My Dinner With Andre

Last night I watched My Dinner with Andre on my laptop. I hadn't seen it in 43 years. I remember seeing it the first time at the Seven Gables theater in Seattle shortly after its release in October, 1981, and how galvanized I was when I left the theater. I felt 50 pounds lighter, as if I’d had a burden lifted by a remarkably gifted therapist. The steady flow of perceptions and ideas about contemporary life were expressed with such eloquence and passion that I was only dimly aware of the quail they were eating. It’s only now that I even noticed there had been no comment about the food. How good it was, how disappointing it was, how well-cooked it was. Nothing. Not a word. Though I do remember Wallace Shawn remarking at how small the quail were when they first arrived at the table, causing a look of chagrin in the waiter’s craggy old face. As soon as the brief interlude of their dinner arriving at the table was over the conversation resumed its former intensity and the food became an afterthought. Everything was about personal discovery in a society that had grown stale and anesthetized. These were things I’d been struggling with, artificiality, robotic behavior, shallowness, banality, vapidity, and a deep alienation. It was exhilarating to hear these issues articulated with such ardent cogency.

I was 34 years old in 1981 and working for a mail service. This had not been my ambition in life. It’s where you find yourself when you haven’t been looking, when you haven’t been paying attention to the ongoing evolution of your life and how stalled and stagnant it had become by comparison to the anticipated successes graduation from college was supposed to obtain. My degree was in English. I had the kind of resumé that induced laughter in employment bureaus. The job, which was a good one, it paid reasonably well and had good benefits, was part-time. I continued to write, as I always had, but never submitting anything. One too many rejections and the illusions I fostered would burst in a fall of hapless confetti. And so I procrastinated, stuffed my work in a drawer feeling partially satisfied I’d achieved something and was growing as an artist and went to movies and bars and drank Rabelaisian quantities of whiskey and ale. When I wasn’t working, of course. The routine of work was helpful in certain ways, apart from the salary; it helped structure my life and kept me from falling over the edge into total chaos.

I was also married at the time, though that was due to end in a few years.

My frame of mind had taken a very dark turn in 1980. In November, Ronald Reagan had been elected president and in December, John Lennon was murdered, shot in the back four times by a deranged fan in the 72^nd Street entrance to the Dakota apartment building. These events stood as emblems, as signs, as reflections of the zeitgeist. The neoliberal economics that came with Reagan, essentially a juggernaut of free market capitalism that was quick to inject its poison into mainstream culture, and the emergence of a new technology: computers. I knew then that one of the early victims of information technology would be books. Literature. An appreciation of the written word and the provocation and preservation of critical thinking. Pretty much everything I valued most deeply and had devoted my life to was increasingly threatened by forces and behaviors I hadn’t fully understood as yet, or learned how to adapt or avoid. Avoidance, I would soon find, was impossible. The new monster was omnipresent. Adaptation came in the form of a Wild Turkey and Courvoisier and deep immersions in Dada and Marcel Duchamp.

My Dinner With Andre opens with Wallace Shawn walking down a seedy Manhattan street dressed in a knee-length trench coat giving an inner dialogue prompted by his upcoming dinner with Andre. The life of a playwright is tough, he hadn’t sold any plays recently, his agent wasn’t calling with acting jobs, and bills were amassing; how was he going to pay them? There’s a bit of biography: he grew up wealthy on the Upper East Side, lived like an aristocrat, all he thought about was art and music, and here he was now, age 36, on his way to have dinner with a man he’d been avoiding, a valued colleague in the theater, a former theater director named André. Wally sounded just like me, hapless, worried and frustrated. I liked him immediately.

André turns out to be charming and charismatic, genuinely affable and happy to see his old friend. He’s older, and seems wealthy. This is implied by the restaurant he’s chosen to have dinner with his friend, a pretty posh place with impeccably dressed and distinguished waiters. I’d forgotten this. I’d somehow remembered the dinner taking place in a bistro, a dimly lit bohemian atmosphere, a time warp of the 60s in 80s Manhattan. This was due to the camera being so closely focused on their table and facial expressions. You forget how big the restaurant actually is. The restaurant was modeled on the Café des Artistes, a New York restaurant on the Upper West Side that had been a favorite of the upscale bohemia since 1917. It closed in late August, 2009. The restaurant where the movie was filmed was, in fact, at the then-vacant Jefferson Hotel in Richmond, Virginia.

The movie kicks into high gear about mid-way in. This is where Wally delivers an astonishing speech, in a response to a story André told about his mother’s dying, and looking like a survivor of Auschwitz or Dachau, and how a specialist put a spin of positivity on her health based solely on his observation of a problematic arm, and said she was coming along wonderfully, “psychically killing us by taking us into a dream world where we become confused and frightened,” and the inability of his friends to express themselves honestly and warmly about the death of his mother. Instead, they told jokes that prevented him from expressing his true feelings. Wally responds to this with great warmth and sincerity: “I mean, we just put no value at all on perceiving reality, I mean, on the contrary, this incredible emphasis that we all place now on our so-called careers automatically makes perceiving reality a very low priority. Because, if your life is organized around trying to be successful in a career, well, it just doesn't matter what you perceive or what you experience. You can really sort of shut your mind off for years ahead, in a way, you can sort of turn on the automatic pilot. You know, just the way your mother's doctor had on his automatic pilot when he went in, and he looked at the arm, and he totally failed to perceive anything else.”

I find these revelations especially pertinent now. Conversations – real flesh and blood conversations – are rare these days. Most of my social life occurs on a social media or social networking service. Pixels. Comments. Virtual friends. Some may actually be friends, but I very rarely see them. The people I interact with in this highly controlled and illusory realm of technology seem pretty nice, and I wish I could have actual conversations with them. Because when I do have an actual conversation, the actuality of what is said can be stunning. A lot depends on the people with whom you’re talking. Some people simply won’t allow too much sincerity, too open a dialogue, too personal a conversation. Emotions have become awkward again, the way they were in the 50s.

The real problem is one of fear and intolerance. People, when they’re overwhelmed by too much stimulus, too many new developments in their environment, become highly anxious and unsure of what’s real and what’s not real. They adhere to a consensus no matter how detached from reality it may be because a consensus is comfortable, stable, and preserves the status quo. The status quo is like your favorite armchair, a chair so comfortable that it mollifies you like morphine. Anything that threatens that chair is evil and must be destroyed. Canceled. Quarantined. Killed.

One of the hallmarks of totalitarianism, said Hannah Arendt, is a cynical willingness to believe in propaganda. “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world,” she observed, “the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

Something to think about next time we get together with friends over dinner.