My Dinner with Andre

My Dinner with Andre is a touchstone for me.  When I first saw Louis Malle's picture in 1981, I took pride in sitting through the whole thing.  I wasn't impressed at that time, but parts of the movie stayed with me -- certain speeches and images came to mind as quotations that I could use in various applications.  I wondered why this was so, but ascribed these memories to the film's hyper-literate script.  I saw the movie a couple of times over the next thirty years.  Now a life-time later, the film feels like something central to my way of seeing the world.  The movie has grown.  It doesn't feel too long to me now and watching the whole thing in one setting is no longer an achievement.  If anything, the movie could be longer, could continue interminably-- Andre and Wally are distinct characters, some of the most remarkable created in the history of film and it's a pleasure to be in their company.  Furthermore, the film is now more meaningful in light of the other works made by these two men, either individually or apart.  I've seen Wally Shawn's The Designated Mourner with Mike Nichols on CD and that play, a work that I've also read several times, seems to be foreshadowed in the mixture of whimsy and bleak horror that appears from time to time in Malle's film.   Of course, Vanya on 42nd Street is a masterpiece and, although I'm more ambivalent about The Master Builder, both of these films arising from collaboration between Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn are also retrospectively significant in considering the early picture.  I went to Chicago to see Shawn's new play, Evening at the Talk House, and it also casts an interesting light on My Dinner with Andre.  Shawn is our most ambitious playwright; he hunts for the biggest of big game and is unafraid to devise plays (and film scripts) driven entirely by ideas.  And, although he has some New York quirks that are disagreeable, Shawn is incredibly smart, literate, and bold.  All of this is incipient in My Dinner with Andre -- the film doesn't look like an anomaly now; rather, it's part of the development of an artistic sensibility shared, at least, as a contested dialectic between Wally Shawn and Andre Gregory.

I've probably written about this film before and, so, here I will just give an account of the movie's plot or narrative as it were.  The speeches made by both characters are fantastically complex and intricate with picturesque details.  But, perhaps, this outline will be helpful to those who wish to explore the movie on their own.  (There is a wonderful Criterion set of My Dinner with Andre, Vanya on 42nd Street, and The Master Builder).  At first, we see Wally walking through a poor part of New York.  He narrates the film and sketches the situation:  he's a playwright but can't make a living from his work; he has a girlfriend named Debbie who is also an artist but has to work as a waitress.  Although he was raised as "little prince of the City" (his father was the editor of the New Yorker magazine), he is now very poor. Years ago, Wally was close friends with Andre who first produced one of his plays for the public.  Something terrible has happened to Andre.  People suggest that he has lost his mind -- he's been sighted talking "to trees" and weeping inconsolably on the street corner.  (The film heightens reality:  all the details about Wally Shawn's life and his relationship with Andre Gregory are, more or less, real.)

Wally is nervous about meeting Andre after the lapse of years, but he warms to him quickly after they greet one another in a posh, very expensive uptown restaurant.  (We have seen Wally looking morose on a hideously graffiti-painted subway car -- this is before Rudy Giuliani and the city looks awful.)  Andre embarks on a monologue that lasts 40 minutes.  He is a mystic and his speech is vatic -- the film honors the nature of his speaking by letting him talk almost without interruption.  The gist of Andre's speech is that life and art must be regarded a preciously sacramental.  But the modern world is increasingly commercial, "robotic", pre-programmed and, therefore, inauthentic.  Andre has attempted to escape this kind of life by traveling to exotic locations where he has various adventures.  He is symbolically "reborn" and, then, "re-christened" by Jerzy Grotowski in a primeval Polish old-growth forest.  In Scotland, he joins a commune that believes all parts of the earth are sentient and awaiting some kind of spiritual resurrection.  These people are hoping for liberation by UFOs and talk to stones and trees.  At Richard Avedon's estate on Montauk, a cult-like sect drags the naked Andre through cold forests and, in fact, buries him for a time alive.  Andre has also traveled (unsatisfactorily) in India, lived on a farm in Tibet, and invited a rapacious Japanese Zen monk into the bosom of his family.  Although these experiences have led to momentary instants of enlightenment, Andre feels lonely, alienated, and, even, perhaps suicidal.  He is haunted by death and imagines that his immersion in these irrational, tribal cults is "fascistic" -- he compares himself to Albert Speer at one point and says he expects someone to prosecute him:  one of the cults uses Sanskrit swastikas as part of its symbolic apparatus.  (Andre has commissioned a banner marked with a swastika that everyone regards as lethal -- it ends up being burned.)  During parts of his monologue, Malle puts the camera so close to Andre and lights his face in a sinister way -- he looks deranged, like Edgar Allan Poe on a bender and his normally handsome, classically aquiline features seems dark and wicked and fearsome.  Andre's notion is that ordinary life has been stripped of its meaning and the only way to get people to feel is to "derange their senses."  But his notions in this regard are gloomy and quixotic:  he wants to drag people, Wally accuses, to "the top of Everest".  He's upset because he was not allowed to stage the Bacchae using real cadaver parts, including a human head that would be passed from person to person in the audience.

Wally finally responds after Andre's monologue.  He accuses Andre of being opposed to science and argues that science (and reason) give us a common world.  Andre wants a world that is tribal, based on being, feeling, and irrational.  Wally believes that such a world would be chaotic and horrible.  He argues in favor of the idea of a rational common reality -- he says that he is happy when he wakes up and finds the coffee he has kept to drink cold in the morning hasn't drowned a cockroach.  This pleases him and he says that he doesn't need to be dragged up Mount Everest to experience reality.

This discussion leads Wally to say that he thinks Andre's pursuit of what Wallace Steven's called "mere being" -- that is just existing in the present -- is pointless.  Wally says that human beings are always doing.  They can't just be, rather, they must be doing something.  Andre's reply is that this ceaseless "doing" is just a fearful hedge against death.  To truly "be" in the moment is to perceive the dissolution of being, the decomposition of the self into death.  Andre, then, says that he feels that his world is dissolving, it's a haze melting into nothingness -- all roles that human beings play with one another are utterly meaningless:  there is no husband, no wife ("what does it mean to be a wife?" Andre cries.)  There are no children, no daughter, no son.  People grow up -- "they take your hand, then, they are all grown up and can lift you themselves into the sky, and, then, they are simply gone."  We are all alone, Andre argues. 

The film succeeds because it reveals that Wally and Andre are not as different as they claim to be.  Their debate reveals them as both troubled by the inauthenticity of modern life, afraid of dying, and desperate to find meaning.  Blake says that in "Opposition is true Friendship" -- an idea that the film demonstrates.  If one takes the both of their positions, although opposed, as comprising one reality, we have a good picture of what it is like to be alive.

Wally takes a cab home, reflecting that he has lived all his life in New York City, and that each street corner along the way has meaning for him.  He tells us that reaching home, Debbie is already there, and resolves to tell her "everything about my dinner with Andre". 

This is one of the world's most beautiful films.