Being There · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Chance steps off the curb into Washington traffic, lifts the television remote in his hand, points it at an oncoming car, and presses. The channel does not change. Ashby holds the shot. There is no cut to a startled bystander, no music to flag the gag, no comedy-film punctuation at all — just a man in a good suit discovering, in real time, that the world will not switch over. The unease is closer to Beckett than to satire. And it tells you exactly what kind of creature you are watching.

Most movies run on what Deleuze called the movement-image: a character perceives a situation, feels something about it, and acts to change it. Perceive, feel, act, resolve — the sensory-motor circuit, and continuity editing exists to keep that chain humming. Between the perceiving and the acting there is a hinge Deleuze named the interval, or the centre of indetermination: the living gap where a normal character weighs what he sees and decides what to do. Chance is nothing but that gap. He perceives everything the world offers and converts none of it into action. He is a permanent interval, a hole where the circuit should close. When seeing stops leading to doing, Deleuze says, the character stops being an agent and becomes a seer — a voyant, someone who can only look and listen. That sidewalk shot is a pure optical situation, an opsign: Chance, and we with him, can do nothing but behold.

This is the lens that opens the film, because the famous joke depends on it. Sellers plays a man with no inner action, and so the comedy can never come from him — it has to come from everyone around him. The real subject of Being There is the reaction shot. When Chance says, in a garden the growth has its seasons; there will be growth in the spring, a roomful of powerful people hears a seasoned forecast of the economy. Deleuze would call that garden sentence a mark — an object or phrase meaningful only by its customary chain, the way a wedding ring means marriage. The insiders complete the chain. They supply the meaning. This is the relation-image, Deleuze's image of Thirdness: sense built not from what is on screen but from the relations the watching mind already holds. The structural gag of the film is that Chance emits marks without ever intending a relation, and the elite supply the relation for him. Ben Rand, dying, says it plainly enough — power keeps reproducing itself by projecting onto whatever blank surface is available.

Deschanel's camera makes us do the same work. It holds Sellers at a distance and in a wide anamorphic frame, so that we read the room and the furniture rather than his (inexpressive) face. His face becomes a lectosign — an image stripped of its sensory-motor obviousness, an image you have to decipher. More precisely it is a qualisign: the immobile, faintly reflecting face that expresses one quality and one only, a placid attentiveness, and lets every viewer pour a different content into it. We are forced into the exact position of the characters: searching a blank surface for a meaning that was never deposited there.

And what gets deposited is a whole person. Chauncey Gardiner is a forgery that comes true — except Chance does not forge it; the world forges it onto him. This is what Deleuze calls the powers of the false, where true and false stop being decidable and that undecidability becomes the film's creative engine. The mirror-dance sequence is the key: Chance alone, copying dance steps off the screen, a self assembled entirely from television, imitation all the way down. Television is his originary world, the savage source beneath the polished surface. The final image — Chance walking, calmly, on water — is the false made literal and left standing, a miracle you cannot rule in or out.

The two sealed houses give this a colder dimension. The Old Man's Victorian townhouse and Rand's Edwardian estate are ordered, aristocratic worlds insulated from history, and both are rotting from within while we watch — Rand quite literally dying as he anoints his successor. Deleuze had a name for that too: crystal-decomposition, the gilded totality decaying from the inside.

The craft debts are exact. Sturges built the ironic fable in Sullivan's Travels, a naif crossing American power and being misread at every level — but Sturges grants a third-act revelation, and Ashby strips it out, leaving only the vacancy. Kubrick had already proved that Sellers could carry a political satire as pure surface, shot without psychological close-up cues. The decisive inheritance is from Tati's Playtime and Nichols' Graduate: hold the wide frame, refuse the cut-to-reaction that would cue the laugh. That refusal is not a style choice. It is what manufactures the opsign — it is what turns a comedy into an act of looking.

So watch it again, and watch the wrong thing on purpose. Keep your eyes off Sellers. Watch the faces around him do the work he never does. The film is happening there.