Rather than review this movie, one of my all-time favorites, I’d like to offer a personal reminiscence. A year or so before it came out, I was a grad student at Cornell. Though I was studying German, the department decided – quite rightly – that I needed to improve my French, so I spent the summer of 1977 or ’78 at CAVILAM, an audio-visual language school located in Vichy.
The town had no university, so there were no local students my age to interact with. The result was that I spent a lot of time outside of class with one of my fellow CAVILAM students, Wolfgang Lehmann, the opera-loving culture correspondent for Berlin’s Morgenpost. Upon first making his acquaintance, I raised an eyebrow and said, “The Morgenpost?!” The unstated implication being: You work for the notorious Axel Cäsar Springer, the West German Rupert Murdoch? He hastened to assure me that he did not even subscribe to his own paper, but instead read the much more respectable Tagesspiegel. After that we spent a lot of time together. When the summer was over and I returned to Cornell, I joked that while CAVILAM may have improved my French somewhat, it had definitely done wonders for my German, and that was due to Wolfgang.
Aside from its famous mineral water, Vichy is chiefly known for its casinos. Since I have never been interested in gambling, and as noted there were no students around, the only conversations I had with local people took place when I went into the shops, for example the ones selling local pyrite, better known as fool’s gold. I also picked up a simple gold-colored pen knife, a single blade and fold-out corkscrew, the image of a lanky French sailor emblazoned the side, lost many years ago now, and still lamented.
My first teacher at CAVILAM was Madame Driencourt, and I shall always remember her for her poise, elegance, and remarkable beauty. One day, as our month-long course was drawing to an end, Mme. took me aside and invited me to her home for tea on the weekend. When I mentioned this later to Wolfgang, he exclaimed, “Do you appreciate what an honor this is? French teachers almost never invite their students home. It’s not like in the US, where professors give parties and have them over.”
When I arrived at her house in Clermont-Ferrand, I was slightly surprised to find that her husband was absent – he was off at work that weekend. I was more surprised to see that she had also invited a woman friend of hers, a neighbor. As my French at this point was still rudimentary, Madame and her friend ended up conversing with each other while I sipped my tea and listened. Since I could not fully follow the conversation, much less contribute, for the most part I sat in silence.
Only once did I pipe up, when the talk turned to belles lettres. In a rather offhand manner, Madame offered the startling if not absurd opinion, as it seemed to me, that France had no great names in literature. Immediately I interjected, “Wait, how can you say this – what about Corneille, Racine, Molière? Are these not great names?” They also happened to be the first three names that popped into my head. Madame and her friend turned and stared at me in astonishment, mouths open. It was virtually the only contribution I made to the conversation that afternoon, but its effect had been remarkable.
Eventually Madame’s husband showed up and kindly drove me to the train station so I could make my connection back to Vichy. There in my room, I began to wonder why my rather innocuous remark had led to raised eyebrows. I dawned on me that I may not have fully understood what Madame and her friend had been saying; after all, how could normally patriotic French citizens possibly believe that their country lacked great literary names? So I got out my pocket French-English dictionary and started to look up some words. Soon I had more than an inkling that I had indeed failed to grasp exactly what they had been saying.
Instead of making the (highly contentious) proposition that there were few great names in French literature, it seems they had been making a somewhat different point: that when you consider the great names in French literature, few of them were also words. Maybe an example will make this clear. In English we have proper names such as Wright and Smith, which obviously derive from occupations, a (wheel- or ship-)wright, and a (black-)smith. So what Madame and her friend were probably saying was that there were few equivalent names like Wright and Smith among great French authors. In sum, what they were saying might be debatable, but far from absurd.
But that still did not explain their astonished looks. So I consulted my dictionary again, and lo and behold, there they all were: “corneille” is French for “crow,” “racine” means “root,” and “molière” is “miller.” Who knew? Certainly not I. Neither Madame nor her friend, based on what they had heard of my French up to that point, had any reason to suspect that I was familiar with this vocabulary. Hence their astonishment.
In other words, purely by chance, I had happened on three French names that were also common words, thus making an effective point – one that I wouldn’t have made had I happened to think of Sartre, for example. And it had all happened quite inadvertently, since as I say I had barely been able to follow the conversation up until then. Though as clueless as Parsifal, I was much luckier.
