I first watched this movie in 1982. My Zen teacher at the time encouraged us to go and see it, and it resonated with me and my friends.
It disappeared for decades but has reappeared sporadically. I am posting it here as a cultural artifact of significance and for educational purposes.
It raises disturbing questions about capitalism, totalitarianism, social control, and the search for meaning. Andre is the quintessential ‘seeker’, who has traveled the world looking for answers to life’s deeper questions. His friend Wally is living a relatively normal working class life of a playright.
You can view the movie for free on Youtube.
This is in my opinion the most significant video commentary on the movie itself. Most movie reviewers, themselves living shallow unconscious lives, miss the whole point of the film! They think it’s just two guys talking over dinner. Far from it…My Dinner with Andre raises important questions about politics, class and consciousness.
And here is the brilliant commentary, which is extremely insightful
Here is the transcript of The Working Classics. You can watch it on Youtube and give it a like or share and support that channel.
Title: My Dinner with Andre Is Not About Two People Talking—It’s About Capitalism, Class, and Complicity
Subtitle: A misunderstood masterpiece of political anxiety, not existential ennui
One of the many—and really interesting—things about the movie for me is the notion of what’s conscious and what’s unconscious.
First and foremost: what is not conscious. What has not been said is that we’re two upper-class guys spending hours talking about life while others are working and suffering. So the most unconscious thing is our political environment.
My Dinner with Andre is a profoundly misunderstood film—maybe one of the most misunderstood films of the Western canon. Its groundbreaking form—a single conversation, almost two hours long—has been defined by both parody and criticism in the popular imagination as “the film about two people talking.” It has since become famous for its universal simplicity.
“It wasn’t about making me happy,” one might say. It shows My Dinner with Andre as a story about a guy who has an unexpectedly enjoyable evening with the weird friend he’s been avoiding lately.
In his reviews, Roger Ebert argued that what they actually say is not really the point. He wrote: “I made a lot of notes about Andre’s theories and Wally’s doubts, but this is not a logical process. It is a conversation in which the real subject is the tone, the mood, the energy. Here are two friends who have each found a way to live successfully.”
We see those images in our head. The movie is like listening to a radio play. In that model, you see two people on the screen, but in your mind you’re also seeing strange, weird, and wonderful scenes and experiences.
But the spell is the medium of storytelling as such—not the stories themselves. The differences between the characters carry no real stakes. Both characters have, to quote Ebert, “each found a way to live successfully.” This is a reading that mirrors the formal equality of liberalism: one opinion is just as good as another, just so long as those opinions are not allowed any substantive social effectivity.
The problem with these kinds of readings is that the political content of what the characters actually talk about has been lost. This is unfortunate, because the film provides us with a very rich critique of capitalism and its psychosocial effects.
“Yes, we’re all bored now,” Andre says. “But has it ever occurred to you, Wally, that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating, unconscious form of brainwashing created by a world totalitarian government based on money—and that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks? And it’s not just a question of individual survival, Wally, but that somebody who’s bored is asleep, and somebody who’s asleep will not say no.”
Although critics have argued that what Andre and Wally say doesn’t really matter, this ignores the fact that Wallace Shawn fought hard to keep every single line of dialogue that director Louis Malle wanted to cut.
“I would explain at great length why every sentence could not be cut,” Shawn said. “Because it had four different purposes in the script. I would list all four. I had a reason for doing the things that I did.”
When we actually listen to the characters with this in mind, what emerges is not at all reducible to a generalized existential ennui, as many have interpreted it. On the contrary, the film is shot through with anxieties that are decidedly political.
The very first words of the film are telling. Wally describes the everyday details of his work, and production emerges explicitly as struggle:
“The life of a playwright is tough. It’s not easy as some people seem to think. You work hard writing plays and nobody puts on your work. You take up other lines of work to try to make a living. I became an actor, and people don’t hire you. So you just spend your days doing the errands of your trade. Today I had to be up by 10 in the morning to make some important phone calls. Then I went to the stationery store to buy envelopes, then to the Xerox shop. There were dozens of things to do. By five o’clock I’d finally made it to the post office and mailed off several copies of my plays, meanwhile checking constantly with my answering service to see if my agent had called with any acting work. In the morning the mailbox had just been stuffed with bills. What was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to pay them?”
To reinsert the political into the film is to be confronted by alienation in its historical sense—not merely anxiety as a universal human condition. Although an aspiring member of the petite bourgeoisie, Wally is still a worker.
He puts on his tie only when he reaches the restaurant. He walks awkwardly through the bourgeois setting. He tries to order a club soda, and the bartender responds, “We only serve Perrier.” The effective weight of the “unexpectedly enjoyable evening” arises directly from the fact of Wally’s exploitation. He explains the reason for his initial trepidation himself: “I had problems of my own.”
Andre, on the other hand, is able to navigate the French menu with ease. People have “always known that he has some money somewhere.” Andre seems to know an awful lot about the menu. Wally admits: “I didn’t understand a word of it. No, I think I’ll have the cailles en sarcophage.” At the end of the film, Andre pays for both of their meals.
It would be a mistake to understand the differences between these characters as arbitrary differences in worldview. These are grounded, material differences arising from differing class positions.
It’s useful here to quote Brecht: “The drama’s force of collision, the passion, degree of heat, the range of characters—none of this can be separated from social function or portrayed apart from it. Those close interactions between human beings in struggle are the competitive struggles of developing capitalism, which produced individuals in a quite particular way.”
Put another way, the motivations and emotional investments of these characters are grounded in ways of living specific to a capitalist mode—a grounding that the film does a lot of work to establish.
This film is fundamentally a film about work and the kind of escapes that are available to those of us who do work.
