"My Dinner with Andre" thoughts
I'm. It's hard to find the words, to be honest. I was tired the morning I wrote the first draft of this. I had overslept and that's often a recipe for an off-day. And I looked at my planner and saw I had an event today I completely forgot about. A friend's baby shower. Now, of course I went but I had to really prepare and psyche myself up. I was hoping and expecting to do nothing, to not leave the house that day. So, I had to get myself ready. And then I watched My Dinner with Andre. There's... a lot to be said here.
I've been curious about this movie for years, thanks in large part to Community doing an episode that's an homage to it. And I'm trying in this year to experience things I haven't--to look at movies I've never seen that I've always heard about, read books that sound interesting to me, play old games I never had a chance to as a kid, etc. And I felt I'd been slacking a bit because as you know if you're my friend, February 2025 has been difficult for me. So, this morning, I decided I'd take a crack at this one. I'll leave this here, but by the time I publish this, maybe I'll have decided where I actually fall on how good an idea this was the day I'm going to a baby shower. It was not a bad idea except that no one wanted to talk to me about this movie that is almost two hours of talking.
One throughline that comes up a lot, and which shows up a lot on social media lately is the idea of people operating as automatons. We go through these motions, we perform these roles that we think we have to and this isolates us from real experience and from each other and so, perhaps, we need to take a step back and try to really experience the world. Part of this is about comfort and the complacency that can get bred into us by being too comfortable. I think that there is something to that, but also, I think it comes—to an extent—from a place of great privilege, at least where the character Andre is concerned. And, to the movie's credit, I think there's a good bit where Wallace Shaun says "but I like being comfortable. Is it impossible to be comfortable and to also truly experience life? To really live?" That's an important question, I think. No one wants to be suffering or fighting all the time and no one should! I don't have an answer and I think the movie also struggles with it a bit.
But, I wanna circle back to the idea of performance and playing roles that we think we need to. Particularly, the idea of playing a son. If you didn't know, I'm AMAB. For the first 20-something years of my life, I accepted that and at a certain point, I thought, hey maybe there's something else because, well, a lot of reasons, but no small part was that I no longer wished to be associated with masculinity and be seen as a man. So, I started turning that around in my head. But, what I'm sort of getting at is that, to some extent, until I was in college, I think that I was one of these automaton-like people. I went to school and acted like a good son, all those things, at least until college. I think until that point, I had trouble really figuring out what I wanted for myself and my life. I've always had vague aspirations of being a teacher, but I was sure that I'd get married and have 2.5 life, the whole thing. My brother did, so why shouldn't I? But somewhere in college, things shifted for me. I realized that while I have some kind of libido and I obviously see people as hot, the idea of actual intercourse is largely unappealing to me. Some of that is lack of confidence, but I really do kind of enjoy my solitaire sex.
But that's not something I understood in high school or before that point in my life. I thought that i had to have a partner, had to have a heterosexual relationship. That I would graduate college and find a job and then that's just what I do for the years of my life. Obviously none of that happened. And I'm pretty happy with that. I stopped thinking about what I'm supposed to be and started focusing on what I want for myself. That's difficult, I've sort of hitched myself to a questionable wagon, but we're getting there. I guess what I'm saying is, in the past few years, I've tried to be more honest and true myself than I think I'd ever been in my life before. While there's still some friction there, my mom at least knows that I don't necessarily see myself as a man. Much as she teases me about wearing earrings (which isn't much), she hasn't said anything seriously negative about it. I guess just that phrase about playing roles we think we need to really stuck with me. It's the kind of thing that has, in some ways, always stuck with me. For a long time in my life, I just sort of accepted the default--my favorite characters in much of fiction as a child was the main character or the mascot character. That's changed more recently as I start to realize that there are so many more options than I ever thought about previously.