Television may be taken to be a completely different order of mind from that of the public forum: it may be an inner state of being, a personal, private existence. Instead of resembling a bustling market square, or a mindless pandemonium, the arena of TV may situate the very heart of mindlessness itself. It may be, as the unlearned dub it, zen. The zen of TV is the zen of Hamlet's unknown country: it is not death as we fear it or pretend to understand it, but the acceptance of a state of mind which has evacuated from the program: we find that we belong to no place in which we are installed: the button is pressed, the channel changes: the dark screen flickers and remains darker than when turned off, turned on. Though TV presents a surface of ceaseless activity and change, the inner cavern of the TV is a vacuum, and the programming an illusory continuity that we are unable to perceive unless the broadcasting switches off; at which we are faced with the crash and violence of black/white static during the witching hour of sleeplessness, or left to endure the unendurable dark glass, on which no amount of light will produce a suitable reflection of our face. When the TV turns off, we see on its glass that we are faceless.
It is not enough to simply watch TV: we must 'be there' in someway, or at least we should hope we are someplace, somewhere, at the moment that we 'watch' an occurrence of images. But perhaps we are not: the struggle with television watching is a struggle to exist: to assume consciousness of the act of watching. Yet the paradox of television watching is that however fixed we become to the lunatic velocity of TV media, we are inordinately 'not there': we are not literally in the screen, yet we are absorbed by it to the brink of nonexistence. When we are absorbed by the TV (when our eyes grow slack and halflidded) our mind hibernates, as it were, out of preservation from the subzero coolness of the TV medium. We become a conduit for the electrode of senseless information. Each channel on the click promises a perpetuity of absurdity: no channel has symmetrical, nor even rational value: one channel displays a row of alluring people exercising on a new fitness machine; another features two people sitting at a broad desk in a studio, calmly discussing the news of the week; yet another erupts into the captured tin roar of a crowd raving at the wild run of a football player across the vast green field toward goal. Since no channel in itself offers substantial obstacle to the reason, the reason shuts off; and each channel in relation to other channels disrupts the already flimsy integrity of the whole through sheer incongruity: the mind becomes terminally unattached, emptied of content and disconnected: a pile of jagged hoarse signs in a junkyard of soundbytes. The imagery are no more than refuse once the remote control button is pressed, banished to a place that has no memory for us. TV does not situate the patently memorable.
In any case, Jerzy Kosinski's & Hal Ashby's Being There is a rather ordinary film that attempts to describe what 'being there' - in the place that has no memory drive, the TV - consists of. The film is subverted by its own meekness: we are led to believe by the affectedly ponderous pacing and little-to-no action that TV really is zen, and that Chance - its protag - is something of a silly sage whose humility accommodates an extraordinary understanding of the world, despite its cruel incongruences. Or perhaps the film's understated sarcasm (an Ashby trait by some accounts) belies the notions that Chance really is a fool, and that the world is duly insane for considering a man who inhabits TV to be just the man to counsel on socio-economic policy and the greater state of the capitalist nation. The joke both ways is that Chance understands the world's ills with greater perspicacity since he happens to watch enough TV: since he is not engaged with the world as a universe apart from television, Chance is able to ascend society's upper ranks as effortlessly as he would click and change the channel: the world is hardly real to him, and so its powerbrokers come to regard him a sage. His simplicity, humility, taciturnity, are the consequence of his brain enfeebled by TV watching, but to the awestruck world they are magnified to denote the resounding characteristics of a wiseman.
Ashby's direction is hardly there, but Kosinski's narrative (of which the screenplay was adapted by him as well) may insinuate more than what is encountered onscreen. The 1st paragraph from the book:
It was Sunday. Chance was in the garden. He moved slowly, dragging the green hose from one path to the next, carefully watching the flow of the water. Very gently he let the stream touch every plant, every flower, every branch of the garden. Plants were like people; they needed care to live, to survive their diseases, and to die peacefully. Yet plants were different from people. No plant is able to think about itself or able to know itself; there is no mirror in which the plant can recognize its face; no plant can do anything intentionally: it cannot help growing, and its growth has no meaning, since a plant cannot reason or dream.
Plantlife is compared/contrasted to human life, but from the little that can be surmised from the film (since I have not read the book) a central feature of Being There seems to be that there is little difference between human life nurtured by the stream of TV information and plantlife sustained by the stream of water: Chance is no worse than a chance weed in a garden, no better than a chance flower in a bush: his nonexistence is best reflected by the dark glass of the television, in which no "plant can recognize its face." Chance has no driving human emotion, and as a gardener he has more in common with the flowers he cultivates than with the people whom he surprises and impresses with his simplicity. Chance doesn't "reason or dream" because he is more or less preoccupied with the supreme neutrality of the television realm: he is constantly submerged in the vapid mentality that a television imposes on the common soul. Even if he "grows" (continues on his adventures) his growth bears no meaning since he is incapable of reflection. All he can do is cultivate his garden, as his predecessor Candide lectures toward the end of Voltaire's work (on which Kosinski doubtlessly modeled his narrative.) That garden may or may not be in the real, physical world, but it certainly takes place, without interruption, in the ebb & flow of TV.
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