My Dinner with Andre is a 1981 film directed by Louis Malle. It was written by André Gregory and Wallace (‘Wally’) Shawn, who also star in it, playing fictionalized versions of themselves having a discussion at dinner in Café des Artistes in Manhattan, the topics including experimental theatre, the nature of theatre and of life, and Andre’s spiritual experiences.
Just as Andre and Wally are based on the actors who play them, Andre’s experiences as described in the movie are based on the real-life experiences of Gregory from the mid- to late 1970s: his growing misgivings about the theatre, the fear of a trend towards fascism in the US (he and Shawn are Jews), his trip to Poland to work with Jerzy Grotowski on experimental theatre before private audiences, and his years spent with spiritual communities like Findhorn.
The film has received universal acclaim, with a 92% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 25 reviews. Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert praised it highly on Sneak Previews, which kept the film in theaters for a year.
Here is a link to quotes from the film, and here is a link to the full movie.
A fascinating irony about this film, brilliantly made fun of at the end of Waiting for Guffman, with Corky’s “My Dinner with Andre action figures” [!], is that the bulk of the film is just these two men sitting at a table in a restaurant chatting…and yet Andre is discussing these out-of-this-world experiences in remote places like Poland, Tibet, India, the Sahara, and Scotland. Andre is advocating going out there and experiencing real life in all of its mystical ecstasy, hallucinatory madness, and tear-inducing trauma…yet he and Wally are just sitting in a restaurant in New York, chatting the whole time, never leaving the city.
Since both men are playwrights and actors, in real life as well as in the film, we see a blurred distinction between the acting world and the real world, reminding us of Jacques‘s famous speech in As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage…” Andre’s ‘sermon,’ if you will, spoken during this ‘last supper’ with Wally, is that we need to break free of the phoniness, the ‘theatre,’ of our boring routines and experience real life. Andre’s dropping out of the New York theatrical scene to travel the world is thus symbolic of such a break with the numbing routine of ordinary life.
Wally, his dialectical opposite, defends this routine, though. The film begins with him on his way to meet Andre at the restaurant, walking the streets of New York, getting on a graffiti-covered subway, and thinking about all of his day-to-day troubles as a struggling playwright, barely making ends meet. He only reluctantly is going to meet Andre, having not seen his old colleague in years, and having heard dauntingly bizarre stories of what the theatre drop-out has been doing.
Wally lived an easy life as a kid in a rich family, always thinking about art; but now, he’s 36, and only thinking about money. As the pragmatic realist of the two men, Wally is preoccupied with the material issues of life. Andre, having much more money and thus able to travel the world, is more preoccupied with abstract, idealistic things.
Wally would rather his girlfriend, Debbie, cook his dinner than eat with Andre. Instead, she has to be a breadwinner for them, as a waitress, rather than ‘play the role’ of housewife. In the dull routine of his life, the phony existence of his that’s symbolized by his work as a dramatist, he’s so conformist as to have his girlfriend cook for him instead of him cooking for himself.
In his private thoughts, a soliloquy given in voiceover as he’s on the subway, he remembers Andre’s “amazing work…with his company, the Manhattan Project (the actual name of the real André Gregory’s theatrical company). When we consider Andre’s misgivings about the role of theatre in modern life, how he, in his discussion at dinner with Wally, talks about how fake our interactions are with others, how like actors pretending and not living real life, we can see how fitting it is that Andre named his company after the research undertaking that resulted in the first of those very weapons that can wipe out all life on the Earth.
The notion of Andre suddenly dropping out of the theatre, traveling the world, and ‘talking with trees,’ when he never used to want to leave his home and family, suggests to Wally that “something terrible had happened to Andre,” as opposed to what Andre will insist were deep, mystical, enlightening experiences.
Just before entering the restaurant, Wally puts on a tie: all actors must put on their costumes before walking onstage. Given Andre’s problems, Wally wonders if he is supposed to play the role of doctor, of psychiatrist, for his apparently ill former colleague.
It’s interesting that the chosen restaurant is called the Café des Artistes, where two men of the theatre will engage in a theatrical dialogue of their own, with Wally doing an acting job of pretending to be interested in whatever Andre has to say. Wally waits for him to arrive at the bar.
