![]() ![]() You can’t hold him to anything because he’s never done anything, politically speaking. Trump owes at least some of his political success to the fact that he has no record. Chance the gardener becomes Chauncey Gardiner because he has no past that can be checked or held against him. Of course, there is no there there in Being There, any more than there is in Trump’s pronouncements, either as a candidate or a chief executive. He knows all the tropes of TV (it’s all he knows, except gardening), so he goes on the news or the talk shows and succeeds magnificently by being agreeable, slightly enigmatic, and saying little or nothing. When he stumbles into fame early in both novel and movie, television takes up his cause in an instant, because he is in every sense camera ready. Give Trump credit for that.Ĭhauncey, too, is purely a product of television. No one has ever forged a literary style out of one-liners before, not even Groucho Marx. Nothing he says is meant to be read, only seen and heard. Trump, a reality TV star, is completely at ease in a milieu where image crafting and soundbites are the lingua franca. ![]() It is their shared window on the world, and not only that: Each man also owes his success to television. It’s a fair question, since both Trump and Chauncey are, in their respective ways, almost purely creatures of television. You know, the ultimate empty suit protagonist of Jerzy Kosinski’s 1970 novel, Being There, and the subsequent film made from the novel by Hal Ashby in 1979 starring Peter Sellers? So, is Donald Trump our Chauncey Gardiner? More than that, this medium that deals almost exclusively in images and surfaces is the only venue through which either man could ever have ascended so meteorically to celebrity. But it’s not merely that TV allows this pair to find fame and flourish. Simultaneously, TV has made both men celebrities. You might even say that for them, TV is life. One man reads very little, and the other cannot read or write at all. Two men who both glean what they know of the world from what we once so quaintly called the idiot box. Two men who are almost purely the creatures of television. ![]()
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