Jerzy Kosinski's Being There, Novel and Film: Changes Not by Chance

College Literature, Spring 2004 by Lazar, Mary

Sometime later, EE said to him: "I am so free with you. Up until the time I met you, every man I knew barely acknowledged me. I was a vessel that he could take hold of, pierce, and pollute. I was merely an aspect of somebody's love-making. . . .You uncoil my wants: desire flows within me, and when you watch me my passion dissolves it. You make me free. I reveal myself to myself and I am drenched and purged." (Kosinski 1970, 96)

Although "reveal myself to myself" is nebulous, we can at least assume that Chance as voyeur and inactive agent brings the woman relief. But Kosinski is careful to leave us with the impression that this catharsis will be insufficient; recall that our final view of Eve as Chance leaves the Ball (an intended pun) reveals her being "embraced" by a general. Chance's training as the ultimate viewer will not serve him long in the world of real sex.

Thirty years after Kosinski wrote the book, one may wonder how accurate his interpretation of the medium remains. Certainly, convincing studies about the negative effects of TV proliferate, and its impact on unsupervised young minds is basically uncontested.With the advent of extended TV-that is, of the VCR and attendant, often violent video games, Kosinski's analysis seems rather mild, perhaps more applicable to residents in a nursing home than to children born in 1985. If Kosinski had lived and revised this story yet again, would a recombinant Chance, like Cockpit's Tarden, have provided a more suitable mirror for mercenaries? Some of those raised on the videogame Doom, most notably the teen assassins, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold of Colorado's Columbine High School, view the electronic media, film included, as somehow more real than the physical.They were convinced, for example, that directors Spielberg and Tarantino would vie for the rights to their story, and they left five homemade videos behind to document their plans and to explain their motivations. After they murdered eleven people and committed suicide, many Americans are still uncertain of the role which reflective yet formative screens might assume in the psyches of their viewers.

In 1973, Kosinski told Daniel Cahill that of his first four books, "Being There [was] the most violent . . . since there the whole notion of violence has been already discarded," and he regarded Chance, who is unable to interpret television as an assault on the self, as "the ultimate victim" (Kosinski 1993a, 83). But in the film, Kosinski appears to contradict himself. Chance is damaged, yes, but he is, at the same time, superior to many of the more sophisticated characters. Perhaps this is because his identity is not entirely linked to television. Gardiner also spends half of his life with nature. The second paragraph of the novel explains, through Chance's consciousness, "Plants were different from people. No plant is able to think about itself or able to know itself; there is no mirror in which the plant can recognize its face; no plant can do anything intentionally: it cannot help growing, and its growth has no meaning, since a plant cannot reason or dream" (3). Granted access to Chance's thoughts-although Kosinski also employs an omniscient narrator-we realize that Chance thinks in the garden; when he watches TV, Chance "float[s] into the world" (5). In the garden, he knows that decay is as important as growth. And the narrator tells us, "In this colored world of television, gardening was the white cane of a blind man" (5).