“I’m just trying to survive,” Wally says. “I’m just trying to earn a living. Just trying to pay my rent and my bills.”
Only when we acknowledge the politicized nature of his characterization can we really see Andre for the tragic character that he is: one who could live in his art but never in his life. A line that both encapsulates the ideological function of cultural production under capitalism and unites the film’s political content with its unique form.
The screenplay was adapted from the tapes of real conversations between Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory. The whole film is the two actors living in their art.
“Ideally the goal, I suppose, was to make up nothing and to use—to make a fake conversation using only real fragments of conversation. In other words, months of conversation were cut up into minuscule scraps and glued together again in a way that no one would notice.”
Beyond characterization, the film returns again and again to a thematic core that can only be fully elucidated in the context of the film’s class politics. Many have identified this thematic core as a statement on the dangers of living life unconsciously. This is not incorrect—but it means little without accounting for the film’s pervasive concern with fascism.
Fascism is repeatedly invoked. Andre recalls a conversation:
“He said to me, ‘Where are you from?’ I said, ‘New York.’ He said, ‘Ah, New York. That’s a very interesting place. Do you know a lot of New Yorkers who keep talking about the fact that they want to leave but never do?’ I said, ‘Oh yes.’ He said, ‘Why do you think they don’t leave?’ I gave him different banal theories. He said, ‘Oh, I don’t think it’s that way at all. I think that New York is the new model for the new concentration camp, where the camp has been built by the inmates themselves, and the inmates are the guards. They have pride in this thing they built. They’ve built their own prison. And so they exist in a state of schizophrenia where they are both guards and prisoners. And as a result, having been lobotomized, they no longer have the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made, or to even see it as a prison.’”
“Then he went into his pocket and took out a seed for a tree. He said, ‘This is a pine tree.’ He put it in my hand and said, ‘Escape before it’s too late.’”
“For two or three years now, Chiquita and I have had this very unpleasant feeling that we really should get out. We feel like Jews in Germany in the late ’30s. Get out of here. Of course the problem is where to go, because it seems quite obvious that the whole world is going in the same direction.”
This isn’t surprising when we recall the wartime experiences of director Louis Malle, who as a child witnessed the Gestapo raid his school and send three of his classmates to be murdered in concentration camps.
“They would ask one of us to come with them,” Malle recalled. “I was one of the last. They came for me and put me in a van. They ran me through fields. They found a kind of potting shed, a little tiny room that once had tools in it. They took me down the steps into this basement. The room was just filled with harsh white light. Then they told me to get undressed and give them all my belongings. Then they put me on a table and sponged me down. I just started flashing on death camps and secret police. I don’t know what happened to the other people, but I just started to cry uncontrollably.”
It is fascism that provides the ethical problem of living life unconsciously. This gets most explicit when Andre chastises himself, realizing the fundamental contiguity of fascism and bourgeois class privilege:
“Finally, I’m sort of repelled by the whole story, if you really want to know. Who do I think I am? That’s a story of some kind of spoiled prince. Or the Shah of Iran. No, I wonder if people such as myself are not really Albert Speer—Hitler’s architect. I’ve been thinking a lot about him recently, because I think I am Speer. I think it’s time that I was caught and tried the way he was. He was a very cultivated man. An architect, an artist. He thought the ordinary rules of life didn’t apply to him either. I really feel that everything I’ve done is horrific. Just horrific.”
But importantly, this is more than a historical point about fascism as a simple effect of capitalism. Through Andre, the film is repeatedly communicating to the audience that there is something obscene, fascistic in the daily functioning of capitalism—and that we are complicit in the violence of class domination insofar as we remain mystified by capitalist ideology, insofar as we fail to live life consciously.
This problem of living ethically under capitalism is what troubles Andre throughout the film—and what would come to trouble Wallace Shawn in real life after making My Dinner with Andre.
“We made the movie about being asleep and waking up,” Shawn later said. “Are you just kind of crawling through your life like a mole, looking at your feet—I don’t know if moles do look at their feet—but not really observing what’s going on in your own life, or even allowing your own consciousness to take in anything? I became very agitated. A waking-up process. But it was not really so much about my place in the universe as my place as a beneficiary of the American Empire.”
These themes would be further explored by Shawn in his 1985 essay “Morality” and again a decade later in his 1990 play The Fever.
It’s also interesting to note that Shawn originally wanted to depict the struggles of the working class peripherally relative to his two protagonists—much like Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 film Weekend.
“There would be a third element, which would be the real world going on while the two different types of bourgeois were chatting. I mean, maybe we would be walking and we would be passing people who were digging a ditch and working. I saw Weekend with my mother, and I was enraged by it. The most hateful thing I’d ever seen. And over the course of maybe two days, it sunk in on me. I then decided that it was my favorite movie I’d ever seen in my life. And it was prophetic.”
Unaware of this context, critics have argued that the primary conflict between Wally and Andre is the contradiction between spiritualism and pragmatism. But this depoliticized reading doesn’t really hold up when we look at the conclusion of Wally’s character arc.
On the surface, this change appears quite mundane—and significantly, not at all an affirmation of Andre’s belief in the supernatural. At the beginning of the film, he walks to the restaurant unconsciously plagued by the myriad stresses of work. The film ends with Wally returning home in a taxi, without anxiety.
Ultimately, the conclusion of Wally’s character arc manifests as a remembering of his own history:
“I treated myself to a taxi. I rode home through the city streets. There wasn’t a street, there wasn’t a building that wasn’t connected to some memory in my mind. There I was buying a suit with my father. There I was having an ice-cream soda after school.”
This lesson is arguably the central theoretical pivot of historical materialism: to become conscious, to live life ethically, is to become conscious of one’s historical conditioning.
And that is what makes My Dinner with Andre a neglected masterpiece.
End of article
