My Dinner with My Dinner with Andre

ISSUE #105

This week, I finally saw My Dinner with Andre. It'd been sitting on my watchlist for years, collecting dust as I could never find it, until the combination of the Criterion Channel and my appalling privilege in a global pandemic gave me time at last to sit and watch. For our generation, it lives on in a pitch-perfect parody that aired nine years ago on Community. For others, it's just the 1981 film famous for being a single two-hour conversation over dinner between two friends—both playwrights, one rich enough to travel the world, the other struggling to survive.

Seeing it now gave the film a strange power. I was again reminded of the importance of dining: the innate vulnerability, the mutual understanding, all confidences kept and judgements erased. Here were two people engaging in compassionate conversation while I sat rapt in the two-month divot my ass had burned in the couch. It felt like seeing Smithsonian taxidermy—the majesty of a world you cannot access due to barriers of time or geography or moral responsibility.

One thing I'll never understand is why some seem to be born only to understand misery. Maybe the forlorn are meant to translate for those who will never feel despair. Likely, there's no purpose at all. What I can't accept with a straight face is that everybody struggles. Not in the same way.

The comfortable tend to say, "You never know what pain people are hiding inside." A thin solace for the guilt of certain birthrights. We all carry existential dread, the nagging fear of death, but their prevalence means they're the baseline, the tare button on misfortune's scale. Other chronic pains—addiction and depression, loneliness and disfigurement—can stack and form true weight. It's these that some will never face and others have in spades.

It's no exaggeration to say that certain people make me want to die; many, if not more, make me love to live. The difference seems to be in those who aim to listen. When generous attention shows its face, the magic of what we share will beat the ache of what we don't. This is the beauty of watching those two old friends, so different and yet so loved, remembering that we all are one.

Perfume Genius, whose fifth album came out today, makes music that understands misery, and he spins it into beauty like Rumpel-fucking-stiltskin. He paints sonic havens for failures and the fragile. I listen to his songs, and they listen to me in return.