Republished by Blog Post Promoter
MY DINNER WITH ANDRE is a 1981 film starring Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn, written by Gregory and Shawn, and directed by Louis Malle, depicting a conversation between Gregory and Shawn (not necessarily playing themselves) in a chic restaurant in New York City. Based mostly on conversation, the film’s dialogue covers such things as experimental theatre, the nature of theatre, and the nature of life, contrasting Shawn’s modest, down-to-earth humanism with Gregory’s extravagant spiritual experiences.
TEXT ANNOTATIONS FROM THE SEGMENT OF THE FILM ABOVE:
| “I mean, things don’t affect people the way they used to. | |
| I mean, it may very well be that 1 0 years from now… | |
| people will pay $1 0,000 in cash to be castrated… | |
| just in order to be affected by something. | |
| Well, why-why do you think that is? I mean, why is that? | |
| I mean, is it just because people are lazy today, or they’re bored? | |
| I mean, are we just like bored, spoiled children… | |
| who’ve just been lying in the bathtub all day… | |
| just playing with their plastic duck… | |
| and now they’re just thinking, ”Well, what can I do?” | |
| Okay. Yes. We’re bored. | |
| We’re all bored now. | |
| But has it every occurred to you, Wally, that the process… | |
| that creates this boredom that we see in the world now… | |
| may very well be a self-perpetuating, unconscious form of brainwashing… | |
| created by a world totalitarian government based on money… | |
| and that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks… | |
| and it’s not just a question of individual survival, Wally… | |
| but that somebody who’s bored is asleep… | |
| and somebody who’s asleep will not say no? | |
| See, I keep meeting these people – I mean, uh,just a few days ago… | |
| I met this man whom I greatly admire. | |
| He’s a Swedish physicist. Gustav Bjornstrand. | |
| And he told me that he no longer watches television… | |
| he doesn’t read newspapers, and he doesn’t read magazines. | |
| He’s completely cut them out of his life… | |
| because he really does feel that we’re living in some kind of Orwellian nightmare now… | |
| and that everything that you hear now contributes to turning you into a robot. | |
| And when I was at Findhorn, I met this extraordinary English tree expert… | |
| who had devoted his life to saving trees. | |
| Just got back from Washington, lobbying to save the redwoods. | |
| He’s 84 years old, and he always travels with a backpack… | |
| ’cause he never knows where he’s gonna be tomorrow. | |
| And when I met him at Findhorn, he said to me, ”Where are you from?” | |
| I said, ”New York.” He said, ”Ah, New York. Yes, that’s a very interesting place. | |
| Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave, but never do?” | |
| And I said, ”Oh, yes.” And he said, ”Why do you think they don’t leave?” | |
| I gave him different banal theories. He said, ”Oh, I don’t think it’s that way at all.” | |
| He said, ”I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp… | |
| ”where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves… | |
| ”and the inmates are the guards, and they have this pride in this thing they’ve built. | |
| ”They’ve built their own prison. | |
| ”And so they exist in a state of schizophrenia… | |
| ”where they are both guards and prisoners. | |
| ”And as a result, they no longer have – having been lobotomized – | |
| ”the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made… | |
| or to even see it as a prison.” | |
| And then he went into his pocket, and he took out a seed for a tree… | |
| and he said, ”This is a pine tree.” | |
| He put it in my hand and he said, ”Escape before it’s too late.” | |
| See, actually, for two or three years now… | |
| Chiquita and I have had this very unpleasant feeling that we really should get out. | |
| We really feel like Jews in Germany in the late ’30s. | |
| Get out of here. | |
| Of course, the problem is where to go. | |
| ‘Cause it seems quite obvious that the whole world is going in the same direction. | |
| See, I think it’s quite possible that the 1 960s… | |
| represented the last burst of the human being before he was extinguished… | |
| and that this is the beginning of the rest of the future, now… | |
| and that from now on there’ll simply be all these robots walking around… | |
| feeling nothing, thinking nothing. | |
| And there’ll be nobody left almost to remind them… | |
| that there once was a species called a human being… | |
| with feelings and thoughts… | |
| and that history and memory are right now being erased… | |
| and soon nobody will really remember… | |
| that life existed on the planet. | |
| Now, of course, Bjornstrand feels that there’s really almost no hope… | |
| and that we’re probably going back to a very savage… | |
| lawless, terrifying period. | |
| Findhorn people see it a little differently. | |
| They’re feeling that there’ll be these pockets of light… | |
| springing up in different parts of the world… | |
| and that these will be, in a way, invisible planets on this planet… | |
| and that as we, or the world, grow colder… | |
| we can take invisible space journeys to these different planets… | |
| refuel for what it is we need to do on the planet itself… | |
| and come back. | |
| And it’s their feeling that there have to be centers now… | |
| where people can come and reconstruct a new future for the world. | |
| And when I was talking to, uh, Gustav Bjornstrand… | |
| he was saying that actually these centers are growing up everywhere now… | |
| and that what they’re trying to do, which is what Findhorn was trying to do… | |
| and, in a way, what I was trying to do – | |
| I mean, these things can’t be given names… | |
| but in a way, these are all attempts at creating a new kind of school… | |
| or a new kind of monastery. | |
| And Bjornstrand talks about the concept of”reserves” – | |
| islands of safety where history can be remembered… | |
| and the human being can continue to function… | |
| in order to maintain the species through a dark age. | |
| In other words, we’re talking about an underground… | |
| which did exist in a different way during the Dark Ages… | |
| among the mystical orders of the church. | |
| And the purpose of this underground… | |
| is to find out how to preserve the light, life, the culture… | |
| how to keep things living. | |
| You see, I keep thinking that what we need… | |
| is a new language – | |
| a language of the heart… | |
| a language, as in the Polish forest, where language wasn’t needed. | |
| Some kind of language between people that is a new kind of poetry… | |
| that’s the poetry of the dancing bee that tells us where the honey is. | |
| And I think that in order to create that language… | |
| you’re going to have to learn how you can go through a looking glass… | |
| into another kind of perception… | |
| where you have that sense of being united to all things… | |
| and suddenly you understand everything.” |
