My Dinner with Andre (1981) was a truly prescient film and for anyone [View All]

who hasn't seen it its worth watching.

The film is set in a restaurant, where a struggling playwright, Wallace Shawn and a reclusive director,Andre Gregory have a long conversation about a very strange and lengthy spiritual quest Andre undertook.

Wallace, a pragmatic man is baffled but nevertheless intrigued with Andre who he hasn't seen in years and struggles to grasp Andre's many insights one of which is his belief that technology is "breaking down human interaction, to the point where humans have become zombies living in a psychotic dream world, pretending that everything is just fine."

Fast forward to 2005. Does anyone else think that 'zombies living in a psychotic dream world, pretending that everything is just fine" describes freepers to a tee?

What stayed with me since I first saw it in 1981 and which I believe to be so prescient was a soliloquy about a new dark age Andre believed was settling in America, where only tiny isolated pockets of people would keep knowledge alive. Furthermore, Wallace, a regular kind of guy can't fathom what Andre is getting at, in his mind everything is fairly okay because he has a girlfriend and an apartment.

"Andre relates his opinion that New York City (and, we suspect, urban America) has become the new model of concentration camp, one in which the prisoners are also the architects and the wardens, a camp from which liberation is almost impossible because it is not truly desired.

Wally agrees with Andre up to a point, but he simply cannot agree that the human condition is as bad off as all that. Wally is more content with the simple things in life: a cup of coffee in the morning, his girlfriend’s company, his apartment, a newspaper.

Wally is relatively content with what he has. His desires are simple, yes, but they are met. Perhaps this is the slavish blindness that Andre suggests it is, or perhaps it can be a truth unto itself. Content can lead to blindness, yet the search for sight may leave you blind."

“A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude.”

-Aldus Huxley, Brave New World


http://www.filmchaw.com/films/mydinnerwithandre.htm