A Meditation on Honesty and Play in the form of a Movie Review
by Judith Goldsmith, October 20, 1991

I've been thinking about a new mythology for the computer age. Jung and Campbell both predicted its coming, talked of the need for it. A mythology that embraces the world as we know it, with technology and the limits of modern science, multinationals and suburbs, drugs and traveling to the moon, people of multi-ethnic origin, world citizens, computer networks and virtual reality.

No one can will create it, probably. It probably needs to spring from our/someone's subconscious(es). But lately I've been thinking about what its themes might include. Campbell thought they would include the unity of spaceship earth, of closed horizons, that "everyone is in this together". We've come far enough from the Piscean Age and have relearned enough from the East and our indigenous predecessors that they might also include the unity of good with evil, the aliveness of matter, the relativity of absolutes, the limits of science, and the value of being able to go back and forth between worlds, live on the edge.

A myth for today might also need to teach the acceptance of risk and change and ambiguity and possibly stress, survival traits for the future: how to dance through life, when to accept change and when to fight it, how to keep swimming fast and cleverly enough to stay afloat.

So one of its most important explorations may be about honesty, authenticity, and what its use in such a fast-moving society is. Spurred on by the beatniks and their attraction to nakedness in poetry and person, honesty had a heyday in sixties culture. Perhaps we had finally gotten past the outer plumage required to distinguish the aristocracy from the ordinary man, the well-born gentleperson from the cockney, the person of means from the lower class working hack. The freedom to be able to do and say what one feels in one's heart was finally considered of more value than the need to keep oneself identified with membership in a particular group. But honesty has taken a beating in more recent times as the more and more depersonalized mass media takes an ever-more prominent place in our lives.

Three recent U.S. movies examine the value of the inclusion of honesty in modern mythology and its relationship to the media. Two of them were so stark in their statement of the value of honesty that the general public could barely incorporate them into its world view. I am referring to the recent sex, lies, and videotape (1989), written and produced by Steven Soderbergh; My Dinner with Andre written by Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory, and filmed by Louis Malle (1981); and the less well known Paris, Texas, a film made in the U.S. by German filmmaker Wim Wenders.

sex, lies, and videotape brings us into the lives of a couple who are having sexual incompatibility problems. She admits to her analyst that she has never had an orgasm, he courts his wife's more sexually-active sister. When an old college friend of the husband's shows up in town, he draws the attention of both the women with his odd ways: living alone, he makes videotapes of women talking about their sex lives as stimulation for his own sex life. He is at first very reluctant to reveal his set-up to either woman (he is said to have devised this barricade against interpersonal contact in reaction to an unsuccessful early love affair), but both find themselves drawn to him by the very rawness of the absolute honesty he maintains about it. While much of the attention paid to the film has centered on its co-themes of adultery and pornography, these are almost a relief for many people to deal with compared to the thought of the possibility of absolute honesty. Honesty is dangerous stuff, the film implies, for it begets honesty, and that can thoroughly change your life, beware!

No critic has compared sex, lies, and videotape to My Dinner with Andre. They seem closely parallel to me. Certainly the strange exultation with which you walk out of the theatre is very close, and in both cases lasts approximately until your next need to deal with the world as it is around you.

My Dinner with Andre harks back to Ingmar Bergman's Personna. Like the actress in that film who stops one evening in mid-stage-sentence and refuses to speak, Andre, a theater director, has given up his career at its height and wandered off on some inchoate personal search. But when Wally Shawn meets him for dinner he is glowing, healthy, sure of himself, and completely able to express his honest feelings about everything at any given moment, without dwelling on them for longer than that moment. He replies to Wally's opening comment that he looks "terrific" warmly - "Well, thank you. I feel terrible" - followed with pleasant laughter.

The discussion reveals that, after leaving the theatre several years before, Andre took part in a workshop in Poland with forty other actors all questioning the value of their involvement with the theater. Instead of improvisational theatre exercises involving characters, this group tried improvising as themselves. He goes on describing an attempt to make a film of The Little Prince, a symbol of innocence who he was disappointed to find to be always taming things; a visit to Findhorn, where he discovered people living with intensity and a wild enthusiasm, not doing things mechanically; and finally a workshop in which he took part in which the participants each acted out their own death - through this whole story, stopping every once in awhile to cast aspersions on the story itself, at his chutzpah in squandering his life in such a self-centered empty manipulative search for the holy grail. And then he announces that in general he's finding the world very upsetting and people very strange.