I think the parallels to “Being There” should be obvious. Jerzy Kosinski was born in Poland in 1933, and only came to America in his mid-twenties. English was for him a second language. One mistake that people who learn any foreign typically make is to take literally statements meant metaphorically, or to misinterpret colloquial expressions.
“Being There” is full of such examples. On the morning after the accident to his leg, when Chance walks out the front door of the Rand estate, the attendant asks him, “Did you want a car?” His response, “Yes, I would like a car!” But a few moments later, when one pulls up, he has no interest in getting in it. The attendant was asking, in effect, “Would you like me to order a car for you so you can go somewhere?” Chance’s answer to this question would likely have been “No, thank you.” But the question could also be interpreted to mean, “Would you like to own a car?” and Chance’s answer to that is an enthusiastic “Yes, I would.”
Earlier, when asked if he wanted to make a claim against the estate of Mr. Jennings, Chance told the lawyer, Thomas Franklin, “I have no claim.” Later he has a similar exchange with Dr. Allenby, who asked if he was planning on making any sort of claim against the Rands. Chance: “There’s no need for a claim – the garden is a healthy one.” The doctor ignores the non sequitur because he is relieved to hear that their guest is not thinking of filing suit over his injury. But when talking with both Franklin and Allenby, what Chance was really revealing was his ignorance of what the word “claim” means or implies.
A native speaker of English would automatically understand the true thrust of questions like “Did you want a car?” and “Are you thinking of filing a claim?” But someone learning English as a foreign tongue could well misunderstand them. Who knows, maybe something similar happened to Kosinski when he first came to America. Maybe he, too, misunderstood what people were talking about and accidentally said something that happened to be à propos. As I myself once did, quite by chance.
Kosinski’s stroke of genius was to transfer this failure to comprehend from a non-native to a native speaker of English, from himself to his hero, rendering it plausible by providing him a sheltered background, making him a latter-day Rip van Winkle whose limited connection to the modern world has been mainly via television.
Update 1: I had always thought the name “Rand” merely coincidental, but from reading an article on Ayn Rand in the LRB (published back on December 1, 2005), I realize there are some links between Benjamin and Ayn. Both looked down on little people. Both had no use for religion. Benjamin’s burial site features the eye-on-the-pyramid motif from the dollar bill. After Ayn Rand died (lung cancer), a “six-foot-high floral dollar sign was erected by her open coffin in the funeral home.”
Update 2: When it comes to the phenomenon of accidentally making sense, something similar happens in “A Fish Called Wanda.” Otto (Kevin Kline) is unprepared to answer questions from Wendy (John Cleese’s wife). When he tries to introduce himself, it comes out something like “Manfredinsinjin” – a name he makes up while saying it, though his imagination pretty much fails him after “Manfred-.” The real kicker comes later in the scene, when Wendy perfectly remembers this nonsensical name and calls him, “Mr. Manfredin St. John,” according to the subtitles. Clearly, the people hired to write them were from the UK, where “St. John” is pronounced something like “Sin Jin.” Otto, like most Americans, has no idea that it’s pronounced any way other than written, “Saint John.” In other words, Otto spouts gibberish which just happens to make sense to British ears.
Update 3: In her childhood (1939), critic Janet Malcolm was taken by her parents out of Czechoslovakia to America, where she attended grade school. There, she heard a teacher say, “Goodbye, children,” at the end of the lesson. Not knowing the noun “children,” Janet Malcolm assumed it was a name, and hoped that someday the teacher would acknowledge her existence to by saying, “Goodbye, Janet.” Even such a simple word as “children” (or “claim”) can cause confusion in the mind of someone new to the language.
Update 4: Wealth confers an aura – until one looks closely. The insipidness of the insights of the super-rich was brilliantly lampooned near the end of this movie, when the president reads aloud from the vapid musings of Benjamin Rand.
“I have no use for those on welfare, no patience whatsoever… but if I am to be honest with myself, I must admit that they have no use for me, either.”
“No accountant can audit life in our favor.”
Reviewing this reminded me of the writings of Bill Ackman, the mogul of the moment who thinks that because heʼs rich that makes him a philosopher. Confusing business acumen with wisdom, he assumes his bank account validates his brilliance. Lord save us from the billionaire wise men! Many of these sages have broken up their families, taken trophy wives, and become estranged from their kids. All of them suffer from an over-abundance of life lessons they feel they must impart.
See also my list of favorite films, elsewhere at this site.
© Hamilton Beck
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