Jeremy’s Tophunder №97: Being There

7 min readMay 9, 2020

After talking about Forrest Gump yesterday, it seems only fitting that today we cover the other movie on my list about a simple-minded man who inexplicably ends up as a national celebrity.

I remember I was a freshman in high school when I first heard of Being There. Forrest Gump was my favorite movie at the time, and I mentioned it to a teacher of mine. He told me that if I wanted to see a better version of it, I should watch Being There. I was perplexed — as far as I was concerned, Forrest Gump was the best movie ever. Now this guy is telling me that not only is there a movie out there that’s better than Forrest Gump, but it’s literally a better version of the same idea? I couldn’t believe it.

So I watched it, and I loved it. I didn’t love it quite as much as Forrest Gump, but it was still great. 17 years later, I still feel that way. Being There is just good enough to sneak into the Top 100, but only barely.

I see two significant differences between Being There and Gump, with the biggest being in the nature of the reaction of the world to the central character. In Forrest Gump, it seems like everybody realizes right away that Forrest isn’t the smartest guy. But, he’s kind, loyal, with a big heart, and everybody seems to like him regardless of how classically intelligent he is. He’s not “book smart,” and he’s not “street smart,” but he clearly has an immense amount of social and emotional intelligence. He’s able to build lasting and meaningful relationships, and that’s a huge reason why he’s eventually so successful. Meanwhile, Chance seems to have a similar mental handicap, but in this case, people confuse his plain speaking for profound metaphors. There’s always three layers of meaning to every conversation — there’s the conversation that Chance thinks he’s having, there’s the conversation that the other person thinks they’re having, and then there’s what’s actually being said. Chance is kind and polite, and that seems like a big reason why people like him, but it’s mostly a constant misinterpretation of everything he says that leads to him climbing the business and political ladders in Washington.

Ultimately, Forrest Gump is a more fantastical story, whereas Being There is more farcical. The story of Forrest Gump is actually vaguely believable — through sheer earnestness and pluck, he becomes a household name because everyone can’t help but like him. The specific examples of how and why that happens obviously stray into the more ridiculous, but the core of the movie rings true. In Being There, I just have a hard time taking the premise as seriously. Sure, there are examples of not-the-smartest-guys becoming successful politicians (I won’t name names but you can fill in the blanks based on your own pre-conceived biases), but the difference between whoever you’re thinking of and Chance is that the real-life people actually believe that they’re smart enough to be the President (or whatever else they decide to do). People don’t accidentally become a key political figure by talking (literally) about nonsense while everyone assumes they’re talking (metaphorically) about something important. There’s always some agency in the matter. It doesn’t seem like Chance ever really has any thoughts on his mind that don’t include horticulture or a desire to watch television.

Chance’s backstory is what I find most intriguing about Being There — he really doesn’t have one. With Forrest Gump, we follow him throughout his life and see how everything connects. With Chance, we just get thrown into his world in his mid-50s, and he becomes an overnight sensation. But there’s a lot that we don’t know about him. He apparently lived in the old man’s house, tending the garden, for his entire life — he says he’s never left the property. There isn’t even really any mention of his family or where he came from. He doesn’t know whether or not he was related to the old man (but doesn’t think so), but nothing else about his past ever really comes to light. It makes me wonder what happened. Is he in fact mentally handicapped, or is this just what happens to a person when he receives no formal education, and apparently very little socialization other than watching TV? Is he an orphan that was taken in by the old man? Not only does Chance say he’s never left the property, he says he’s never been allowed to leave the property, which certainly raises some red flags. Is there, or was there some form of abuse going on? He doesn’t know how to read or write. All of his clothes belonged to the old man, and it doesn’t seem like the old man left the house all that often himself. Chance really is a blank canvas, and you can really fill in the gaps with whatever you think makes the most sense, because the movie really doesn’t tell us.

The other major difference that I can’t help but think of between Forrest Gump and Being There is the lead actor’s relationship to their role. In my eyes, Tom Hanks and Forrest Gump are incredibly similar. Obviously, Hanks isn’t mentally handicapped or from the south, but both of them are just lovable goofballs that everybody can’t help but be drawn to. They’re both kind, caring, boyishly energetic and effortlessly charismatic. And there’s obviously a reason for that — in a lot of ways, I’m sure that Hanks played Gump in a very personal way.

On the other hand, Chance the Gardener and Peter Sellers seem like they couldn’t be more different. I did some research on Sellers for this project, and it seems like, by nearly all accounts, he was a moody and enigmatic prick, a bad husband, a worse father, and often absolutely miserable to work with. He married four times, and it seems like all of them ended rather ugly. He battled constantly with directors and co-stars, and often lobbied to get them fired, up to and including Britt Ekland, his co-star in The Bobo, which seems relevant, considering they were married at the time. Following his death in 1980 (he was only 54), his children received £800 of a £4.5 million estate. He was widely described as paranoid, childish, insecure, and, the way that I read some of these accounts, manipulative and borderline abusive. It really seems like the only thing in Sellers’ life worth celebrating was his professional career, and even that is hit-or-miss. Based on large part on the aforementioned feuds with co-workers, he ended up with a large handful of movies that just weren’t very good. He is almost solely responsible for what we know now as the character of Inspector Jacques Clouseau from The Pink Panther series, one of the more iconic film depictions of investigative law enforcement in history. He was obviously magnificent in Dr. Strangelove, which is probably on a very short list of best acting performances of all time (and it somehow didn’t earn him an Academy Award, but that’s a 7000-word essay for another time), and he was also great in Lolita. Beyond those three roles, and a fourth here in Being There, there are only a few others that stand out, but a slew of movies that were just plain bad.

I think Being There holds up for a lot of reasons. It’s satirization of business and politics rings just as true today as it did in 1979, and it’s an incredibly well-acted movie, with Sellers being supported brilliantly by Melvyn Douglas (who won an Academy Award) and Shirley MacLaine (probably my favorite actress of her generation). It’s funny, but not “ha-ha” funny, and it has an ending that I’m still not sure I understand, but I’m not sure that I need to or am supposed to. It’s a movie that has held meaning for me for most of my life, although I’m not sure how much I actually love it. Either way, it’s certainly enough to make my Top 100 list, but by only the slimmest of margins.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

15. Skyfall

17. Ocean’s 11

18. Air Force One