Against Culture Shlock

PEOPLE will watch anything.

The screen fills with hundreds of colored shapes spinning like a crayola volcano dancing the twist. The Electric Horseman, starring Robert Redford and Jane Fonda, is not scheduled to start for ten minutes yet the balding accountant three seats down already has his right hand in bucket of popcorn; his other inching up his wife's sweater, his eyes aimed at the screen. The color pattern repeats itself on the black screen, revolving twice with a one and a half twist like a lasarium with hiccups. Everyone in the theater, not just the accountant, watches the screen as if something were about to happen, as if these silly colored dots will line up to sing the national anthem. These people keep staring at the whirling colors until more colored balls tapdance onto the screen to announce the "Feature Presentation."

Colored dots also fill the screen as the final credits roll for Being There, for which director Hal Ashby has coaxed terrific performances from Peter Sellers and Shirley MacLaine. These dots are tiny in contrast to those on the "filler" reel before Electric; they form the image of a gigantic color TV on the blink. This spectrum of static, infuriating when it appears on the 19-inch Sony in the den, seems almost beautiful, an electric Jackson Pollock or Gene Davis gone haywire on this enormous cinema canvas. The Being There audience stays until the last credit has disappeared over the top of the frame. They would stay if they showed more colored dots. To watch, to watch.

Ironically, almost anyone who runs to see Being There or Electric Horseman suffers from the video/slick malaise that both these films attempt to ridicule: the need to replace people with images. Both films finger TV as the villain behind a plot to steer Americans toward artificial lives, to keep them from the wonder of natural beauty. Unfortunately, each film exaggerates TV's ill-effects to hammer home its message.

Ten years ago, Jerzy Kosinski wrote a short novel about an idiot gardener who does nothing but watch TV, tend to his plants, eat and sleep. His screenplay for Being There could hardly be more faithful to the novel. According to Kosinski's metaphorical fable, the TV-idiot, Chauncey Gardiner (Sellers), bumps his way to the mansion of influential, dying financier, Melvyn Douglas and his younger, sex-starved wife Shirley MacLaine. So limited is Gardiner's intelligence that his communication consists only of child-like imitations of people he has seen on TV or references to his beloved garden. The hilarity--and the irony--begins when Douglas, MacLaine, Douglas' friend the President, the Russian Ambassador and the American people start to believe that Gardiner's simple words about his garden are the concise metaphorical epigrams of an oddly innocent genius. Being There elegantly carries this joke as far as it will go, until the president has quoted Gardiner in a speech, until MacLaine falls obsessively in love with him, until, in the film's final sequence, Douglas' cronies consider Gardiner as a candidate for the presidency.

THE ABSURD, fairy-tale premise of the story works in Kosinski's novel because the author, like the Grimms, writes caressing, witty words while he brazenly plunders his frail theme. Ashby's direction of Kosinski's script slips at times from wit to slapstick but generally maintains a simple, even tone reflective of his hero, the boob-tube boob.

Restrained camera movement and dark and sparing lighting syncopate nicely with the undynamic plot and overall surrealism. In one directional flourish Ashby stole the theme from 2001 to accompany Gardiner's exit from his primitive garden-world into the "modern culture" and civilization of Northeast Washington D.C.

Where Kosinski had to describe in print the TV show that Gardiner watches constantly (in his garden, at meals, in bed, at parties) Ashby orchestrates his film with TV snippets: cartoons, concerts, exercise classes, the news, sit-coms and of course, commercials. The inspired collection of TV clips climaxes when MacLaine tries to seduce Gardiner while he eats breakfast in bed, all of his attention focused on his TV and the irrepressible Mr. Rogers ("won't you be mine?"). Ashby had to tell a story about a man who, like his TV, captures attention wherever he goes yet has so small a brain that the narrative cannot unfold wholly from his perspective because he has no single perspective. In solving this problem of a non-entity at the movie's core, Ashby had the help of Peter Sellers' sublime performance as Gardiner.

The story goes that Sellers read Kosinski's novel and decided the Gardiner had been created for him. In any case, he portrays perfectly the simple voice and simple gestures of this simple man whose world of TV and roses expands around him to include politics and sex without expanding him. He is miraculously changed from the comic inanity of the Pink Panther tales or even his tense how-deep-is-your glove performance in Dr. Strangelove. While Being There demands a Brooklyn-Bridge-sized suspension of disbelief, Sellers never loses Gardiner's innocent, vulnerable essence.

