Myth Steps (& peace mill)

SPOILER ALERT: In this discussion of My Dinner with André, I recount the long dinner conversation of the movie, from beginning to end.  However, I don’t think reading this piece will ruin the film for you.  After all, I can’t possibly convey the beauty of the conversation.

At the beginning of the 1981 movie My Dinner with André¹, we see Wallace Shawn walking through the cold winter streets of Manhattan.

With his overcoat buttoned all the way up to his neck, Wally looks so miserable.  Closed off from the world around him.  But who can blame him for shutting down?  His environment doesn’t seem so inviting.  Look at all that trash.  Look at that subway car scribbled over with graffiti.

Through a voice-over narration, Wally tells us of his hard times.  No one will put on his plays.  No one will hire him as an actor.  At thirty-six, he’s struggling financially, after knowing a childhood of privilege. 

He’d rather be at home with his girlfriend Debbie.  But an acquaintance persuaded him to meet and have dinner with someone he’s avoided for years.  André Gregory.  Founder of the influential theatrical group The Manhattan Project.  The first director to stage one of Wally’s plays.  An old friend and a mentor. 

For reasons unknown, André stopped directing a few years back.  Based on rumors circulating about him, Wally is concerned for his friend’s mental health. 

“Obviously, something terrible had happened to André,” Wally tells us.  “The whole idea of meeting him made me very nervous.  I mean, I really wasn’t up for that sort of thing.  I had problems of my own.  I mean, I couldn’t help André—was I supposed to be a doctor or what?” 

But when Wally arrives at the restaurant, he doesn’t find an André in distress.  In fact, the man looks quite chipper in his cardigan sweater. 

Soon into the dinner, he explains why he decided to drop out of the theater:

“Really, I had nothing left to teach.  I had nothing left to say.  I didn’t know anything…Working on scenes from plays seemed ridiculous…I didn’t know what to do.” 

Then his mentor, Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, pushes him to lead a drama workshop.  André tries—and fails—to put him off by making some ridiculous demands.  And so he soon finds himself in an old-growth forest in Poland, along with a group of theater people, none of whom know a lick of English. 

They camped outside the ruins of a small castle and used a big stone slab for a table.  Every day, after sunset, they’d begin their theater exercises and would continue to work until six or seven in the morning.  Then they’d dance and sing for a couple of hours before settling down to breakfast. 

At the end of the workshop, the group honored André with a baptism ceremony and presented him a new name.

Quite an experiment.  André says he felt truly alive afterwards—perhaps for the first time in his life.  And yet in a photo taken during the workshop, he looks half-dead.  I see the face of a haunted man.  A paradox: his feeling of being alive brought with it a heightened awareness of death.

The workshop is just an early step on André’s journey…

So what was he searching for on that journey?  Well, he doesn’t really say.  But I think he was asking himself what every human being asks themselves: how can I live in this world?  We begin looking for answers right after birth.  And continually revise along the way.  Especially when the old answers aren’t satisfying deeper needs.  That’s where André was—I believe he was finally listening to a deeper need.

The workshop in Poland leads to a series of workshops.  But that positive turn is followed by a stumble:

While walking in a field one day, André hears a disembodied voice say, “Little Prince”.  Of course, he thinks of the classic novella by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.  He then experiences what he believes to be a series of synchronicities—all of which point to the book.  So of course, André believes it must hold an important message for him.  But if so, what is it? 

Well, maybe he can discover the answer by staging a production.

The story is set in the Sahara desert.  So as a part of his process, André goes off to the Sahara, taking along a Buddhist monk and two actors. 

To me, it sounds as if he was trying to force a seed to sprout.

And indeed, André doesn’t find his answer in the desert.  At one point, in extreme frustration, he began to eat sand. 

Sounds crazy, but I understand that frustration.  Figuratively speaking, I’ve eaten sand many times in the past.  Like André, in desperation.  Desperate for what? you ask.  Well, for many things.  At one time, I wished to be hit with a flash of illumination that would change my life.  Change it how?  I don’t think the details were clear in my head.  But I am sure about one thing: I wanted the mundane to become magical.

André wanted magic too.  But when he tries to create a magical flag, the results cause his wife to vomit.

The Buddhist monk seemed magical at first with his surprising abilities.  But in time, he turned out to be a contradiction and a disappointment.

A trip to India wasn’t so magical either.  André felt like a tourist there. 

However, he does finds good magic at the Scottish community of Findhorn.

According to André, that magical place of eccentric wise folk blasted him open. 

On his way home, the faces of the passengers on the plane became animal faces.  Did André go insane?  I would say: if you see animal faces, but know there are people behind those faces, you’re probably okay.  I believe he was witnessing a hidden truth.  I myself have been many animals in this life.

Later, at a Christmas mass, André sees a half-man, half-bull creature² standing before him in the cathedral.  Tall and blue with violets growing from its eyelids and poppies from its toes.

André tried to banish the man-bull from his eyes and mind.  But it’s good the creature remained, because it actually comforted him.  Through its presence, it conveyed this message:

“Well, you may feel low and you might not be able to create a play right now.  But look at 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.  Hang in there.”

And indeed, André does hang in there ‘til the end of his journey.  It began with a baptism, so it seems natural it should end with a burial. 

Three friends staged this mock burial at a Long Island countryside farm on a wild Halloween night.  A surprise for André—he didn’t know they were going to put him through the paces of an elaborate ritual, then lower him into a grave.