Wally has heard a recent story of Andre being seen sobbing because he’d seen a scene from Autumn Sonata, in which Ingrid Bergman‘s character says, “I could always live in my art, but never in my life.” These words touched Andre so keenly because this has precisely been his problem as a dramatist: his whole life has been only fakery, acting, pretending; it has never been a real life. All the world’s a stage…
Andre arrives, sees Wally, and gives him a warm hug and a big smile. Wally, the actor, puts on his fake smile for Andre, says Andre looks “terrific,” though Andre insists that he feels terrible. (Falsely saying an ailing or profoundly unhappy person looks “terrific,” a phoniness that infuriates Andre, will be dealt with again later.) Fittingly, Wally notes that he’s “really in the theatre” at this moment.
Early on in their conversation, Andre mentions Grotowski, his old theatrical mentor who’d also dropped out of the theatre. Their table is ready, and they can go sit down: the rest of the film, minus Wally’s taxi ride home at the end, is just them sitting at their table chatting, for about an hour and forty minutes out of the total hour and fifty-one minutes.) Kids, get out Corky’s action figures and have some fun!
Since Wally is feeling very nervous about having to socialize with Andre for the whole duration of this dinner, he figures the best way he can get through it all is to ask him questions. He’s sometimes thought of himself as a private investigator, as a detective: once again, Wally is finding himself an actor playing roles instead of just being himself. He still has that fittingly fake smile on his face. They order their meals, Wally hardly understanding the French on the menu, while Andre orders expertly…even though Wally has always known Andre to be quite ascetic in his eating habits. Maybe Andre is being a bit of an actor here, too.
Though at first reluctant to talk about what he’s been doing for the past five years, Andre finally opens up about it. First, he discusses going to Poland to be with Grotowski and a group of Polish actors in a forest there. None of these actors could speak English.
As the leader of a group of people who couldn’t understand a word he was saying, and vice versa, Andre had no frame of reference by which he could communicate with them or organize the improvisational theatrical events. Out in a forest, they were far away from modern civilization and all of the things that Andre had been coming to dislike. The actors would act on impulse, doing anything that came to mind…but they, as improvisors, weren’t trying to embody any kind of character from a play. They were being themselves.
They weren’t speaking from a script. They weren’t pretending to be someone else. They weren’t being fake, or following a plan. They were being real, as natural as their green setting. Andre was seeing real life in action, a breaking-free from the routines of New York.
Andre speaks of Grotowski’s “beehives,” paratheatrical events that involved simple interactive exchanges and unstructured work that Andre was fascinated with. Grotowski made Andre lead a beehive, which made Andre very nervous, since he didn’t know what to do to organize an event with a huge number of Polish strangers. But that was the point: there was to be no organization at all. The group of people ended up singing a beautiful song of St. Francis, a song these people didn’t even know how to sing.
Now, Grotowski’s beehives–in real life, that is–generally weren’t successful as attempts to blur the line between performer and audience, to bring about genuine creative spontaneity; the participants mostly gave stock emotional reactions, causing stereotypical, clichéd performances. Andre’s beehive, however, seems to have been a glorious success with this St. Francis song, sung over and over again.
There were no costumes or makeup for the performance, but it was a performance all the same. The beehive was, as it were, a sublation of the opposites of performance and non-performed, spontaneous, natural action. People were singing the song and dancing an impromptu dance; it built into a group trance, something Andre compares to one of Hitler’s Nuremberg rallies (this being one of a number of references in the film to Naziism), so we see how trance can be heavenly or hellish.
Nonetheless, all of this improvisational work in Poland has been like an enlightening, mystical experience for Andre, a discovery that theatrical performances can still be genuinely felt, as long as they maintain this level of spontaneity. Life, like drama, can be real if unscripted, free of routine.
An example of one of the wonderful experiences he had with the Polish improvisers was seeing two of them fall in love. This, during an improvisation about being on an airplane with a bad motor, and therefore fear among the passengers that they might die. Here, we see the heaven and the hell of the mystical state felt in trance-like improvisation, the fusion of acting with real life.
These two lovers, having left the group to be alone in the forest, understood the real meaning of these unstructured improvisations: it was all about really living.
On the last day of the improvisations in the forest in Poland, the group arranged a christening, a baptism for Andre. It was a simple ceremony, with flowers, candles and torches set up all over a castle in “a miracle of light.” Again, this was a spontaneous act, yet also a ceremony, a fusion of the planned with the impulsive act, a dialectic of theatre and life. A man and a woman played the roles of Andre’s godfather and godmother. He was named Yendrosh, and it really felt like a new name for him; it could be said that Andre felt reborn.
