Dialectic Dining: Analyzing Isolation and Inauthenticity in My Dinner with André
The eccentric essayist and philosopher Søren Kierkegaard famously asserted, “Our age is essentially one of understanding and reflection, without passion, momentarily bursting into enthusiasm, and shrewdly relapsing into repose." A veritable prophet ushering in the modern age, Kierkegaard’s arguments continue to bridge the distance of time and resonate with the cultural life of modern America. A more contemporary take on Kierkegaard’s analysis, and one which accounts for the facts of modern Western Civilization after the Second World War, can be found in the 1981 Louis Malle film My Dinner with André. Film can serve as a particularly poignant medium for elucidating essential truths about human existence, and My Dinner with André is a film with a unique understanding of the ability of dialogue to do just that. Conversation is a cornerstone of political life, and while Wallace Shawn and André Gregory, like Plato, understand that it is unwise to make a universal truth claim, they also recognize that a proper dialectic can at least bring us closer to knowledge. But to challenge an age of reflection knowledge is simply not enough. Instead, political action and a critical self-awareness of how we interact in the world can show how to counter the isolation, inauthenticity, and mechanical acceptance which characterize an age bereft of passion.
The movie opens with Wally, Wallace Shawn essentially acting as himself, briskly striding through a dreary urban landscape and narrating the mundanity of his life. He is a struggling playwright who constantly worries about making his next rent payment. His girlfriend, Debby, works an extra job. As Wally laments at the end of his first narration, “I grew up…surrounded by comfort, and all I thought about was art and music. Now, I’m thirty-six and all I think about is money!” Art and the two central character’s identification as creatives plays a central role in the movie. As Wally soon reveals, he is going to meet a friend, André Gregory, for dinner. Wally is in no way excited by the prospect of seeing André, an old friend who disappeared for several years and seemingly popped back up acting like a madman. Thus, the scene for the rest of the film is set as Wally arrives at the restaurant and they settle in an environment of casual decadence to do what people so rarely know how: have a conversation.
Wally does not expect to be interested in the conversation, and so at first he is not. André recounts a variety of bizarre experiences while Wally listens passively, at most asking simple questions. He hears how André ate sand in a desert with a Tibetan monk, how he joined a bizarre separatist community in Scotland called Findhorn, how he gallivanted in the woods of Poland, and even how he allowed friends to strip him naked and half bury him alive. Wally listens, largely with a bemused expression, and faintly seems to wonder what on earth he’s gotten himself into. Then, in the first turning point of the film, André surprises Wally by suddenly remarking, “I’m sort of repelled by the whole story if you really want to know." He then compares himself to Albert Speer, a prominent Nazi who André says thought the rules of life didn’t apply to him because he was a cultured and artistic man. In fact, André goes so far as to say that he would hate to be on his deathbed and have to accept being the man he was for the last few years. While André frequently invokes Holocaust imagery throughout the film, a prime example of evil in the modern age, this key moment signals a distinct change in the plot. It first seems to the viewer as if André’s bizarre experiences will turn out to offer some sort of wisdom, yet their validity is immediately rejected and the interlocutors instead begin to focus on whether modern Western Civilization is flawed.
A key point to question in the film is the invocation of the children’s book The Little Prince. André references ideas embodied in the story several times throughout the conversation. The Little Prince chronicles a pilot who meets a child in the Sahara Desert, the Little Prince, who turns out to be from another planet. The Prince’s world is a small rock on which he is the only inhabitant. The Prince goes on a journey to escape his isolated, atomized rock and meets several characters along the way. A lazy man whose inaction allowed his planet to be destroyed, a businessman obsessed with “matters of consequence,” who, absurdly, spends all day counting stars, and a king alone on his rock who claims his authority extends to the universe. The only person the Prince meets who he considers useful is the lamplighter who constantly engages in the Sisyphean task of lighting a flame every time his small planet completes its short rotation. While ultimately as meaningless as the other tasks, the Prince likens the lamp to adding another star to the sky and thinks, “That is a beautiful occupation. And since it is beautiful, it is truly useful.” Indeed, the defining qualities of the Little Prince are his inquisitiveness, his imagination, and his appreciation for beauty which endear him as a true friend to all he meets. It is these very qualities which inspire André’s recurring fascination with the story. In a society which André and Wally perceive to be asleep and isolated from authentic human connections, they ask themselves: is it possible to reach people through art?