This symbolic death mirrored, I believe, a death André was experiencing on the level of the psyche (for lack of a better word).  On that level, an ego death is experienced as an actual death.  No wonder this mock death felt so scary to him.  It brought to the surface the fear he felt deep within.

But André endures this death and at the end, is resurrected. 

Shortly after that harrowing event, André told his agent he was interested in directing again.  So, as often happens with journeys, the end was followed by a new beginning. 

Or was it?

I mean, he was just returning to his old life, right?  What did he gain from all his efforts?  Looking back at his journey now—at all he did—it seems “horrific” to him. 

“Frankly, I’m sort of repelled by the whole story,” he tells Wally.  “Who did I think I was, you know?  I mean, that’s the story of some kind of spoiled princess.” 

Okay, but just look at him now: he seems bright, energetic, healthy in body and mind.  He’s certainly not the guy in the forest workshop photo. So to me, his journey—despite all the confusion, all the frustration, all the self-indulgence—was a success.  Did he find any new answers to that old question?  I don’t know, but the feeling of being fully alive remains.  At the end, he’s learned how to live with that feeling—and the fear of death it brings.  I say: he’s satisfied a deeper need?

Yes, his nerves are still extremely raw.  Minor events can have a strong impact on him.  But that’s what happens when you resurrect your feeling sense.

At this point, Wally enters more fully into the conversation and the talk becomes philosophical.  The main question being: how can we best live this life?  

Collectively, we need to make some revisions—on that they both agree.

We’re asleep.  Zombies walking habitual steps.  Blind to reality.  Performing in our lives; acting a part.  Inauthentic.  Unaware of what we really feel.  Unaware of our own confusion. 

I think I might know why audiences responded to this talk back in 1981³.  Maybe they’d grown tired of seventies America, tired of the preening narcissism, the artificiality, the atmosphere of somnolence.  After all the commotion of the sixties, we took a break in the 1970s.  Instead of dancing in the streets, we danced in the disco.  Turn up the music and shake your thing.  Zombies are a paradox: they can dance while asleep. 

André then presents an idea more in sync with our current times…

He wonders if we’re entering a new Dark Ages.  A dismal prospect, yes, but like the Dark Ages of old, pockets of light will “spring up” all over the world.  People will go to these pockets—these “invisible planets on our planet”—to “refuel”, so they can come back and do what they need to do.

Such centers could function as a “new kind of school, a new kind of monastery”, according to André.  This underground network would help “preserve the light, the life, the culture”.

It’s forty-five years later and those Dark Ages have yet to arrive.  That said, the world seems to be dimming noticeably these days.  Or maybe it’s just my eyes.  In any case, I think many would agree: the threat is real.  So I like to imagine what those pockets of light could be and how they might save us. 

At this point, Wally can no longer hold back.  He has so much to say, he struggles to get it all out. 

For one thing, he’s not ready to throw out science and embrace the mystical.  Where André sees synchronicity, Wally sees coincidence. 

And furthermore, why do we have to go to exotic locations—to “Everest”, figuratively speaking—in order to wake ourselves up to life?  After all, the cigar store next door is just as real.  

Yes, André agrees.  But we can’t see the store.  It’s too familiar.  So we must go to Everest in order to wake ourselves to reality.

Wally wants to enjoy his electric blanket on a cold winter’s night.  André, on the other hand, distrusts such comfort.  He fears it’ll numb him.  Wally says life is hard enough as it is. 

“I’m just trying to survive,” he tells his friend.  “I’m just trying to pay my rent and my bills.  I mean, I live my life, I enjoy staying home with Debby, I’m reading Charlton Heston’s autobiography, and that’s that.” 

He describes how he makes a list of things to do each day.  And whenever he crosses an item off the list, he feels quite satisfied.  Wally is about doing; André, on the other hand, wants to focus on just being.  According to him, you have to cut out all the noise in order to discover who you really are.

And so the conversation goes and when it ends, it doesn’t end because there’s no more left to say.  But because enough has been said for now.  I can imagine these ideas being revisited during another dinner. 

Such conversations don’t change the world.  But they do push ideas along.  So yeah, I guess they actually do change the world, if only a tiny bit.  Besides that, consider the change in Wally:

The guy we see at the end of the movie is not the same one we saw at the beginning.  Gone is the buttoned-up man shut off from the world.  Now, Wally sees the world, is open to the world.

As he gazes out the window of a taxi, he tells us:

“I rode home through the city streets.  There wasn’t a street—there wasn’t a building—that wasn’t connected to some memory in my mind.  There, I was buying a suit with my father.  There, I was having an ice cream soda after school.”

To remember is to feel.  To feel is to be alive.  Maybe the feeling will fade by morning.  But for now, Wally’s awake.  And he didn’t even need to go to Everest.  All he needed to do was sit down to dinner with an old friend.

¹ Directed by Louis Malle.  Starring André Gregory as André Gregory, Wallace Shawn as Wallace Shawn, and Jean Lenauer as a tall, quiet waiter who’s as patient—and as old—as Father Time.  Written by Shawn and Gregory, with Shawn doing the heavy lifting. 

² André would seem to be describing a minotaur.  That brings to mind a story he told earlier: about what he found in an old copy of a surrealist magazine called Minotaur.  Is his vision of the man-bull in some way connected to the magazine?  Or am I trying to see synchronicity in coincidence?

³ Yes, there were many who loved this movie and dragged their friends to see it.  But not everyone was so enthused.  I once worked at a theater where the employees liked to tell the story of a mass exodus.  In the middle of one showing, a man stood up and headed for the exit.  Then in the next moment, as if given permission by his departure, a whole row stood and walked out.