MacLaine succeeds equally well as the seductress. Beautiful even in middle-age, she turns two potentially disastrous love scenes into touching monologues of vitality. No doubt the scene where MacLaine bares all for Gardiner--masturbates at his feet--will be criticized as too heavy-handed, akin to some of her brother Warren's shenanigans in Shampoo. But the scene is neither pornographic nor embarrassing and fits neatly and importantly into the narrative.

Being There is not flawless, however. Jack Warden was cast terribly as the president and several of his scenes in bed with the first lady lack the precise timing and vigor that MacLaine and Sellers bring to their roles. Kosinski has also padded the script with the geneses of several subplots and characters that he leaves hanging forever, an annoying trait that does not occur in his novels, in which all loose ends are cleverly macramaed by the last page. Like Kosinski's novels, however, the film playfully and insightfully taunts our plodding culture at the same time it entertains.

BUT THE scriptwriting that sustains Being There is missing from Electric Horseman. Willy Nelson, the singer, has the best line in Electric Horseman. Sunning in a cafe near Caesar's Palace he plans to get "a bottle of tequilla and keno girl who can suck the chrome off a trailer hitch." Nelson wrote that himself and the slick script of this Hollywood romance rarely matches the rugged quality of his improvisation. Indeed the film suffers from the same slickness and image-mongering that it purports to criticize.

The posters for the film show Robert Redford holding Jane Fonda by the thighs while she hangs on for dear life with her head between his legs. No such scene ever occurs in the film. The posters also advertise with the catchword "Electric," hinting that Fonda and Redford spar and spark together like Hepburn and Grant in the olden days. It's not that the poster meant to lie, they just wouldn't sell many tickets with a slogan like "Blown Fuse." Truth is, Redford makes a cute, loveable cowboy in this pleasant, if pretentious, film. And Fonda makes a cute...bitch.

While Being There takes on television and the older theme of illusion versus reality, Electric Horseman takes aim at the artificiality of American commercialism and the evils therein. Redford plays an ex-rodeo champ who's been roped into selling breakfast cereal as the advertising symbol of a huge conglomerate. The corporation's other symbol is Rising Star, a champion race-horse worth $12 million. When Redford, already unhappy with the life of a travelling pitchman, discovers that his employers have drugged Rising Star with steroids that not only slow him down but make him sterile as well, he takes the reins into his own hands and gallops into the desert intent on setting the horse free. Do we get it?

Enter Fonda in designer boots and jeans, caught in the TV newswoman syndrome for the second time in a year. She goes after the horse thief hoping for an obnoxiously good story; she winds up with the story and a few cozy nights with Redford under the Utah stars to boot.

THE ESCAPE to nature theme of this film could have been a little subtler. And singing "America the Beautiful" with majestic, purple mountains in the distance would be better left to Sunday school kids in Salt Lake City. The second half of the film, a journey on foot to introduce Rising Star to a herd of mustangs, is filled with lines like: "You can name anything anything;" "This country's where I live;" "I'm seeing this country for the first time;" "We're all going to heaven or we're not;" "I been hurt--you still get up." No doubt people--even cowboys and New York Happinews reportresses--talk like that but the lines add humor, not the intended poignancy.

Redford manages to tug the movie to a level that makes it worth seeing. In his first role since All the President's Men, he proves himself still capable of the twinkly eye and boyish, ultra-bright smile. The man can act. Except for several lapses in his Westernese dialect, he shows he can play more than Newman's or Hoffman's sidekick.

Fonda, however, continues her series of chillingly smug self-portraits in this installment of "The Jane Fonda Story." Even when the script calls for a loving gaze, she still has a look in her eyes that says "Ha ha, I'm making two million dollars a year so Tom and I can afford to be ostentatiously political." And while the camera tries to catch her pert derriere every time she bends over, Fonda looks older than ever before. Redford should have kept Rising Star and set Fonda free with the mustangs.

The Electric Horseman and all its simplistic neon sing-flashing will appear someday on TV. Being There may never, thank God, be there.