He says that this experience in the forest was the first time in his life that he’d ever felt truly alive. Again, such a mystical experience has both a heavenly and a hellish aspect to it; such spiritual feelings are not a mere sentimental removal of all of one’s pain. In Andre’s feeling of being truly alive, there’s also the frightening realization of the opposite of that state…death. He will later discuss an experience he had during Halloween of almost dying that is the dialectical opposite of this experience in the Polish forest. The mystical feeling of being connected to everything means also being connected to death.
Andre’s next major topic of discussion is The Little Prince, and certain feelings of synchronicity associated with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry‘s book. Andre discusses a trip to the Sahara with a Japanese monk (whom Andre imagines to embody the little prince) to work on a play based on the book. Analogous to Andre’s travels around the world, the little prince also leaves his tiny planet to visit a number of other planets, including Earth, where he meets a pilot who’s crash-landed in the Sahara, far from civilization…rather like the Polish forest. So if Kozan, the Japanese monk, is the little prince, in this context, does this make Andre the pilot?
A recurring criticism in The Little Prince is that of adults; the little prince considers them to be very strange. Andre’s experience in the Polish forest, with the unstructured improvisations, was that it made everyone like children at play again, something he found to be wonderful. The little prince’s nobility is in his childlike state: he’s a prince because he’s little. Andre and the improvisers were truly alive because they were children again.
Other parallels between My Dinner with Andre and The Little Prince can be found, thus further justifying Andre’s discussion of the book in the movie. Both stories involve two males, the one telling the other about his travels to many places, meeting interesting and even strange people. Wally thus is the pilot, and Andre in this context is the little prince. Wally at first dreads having to have dinner with Andre, worrying about his own personal, financial problems; the pilot is at first annoyed with the little prince wanting him to draw a sheep for him, when he urgently needs to repair his plane. Just as the little prince cares for the flower that he’s left behind on his little planet, and is fearful of her dying, so does Andre care about his wife, Chiquita, and his two kids, Nicolas and Marina, and he grieves bitterly over his mother’s death.
One major difference between the two stories, though, is that while in The Little Prince, the two friends meet in a desert, the pilot having a limited supply of drinking water, in My Dinner with Andre, the two friends are eating in a fine restaurant, with Andre ultimately treating Wally. This opposition of famine and feast, however, can be interpreted dialectically, as can the film’s other oppositions: theatre vs life, routine vs spontaneity, ecstasy vs agony, staying in the same place vs going out there into the world.
Andre’s noting of the oft-repeated word “tame” in The Little Prince is also worthy of commentary. The little prince tames his flower, the fox, and by implication, the pilot, making them all his friends. Andre tamed his Polish improvisers, making them all his friends, too. We all need taming, so we can be each other’s friends. In the act of spontaneously experiencing real life in those improvisations, the group of people collectively experiences a mystical, ecstatic oneness, inspiring mutual love.
In any case, nothing productive came from the trip to the Sahara with Kozan, so Andre, still acting on impulse (a habit he no doubt picked up from the Polish improvisations), brought the Japanese monk with him to New York to stay with him and his family. Kozan ended up staying with them for six months, taking over, since Andre, always wanting to travel to places like Tibet and India, wasn’t being much of a father.
It was as though Kozan and Andre were trading places. The monk taught the family about meditation, Asia, and his monastery, but he also began wearing Gucci shoes under his robes, as well as eating beef. Just as Andre had been neglecting his children, Kozan came off as not liking them, either. His taking over was like him being the new father…the implication being that Andre, wanting to go to Tibet, getting into meditation, and having these mystical experiences, was turning into a kind of Buddhist. In these two men we see another instance of the unity of all things, the blurred boundary between self and other.
Andre speaks of a hallucination he had in a Catholic Church on Christmas Eve: he saw a six-foot-eight apparition, half-man, half-bull, with blue skin and violets coming out of its eyelids! It remained for the whole Mass. Andre couldn’t erase the monster’s presence from his mind. With enlightenment also comes madness, paradoxically–that mixture of heaven and hell. And indeed, he did feel some enlightenment with this madness that wouldn’t go away, for Andre felt that the creature was there to comfort him, that even though he wasn’t being productive as a dramatist, all was okay, just a part of the journey. Hang in there, Andre, for the bad luck would soon change to good.
Around when Kozan left, Andre got this odd idea of getting a flag, and he ended up getting one with a Tibetan swastika on it. Though, of course, it was nothing at all like the Nazi swastika, one cannot help making the association, and so when he took the flag home, his wife and daughter found it intolerable to look at. Again, we see in this flag associations of extreme opposites: the ancient, Tibetan meaning of the swastika, a symbol of divinity and spirituality; and the Nazi meaning, linked with virulent racial hatred.
