Here’s one more from yesterday. Thing about infrared photography that I like is that it
works best when the sun is high, which is the opposite of ‘regular’ photography. It also gives interesting skies, which I’m very much into. Since the atmosphere does not absorb infrared, skies will usually come out black. (Notice how, towards the horizon, the sky gets lighter, indicating thicker air, which absorbs more infrared. I think this is how it works.)
Clouds are great too, as I hope you will eventually see. This and yesterday’s were just test shots but they turned out viewable.
At the very end, Chance obliviously walks on water at the funeral of one of Elite.
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This keeps happening: Someone goes on and on about a narrative (usually a movie) and is not able to see what’s right in front of him/her. Recall this happened with Bug and with Derren Brown’s ‘Apocalypse’ (TV doesn’t get to be italicized in my world) and… I forget but there are others.
And yesterday I stumbled across a detailed analysis of one of my favorite films, Being There and it happened again. (See it free here.) This channel zeroed in on the ending, just the ending, and ran on for half an hour giving different theories on what the ending means and somehow managed to miss the most obvious point (sledgehammered through visual symbolism). You have to have seen the movie to really get what I’m saying, but I’ll add some grabs to make my point. Anyway, here’s the comment I left, which so far has gone unanswered. Yes, it’s early yet but I’d bet the guy is too steeped in denial (as with Bug) to deal with it.
Just before the walk on water scene, the Elite pallbearers decide that Chance would make a ‘good’ next president. Re this image: Gimme a break! How could a film analyst miss this?
On the surface level: Chance is unique in the history of (successful) fiction protagonists. How? Nothing bad ever happens to him (once the story is launched). You cannot get away with this in storytelling, yet JK/Ashby do just that. So: Given life is a state of mind, nothing bad is going to happen, like getting his feet wet.
At a political get-together, Ashby works in the usual checkerboard tile floor.
Plus: Chance’s ‘miracle’ happens immediately after the (elite) pallbearers decide Chance will be the next president. He is thusly anointed and can do no wrong: The secret society that rules the world has so decreed it. (I suspect that a close examination of the film would reveal more symbolism, the number ’33’, say, but I don’t have the time.)
I haven’t read the book — I did work as a H-wood screenwriter for many years — but I suspect the above message is a bit more from Ashby, rather than JK, since Ashby knows all too well who runs show biz… and the world. (I could be wrong on this; I may read the book.)
End credits roll over a blooper reel of Sellers cracking up over and over and over. Who/what is he really laughing at?
I’m not saying that the above is the meaning of the film (or the ending, same thing) but it certainly should be in a detailed analysis. I’ve mentioned a few times how often occult symbolism makes it into feature films, usually via checkerboard tiles; I would have been collecting them with grabs but most channels block you. But I do come across them in other ways. I’ll
‘The West Wing’ TV show was lousy with checkerboard floors (it was also lousy with democrats, which should not surprise us). (‘Veep’ was also like this.) The PTB just love this sort of ‘wink’.
add a couple here. (That Kubrick would do this is somehow both interesting and predictable.)
Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes is an anthology wherein Jarmusch somehow manages to work the checkerboard motif into every story. I suspect this was more ironic than ‘devotional’ (to the PTB). One can hope, anyway…
I think you (and the author of the video you’re addressing) give Ashby too much credit: Being There isn’t a layered masterpiece, it’s a populist fable with (lazy) Kubrickian aspirations. It was aimed at the same demographic which ate up the Dudley Moore hits “10,” “Arthur,” “Unfaithfully Yours” and so on: Anglophile NPR listeners. Ashby’s use of Eumir Deodato’s version of Strauss’ “Thus Spake Zarathustra” (along with an early vignette in the film involving a storefront window, a video camera and a moonscape) are nods to Kubrick without any of Kubrick’s sly wit or purpose.
The film’s targets are obvious (“The white man has a god complex!” reads the tone-deaf graffito, meant to be of “urban” origin, the camera pans during an establishing shot). There is no Second Act Conflict because the audience didn’t need one: they wanted to see Peter Sellers conquer, without even trying to, a very MILFY Shirley MacLaine, in opulent settings. The proto-Yuppie demographic wanted, apparently, an updated Anglo American Period Piece comedy of manners and Ashby delivered and so the film was a hit.
The “Washingtonian machinations” material was just throw-away stuff and the figure of the curmudgeonly-but-lovably-decent Plutocrat (with a much younger trophy-wife who actually *cared* for him!) is pure Hollywood. I.e.: juvenile fantasy. CG walking on the water at the end was a “wry” joke with no deeper meaning (if only the character’s initials had been JC, eh?).
The Masonic crypt and checkerboards would have seemed significant to the “uninitiated” (no pun instead) but people forget that Conspiracy Memes didn’t begin with 9/11. Sherman Skolnick and Mae Brussell had devoted followings, among the cognoscenti, in the ’70s, and maybe Ashby was twitting them, or maybe he was a believer… neither possibility confirms, necessarily, that he was an “Insider”. Maybe the set-designer was an “insider” or maybe checked floor tiles (like hosed-down streets in urban night scenes) give more visual bang for the buck? Maybe Ashby thinks the checkerboard symbolizes duality or racial politics… ? Or maybe he’s a ranking Mason. Don’t know. Would it matter? (I mean, knowing that Ashby, in particular, was Mason: would it matter?).