By now, you're probably squirming in your seat, thinking "Oh no, I don't want to think about these things, I have enough of a time just keeping my daily life together without going to see a movie that makes me think about things like this . . ." And then he starts describing how people generally lie to themselves and others about the state things and people they know are in - telling people they look fine when they don't, and believing things are going to turn out all right when they don't. But then, just as you're ready to sneak out of the theater, he mentions how occasionally he meets someone who allows themselves to honestly experience the things that are happening to him, and what a relief it is to connect with such a person . . . and you think, umm, hmmm - and how people sit glued to their radios when something like the mass suicides in Guyana (or the massacres in Beijing or South Africa - or the Vietnamese kids gunned down on the Modesto? schoolyard) happen, but how somehow we train ourselves to try to ignore it all and just keep on because we're so inundated with that kind of thing, let ourselves zombie out while "rage and worry and uneasiness" builds up inside. Which rage comes spilling out inappropriately, often at people we really love or like, just because it's left over from some other situation.

Andre talks about the collective social lie we live, like being at a dinner party while his father is dying and none of his friends mentioning it at all, and suddenly Wally is spilling out similar experiences: how everyone has this goal in life of what they're supposed to achieve, whether it be making money or creating art or whatever, and they're so busy trying to live up to this goal or fantasy that they never can step out of the role, or ask their friends to, because that would make everybody uncomfortable.

Then, they're both talking, about how this way of living is the opposite of the zen or hasidic idea of recognizing the spirit in everyone. And the question begins to surface, naturally, since they're both involved with the theater, of how anyone can possibly do meaningful theater (or any other art, really) in times such as these. Because if you show people how horrible the world is, people who already in their hearts are experiencing that horror just tend to shut down even more, feel even more powerless and passive. It's again, the question of the media's role in promoting honesty.

Wally, who started out the evening jaded and cynical, is getting more and more protective of his little world - inconceivably to the self he was at the start of the evening, sighing about the ordinaryness of that same little world. But the warmth of Andre puts things right in the last few minutes of the movie: his willingness to be honest to himself, to accept himself - to accept his doubts about himself, and the very ideas he's discussing, yet at the same time accept his wonder at it. Wally and you go out into the night feeling like maybe it is ok to let yourself experience just a little bit of the world honestly, to get back in touch with your real feelings about things, your likes and dislikes, your wants and needs, and to really try to connect, occasionally, to other people.

This honesty is scary stuff, of course, This is the stuff of which encounter groups is made: telling others what you really think about them. Imagine doing that at your job, in your relationship, with your kids, with your kids teachers, with your family, with your friends, with the sales clerk at the store. Sure, these days we might let a little of it creep into our conversation, jokingly, but very guardedly.

The grating that living this facade puts on a person in a social situation in which one typically has the possibility of interacting with a hundred or more people - many of them through casual interactions which we try to make every effort to keep limited - on an average day is becoming ever more onerous. Most of us hide from it to a great extent, gloss things over, stay home and watch tv, look for like-minded friends that we can "be comfortable" with, create enclaves. And meanwhile, we have entered an era of the organization, in which the great majority of us find ourselves working in or otherwise dealing with entities in which the way to get by is not to rock the boat too much, "be a team player", try to leave the big decisions to someone else. More and more of us have become part of large institutions (corporations, school districts, universities, governments) where the person we disagreed with will still be there at the next meeting or the next day at work. Somewhere I read recently that this widespread predicament may be the very reason for the renewed popularity of such outlaws as John Wayne, with his "I don't take no shit" attitude, clean end-all totally honest solutions. I know a number of people who have confided that they have to work really hard to maintain their cool because if they ever got too many of their buttons pushed they're afraid they might totally freak out, grab a gun, beat someone to a pulp.

But the feeling of well-being that comes when we let ourselves be aware of just a little bit of our real reactions to the world and our lives could be a valuable contervailing force. Because in the end we have been hiding from the good as well as the bad, just in order to keep going. Which brings us back to sex, lies, and videotape.

