Being There in the Nation's Capital: Hal Ashby's Subversive Take on the Washington, D.C., Movie (Critical Essay‪)‬

Being There, Hal Ashby's 1979 film adaptation of Jerzy Kosinski's 1970 novel, is designed as a subversive riposte to the conventions of the Washington, D.C., movie of the kind best represented by Frank Capra's classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). Such films typically argue that while there may be corruption among the longtime political insiders of official Washington, the democratic process can be renewed and revitalized through the intervention of an outsider who is pure of heart. Being There overturns and controverts those expectations by setting forth a main character, Chance the gardener, whose innocence stems from mental deficiency rather than purity of heart; by compromising Chance's "outsider" status (he is a D.C. native and resident whose sheltered life inside the estate of a wealthy old man makes him a complete stranger to Washington life); and by suggesting that his movement into the political elite of Washington will exacerbate rather than resolve the problems facing the American body politic. It is important to acknowledge that Washington is a city, not a genre, and that the city has served as the setting for films that fit neatly within established genre categories, including films that de-emphasize Washington's status as the nation's capital and foreground the experiences of ordinary, everyday Washingtonians whose lives have little or nothing to do with the workings of the federal government. Such Washington films include science-fiction films like Robert Wise's The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), horror films such as William Friedkin's The Exorcist (1973), and coming-of-age dramas like Joel Schumacher's St. Elmo's Fire (1985). Nevertheless, it can be seen that a frequently recurring dramatic pattern in Washington, D.C., films combines the nation's capital as setting with a plot in which an ordinary citizen gains access to the corridors of power and gives American democracy a new birth of freedom by introducing fresh ideas that sweep away entrenched representatives of a corrupt old order and bring about positive change.