After this, he went to India in the hopes of finding great spiritual enlightenment, but he left the place disappointed, feeling his experiences were no better than those of a tourist. After that, he went to Findhorn in Scotland, and found far better spiritual inspiration among the people there and their plants. He tells Wally of having run in the forest there, in a state “where laughter and tears seem to merge.” He was also having lots of wild hallucinations at the time: once again, enlightenment meets madness, heaven meets hell in the realm of mysticism. Indeed, Andre alludes to William Blake, who wrote The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
In the fall, after these experiences, he had his last wild one, on Long Island. This was the hellish one to contrast with the heavenly one he had in the Polish forest. It was during Halloween. He and the other participants were made to write out their last will and testament. After this, he had to wear a blindfold and run through a field. Then he was taken to a basement and made to get naked. He was so scared, he was thinking about Nazi death camps and secret police.
The participants of this Halloween event took photos of him, naked and blindfolded; he was made to run naked in a forest, still blindfolded, and taken on a stretcher through forests and lowered into the ground. It was one of six graves, each eight feet deep! Wood and dirt were put on him, and a sheet was put over his head, all to make him feel buried alive. He was left in there for about a half-hour, though he didn’t know how long he’d been left there…then he was “resurrected,” as it were.
The blindfold was taken off, and they had him run through fields until he came to “a great circle of fire” with music and wine, “and everyone danced until dawn.” So his first experience in the Polish forest was the ecstatic, nirvana-like one that he wanted in some way to relive as best he could in places like the Sahara, India, Findhorn, and this Halloween event…but this last one was so traumatizing that Andre didn’t want to do these things anymore. Still, in all of it, he was really living.
The extremes of these experiences, going to heaven and back, and later to hell and back, are rather like going all the way along the coiled body of the ouroboros, as I’ve described it and used as a symbol of the dialectical relationship of opposites, something I’ve written about in so many other blog posts. The biting head represents one extreme, and the bitten tail represents the opposite extreme, them both meeting at the bite, of course, while the rest of the serpent’s coiled body symbolizes all the intermediate points on a circular continuum.
When Andre, so disillusioned as he was with the state of the theatre in New York in the mid-1970s, left it to experience the blissful spontaneity of the beehives in the Polish forest, he moved up the serpent’s coiled body from the back half, near the tail, to the biting head. He loved it, like a cocaine high, and he tried to sustain that high, tried to stay as close to the serpent’s biting head (if you’ll indulge me in my mixed metaphor, Dear Reader!) as he could.
It is a reality in life, though, that the initial ecstasy of the ‘religious experience’ will wear off over time, and one will come back down to a middling experience, one around the halfway point between the head and the tail. Still, Andre felt the urge to return to that point of extremity, but he went the other way during the Halloween event…he went to the bitten tail, where a kind of harrowing of hell led back to the biting head, the circle of fire, the wine and the dancing–heaven.
This going all the way around the circular continuum that I’d have the ouroboros symbolize is the essence of what Andre would deem living real life. It isn’t a sentimental place where one never feels pain again…on the contrary, one can feel torturous pain as well as profound joy. All of it, all the same, is experiencing life to the fullest.
Wally, on the other hand, prefers life in the comfortable, safe area in the middle of the coiled body of the ouroboros–not too happy, but not too scary, either. Hence, towards the end of the movie, he vehemently defends his enjoyment of simple pleasures: coffee, an electric blanket to keep himself warm in winter, writing his plays, and being satisfied with just staying in New York.
The extremes that Andre has gone through have made him feel as though he’s guilty of some kind of delusion of grandeur, and thus he’s a terrible person, as bad as someone like Albert Speer, the Nazi architect and Minister of Armaments and War Production. Andre compares himself to the man because he imagines himself, like Speer, to be guilty of narcissistically thinking himself above the normal rules of human conduct, that they don’t apply to him.
Since Andre has seen a lot of death around him over the past several years, he knows that when you die, you do it alone. None of your life’s achievements matter anymore. Dying alone feels like facing judgement before God, as it were; so Andre is feeling guilt over the excesses he’s been experiencing. Were they any less theatre than the plays he’s done? Were those events he participated in any less phony than his plays? The trauma of the live burial, combined with the deaths and hospitalizations in his family (a family he left behind, he abandoned, to travel the world) must have gotten to him.
His mother died, other family members have had medical problems…and he had left these important people in his life in a Buddha-like quest for enlightenment in India, Tibet, etc. Far from attaining his desired spiritual growth, Andre was indulging in some kind of self-absorbed solipsism–if anything, a spiritual degeneration…or so he feels, at least.