Just as Kierkegaard proclaimed “For intelligence has got the upper hand to such an extent that it transforms the real task into an unreal trick and reality into a play,” as Wally becomes progressively more engaged in the conversation so the two playwrights consistently characterize life as a stage performance. The first instance is a social gathering where André is fascinated by how the people showed up taking off their jewelry as if preparing for a performance. They seem to turn on appearances and then, as soon as the gathering ends, so too does the performance. They say goodbye and abruptly slip out of the façade and back into absurd isolation. Human ties cease to exist outside immediate contact. But André does not just feel that people are inauthentic, he thinks everyone is living in some kind of fantasy. First, he recounts a day in which he came to the theater feeling despair, but everyone said he looked wonderful. Only a person who had recently experienced tragedy asked if he was ok. Because, André postulates, people don’t live authentically, they see only what they want to and utterly fail to look past the superficial. Even when his mother is dying, André argues that the doctor, “psychically kill[ed] us by taking us into a dream world, where we become confused and frightened. Because the moment before we saw somebody who already looked dead and now here comes a specialist who tells us they’re in wonderful shape!”
It should have been plain to anyone, André was convinced, that his mother was dying yet the doctor told them the exact opposite. Such an assertion so obviously out of line with reality was just plain bizarre. And then, after André’s mother died, he is baffled by friends he had dinner with who avoided saying even a word of condolence to him and spent the night laughing. Such nonchalant chatter after tragedy is, to André, “unimaginable behavior." Wally picks up on this theme and offers enthusiastic agreement, expounding, “Because somehow in our social existence today, we’re only allowed to express our feelings weirdly and indirectly. If you express them directly, everybody goes crazy!” Inauthenticity and isolation are not separate, then, they are intrinsically connected. People are isolated in modern society not just because of the erosion of community and the disconnection with reality engendered by modern phenomena, but they are stuck in a performance, unable to communicate their feelings and develop connections with real human beings. Seemingly, modern culture is coded against authenticity.
Inauthentic life then manifests itself in a kind of existential frustration, the “ressentiment” elucidated by Kierkegaard. André brings this concept into stark clarity as he rails against the deficiencies of society, arguing, “we’re just walking around in some kind of fog. I think we’re all in a trance!...I don’t think we’re even aware of ourselves or our own reaction to things, we’re just going around all day like unconscious machines. I mean, while there’s all this rage and worry and uneasiness just building up and building up inside us!” One of the central questions recurring throughout the film is how people can live meaningful, happy lives in a world which feels empty, passionless, and devoid of true human connection. How can one affect positive change in society and fundamentally alter the way people behave? Ressentiment manifests itself in André when he recounts an outburst at a dinner party where he started screaming and making outrageous statements, such as about a man’s genitalia falling off from gonorrhea, or how he wanted to pass a real human head around the audience in a rendition of The Bacchae. André’s problem is not that he is hateful or insane, he’d “just been desperate to break through this ice!” But the ice of inauthenticity often seems too thick to thaw, and it becomes futile to wonder what would be necessary to shock people out of their reverie.
With this essential revelation, the duo return to their contemplation of the dream life and disconnection from reality. Wally wonders if creative mediums such as plays, writing, art, or music could ever be enough to wake people up to an authentic understanding of life. André argues the contrary, noting, “People today are so deeply asleep that unless, you know, you’re putting on those sort of superficial plays that just help your audience to sleep more comfortably, it’s very hard to know what to do in the theater…serious contemporary plays…may only be helping to deaden the audience." They know that the world is chaotic and violent, that their lives are messy, that they live inauthentically; they are aware of their own isolation. Therefore, to remind them of this condition is merely to suggest that their negative worldview is correct, there is no way out, and they are, “passive and impotent." Wally’s enduring faith that he can reveal little pieces of reality through art nonetheless carries a sort of optimism, even as André insists that people will never perceive reality.
