My Dinner with Dante

DANTE

Ibérico ham. Immaculate.

ME

Never had it.

DANTE

Did you end up watching the movie?

ME

Yes.

DANTE

What did you think?

ME

It was strange. How about you go first?

DANTE

If you insist.

He stabs a gougère with a fork.

My first feeling, I think, was one of overwhelming familiarity. Wallace approaches the dinner first like a chore. Like him, by now I know the prompts, the interjections, the reactions, the contortions of posture and expression to elicit more.

Considering the langoustine.

Every conversation becomes this mechanical exercise in drawing out more from the other, keeping them utterly self-occupied. Like pulling a red string that runs between their lips to spill their guts. It's fundamentally defensive, and now that I see someone else do it, disgusting.

ME

Tilts head.

Tell me more.

DANTE

Andre, on the other hand ... he's a strike of lightning. Mystic, mythic, schizophrenic. He's immediately fascinating, hallucinatory. From anyone else you'd think them pretentious — well, leaving his wife and kids makes him a shitty person, I'm not denying that — but he believes himself so fervently that you can't help but respect that sincere and ceaseless search for something more.

Drizzling aged sherry vinegar on the gazpacho.

Next to Andre, Wallace is petty, temporal, corporeal, culture-bound, ugly, an gargoyle. Every time he interjects it's repulsive, shooting down Andre's angelic visions to meteoric impact. He begins with these deceptive, cloying niceties and desperate segues, but as Andre's high-minded experiences and ideas begin to poke at his inferiority complex, he starts to try to put on some airs of his own. He starts rewording Andre's sentences to court his validation—

ME

—just mirroring what he hears—

DANTE

—exactly. Occasionally he comes up with a flash of insight — the cigar shop next door is just as transcendental as Mt Everest! — but it's ruined by how obviously pleased he is with coming up with it, and they're often just grasping outgrowths of his complex.

He picks up chopsticks and starts rearranging the blue fin tuna sashimi on his plate.

It's crushing how self-aware he is of his own inadequacies and miswordings; he's not stupid. And I have to stress how great the acting is here. The two express their dynamic perfectly and it's immediately obvious to anyone who has found themselves on both sides of it at different times in their life.

ME

For sure.

DANTE

Spooning mushroom cream sauce on the veal sweetbreads.

And Wally gets this magnificent crescendo of a character arc; there comes a point where he abandons all pretense and performance and expresses himself with stunning ineloquence, pure and true and authentic and finally an equal to Andre in the conversation.

WAITER

Everything good, gentlemen?

ME

Yes, thank you.

DANTE

Idly rolling around a quail egg with his fork.

That was another touch I enjoyed. As Wally matures, my resentment with him, the metonym for the banality of modern life, is displaced onto the interrupting waiter, symbol of the machinery of the world ... until the very end, after the dinner, when we get the music and we see the waiter have his cigar — and in that moment he, too, becomes human.

ME

I hadn't thought of it that way.

DANTE

I suppose I could be reading too much into it.

He looks up.

Anyway, what did you think?

ME

I thought Andre was full of hot air, to be honest. Total douchebag, doesn't know when to shut up.

DANTE

Huh.

ME

He just goes on and on with these pretentious pontifications. He's obsessed with himself. He abandoned his wife and kids to join, like, a bohemian sex cult. Also, why does he keep on bringing up the Nazis? It's weird.

DANTE

Now that you mention it, yes, that was a running theme. Not sure I understood where they were going with that.

ME

What struck me, too, was this ... chauvinism behind the film. Presumably, it was made by a weird artist, and it valorizes its own weird artist so much that ... I don't know, it feels a little incestuous, or narcissistic. Where's the weird art valorizing our waiters and bus-clerks and McDonald's managers?

DANTE

You think the movie is all about how great Andre is?

ME

It didn't convince me it's not.

DANTE

Well, I don't think there's a message to the film, per se, so much as just a bunch of ideas presented — art as opium, people living in a fugue, and so on — but I think that the movie exists at all indicates its creators agree with Wally's insistence that art is able to awaken its audience, if nothing else.

ME

Looking at the dishes.

I could really use a hamburger right now.