Far Out Conspiracies: The Illuminati of Hal Ashby’s ‘Being There’
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(Credits: Far Out / United Artists)
No arguments can be made against Hal Ashby’s Being There‘s classification as a satire, but just how deep down the rabbit hole does it actually go? Plenty of movies have found themselves interpreted in ways that may or may not have been the intention of the filmmakers, and the classic dramatic comedy is one of them.
Peter Sellers earned a ‘Best Actor’ nomination at the Academy Awards for his performance as Chance, a gardener raised almost entirely by television, who ends up being forced out of his lifelong home when his wealthy employer dies. Cast out onto the streets, he ends up working his way into the upper reaches of high society when Melvyn Douglas’ businessman, Ben Rand, assumes they’re cut from the same cloth.
It’s obvious to the audience that Chance is a simple-minded person. However, after being thrust into a brand new persona of Chauncey Gardiner, he continually falls upwards to the point that by the end of the film, he’s being discussed as a potential presidential candidate following the passing of the current White House incumbent.
What does that have to do with the nefarious secret society of the Illuminati? At first glance, not a whole lot, but unpicking the themes at the heart of Being There and applying them to the conspiracy theory that a group has been quietly operating in the shadows and pulling the strings in the global corridors of power does make it a little easier to understand how some people ended up joining those particular dots.
The scene set at Rand’s funeral reveals he’s being buried in a pyramid-shaped tomb with an all-seeing eye on top. The iconography is on legal tender in the United States, but it’s also been extrapolated as the Illuminati pyramid and the Illuminati eye, with Chance reflecting on how anybody can be plucked from obscurity and potentially tasked with one of the most important jobs on the planet if deemed a worthy puppet by those in charge.
A more cynical assessment of Being There would suggest that Chance is allowed to make it to within touching distance of the White House because everyone he encounters is too much of an idiot to understand that he’s little more than a blank slate who can have ideas, beliefs, and ideologies imprinted upon him no questions asked. Who would love somebody like that running for office? That damned Illuminati, of course.
Does that mean Ashby’s Oscar-winning favourite is an Illuminati movie? Almost certainly not, or is that just what they wanted everyone to think? His personality is that of a person who has no personality, which, by extension, makes him the perfect weapon in the wrong hands, given the friends he makes during his unwitting climb up the social ladder.
As it happens, those who buy into the Illuminati signs have a very real fear of a secretive cabal taking somebody who has no identifiable characteristics of their own, forcing their agenda upon said avatar, and then positioning them to spout their agenda to the widest possible audience to curry favour, win votes, secure funding, or whatever it is the organisation is supposed to be up to. It’s not exactly laid out in black-and-white, but it doesn’t take the full six degrees of separation to understand how Being There has been tarred with such accusations.
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