At this point, the film experiences its last climactic turning point. Wally, who by this time has fully escaped his initial lack of interest and become engrossed in the conversation, launches into a refutation of André’s argument. While acknowledging that people are resistant to seeing reality as it exists, he maintains that they are capable. Turning away from the abstract, Wally latches onto action. Admitting that he himself practices a sort of bystander morality whereby he thinks of himself as a good person because he does no harm to anyone and is reasonably polite, Wally also concedes that people never seem to be aware of how they act in the world or how those actions affect others. He proposes that “if we allowed ourselves to see what we do every day we might just find it too nauseating."
While at first agreeing with some of André’s points, Wally’s focus on action over abstraction marks a clear deviation, and he soon cements this course correction by expanding the scope of his critique. Wally marks the most critical moment in the movie, and the point of his own highest engagement in the conversation, when he remarks, “D’you wanna know my actual response to all this? I mean, do you want to hear my actual response?” André, of course, replies with an enthusiastic “Yes!” because his entire goal has been to break through and engender authentic conversation with Wally. Following this, Wally launches into a diatribe in which he challenges the broadest assumptions raised by André. Recalling the play’s central argument, he summarizes, “you seem to be saying it’s inconceivable that anybody could be having a meaningful life today, and you know, everyone is totally destroyed. And we all need to live in these outposts." This is a notion, however, that Wally thoroughly rejects, asserting, “even if I were to accept the idea that there’s no way for anybody to have personal happiness now, well, you know, I still couldn’t accept the idea that the way to make life wonderful would be to just totally reject Western Civilization and fall back into some kind of belief in some kind of weird something."
The core of Wally’s argument is that while there may be flaws to modern society, and there are times at which life can feel empty or meaningless, there is also an abundance of meaning to be found in the mundane. There is meaning to be found in conversations with his girlfriend Debby, in enjoying his morning coffee, reading an engaging book, or simply contemplating during a cool stroll. Wally’s essential conviction is that human beings are purposeful creatures who instinctually assign meaning to things that otherwise might seem logically meaningless. He even recalls an argument made by André that an electric blanket, a symbol of modernity, separates humanity from the primordial cold, and with the loss of the cold comes the loss of the need to react to it in any way. André argues separation with the state of nature is unnatural and has thus made humans unnatural. But Wally retorts that life is a struggle in its own right, full of opportunities to suffer and react to the natural difficulties of the world and that the blanket is simply a comfort which allows momentary escape from this desperation. Habit is a comfort to Wally, but it is the greatest danger in André’s mind. “If you are just living mechanically,” he argues, “then you have to change your life."
As Wally and André wind down the last moments of their conversation, reflecting on the fleeting nature of meaning, how ephemeral moments of happiness are, they realize the restaurant is empty. Wally rides home in a taxi, as he did when he was a child, and peers out the window with a new appreciation for the unremarkable streets he treds each day. Neither argument is ever endorsed as the definitive answer. Unlike most people, who spew nonsense and yet remain confident they speak only truth, Wally and André’s conversation is characterized by a humble disagreement. They live in a passionless society, one in which reflection dominates and action takes a back seat to the great performances put on by regular people, celebrities, and politicians alike. Largely, the film attributes the phenomena of isolation and inauthenticity to be products of the modern age and the Enlightenment. As the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau illuminated, “Reason engenders vanity and reflection fortifies it; reason turns man back upon himself, it separates him from all that bothers and afflicts him."
At the heart of My Dinner with André is a call to action. The essential frustration experienced by the two interlocutors centers on the inability of people not just to see the world as it really is but to act in a way that is real. Until people can understand how to reach such a level of authenticity, meaning, happiness, and positive action in the world, whether personal or political, will remain a dream no more tangible than a puff of smoke. If people want to experience substance in their discourse and in their relationships, if they want to enact meaningful difference in the world, then they should simply emulate André and, “cut out all the noise, stop performing all the time, and just listen to what is inside."
