'Chance' comes, illiterate and unaware. The way the decadent aristocracy of US society and the media latch onto his ignorance is carefully detailed in the film.

"Chance' is a straw at which they clutch.

The metaphor is obvious. The logic of these encounters, as the CIA scurry in search of information and the media lionise him, is to promote Chancey Gardiner as the next vice-president.

• It is an apt indictment of the crisis of leadership facing the US bourgeoisie.

But Kosinski's penetrating eye still breaks through at the end of the film, ridiculing the idealism.

Fiasco

In the final fiasco, as the President reads a funeral oration to Rand the industrialist, taken from his own quoteswhich begins "I have no time for the welfare of scroungers" -we watch as Chance begins the long walk which idealism dictates for US imperialism.

"Chance', their final hope, is seen walking slowly step by step on water, and all around lie the deeps.

As we all know, those who attempt such things in the real world have a habit of drowning.

As Kosinski correctly points out in the opening chapters of the novel:

"And yet, with all its life, even at the peak of its bloom, the garden was its own graveyard. Under every tree and bush lay rotten trunks and disintegra; ted and decomposing roots. It was hard to know which was more important: the garden's surface or the graveyard from which it grew and into which it was constantly lapsing"

Kosinski may not be a socialist, but his vision of American society can hardly be good news for Hollywood or for the White House.

But, there again, if Reagan does win, then maybe the two will be amalgamated anyway!

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