My Dinner With Andre, 40 years later

What was the subversive 1981 film really saying in hindsight?

Baby Boomer hangover

My Dinner With Andre is a memorable little 1981 film about two middle aged men having a long conversation about modern life in the wake of the 1960’s hippie movement falling apart. There is no plot or progression besides this dinner meeting, wherein the main character, an actor named Wally, politely interrogates a theatre writer-director, named Andre. The premise is that Andre has lost his mind after a few years of abandoning his family, exploring the world, and trying to connect with some mystical sense of meaning. But as the story progresses, we begin to see the logic of Andre’s escapades, and by the end we are meant to believe that Wally is in fact the weirdo, because he lives in the trappings of modern pretentions, not allowing himself to be present, inspired, emotional, honest, or playful. He’s boxed in, comfortable, dead inside, and pressurized by society at every turn.

As two experienced men in the theater business, they speak in terms of acting, stages, and performance. Modern life is a performance, they say, where instead of being a real person who may burst forth with raw, unrestrained expressions at any moment, a person is bound to say and do only what everyone expects of them. The social script is designed to avoid conflict, amuse each other, and steer each other away from the underlying anxiety, fears, and frustrations humans experience every day.

From today’s perspective, the dialogue reeks of Baby Boomer self-aggrandizement, with them openly complaining that the 1960s were the last days of sincere human existence, as if their Woodstock memories really were the climax of world history. In reality, Boomers have been the most obnoxious, self-indulgent generation ever, and they continue to drag the world down with them in the misguided notion that they deserve everything, perhaps because they think they alone hold the key to the meaning of life.

By far, the highlight of the film is Andre’s rant (start at 1:19:00 in the YouTube video for a little context) about the nature of urban hell. The clip has been shared countless times and gone viral because it seems to hit the nail on the head regarding a grand social engineering scheme, to trap people in a constant state of proud indolence, or disaffected superficiality, obsessing over money and acceptance instead of personal fulfillment and communion with the great spiritual world of nature, the cosmos, and each other. But if you decide to watch the movie for a great commentary on this conspiracy, you’re in for a surprise.

Aquarian dreams

We know now that the 1960s were the greatest age of propaganda in American history, creating the “counterculture” designed to erode traditional values, religion, and national pride with a bogus dream of enlightenment, oriental wisdom, and psychedelics. Although My Dinner With Andre only touches on these topics briefly, they are all there. The jaded, middle-aged Boomer looks back on his spiritual journey as full of highs and lows, but ultimately defends it as a worthwhile attempt to break free from the shackles of conformist mediocrity.

Many comparisons are made to the primitive peoples of third world countries, medieval monasteries, and the Eastern style of unvarnished coexistence. Out there, people cry when they’re sad, get mad when they’re mad, and laugh when they’re happy, but even the monk who tags along with Andre and lives with him in New York City becomes gluttonous and pathetic over time. It’s the Western way of thinking that corrupts everything. This is familiar rhetoric from the Cultural Marxist philosophy, which frames every aspect of capitalist society into a tragedy, never truly weighing it against other cultures, except to point out how others are doing it better.

Things get really weird when Andre promotes cosmic “workshops” designed to communicate with interdimensional beings. He’s witnessed the physics-defying engineering of these buildings, and presumably experienced this communion with the alien intelligence. He says they “work” to contact flying saucers. Becoming immersed in ancient German forests and performing pagan rituals is also part of the deal.¹

Human Potential Movement

Now see if this sounds familiar:

Esalen is a creative laboratory, an incubator of human potential asking the daring and curious questions that traditional university and religious institutions can’t and/or won’t. 1962 marked the beginning of this extraordinary journey — an adventure of minds, bodies, spirits and souls — where Michael Murphy and Richard Price, young Stanford graduates were inspired by the ideas of Abraham Maslow and Aldous Huxley, and together founded Esalen, the birthplace of the Human Potential Movement.

— Esalen.org description of their founding

The Human Potential Movement is another way of describing the New Age mystical movement, obsessed with psychic phenomena like telepathy. It was inspired by the older New Thought movement of the late 1800s, which explored mesmerism, which tried to harness self-discipline, willpower, and focus to overpower others, heal people, and defy the limits of the rational world. Aldous Huxley bought into it big time, and Manly P. Hall was a believer. Atlantic intellectuals who became familiar with East Indian mysticism, gurus, and Theosophy believed that they could tap into the secrets of the universe not sufficiently explained by science. The Esalen Institute was founded as a West Coast attempt to revive that movement in the midst of cold, calculated Cold War materialism. My Dinner With Andre does not mention the Esalen Institute, but it fits perfectly with their narrative. It’s the exact kind of “retreat” or “workshop” that Andre promotes over and over.

Those familiar with my analysis on the elevation of the New Age into the US Army will know about the First Earth Battalion, envisioned in 1979 by Jim Channon. The hope of taking “invisible space journeys on this planet” and “contacting cosmic intelligence” are part of his dream. But it gets morbid when we realize that the Age of Aquarius is a formula for obliterating the Christian Church and replacing it with an Eastern neo-pagan death cult. Andre wants to have an “underground school for surviving a dark age”, which I call the Green World Order.

1. Check out Nazi Ecology: The Oak Sacrifice of the Judeo-Christian Worldview in the Holocaust by R. Mark Musser for a thorough study of the relationship between old German forests, paganism, hippie culture, and the Nazis.