"Being There" movie

[Shaman]

I just saw a DVD of an old Peter Sellers movie called "Being There" which co-starred Shirley McLaine. Can anyone who has seen the movie explain to me what that ending was all about. By walking on water in the end of the movie does it mean that the main character was God pretending to be a simple minded Forrest Gump-like gardener?

[Sooga]

Great movie. There have been many discussions regarding the ending of it. Some of these are:

* Obviously, walking on water has only been associated with Christ. Perhaps the movie is saying that we too easily try to find profound meaning/religion in very simple things.

* That while we may listen to the words of great leaders, that maybe they are at the core, meaningless?

* Or maybe it's simpler than that; that what people don't know can't hurt them.

[WillMagic]

Great movie - one of my top ten of all time.

He could be a christ figure...but my favorite way to think about it is that he's like a looney tunes character - he can't fall in to the water until he understands his predicament.

Will

[sfer]

[ QUOTE ]
I just saw a DVD of an old Peter Sellers movie called "Being There" which co-starred Shirley McLaine. Can anyone who has seen the movie explain to me what that ending was all about. By walking on water in the end of the movie does it mean that the main character was God pretending to be a simple minded Forrest Gump-like gardener?

[/ QUOTE ]

I think the best answer is: maybe.

[Cyrus]

The character of Peter Sellers is an empty shell on which all the people around him and those that see him through the media, project all they want to see. They take his trivial sayings about gardening to mean something extremely profound, etc. Such people, in our starved-for-meaning lives, and especially in our extremely trivialized and un-thinking era, can become very powerful, since the vacuity of their being (they are just being there) fits perfectly with the vacuity of modern society - a society that refuses to think, lest the whole contraption collapses down.

The man, at the end of the movie, is poised to become President of the United States of America, arguably the most powerful man on the planet. From then on, the possibilities are endless and that's where the movie ends, because it is not a movie about how to become the President or become powerful. (Although, the movie seems, in terospect to be prescient about American politics --viz. Ronald Reagan--, it was not about that.) The director ends it on a little whimsical note: You want the man to walk on water? He will walk on water. You want the man to be your God, your all-knowing, all-powerful God? He can be that too. As long as he says what you want to hear and as long as he looks like what you want him to look. (He was good in bed too.)

...Yeah, they made movies like this a few decades ago. Amazing, isn't it?

[natedogg]

If you like this film, see "network", it's the other great media satire of the 70s.

natedogg

[elwoodblues]

I think this is a very good description of the ending.

Watching Peter Sellers makes you wonder if both Tom Hanks (Gump) and Dustin Hoffman (Rainman) were just doing their best Peter Sellers.

[John Cole]

But it wasn't anywhere near as funny as Caddyshack or Animal House.