In his feeling that he was fooling himself in this spiritual quest, we see another example of the dialectical relationship between good and evil, heaven and hell, saint and (Nazi-like) sinner. He starts complaining about some talkative Norwegian director, telling story after story, and sounding pompous. Yet what has Andre been doing this whole time, if not talking and talking endlessly, telling story after story, while Wally patiently listens? Just as with Kozan, this Norwegian is another double for Andre, another case of the blurred boundary between self and other, further proof of the oneness of everything.
The Norwegian gabbed about his mother constantly, and Andre found him so intolerable that he politely asked his garrulous guest to leave. Recall that, around this time, Andre’s mother died. He wept, since this guest had been a good friend of his for some time. Then after the man left, Andre saw a man on the TV win at some sporting event, “smiling malevolently at his friends,” and Andre judged the guy harshly…then he realized he was projecting his own bad qualities onto him.
Just as he’d projected his own chattiness onto the Norwegian.
At a show on Billie Holliday, Andre was similarly judgmental of some businessmen-types, then again realized he was no better–just projecting his own vices onto them. When Andre’s speaking at this point in his discussion with Wally, his words are all shot out rapid-fire, like bullets from a machine gun. He is in quite an extreme, turbulent emotional state. He hates the theatrical phoniness of the world, yet he feels himself to be no less theatrical or phony!
And Wally, the whole time, is just listening to Andre pouring out his thoughts in an endless torrent, listening as if he was Andre’s psychoanalyst, making the occasional comment or interpretation, trying to figure out just what is troubling him.
Andre, in his highly emotional state, feels the world is getting worse and worse. Few people seem aware of how bad things are. He recently met a number of people who said he looked ‘wonderful’ (i.e., his physical appearance), when he really felt awful; recall that Wally, when he first saw Andre in the restaurant, said he looked “terrific,” yet he’s really been feeling awful.
Only when Andre met a woman, whose aging, beloved aunt was in hospital for a cataract and was crippled from a fall from her poorly-prepared bed (therefore the woman was very upset for her aunt), did he find in her someone who, in her own pain, could clearly see how awful he felt! Only those of us in deep pain, roused from the torpor of our comfort zones, can see “with complete clarity.” The rest of the complacent world cannot, because they’re living in a kind of insane dream world.
Andre’s observations here tie in with what he was talking about before, with the Halloween event, and how I interpreted it above, in terms of my ouroboros symbolism. His having gone to hell and back, from the trauma of the serpent’s bitten tail to the enlightenment of its biting head, is like this woman’s pain for her aunt’s sake giving her the empathic insight to see Andre’s pain for what it really is.
Wally can empathize with Andre, too, for he can understand that those who thought Andre looked “wonderful” couldn’t see the real him–they only saw what they wanted to see, being in their insane dream world. Andre discusses his dying mother in the hospital, and how infuriated he felt with a doctor who saw her and said it was so “wonderful how she’s coming along.” Andre felt she looked as awful as any survivor of Auschwitz or Dachau. Again, this doctor was in a complacent dream world.
This idea of Andre’s, that most people are in some kind of fog, in a trance, a dream world, also ties in with the idea explored above about how life is like theatre, a display of false emotions and scripted words, planned routine, lacking spontaneity and genuine creativity. As Wally is growing more sympathetic with what Andre is saying, we can see Wally going from just politely agreeing with him, acting out a role of his own, waking from his own dream world, to offering some experiences of his own of this kind of inappropriate communication, from friends whose words are ultimately hostile to him.
Social convention, Wally observes, requires one to express oneself indirectly, resulting in awkward, inappropriate word choices. This is the phony theatre of life that Andre has been trying to escape from. In fact, the hostile words of Wally’s friends were in the context of a theatrical performance in which there were serious problems with Wally’s costuming, a cat suit he’d be uncomfortable wearing onstage, making him hear everything wrong. His friends, colleagues in the performance, were pointing these problems out in a taunting way, as if to laugh at him and make him feel humiliated onstage in front of a presumably large audience. Here is an example of how My Dinner with Andre uses theatre as a metaphor for life.
Wally, in his having not yet woken from his own torpor from the societal dream world, hadn’t known what to think about his colleagues’ taunting words. Over the course of his listening to Andre’s recounting of his extreme experiences, though, Wally is beginning to wake up to the kind of world we’re all living in.
