My Dinner with Andre

The 1981 flick “My Dinner with Andre” represented a departure from traditional filmmaking across several different dimensions.  No plot, no character development, no cinematography, no tension, and certainly no denouement.  At the same time, it’s thoroughly worthwhile.

As shown in the clip linked above, it does have a theme, i.e., that human beings have been brainwashed into living lives virtually devoid of real thought and emotion.  “(At the direction of the corporations), we’ve built a concentration camp in which we are both the inmates and the guards.”

When I came across this film in the 1990s, I was enthralled with all the high-level intellection, but I doubted the central concept.  Now, it seems more real; our capacity to explore big ideas and live each moment of our lives fully certainly has gone down the drain.

Think of how white nationalists, Trump supporters, anti-vaxxers and other science deniers would have been regarded back then.  Now all this hate and stupidity is a standard, perhaps permanent, feature of our culture.