Word: film
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...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...
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...