In sex, lies, and videotape the depersonalized media helps allow and promote honesty. The denouement in this film is not only the wife finding out about the distressing goings-on between her husband and her sister, after the sister gets drawn by her own fascination into making a tape with the husband's friend; it is also about the wife's discovery of the attractive character of the friend, who at first disgusts her with his tape-making, but winds up drawing her out with his utter honesty about himself and what he's doing. But the truth is so hard for any of the characters to take that it is only after they have made a tape or listened to a tape that they are able to incorporate a part of their lives that they "knew" about, but would not admit to themselves that they knew. The videotape becomes the medium which allows people to do what they can not let themselves do in everyday life.

This beneficial role is the same part that the medium plays in Paris, Texas. At the start of the film, the main character is discovered, again silently, wandering in the desert near the Tex-Mex border. A doctor locates the man's brother from a note in the man's wallet and the brother, a suburbanite from California, comes out to bring him home. Seems the man just up and disappeared several years before after a break-up with his wife. Slowly drawn out by his brother, the lost man begins to talk, though mostly in riddles, but always honestly, and by the time they get back to California, his human side has re-surfaced, though we can feel what an effort is in for him and also his uncertainty about wanting to return. There he is introduced to his small son, adopted by the brother and his wife after the boy's mother left the son with them. After delicate manoevers, the boy and his father get back in touch, and both decide they want to find the mother.

The father and son take off for a city from which the mother has been sending monthly checks and, on the correct day, wait outside the bank where she deposits them. When the mother appears they follow her to the building where she works. Leaving the boy in the car, the father goes in and discovers a telephone-sex house, where women sit behind a one-way mirror and talk to or perform for the men who talk through a telephone on the dark side of the mirror. After an aborted attempt, a good dose of liquor, and a night's sleep, the father returns to the place on the next day. When his wife comes in, he tells her he wants to tell her a story, turns his chair around away from the mirror, and proceeds to tell her what happened in their lives leading to their break-up. She, of course, soon realizes who it is, and weeps through his story: how he went on jealousy fits, how he tried to keep her in and tie her down because he was afraid to lose her, how much she meant to him. When he finishes, he is so overwhelmed with emotion that he gets up to leave, but she calls him back, by name. They look around for a switch to see if she can reverse the lighting so she can see him - the first time she's ever tried to do this - and she takes her turn on the telephone telling him what went on in her mind.

This medium of telephone distance is the only way the two of them are able to be honest enough to sort out the confusion of an intense, problematic relationship. If either of them had tried to be this honest "in person", one or both of them might well have still been too upset to handle it. But the space which the telephone set-up allows them provides the right neutral territory to be fully honest, about feelings, mistakes, regrets, and guilt. A rapprochement of sorts is reached.

I think this film puts the honesty of the other two films into its proper place in the world. We will probably never live at such a high level that we can go about being continuously honest about everything. But more and more, society, myths, and movies, are trying to find mediums - encounter groups, is the best example - where we can be at the level of honesty we sometimes need to sort out our lives in this complex world. If people could know that, even if they have to keep up the "everything's ok" facade going most of the time, that there are times and places in their lives when they can open up just a little, and have people really compassionately LISTEN to them, and, by doing this, open for themselves - and others - a whole new world, perhaps we won't continue to helplessly elect and support fairy-tale-telling leaders who calm us by feeding us warm and fuzzy bedtime stories.

How to find an adequate place for honesty in our lives will be an ongoing challenge. But perhaps movies like these will help make the need for this a permanent part of our mythology.

* * *

There is another film which explores this relationship between honesty and the media one step deeper - which, unfortunately, you will be unlikely to see. Its name is The Documentator (A dokumentátor), produced by Istvan Darday and Györgyi Szalai in Hungary in 1988. I saw it at the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1990, but I have not heard of its being released in the United States.

Probably the distributors guessed rightly. This film is not for everybody. The people who most need to think about some of its messages - the lack of subtlety in the modern media and its relationship to the slowness of the working out of ideas about mankind's direction - would walk out part way through the first part, drowned in images, unable to sit through that very subtlety and slowness in that media, confused and unrewarded. Those who stay, and put together the pieces, however, may rediscover something they already knew about the world - that there are no easy answers.

