BEING THERE

USA1979(130 min)

Based on Jerzy Kosinkski’s 1971 Polish novella, this satiric film directed by Hal Ashby centers on a middle-aged, simple-minded gardener named Chance (Peter Sellers), who has spent his entire life working in the garden of a wealthy man in Washington, D.C. Having had no contact with the outside world, his only source of information is television. Thus, like an individual with autism who is capable of echolalia (repeating words or phrases he’s heard), he appears to be speaking metaphorically even though he cannot generate new original sentences. When his boss (“the old Man”) dies, Chance is kicked out of the house and through a series of coincidences and misunderstandings ultimately becomes a successful political figure (now called Chauncey Gardiner) on whom others project their own meanings and desires. Although he is a symbolic innocent designed to expose the limitations of the corrupt culture he inhabits, in retrospect his behavior evokes several connections with autism, which is also a condition onto which neurotypicals frequently project, as Anupama Iyer puts it, their own “devices and desires.” Yet neither autism nor any other cognitive disorder is mentioned in the film and Chance’s behavior (like that of Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener and Varda’s female Vagabond) is purposely not explained. The problem with such symbolic representation is that it ignores the lived experience of the person with mental limitations and treats him only as an exotic Other, who tells us more about ourselves than about him. While this is an ideal dynamic for social satire, it provides little insight into autism or any other mental disorder.

Marsha Kinder