July 22, 2006

My Dinner With Andre (1981)

directed by Louis Malle
written by Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn

One problem with the Netflix approach to movie-watching is that everything is part of a grand checklist, which can be deadening. In thinking back over my response to this movie it seems like the greater part of it was “I’m finally seeing My Dinner With Andre!” and that’s no good. I remember trying to write up a review of Die Hard a few years ago and realizing that my sense of checklistic satisfaction at finally having seen Die Hard completely overwhelmed anything I might have thought about the actual stupid movie.

That’s not to say that My Dinner With Andre doesn’t have anything more to offer than Die Hard; far from it. But my received knowledge about what goes on in My Dinner With Andre was pretty accurate; the movie was, for me, just the fleshing-out of the potential, secondhand My Dinner With Andre that I had already had outlined for me by pop cultural reference and, I think, by my dad telling me about the movie. So it didn’t have a lot of punch to it. But I’m certainly glad I saw it. Not only because now I’ve seen it, but because of the principle that makes the movie work in the first place: being present while a conversation plays out is intellectually engaging in a way that is not lessened by the conversation’s being on film – or, in my case, by one’s already knowing roughly what the conversation is about.

One thing that did surprise me was how simple the scripting was. There was no particular attempt to simulate the complicated back-and-forth of a real conversation; the two characters each offer their thoughts in a fairly stylized, formalized alternation. Maybe that’s how some people conduct conversations, or maybe the hocket I’m used to is more of a contemporary phenomenon than I imagine. I know it’s pretentious to say “hocket” but I’m proud of having thought of it, and if it’s new to you, then you just learned a cool word. But… right, that seems unlikely. People used to interrupt each other just as much as we do now, didn’t they? It’s so hard to be confident about a thing like that when one’s impression of the past is almost exclusively formed from works of fiction, which have always been, and for the most part continue to be, markedly unrealistic in their depiction of actual human speech.

And this was fiction too, so I ought not have be surprised. But I was a little surprised, since it was a formal experiment about the experience of intellectual engagement and exchange that arises from conversation; you might think that would be dependent on the rhythms of “real” conversation. But it still worked, just in a slightly broader, more theater-based way. Ultimately, this captured two major things about conversations: the way they can suggest a wider interrelatedness of everything under discussion by assimilating digressions and reactions, and the way that they are fundamentally driven by the confrontation between two different points of view. But the formal side of the experiment – the “it’s just this conversation” factor – didn’t seem to have been worried over very much. It was left up to the viewer to think about that aspect of it; the movie was neither coyly pointed or grittily “real” about it. In fact there’s a strange quasi-magical gesture at the end where the restaurant has mysteriously emptied around them without their noticing. It was hard for me to figure out how that sort of thing fitted into the “here’s a conversation we had” package. Again, more of a theatrical than filmic approach to the question of a dinner conversation. So that stuff surprised me.

Another thing that surprised me about the movie, slightly, was how fast-and-cheap-looking it was. A lot of badly-matched lighting and such.

As for the content: the movie could work just as well, or better, with fewer of Andre’s stories and a little more interchange of ideas; one’s sense of involvement rises considerably once they are trying to express something to one another, whereas most of what Andre says, at least in the first section, is mere storytelling. If you are like me (or like Wallace Shawn, or like almost anything other than Andre Gregory as here depicted) and not initially inclined to find the details of these stories specifically compelling, this section clearly goes on several stories longer than it needs to get “the gist” across.

As I’m writing this I’m thinking about one of my problems with theater. It seems like the attitude motivating a lot of what happens on the stage is “people are interesting because they’re people, they go deep and even the insignificant things they say resonate if you are listening closely,” but then the people to whom we are meant to bring this attention are fake people who only go as deep as they’ve been programmed to go. It’s a question of finitude vs. infinitude, one that, you’ll pardon me, I relate to the problem of contemporary video-games. I can’t play these new games, these truly vast games where the selling point is something like, ahem, “you could explore the game-world for hours and hours and not even encounter the main quest” – and I can’t play them because this is a gogglingly enormous finitude, not a real infinitude, and being aware of that, I will be subconsciously aware that a partial exploration of what its creators have to offer is incomplete. The idea of a vast offering is meant to appeal to the desire for an inexhaustible entertainment, but players are unshakeably aware, deep down, that they are still within the realm of exhaustibility. Reading some Borgesian book with no end would be an incredibly different experience from reading a book that advertizes itself as “so long that you’ll probably never finish it!” Of course we’d still want to try to finish it.

Finitude is a crucial feature of our notion of an artwork because it allows one to identify one’s experience as having been of that artwork and not of something else, or of only a part of that artwork. If artworks could not be closely correlated with the experiences they elicit, those experiences could not be clearly said to be of those artworks and so would be difficult to distinguish from experiences of real-life stimuli. If art is valuable because it is created, because it is filtered through human consciousness – that is to say, if a painting of a sunset is not necessarily just a poor subsitute for a sunset – a great part of what makes it appreciable as such is that it is bounded. Photography, which borrows its substance as directly as possible from the real, non-art world, is knowable as art because it is bounded.

