Talk:Being There

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Sections to add

Social commentary
Analysis
End scene - walking on water
Controversy over out-take sequence during credits

Bungopolis

Source

An interesting source for this article is the long interview by Illeana Douglas on Kevin Pollak's Chat Show (http://www.kevinpollakschatshow.com/archive/?cat=214). She describes the connections between Melvyn Douglas and Peter Sellers, and the origin of the unusual final scene of the movie. David Spector (talk) 21:02, 20 March 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I will have to read the Polish novel, however one might want to read, or refresh their knowledge of The Idiot and the discussions of it's meaning and relationship to Jesus Docriverside (talk) 19:44, 17 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Recent edits of article re African-American characters/issues; corrections/clarifications; shortening things; etc.

I'm not sure I've done such a terrible job in respect to summaries, etc., but am certainly willing to discuss things.

First, respectfully said, the recent Undo just undid everything I did, including error-correction or clarification. E.g., "in reply to the question who he is" deserves an "of" before "who", which I added. So an error, or at least clumsy phrasing, was needlessly restored. Too, I cleaned up a lot of excess verbiage, which was undone too, rather than an editor carefully going through what I did and saving what he/she could.

Second, while some may disagree about the African-American issues in the film, I don't have to have the same opinion as other editors. Moreover, Hal Ashby clearly emphasized various Black/black issues in the film, cf. this review of "Being There" at https://deepfocusreview.com/definitives/being-there/, in pertinent part,

"Ashby, ever the social justice warrior, hints at another reason for Chance’s ascendance early in the film . . . As Chance walks through a largely African American neighborhood, the viewer cannot avoid seeing a graffiti message spray-painted onto a building wall: 'America aint shit cause the white man’s got a god complex.' There’s something to be said about how the men of power in Being There, . . . trust Chance simply because he appears well-dressed, a man of mystery and means—but most importantly, he’s white. When Chance eventually appears on television and gives an interview where the American public clings to every dippy word out of his mouth, Ashby cuts away to Louise (Ruth Attaway), the African American servant who raised him. 'It’s for sure a white man’s world in America,' she remarks. 'Hell, I raised that boy since he was the size of a pissant… Had no brains at all… And look at him now! Yessir, all you gotta be is white in America and you get whatever you want!' Lines such as this harken back to Ashby’s collaboration with Jewison, specifically In the Heat of the Night and The Landlord, where they sought to made entertaining films with a message not just in favor of civil rights but condemning of white systems of power."

So, unless an editor has an unreasoning desire to hide African-American issues (not that I'm accusing anyone of that), it could seem perverse, even willfully ignorant, to keep such issues out of the Plot section. This is far more important than fine points of exactly how one person wants an edit summary to be written; many people don't even write edit summaries at all, though I did provide one, and the substance of the edit is more important than the summary.

Finally, I kept the Plot section to 700 words, helped by eliminated plenty of unnecessary verbiage. As one sees, I undid the recent Undo -- since I see no problems with anything I did, and indeed, I added a great deal of cleanup/correction/needed minority-issue discussion to the article --, but if one wants to discuss further civilly, please let me know. Thanks. John315 (talk) 03:36, 30 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]