So why bother? Because, whether we ignore it, chafe against it, or accept it, this reality of no easy answers - these attempts to discover the sustainable lines between honesty and falsehood, between individual justice and the common good, between the medium and the message - will buffet our lives through the forseeable future.

In The Documentator, a condemnation of the State Socialist world's inner workings unravels slowly from a three-way love story. The victim is a man we are not allowed to admire particularly - an intellectual, a doubter, one who does not relish being forced to take sides. And that is exactly why we should feel sorry for him in the end - because (like us) he is no hero, but a self-centered, self-doubting, technology-loving, out-of-touch modern man. But do we? Which side are we on?

The central setting is a video, computer, hi-fi store in Budapest, Hungary, 1988. "Chip", the gorgeous, fashionable saleslady, agonizes between a husband (our "non-hero") who has grown distant and cold, and a lover who she only calls on when the vacuum becomes too unbearable.

Her husband, the store's owner, having become wealthy by what both the capitalist and now the ex-Communist world consider honest means - having the right ideas at the right time - agonizes over his wealth and his lack of sympathy for the common people, and over his intellectual distance. "Safe" in his "ivory tower" (the upper suite of the store), he spends his time contemplating selections from a collection he is compiling of video documentaries of important political events: Prague in the sixties, Hungary in 1956, the struggle for civil rights in the U.S., Hitler's Germany, Latin America, etc. Like Winston Smith in Orwell's 1984, he enjoys discovering proofs of historical dissonances and feels his mission is to serve by creating this collection of "realities". Yet the honesty he seeks in the media he does not have in his own life. When his wife tries to talk to him, he is unfeeling - until she admits that she has another lover.

Her lover, the store's assistant and delivery man, nicknamed "Rambo", appears a stereotype, with his motorcycle, leather pants, and porn film selections - but we then see that he displays real human humor, warmth, and compassion in dealing with people. When the husband traps them in the act (both by setting them up and then by physically locking them in) and the two are forced to listen together to the husband's disembodied description of their relationship (the way the husband has finally found of telling his wife how he feels), Rambo cries with her.

We have witnessed the same old trite solution being applied by a jealous husband as is used by repressive governments - even democratic governments in the form of corporal punishment - force. Yet we have seen him earlier declaring to a colleague that "video will set people free," in a weak argument in which he goes on to admit that video gives a false sense of honesty, when in actuality the camera chooses what you can look at and thus biases your opinion by taking sides for you - indeed, by forcing the viewer to decide which side he is on.

We are saved momentarily from facing the rawness of the plot by (as in all modern commercial media) a trashy, or more accurately, a denied, "intermission" consisting of hokey put-on advertising. Yes, the filmmaker too is playing with our minds rather cruelly - not only with this joke, but by leaving his synthesis for well into the second part.

The lover's death is the simple trashy movie ending we have learned to expect. But instead, as Gorbachev speaks on television about glasnost, we see that, nevertheless, undercover agents are still doing their dirty work. It is instead the husband who is carted off to prison and a car "accident", turned in by a truck driver possibly acting for the lover or the wife, or someone else with a grievance against him - shown on television in the same gritty one-sided video sequence as the clips the husband once collected. The personal is political, as government sits in for the forces which the members of the triangle are too civilized to exercise. The movie ends with a beautiful version of a Dire Straits' melody fitted with Hungarian(?) words, talking about hope for the next generation.

This was 1988, before the events which pierced the iron curtain in 1989. But the plot is valid under any government, and probably always will be. There are always some people who try to "take care of" people who are in their way by messing up their lives, yet who know the rules of the game well enough to be officially condoned and even become rich and "successful". If one attempts to be honest, to hold onto truths, one can become dangerous to other game-players. This goes for the husband's political activity as well as for the wife and her lover.

The medium is not the decider. There are two aspects to video and to other media - honest and dishonest, fair and unfair - just as there are both to state socialism and to democracy, and we have little or no control over their effect - but, as these movies predict, most people will walk out before getting any of this, draw little circles around their lives, run their electric blankets in winter, and continue to say "I'm fine" no matter how bad things are.