Andre and Wally continue to discuss how bizarre people’s topics of conversation can be, such as the death of Mary Jo Kopechne–and laughing about it. This joking about macabre things is a reflection of social alienation and a lack of consciousness…it’s also another example of people performing, in the theatre of life, rather than being themselves. Hence, Grotowski left the theatre, as Andre attempted to.
People, in these public performances, know exactly how they ought to act and present themselves, yet privately, they don’t know who they are or what they should be doing, what Marx called alienation from one’s species essence. We focus on goals and plans, the structure of the performance of the theatre of life, but none of those goals and plans have anything to do with reality. Life becomes habitual, dream-like, and meaningless.
Very rarely do things happen in a spontaneous way anymore, since if they did, people would be too disoriented by the shock to deal with it, as happened when Brando rejected his Godfather Oscar, having Sacheen Littlefeather decline it on his behalf as a protest against Hollywood’s negative portrayal of Native Americans. Andre insists that if we’re always living by habit, those planned performances in the theatre of life, then we’re not really living.
In Sanskrit, he says, the root of their verb for “to be” is the same as “to grow,” or “to make grow.” To exist in a meaningful sense, we must grow and help other people and things grow.
Andre then discusses a mathematician associated with Findhorn who refused to have any kind of imaginary or dream life, yet who saw, in the gardens of Edinburgh, a faun! A man who insisted on having only a direct perception of reality, apparently saw a mythological creature! Again, the boundary between fantasy and reality has been blurred. All is one. The extreme insistence on experiencing only direct reality, the serpent’s biting head, can lead to the experience of fantasy, the bitten tail.
We’re so stuck in our states of habit that we lose consciousness of what we’re doing or saying, ignoring such things as the taste of our food or the macabre things we laugh about, and thus we enter that dream world that Andre dreads so much. Wally, enjoying the comfort of his electric blanket or the taste of the food he’s eating in the restaurant, has far less of such a dread.
Andre, not liking such technological advances as electric blankets, feels that the comforts provided by these things lull us into a dangerous comfort that blinds us to direct perception of reality. When, lacking the electric blanket, you feel the discomfort of the cold of winter, not only are you aware of your own discomfort, you’re also aware of the discomfort of your cold partner lying beside you, and you feel compassion for him or her. Schopenhauer noted how the hell of suffering leads to the heaven of compassionate love, as I observed here.
Andre complains about how we treat one another in our semi-conscious state, and Wally agrees that this is a problem. Some of this alienation is due to class differences, and some of it, as Wally observes, is based on being focused only on our experiences in our own part of the world, ignoring what’s outside of it.
Though Wally admits that he ignores large parts of the world, like Africa, which are not relevant to his immediate place in it, he enjoys writing plays that he feels connect him with some sense of reality. He agrees with Andre that the theatre (a metaphor for real life, remember) is in terrible shape, yet at least a few years ago, people acknowledged what bad shape it was in. Now, it’s so bad that people can’t even see what’s wrong with it.
Andre, too, understands that the theatre, if done well, can bring the audience face to face with reality. He tells Wally about a production he did of The Bacchae when, at the point of the dismemberment of Pentheus, he’d wanted to have a head…a real one…passed around the audience. The actress playing Agave, for obvious reasons, refused to do this. Andre wants a kind of theatre that shocks people out of their dream-state, but contemporary theatre lulls people further to sleep by just presenting things all too close to everyday life, so close to it that people don’t notice what’s wrong.
Still, Wally, who is becoming more and more engaged in the conversation, insists that one shouldn’t need to escape all the way to Mount Everest to experience the fullness of life. Surely, one can experience that fullness just from a trip to the local cigar store, provided one’s consciousness is sufficiently sharpened. Surely one can still write meaningful, realistic plays today, too! All of reality, human experience, is uniform on a deeper, mystical level…all is one, so where one experiences it is irrelevant.
Andre agrees with Wally’s argument in principle, but most people are blind to this uniformity of truth. Most cannot see that nirvana and samsara are the same, as the Mahayana Buddhists see these opposite states of being. This blindness of most people has become more and more serious in recent years, as Andre has come to understand.
Now, Andre comes to an extremely important point, perhaps the most important one of the entire film. This inability of most people to see the nirvana in samsara, the hidden Mount Everest, so to speak, inside the ordinary cigar store, comes from a boredom, an apathy to life that in turn comes from a self-perpetuating kind of brainwashing.
…and with this brainwashing, things start to get scary.
This self-induced brainwashing, this conditioning not to care about what’s going on around us, was started “by a world totalitarian government based on money.” Now, I suspect that most people who hear Andre’s words at this point focus on “world totalitarian government” (which it surely is), but pay far less attention to “based on money” (a.k.a. capitalism).
