Beatriz at Dinner

Published on 2018-6-10 by Michael Stanton


I saw this movie on the plane back from Oklahoma and was stunned by it.

She is tone-deaf and utterly unable to be a political animal. Her very insuitability tells us what a deeply political world we live in. Right now I'm also reading Disciplined Minds, about how professionalism is simply a velvet glove over political goals.

What better way to ensure a compliant workforce than to build up a whole culture of "teaching," among empathic people who will wring their hands on the capitalists behalf that Johnny is not sitting still long enough to have his head crammed full of facts A, B, and C?

The real reason Johnny is made to sit still is that his personality must become submissive to the desires of power. Through a deft slight-of-hand, a different ostensible goal is substituted for consumption by the professional: she can console herself that Johnny needs to submit to sufficient knowledge, and she can bend the whole force of her own personality to that goal.

So, thusly we have a "crisis" of education.

That was a tangent! I'm just reminded by Beatriz that all our interactions and manners are primarily designed not to offend truly offensive people.

Note, in the film, how she ignores the convention of handshakes. She hugs people, visibly startling them. She apparently believes she's been invited to break bread with others and means to do it with her whole soul. This is not cool.


She sings to the gathering, and even though she's begun to feel the despair that will send her running from this cruel existence, she sings from the bottom of her heart. Curiously, only the business magnate responds to her performance. A wonderful subtext of the film is that it is a conversation between those two, and the other people are just social cows responding fearfully to cues.

In life this does happen.

Some of the greatest conversations of the age are between people who may never meet or even address each other directly. There are poles, and moment points in which they slide into meaningful configurations that may seriously alter the hue and saturation of existence for the rest of us. The players both know and don't know, or at least pretend they don't know. This feeling was palpable in the film. The magnate played by John Lithgow was both squatting demon over existence, sucking all value into himself, and merely a man who learned the wrong lessons too well. Beatriz was Christ-like in her fundamental inability to lie, and her allergic reaction to insanity. But she was also a misfit who couldn't empathize with the ways people contort themselves into alignment with the cruel.

I read one critique of the film which I'd like to disagree with: it suggested that the film fell into the trope that all immigrants are holy and all businessmen are demonic (similar to the "Magic Negro" trope). But no...that misses the richness of the film. The reviewer didn't really see it, I think!

Who can avoid sympathy with the dinner host, a self-made man who does his bit, achieved success (mostly) playing by the rules, and has achieved the American Dream? He's not a cruel person, he just benefits from the cruel cast of this world. He's not evil, and that's precisely why we need to meditate deeply on him: am I this man?

Are my friends this man?

Do I speak to my friends with a voice of Truth, or do I help them cover the uncomfortable thoughts?

Beatriz, standing there as she does at a pole...unable to moderate her view...she speaks to the conscience in all of us.

We often lament that the world goes to hell -- but what are we personally doing? Couldn't we at least shout about it? Mostly, that is too high a bar to meet...

With regards to the critique that all immigrants are holy, that's wrong too because it was clear that Beatriz was a singularity. There was an interaction with the Mexican maid near the end, in which Beatriz was unsympathetic. There was no "light of consciousness" waxing out of her and across to the maid, carrying empathy and solidarity. No, Beatriz was as much a puzzle to the low-status people in the movie as to anyone else. Nobody "got" her. The only reason she said the things she did, and did what she did, was that she's missing that kind of reflexive second-guessing that most of us have.

Mostly, we accept our place because we are so ready to label ourselves as ridiculous. It's the herd instinct expressed at a higher level. It is probably the greatest servant to avarice, and though it makes civilization possible, it ensures the ultimate transformation of all value in nature into profit which prefigures the end.

Lovely we are, though at times we are sheep in profile. Don't gaze overlong at this -- it is embarrassing.

From the ending, it's clear what kind of world we may end up with. The materialists will just be the last to expire. They will have rendered spirit in all it's forms into crude matter, then extracted all value from each piece. They will have no idea what they are doing. It must be so, because if they were capable of understanding the result of their endless butchery, they wouldn't do it. Or rather, those that did would be easily identified and destroyed. Here, at a dinner party, we saw an epic battle of good and evil which for me, was far more exciting than the latest 3D CGI animated blockbuster. Far more dangerous even to watch too...you will have to ask -- which character would I be?

I for one, am not comfortable with the answer.