On Screen

...he asks incred-uously when his mother, played by Mabel King, breaks the news), Navin decides to leave home and make his fortune on the road...

...To anyone besides Kosinski's characters, such a man would certainly look even StrangM_ ior is inconsistent...

...If Kosinski is trying to make a serious point about instant celebrities, I must confess it eluded me...

...There are some funny moments in Being There, most of them involving the way social conventions gather so much inertia that they practically force reality to conform to them...

...He behaves so ingenuously as well that he is seen as a paragon of sincerity...

...Later, the two lovers stroll along a moonlit beach, singing "Tonight You Belong to Me" in a pleasantly off-key duet, accompanied by ukulele and, of all things, cornet...

...What all this exemplifies is the kind of undergraduate self-indulgence that has regrettably been legitimized by Saturday Night Live...

...And when Eve tries to seduce him, he responds passionately because he is watching a television romance...

...Despite the title, the story has nothing to do with Heidegger'sZ)a-5ffln, even though it does contain large doses of Dada...

...Similarly, talk-show etiquette should not be alien to Chance, who (we are told) has spent 17 hours a day watching the tube...

...he then sits down in the wrong chair and has to be told to take the seat next to his interviewer...

...You would think in a fancy restaurant like this, they could keep the snails out of the food...

...Though intended as satire, Being There lapses into self-caricature...

...One scene, for example, has a bank imposing a "substantial penalty for early withdrawal": death by firing squad...

...Some easy laughs result from his awkwardness, but Kosinski and Ashby miss the opportunity to make a far subtler point about how easily we adapt our behavior to what we have seen on screen...

...At two crucial points he interrupts what he is doing to imitate what he is watching on television: When an investigative reporter tries to interview him by phone, he hangs up because he is too busy practicing the calisthenics on screen...

...In 1941, Spielberg spends a lot of time on Hollis Wood's capture by and subsequent escape from the Japanese sub, but there is no payoff—we never learn what happens to him...

...It has been remarked that city children who have never seen a horse in the flesh can mount one, from the correct side, as a result of their attraction to TV Westerns...

...Upon learning that he is really white and adopted ("You mean I'm gonna stay this color...

...Following a series of wildly improbable adventures, he rises from rags to riches, only to fall from riches to rags in the wake of some equally improbable bad luck...

...Of course the world looks strange to a man with the mind of a child who has been locked away for almost his whole life...

...At other points in the story, however, Chance fails to match his behavior to what he could not have missed on television...

...To be sure, this picaresque tale is far from a classically constructed comedy...

...But the movie exhausts this humorous premise in the first dinner-table conversation between Chance and the Rands, and then we are left with what apparently is supposed to be a satire of contemporary America and the perverse influences of television, politics and big business...

...Should Kosinski mean to suggest that watching television is tantamount to watching nothing at all, he is simply wrong...

...After Navin meets his true love, Marie (Bernadette Peters), he excitedly writes his mother: "Dear Mom, she looks just like you—except she's white and blonde...

...Strangelove (in the War Room, where the doctor, played by Peter Sellers, is unable to make his arm obey him...

...By accident—literally, through a car collision—the aptly named Chance becomes the house guest of Benjamin Rand (Melvyn Douglas), a financier and political kingmaker, and his wife, Eve (Shirley MacLaine...

...But everything works out for the best, and he is reunited with his family in a ridiculously happy ending...

...No one who has actually watched television over the past quarter century could portray a man whose primary experience was the tube as ignorant of colloquial English, heterosexual and homosexual behavior, automobiles and hospitals...

...Even watching Being There is not the same as watching nothing...

...Surprisingly, the most enjoyable comedy of the season has turned out to be The Jerk, directed by Carl Reiner and starring Steve Martin (who also wrote the script with Carl Gottlieb and Michael Elias...

...He promptly switches channels to The Gong Show...

...Basing this on the classic naif, however, assures an extremely simple-minded view of the world—a semimentali-zation of "innocence" and a celebration of the abnormal as the "true" perspective...

...You have the gift of being natural," Rand tells him...

...In addition, Spielberg borrows the dog fight and bombing run from Star Wars, the masked motorcyclist from Amarcord, a dance number from Singin' in the Rain, and some visual imagery from The Graduate...

...as a character says in the film, "This isn't the state of California, it's a state of anarchy...

...Once he strikes it rich, Navin becomes the prototypical anxious arriviste...

...townhouse, where he has worked as a gardener for an eccentric, wealthy recluse...

...the sequence in which Wild Bill Kelso pounds his leg because it has fallen asleep is similarly modeled after a scene in Dr...

...Equally mystifying is why he should try to emulate Kramer, although the two share an inability to construct a joke...

...the item-by-item accounting of the personal effects of Hollis Wood (Slim Pickens) is stolen from the survival-kit checklist in the B-52 commanded by Major "King" Kong (also Slim Pickens) inDr...

...Peter Sellers stars as Chance, a childlike middle-aged man who was "shortchanged by the Lord" and "stuffed with rice pudding between the ears...

...It would have been more interesting if Chance were presented as having assimilated all the bizarre things shown by the networks over the years, but his mind is a blank...

...So, keeping Stanley Kramer's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in mind, he began with a script (by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale) about the pandemonium in Los Angeles during the week after Pearl Harbor...