So many people in recent years have been lulled into believing in the popular NWO conspiracy theory, which tends to be a far-right-wing conspiracy theory (though admittedly, some leftists believe in a version of it). They imagine that its centre of evil is in the government-as-such, rather than in the love of money, and the power that comes from owning billions of US dollars.
The far-right ideologues that believe in the coming totalitarian ‘One-World-Government’ also think it is a kind of socialism, since, apparently socialism is ‘anything a government does,’ rather than how I explained it here and here. But Andre isn’t talking about a left-wing world government; he’s talking about fascism (recall all of his references to Naziism in the movie). Our current world government is in Washington, DC, NATO is an extension of it, and American military bases can be found all over the world.
The totalitarianism we need to fear isn’t communism; it’s capitalist imperialism, which has plundered the Third World for resources in a big way since at least the years of the Scramble for Africa. Meanwhile, those of us living in the imperial core, like Wally, have wandered about apathetic to the problem, because if we did wake up to it, and began to care, the powers-that-be would feel threatened. Those powers have an investment in keeping us all asleep.
Andre tells Wally of a man who no longer reads newspapers or watches TV, to escape the brainwashing. He speaks of another, a man from Findhorn in his eighties who’s trying to save the trees, who goes everywhere with a backpack because he could end up anywhere tomorrow. This old man told Andre that New Yorkers never leave the city, even if they say they really want to. He told Andre that the reason for this staying in New York is because they’re psychologically imprisoned there; the Big Apple has become a kind of concentration camp that the inmates have built for themselves. Their pride in what they’ve built (symbolic of nationalism?) keeps them imprisoned in the city.
Andre says that he and Chiquita have had the same, growing fear that they need to get out of this Auschwitz that they’re living in…except that every city, in every country around the world, is growing into its own Auschwitz. There’s nowhere to escape to anymore. In this predicament, we see the sublation of the dialectic of Andre’s wanderlust and globetrotting on the one hand, and Wally’s preference to stay in New York on the other, all encapsulated in a film the bulk of which is just two men chatting at a dinner table, going nowhere else.
Andre then states his belief that the 1960s were the last decade “of the human being, before he was extinguished.” For him, this moment being 1981, when the movie was made, is the beginning of “the rest of the future, that from now on, they [the people, that is] will simply be all these robots walking around, feeling nothing, thinking nothing, and there’ll be nothing left almost to remind them that there once was a species called a human being, with feelings and thoughts…”
It’s significant that this beginning of “the rest of the future,” especially now, understood by us in hindsight, should be the early 1980s, with the beginning of the ‘Reagan Revolution.’ Recall that this “world totalitarian government” is “based on money,” that is, it’s a capitalist government…and Reagan and Thatcher were the ones who inaugurated the neoliberal, “free market” version of capitalism in the 1980s.
As I’ve argued many times, right-wing libertarian ‘small government’ is a con game, which, by cutting taxes for the rich and deregulating businesses so capitalists can maximize profits, allows the wealthy to become super-wealthy and thus buy all the political parties in order to control them better. When the common people try to resist, this capitalist government becomes more authoritarian…fascist, even.
Back in the 1960s, political leftism was still a formidable force, pushing liberals to the left, if only relatively so. Now, after all the ill effects of Reaganite neoliberalism have set in, liberals are so far to the right, without even realizing it, that they’re banging the war drums against Russia and supporting Ukrainian Nazis!
Technology has numbed us with smartphones, tablets, and social media to the point where we scroll and scroll while ignoring those sitting next to us. Andre is being prophetic about these social ills we now have, and his fears of a resurgence of fascism, way back in the 1980s, when the ideology was still latent, were also foretold by Frank Zappa, who was scoffed at for it…and yet what Reagan began has become much more apparent in the 2020s, with such things as the overturning of Roe vs Wade and the authoritarian measures used to deal with the pandemic.
Now, Andre has some hope that we can “preserve the light” through these new dark ages. Pockets of resistance are popping up here and there with organizations like Findhorn, the kind of thing Andre was trying to do with his spontaneous beehives. He wants a new language, one of the heart, as there was in the Polish forest, where language wasn’t needed. He wants us all to have a “sense of being united to all things,” because all is one.
After hearing all these wacky things that Andre has been going on and on about, Wally offers his thoughts about it all. As Andre’s dialectical opposite, Wally isn’t concerned with deep, spiritual issues or political conspiracies; he’s just trying to survive. He is living on the plain, ordinary, surface level of material existence.
