Movies
“Attention, program. You will receive an identity disk. Everything you do or learn will be imprinted on this disk. If you lose your disk or fail to follow commands, you will be subject to immediate de-resolution.”
“Mirroring complete. Disk activated and synchronized. Proceed to games.”
—//—
My Dinner With Andre
Notes:
“And when I was 10 years old, I was rich…all I thought about was art and music. Now I’m 36, and all I think about is money.” -Wallace Shawn
This is important for the conversation ahead with Andre, as Andre will describe grownups learning once again to play as children.
Children caught-up in play, think not of finance, nor concern themselves for a future-time with its lack or abundance. Without the unnecessary worry over income, a child is free to be creative.
—//—
“So I was on my own. But the worst thing of all was that I’d been trapped by an odd series of circumstances into agreeing to have dinner with a man I’d been avoiding literally for years. The whole idea of meeting him made me very nervous.” -Wallace Shawn
Avoiding someone?
Was Wally avoiding Andre, or the reflection that might be cast back in his direction?
—//—
“Wow, you look terrific.” Wallace Shawn says to Andre Gregory.
“Well, I feel terrible.” Andre Gregory responds chuckling.
This is important for an upcoming scene. As it turns out, upon meeting Andre at the bar after so many years, Wally was not actually seeing Andre at all.
If Wally were to truly see Andre, Wally would be forced to end his own charade, his act, in which his life is satisfactory and without complication outside a lack of animal struggle which humanity calls “work”.
If Wally truly allowed himself to see Andre at this moment, he would instantly be forced to see himself as well, and as Andre expresses in another scene, that can be quite frightening.
—//—
“At one time, he’d been quite fat. Then he’d lost an incredible amount of weight and became very thin and grown a beard.” -Wallace Shawn
Sounds to me like a natural path of growth into maturity.
Expansion and contraction.
The baby born fat, then becomes thin.
A lanky teenager goes to college, and puts back on ten.
The hunt for a partner encourages a trimming-up.
Until life blesses you with a few pounds and a pup.
Now fat again, and happy, hormonal and hairy.
Until old age calls you to be so skinny, you look scary.
A man once fat, becomes thin and mature;
One thing is certain, there be growth for sure.
—//—
“I was beginning to realize that the only way to make this evening bearable would be to ask Andre a few questions. Asking questions always relaxes me. In fact, I sometimes think that my secret profession is that I’m a private investigator, a detective..” -Wallace Shawn
Questions, he says.
—//—
“…I had nothing left to teach and nothing left to say.” -Andre Gregory
The master who claims to master, does not.
He with naught to say, may speak the loudest.
—//—
“So we were camped out beside the ruins of this tiny little castle. And we would eat around this great stone slab that served as a sort of a table. And our schedule was that usually we’d start work around sunset…” -Andre Gregory
The greatest of works, are begun in the night.
You toil away your day, and sleep away the night. What time, what space…is there for you to do, whatever it is you truly want to do?
Embrace the night.
—//—
“…except that in this type of improvisation…the theme is oneself. So you follow the same law of improvisation, which is that you do whatever your impulse as the character tells you to do. But in this case, you are the character. So there’s no imaginary situation to hide behind. And there’s no other person to hide behind. What you’re doing, in fact, is you’re asking those same questions that Stanislavsky said. The actor should constantly ask himself as a character, who am I? Why am I here? Where do I come from? And where am I going? But instead of applying them to a role, you apply them to yourself…Or to look at it a little differently, in a way, it’s like going right back to childhood where a group of children simply come into the room…a room without toys, and begin to play. Grownups were learning how to play again.” -Andre Gregory
—//—
“…it has something to do with living…” -Andre Gregory
—//—
“He said you look like you’d come back from a war.” -Wallace Shawn to Andre.
A confrontation with oneself, may be just that.
—//—
“Yeah, well most—most people I met thought there was something wrong with me. They didn’t say that. But I could tell that that was what they thought. But you see, what I think I experienced was for the first time in my life to know what it means to be truly alive. Now, that’s very frightening. Because with that comes an immediate awareness of death because they go hand in hand.” -Andre Gregory
—//—
“I remember always being exhausted in that period. I always felt weak. You know, I really didn’t know what was going on with me.” -Andre Gregory
Seem familiar in any way?
—//—
“Anyway, the desert was pretty horrible. It was pretty cold. We were searching for something. But we couldn’t tell if we were finding anything...we didn’t know why we were there. We didn’t know what we were looking for. The entire thing seemed completely absurd, arid, and empty. It was like a—like a last chance or something.” -Andre Gregory
—//—
“I mean, here I am. I’m a grown man. And there’s this strange person living in the house. And I’m not working. I mean, you know, I was doing nothing but scribbling a little poetry in my diary. I can’t get a job teaching anymore. And I don’t know what I want to do. When all of a sudden, a huge creature appeared…I could not make that creature go away…I felt that this creature was somehow coming to comfort me, that somehow he was appearing to say, well, you may feel low, and you might not be able to create a play right now. But look what can come to you on Christmas Eve. Hang on, old friend. I may seem weird to you. But on these weird voyages, weird creatures appear. It’s part of the journey. You’re okay.” -Andre Gregory
Are you the stranger in your own house?
—//—
“You know, so—so I’m feeling very raw right now. I mean—I mean, I cant sleep. My nerves are shot. I mean, I’m affected by everything.” -Andre Gregory
A sign of these times?
How are you feeling lately?
—//—
“You know that seven or eight people told me how wonderful I looked. And then one person, one, the woman who runs the casting office, said, gee, you look horrible. Is something wrong? And she…could see me with complete clarity…the other people, what they saw was this tan, or this shirt, or the fact that the shirt goes well with the tan. So they said, gee, you look wonderful. Now, they’re living in an insane dream world. They’re not looking.” -Andre Gregory
What do you see?
—//—
“Everyone’s sort of floating through this fog of symbols and unconscious feelings. No one says what they’re really thinking about…it may be why that one of the reasons that we don’t know what’s going on is that when we’re there at a party, we’re all too busy performing…I mean, we live in a world in which fathers or single people or artists are trying to live up to someone’s fantasy of how a father or a single person or an artist should look and behave. They all act as if they know exactly how they ought to conduct themselves at every single moment. And they all seem totally self-confident. But privately, people are very mixed up about themselves. They don’t know what they should be doing with their lives.” -Andre Gregory
...
—//—
“…by performing these roles all the time, we’re just hiding the reality of ourselves from everybody else…I mean, we just put no value at all on perceiving reality…on the contrary, this incredible emphasis that we all place now on our so-called careers automatically makes perceiving reality a very low priority. Because if your life is organized around trying to be successful in a career, well, it just doesn’t matter what you perceive or what you experience. You can really sort of shut your mind off for years ahead in a way. You can sort of turn on the automatic pilot…” -Wallace Shawn
Feeling, robotic?