Kozinski (the book’s author, more famous, in the end, for the scandal that dogged him, than anything he *actually* wrote) was probably better educated than Ashby and built a deeper (satirical?) meaning into the book through its title, which is close enough to being a literal translation of Heidegger’s special term… “DASEIN”… which Heidegger used to denote the unique (even super-human) presence of the kind of Being the average man is not. Which Nietzschean distinction was at the heart of Mr. A. H.’s nasty platform in the 1930s and 1940s, no? Maybe Kosinski was taking a pot shot at “The Master Race”.
Ashby was just making higher fluff for the pro-Yuppies to dream on.
In general, imo, only Kubrick’s mad and layered films deserve (and reward) super-scrutiny.
PS Your comment is still up at YouTube.
PPS I can’t see the outtakes as anything but what they were. Sellers couldn’t deliver his “Ebonics”-based line with a straight face. Ashby (or his producers) realized it would make a crowd-pleasing tag at the end (especially since Sellers died before the film was completed in post-production, I think). I think the “laughing at the audience” stuff wasn’t nearly as widespread in ’79 as it is now.
Missing my point: I was only saying that this guy does a half hour YouTube and the ENDING and does not notice the symbology, and this ignorance is rife in film goers. I think I made it clear that that was my point. Did you miss this?
You didn’t like the movie, it seems, while I did. Okay.
I like Kubrick but HE was no god (2001 is rife with continuity errors, esp w liting). And that the same folks who put checkerboards in movies killed him. Did you know it was in his last contract that the film would open on July 16? The only notable occurrence for that date is the launching of Apollo 11, which Kubrick ‘filmed’. Gotta love that kinda stuff. (Why do I suspect you will disagree?)
If Kubrick had filmed “Apollo” it would have looked more convincing; they did a shitty job using “slow mo” to stand for 1/6th Earth gravity: that’s not how humans/ objects would move in 1/6th gravity (they’d move like supermen on speed while remaining rather longer in the “air” during jumps, a difficult ballet to fake with their Peter Pan cables and without CGI… uh, if it hadn’t been impossible for ’60s-vintage astronauts to survive the lunar surface for more than 40 minutes). The team who faked it were just good enough to hoodwink people intellectually incapable of doubting GOV; I have been astonished, again and again, at the “Skeptics” who considered “Apollo” a “great achievement”. Tell it to Gus Grissom’s family.
I think a greater achievement was setting up Fidel Castro as the biggest CIA mole in the hemisphere, but that’s just my sense of aesthetics. 2001’s “continuity errors” are, largely, deliberate signposts pointing to Kubrick’s subtler messages. Here’s my theory: Kubrick was safe until early versions of the Internet featured discussions between intellectual film buffs who inadvertently outed him. Kubrick’s messages might have stayed buried (like, eg, a monolith on the moon) another hundred years had there been no A) video rentals C) early paranoid Pynchonian academic film buff forums getting Stanley in trouble.
Kubrick was a very clever and meticulous filmmaker: so why is there full Earth gravity on the lunar base, in 2001, in which Heywood Floyd delivers his press conference? SK tells you two things over and over again: 1) beware great power 2) nothing is but what is not! Kubrick’s feud with Freddy Raphael points us to other things Kubrick knew, too. Things much bigger than Apollo.
But on a lighter side: is there an author, whose work Kubrick adapted, that Kubrick DIDN’T twit or expose? Nabokov, Burgess, King, Clarke… look into it for a chuckle.
Allan,
Doesn’t Chauncey Gardiner currently reside in the White House? The similarities between Chauncey Gardiner and Wrong Way Joe Biden are remarkable; in my humble opinion of course.
My god I couldn’t disagree more.For one thing, Chance was not a psychopath. Maybe watch the movie again.
It’s been a minute (years) since I’ve watched Being There. But I always thought the Chance character was a metaphor/ manifestation of God? Chance saying at one point, “I like to watch.” While he was talking about TV, I believe, the same could be said for God, why else would He/She create this world except He/She likes to watch things unfold here on earth? And he is a gardener, with a super simple worldview, which all the other characters regard as wise. The other characters are projecting onto Chance. When the old man Ben is sick and dying, Chance says matter-of-factly that he knows all about Ben being unwell. When he inspects a tree in a park and goes onto tell another character (I think it was a beat cop) that the tree is sick and needs help. Then, of course, the ending where he walks on water. As a youngster I didn’t understand the Illuminati imagery, but in retrospect it’s so blatantly obvious. Sledgehammered in for sure.
Good points, for sure. I only meant to point out how blind some folks are, not that the Freemasons etc. are what the movie is about. As usual, its just a little aside to each other. The channel deleted my comment! More hypocrisy.
Allan, if you want to be shocked by checker board pattern warning on steroids, type into google images – ‘Hundertwasser building Whangarei NZ’ – built just up the road from me recently. WTF. And I am the only person who has noticed it seems!.
I am not feeling the buzz/excitement of these new heat pics YET at least.
Yeah, holy shit I hit ‘images’ for that place and came up with a page full of B&W checks, ridiculous. Don’t the cops there have the checkers too, like in Oz and UK?
Yessiree they most certainly do!.
They flaunt these checker patterns, as they protect the people who rob us every day, of fee’s and “interest” and real property.
I’ll watch “Being There” again, then. I saw it when I was a teenager
and it made no sense to me. I was used to loving Sellers in The Pink
Panther” and was disappointed and bored with this film. I;ll
watch with fresh eyes now. 👍