Accordingly, Wally derives happiness from simple things: being with his girlfriend, Debbie, drinking coffee, and reading Charleton Heston’s autobiography. He gains intellectual satisfaction from writing plays and reading those of other playwrights, as well as reading reviews of those plays. Simple stuff.
He has a notebook with lists of errands and everyday responsibilities–his routine to which he adheres, all antithetical stuff to Andre’s hyper-spontaneous philosophy of life. Wally can’t imagine there being anything more than his simple, hum-drum life. Why can’t we just be happy with what we have? he wonders.
The dialectical opposition between Andre and Wally is that the former is hovering–to use my ouroboros symbolism again–around where the serpent is biting its tail, at the extremes, while the latter is in the moderate middle of the serpent’s coiled body. Ironically, both Andre and Wally are, each in his own way, experiencing a verson of both opposites together: Andre has had heaven and hell thrust in his face in a vivid, shocking way, while Wally has had both in the sense of being in the middle of them, a dull experience of half of the one and half of the other. This is the unity of their opposition to each other, further proof that all is one.
Wally also rejects Andre’s synchronicity, affirming modern science over a belief in heavenly-ordained coincidences. Wally can understand the temptation to believe in synchronicity, but his rational mind cannot accept a belief in omens or portents of the future.
Now, Andre and Wally don’t completely disagree: Andre acknowledges that total belief in omens can be abused in order to avoid responsibility for one’s own actions. The occasional agreement of dialectical opposites is their sublation, a manifestation of their unity in opposition. Such unity is a further example of how My Dinner with Andre uses dialectical opposites to show how all is one.
Andre acknowledges that the kind of spirituality he’s been exploring can grow authoritarian, even fascistic; but science, too, if held in too high an esteem, can also be perceived as a kind of “magical force” capable of solving anything. He sees a destructiveness in science that people are reacting against.
The two men agree that both religious feeling and a credulous acceptance of science, taken to excesses, can be equally bad for humanity. So again, we see the dialectical opposites in Andre and Wally being sublated.
Wally observes that the whole purpose of Andre’s workshops was to strip away all purposefulness in order to experience “pure being,” which seems Zen-like. Not doing any particular thing, a state of ‘no-thing-ness.’ Wally objects to such a project, feeling instead that one shouldn’t have moments of not trying to do anything. It’s in our basic human nature to have purpose, he argues.
Andre notes that the idea of doing nothing, of just being, seems to frighten Wally, to make him nervous, which Wally deems a perfectly understandable emotion to have in such a situation. Andre considers it equally absurd, and deadening, to find oneself always needing to have something to do, a neurotic need that, incidentally, has only grown exponentially worse in our neoliberal era.
One should only do things if one really feels the passion to do them; but if one does things mechanically, as Andre says, one isn’t really living. One is just acting out roles in the phony theatre of life. In relationships, in marriage, this can be a problem, too; we often only play the roles of partner, husband, wife…the love is gone.
An irony about Andre’s own relationship with his wife and kids, after a day of being annoyed with them, was that a contemplation of what it would be like to leave them all, to abandon them, led to the realization that he all the more wanted to stay with them. However one chooses to do it, by going to the Sahara or just staying at home, Andre insists that we must, at some point in our lives, “cut out the noise,” stop performing, and listen to what’s inside ourselves, the silence.
Wally admits to disliking “those quiet moments”: they scare him. Perhaps they’re like doing Shadow Work, “the fear of unconscious impulses.” He’d feel exposed and vulnerable to failure. Andre can understand Wally’s fears: feeling emotions as intensely as Andre’s been feeling them can be overwhelming…but one can also be filled with overjoyed enthusiasm, a true lust for life.
All the patrons except Andre and Wally have left. The restaurant is about to close. Andre pays for the whole meal, so Wally can treat himself to a cab ride home.
The first of Satie‘s Trois Gymnopédies is heard on the piano. It’s a fitting piece of music to end the movie with, firstly because the title means “three nude dances,” symbolic of how Andre threw himself into the world ‘naked,’ as it were, vulnerable and unprotected from the abrasiveness of his surroundings; secondly, because the opening back-and-forth of the G-major 7th and D-major 7th chords suggests a symbolism of that unity-in-opposition as personified in Andre and Wally.
As Wally’s going home in the cab, he looks out the window and remembers all the places he’s been to at some point in his life. He’s feeling a mystical union with New York. Andre’s words have touched him. He knows that all is one.
…and he didn’t even need to leave the city to realize that unity.
Infinite Ocean 
