Being There, by Jerzy Kosinski 8.25

This is my second time reading the book, although I’ve seen the film a good handful of times. In fact, it’s my adulation of the film that even got me to read it in the first place, since a friend had it and suggested I give it a shot.

Despite its short length of a little over 100 pages (and short ones, at that!), I had forgotten some key details. It was nice to revisit this and get the chance (!) to compare the two versions of the same story.

For one, I was surprised how much more accentuated the sex and politics is in the book.

With regards to the sex, it’s hardly surprising; American culture is rife with sex that conflicts with its puritanical roots. Thus, removing it from the script would have been a natural reflex. Anyway, one of the two scenes would have been pretty controversial at the time…

As for the politics, it’s not so much that there’s more of it in the book. It’s just that there’s less of the other stuff that was added to the film, so it makes for quite the contrast between the two. I’m hardly complaining, because I do love politics. Especially political satire, such as this is. It’s strictly an observation.

‘Being There’ is the story of Chance, a simple-minded gardener who ends up thrown into the public eye after having been secluded all his life, his only window into the world being his television. Almost everything he knows is coloured by what he’s seen on is trusty TV and he acts consequently.

The book is about celebrity, the cult of personality, voyeurism, perception and the meaning that we assign to our lives. In its satire, it also provides an insightful look at the economy and about life in general.

Here’s a bit that particularly struck me:

“Facing the cameras with their unsensing triple lenses pointed at him like snouts, Chance became only an image for millions of real people. They would never know how real he was, since his thinking could not be televised. And to him, the viewers existed only as projections of his thought, as images. He would never know how real they were, since he had never met them and did not know what they thought.“

For me, it brought up reflections of how we colour our perception of the people that we think we know – people who, in truth, can only be known by their own selves (and even this is rooted in perception). As time goes by, I’m more and more convinced that we project on others more than we care to admit. It can even explain some relationships.

No matter what happens, we are a mere glimpse of ourselves to the outside world, and no cameras can really capture what’s at our hearts and in our minds. To watch another and believe that we understand them is a farce, unless deep dialogue takes place. This type of exchange is rare, especially in an age that limits communication to 140 characters or less.

‘Being There’, even though it was first published in 1970, remains relevant. In fact, it is a book that is perfectly suited for the times we live in right now, what with online “friends”, “reality” TV, manufactured news and our addiction to celebrity “culture”.

I highly recommend it; it’s a quick read and it’s very simply written, but it’s exactly matched to the simplicity of the main character and its message. ‘Being There’ forces any thinking person to reconsider the “reality” we live in, to get a different perspective on it.

To me, that makes it a great book. It should be requisite reading in schools.