I seem to be wandering toward what ought to be the long-delayed follow-up to this old posting. I guess I’m just going to go there now under the unrelated heading of My Dinner With Andre. Most video games – any formalized interactive make-believe, but video games are the best example – are ostensibly mimetic*. That is, they portray people doing things, and our interaction consists of variously influencing those people or things. But that mimetic veneer is so thin that I would say it’s irrelevant to our experience. I mean, a plumber who punches bricks, kicks turtles, and eats mushrooms and flowers? Obviously that’s all garbage. The fact that “abstract” games like Tetris feel more or less like interchangable kin with “mimetic” games like Super Mario Whatever makes clear (to me) that a player is interacting directly with the mechanics and disregarding the incoherent stab at mimesis. No man is Pac-Man. I would argue that even in story-oriented games – adventures and role-playing games and whatever – the player is always directly aware of the underlying engine. How many objects can you carry at once, and how many moves before the monster wakes up? These things feel like variables, not life. If there is a mimetic element, it is conjoined with these mechanics and offers a place for another part of the mind to vacation while the game is played, but it is distinct.

This is all to say that playing a video game is unlike being in the situation depicted.** An infinite video game, therefore, is as fanciful and undesirable as an infinite painting. After a while you feel disoriented by this monstrous painting and just want out. (Unlike life, one hopes.) An enormous painting, however, can impress by its hugeness. When I read À la recherche du temps perdu, I told people that I had come to terms with its enormity by just thinking of it as infinite and taking it in small doses as it pleased me. But obviously I was still aware of its finitude; otherwise I might well simply have stopped. Dealing with infinity is like dealing with a habit, not with an object. Soap operas are infinite, and it is the ritual event of watching, rather than the cumulative content, that drives their viewership. The cumulative content of a soap opera over any large span of time is generally contradictory and inassimilable.

I am thinking of all sorts of counter-examples and complications as I try to straighten this out. An amusement park is exhaustible (“let’s go on every ride!”), yet the actual experience had there is so personal and intermingled with reality that the offering feels unbounded. A game like Pac-Man is known to be infinite, but is practically (and intentionally) bounded by the player’s capacity. Still, a player who is skilled enough to play infinitely will only play toward the unknown but assuredly finite endpoint of a high score or a world record or whatever; actual infinite play has no appeal whatsoever. Life is bounded by death but savoring real-life experience doesn’t feel informed by that finitude except under morbid or pointedly philosophical conditions; real-life, despite its infamous finitude, is the “infinite” experience to which I am contrasting artistic experience. But perhaps that illusion of infinite life (and the resulting sense that art is distinguished from life by its finitude) is specific to this era, or this culture, or my segment of the population defined in some other terms.

Well, enough. To bring it back to where it started – for one reason or another, despite all possible examples to the contrary, I feel convinced, at this point in time, that: life offers infinity; art doesn’t. When art purports to have enriched itself by incorporating the infinite, it seems to me confused. The only way art can truly incorporate the infinite is by leading us back to life itself rather than by encapsulating it. A huge video game is never going to lead back to real life – it’s a video game! – so in this sense it is bounded. Any suggestion that infinity lives within those bounds is either false and disregardable, in which case we have a game that begs to be exhausted but makes unthinkable demands on our time (check!), or else we have an infinity that is trivial and to be avoided as a habit, as with soap operas. In theater, there are several roads by which the art might lead us back to life in a profitable way, and thereby to inexhaustible potential significance, but these must be out-roads. A character in a play who says seven lines is only seven lines deep. A person in life who says those seven lines has infinite potential significance. For a play to benefit from that infinitude, it must resign itself to merely pointing toward that significance rather than containing it. The limited clay of a play can be molded into either a decorative shape, a very shallow bowl, or an arrow pointing toward the bottomless bowl of life. The shallow bowl, which purports to put a premium on depth, tends to seem pretentious and wasteful compared to the arrow.

Oh good lord, do I really think that? Obviously not. I’ve tangled myself terribly here. Plus this really doesn’t apply to My Dinner With Andre, where the “out-roads” back to real life were entirely conscientious and obviously the point. Except for when his stories went on too long. Okay. I think that was what I wanted to say. I should have saved all this video game crap for another time after all. Someone please help me end this mess.

Oh look, it’s over! Thanks for your help with that.

* I’m using it!
** A good rebuttal to this would be that, actually, a wide variety of games are very much like being in the situation depicted – flight simulators, first-person war games, and so forth. Good point. Nonetheless the point holds that the experience of playing these games is entirely distinct from living; flight simulator-ers might hope not to “crash” the “plane,” but the fact of interaction has not confused them into actual fear, the way a dream would. They are still participating in artifice. Furthermore, the screen may resemble a cockpit and the sorts of choices a player must make might be analogous to those made by a pilot, but the player still knows that this is so only because it has been programmed this way. For example, a flight simulator might be described as “totally realistic except for the trees, which you can fly right through” – surely the player does not think of these mysterious trees as being of some other “type” from the rest of the simulation. If things are comparable to life, it is because of the talent of the artist, and everyone is always aware of this. There’s no trompe l’oeil in video games, just as there’s no trompe l’oeil in life.

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