...The reason for this, I suspect, is that Kosinski does not understand his targets...

...What we find funny says a lot about what we take seriously—and that seems especially true in the case of directors, performers and writers...

...An even riskier investment than 1941 was Being There, a "serious" comedy directed by Hal Ashby from Jerzy Kosinski's adaptation of his own novel (which I have not read...

...Instead, it is an oddly touching romantic interlude, a pleasant contrast to the rest of the film...

...When his master dies he is thrown out into the real world, without an identity (lacking a Social Security card, he is a "nonperson") and utterly unequipped to deal with a society he he has come to know only from watching television...

...he complains to Marie as he huffily sends back the escargot...

...But even some of the irrelevant material is strangely entertaining...

...Since Rand is near death, he seizes on Chance as his successor—in the board room, back room and even bedroom...

...His Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind having been very well received by critics and mass audiences, he decided his latest feature, 1941, would be something entirely different—a comedy (the previous films were only unintentionally funny...

...So what...

...And Spielberg, once praised for his Hitchcock-esque manipulativeness, is living proof that two hit movies are enough to guarantee that some studio will give you $26 million to fall flat on your face...

...His whole life has been spent within the walls and yard of a Washington, D.C...

...A running gag has him amazed by elevators, yet surely he has seen them before on the tube...

...You don't play games with words...

...Strangelove...

...Unlike Ze-meckis and Gale, who seem to think that nonstop pies in the face are the essence of comedy, Martin—perhaps because he works as a standup comedian—understands the role of rhythm in humor...

...Martin plays Navin Johnson, a somewhat unlikely member of a family of poor black sharecroppers...

...In a key moment, after news of his meeting with the President has made him an instant celebrity, Chance appears for the first time on a talk show...

...The scene could have been nothing more than the kind of blatant lampooning of movies of the past that runs throughout 1941...

...When he finally gets the opportunity to see himself on screen, what does Chance do...

...His idea of a romantic line is to tell Marie, "You look so beautiful and peaceful you almost look dead...

...They ring true enough to make us squirm, and invite us to laugh not just at others but at ourselves...

...Was the xenophobia that led to the forced "relocation" and imprisonment of thousands of native Americans of Japanese descent really funny...

...So the former gardener—inadvertently re-christened "Chauncey Gardiner" by his hosts, who misinterpret his name along with everything else— becomes an informal adviser to the President (Jack Warden), Rand's heir-apparent in the "First American Financial Corporation," Eve's not-quite platonic lover, and finally a potential presidential candidate...

...Emerging from behind the studio curtain, he has to be directed toward the host...

...In conversation, Chance is so slow on the uptake that his hosts soon regard him as thoughtful, and his nonsequiturs are continually and mistakenly interpreted as metaphorical profundities...

...The paucity of Spielberg's (and Zemeckis and Gale's) comic imagination is apparent from the number of gags lifted from other movies: Donna (Nancy Allen), the generously endowed assistant to General Stilwell (Robert Stack), is almost a carbon copy of General Dreedle's assistant in Catch-22...

...Other gags simply aren't set up properly: The sexual difficulties suffered by Donna (who can't "make it," except when she's airborne) and the "egg-phobia" of Sitarski (Treat Williams)—the mainsprings for protracted running jokes —are completely arbitrary and unconvincing...

...then he happens to switch channels to a yoga program and leaves her writhing on the floor to stand on his head...

...There are gags that might work as blackout sketches on Saturday Night Live that merely interrupt the story line of The Jerk...

...I must admit that I have never been a fan of either Martin or Saturday Night Live, where he rose to prominence...

...Nevertheless, in The Jerk he has carefully put together a persona that is a genuine comic archetype...

...There are narrative gaps and illogical thrusts that, I fear, were unintentional...

...To top it all off, there are utterly tasteless toilet jokes and crotch shots (both male and female) that rival Mel Brooks' childish view of the human body...

...It also turned into a colossal bore, totally lacking in good belly laughs, or even mild chuckles...

...It is beyond me why the director thinks it funny to lampoon his own work...

...Like Jaws, 1941 begins with a girl (Susan Backlinie, in both) shedding her clothes as she runs along a beach...

...Steven Spielberg is an example...

...Incredibly, he has even stolen from his own films...

...Zemeckis and Gale, film-school graduates who seem to know everything about old movies and nothing about real life, have absolutely no talent beyond knowing the right people—like John Milius, the executive producer of 1941, who introduced them to Spielberg...

...Thus 1941 became another big-budget spectacular, laden with expensive special effects, explosions, crashes, mindless destruction, and crowd scenes...

...Unfortunately, the director never asked himself whether the paranoid superpatriotism of that era actually was humorous...

...With his eyes darting wildly, his tongue tripping clumsily in his mouth, and his arms flapping helplessly at his side, Navin is the perfect embodiment of awkwardness and insecurity...

...Of course, Spielberg's idea was to make a free-for-all comic fantasy, not a political satire...

...Not quite, anyway...

...Unlike 1941 and Being There, which bear no relationship to reality, The Jerk, though admittedly fanciful, derives comic strength from its small moments...

...once again, an underwater menace—this time a Japanese submarine, instead of a shark—interrupts her skinny-dipping...