My Dinner with André

In 1981, My Dinner with André—a nearly two-hour film that, in the words of one reviewer, was “literally all talk and no action”—became an improbable hit, running for over a year in one New York theater as well as in hundreds of theaters nationwide. At its first public screening at the Telluride Film Festival, it received a standing ovation. Film critic Roger Ebert described it as not only “wonderfully odd” but “entirely devoid of clichés.”

Directed by famous French director Louis Malle, the film consists of an extended conversation between two barely fictionalized men well-known at the time in New York’s theater world: playwright and actor Wallace Shawn and avant-garde stage director André Gregory, who paused his career in 1975 to travel and visit spiritual communities outside the U.S. Much of the conversation consists of André monologuing about what he learned from those experiences.

Casting a fresh eye on My Dinner with André, recent posts on social media have pointed out, “They knew, all the way back in 1981.” What did “they” know? Apparently, they knew, as Catherine did, about the “lobotomizing” effects of television (and later, smartphones) and about people’s willingness to habituate to the control grid. André recounts:

“I met this man whom I greatly admire…. And he told me that he no longer watches television, he doesn’t read newspapers, and he doesn’t read magazines. He’s completely cut them out of his life because he really does feel that we’re living in some kind of Orwellian nightmare now and that everything that you hear now contributes to turning you into a robot…. He said, ‘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, and they have this pride in this thing they’ve 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, they no longer have—having been lobotomized—the capacity to leave the prison they’ve made or to even see it as a prison….’ And he said, ‘Escape before it’s too late.’”

Fast-forwarding to 2021, My Dinner with André provided a template for a four-part series of conversations between Catherine and playwright/political satirist CJ Hopkins about the same kinds of issues—such as propaganda and control—raised by André. Produced by OVALmedia, We Need to Talk about Mr. Global is viewable at the link listed below.

Fortunately, as André concluded in 1981 and as Catherine and CJ echoed 40 years later, there are always grounds for hope. In fact, André’s description of “pockets of light springing up in different parts of the world,” becoming centers where people can “refuel” and “reconstruct a new future for the world,” sounds a lot like Solari’s growing global network of people dedicated to living a free and inspired life!