We never hear Chance think in voiceover; uncredited script doctor and frequent Ashby collaborator Robert C. Jones wisely excised all internal monologue from Kosinski’s draft. The viewer receives exactly what the film’s other characters receive – a calm face, a beautiful suit, a measured voice – and is invited to draw the same inferences. If the novel proves the room is empty, the film demonstrates why, from outside the room, that proof is unavailable.
* * *
Roger Ebert’s retrospective 1997 review of Hal Ashby’s Being There – an adaptation of Jerzy Kosinski’s slim satirical novel – contains an insight of stunning prescience. Earlier that year, IBM’s Deep Blue defeated chess world champion Garry Kasparov by evaluating up to 200 million positions per second, and on that day Ebert found himself thinking of the film. Chance the Gardener, the isolato main character of Being There, had a mind that worked “like a rudimentary AI program” in Ebert’s estimation. This was a particularly farsighted analogy, as the age of consumer artificial intelligence was still decades off. IBM’s supercomputer was a brute force calculator, but was it intelligent? The classical test of AI, as Ebert noted, was whether it could persuasively converse with a human being. This is known as the Turing Test, named in honor of the foundational British computer scientist Alan Turing who first proposed the benchmark. With the clarity of hindsight, Ebert’s analogy appears understated. Chance is not merely “like” an AI; he is a living prototype of the modern generative pre-trained large language model (LLM), drawn decades before such a thing existed.
Not long after the film’s release, American philosopher John Searle’s “Minds, Brains, and Programs” introduced the AI thought-experiment of the Chinese Room. A man sealed in a room receives slips of paper covered in Chinese characters. He speaks and reads no Chinese, but he has a vast rulebook: when X symbols come in, send Y symbols out. To the native speakers outside, the room converses fluently; inside, there is only lookup, syntax without semantics. Passing the Turing Test, in other words, did not indicate real understanding. As a description of LLMs, the premise is admittedly insufficient; modern language models converse through enormously complex statistical computations rather than the linear system of correspondence described by Searle. But whatever the mechanism, the point stands – the observer outside still cannot see in.
Chance has spent his life sequestered and with limited human contact; he cannot read or write. His “training” is television – years of it, absorbed without comprehension. The prose renders his interior world as its own kind of broadcast; the television, Kosinski writes, “created its own light, its own color, its own time.” From this corpus, combined with his work in the garden, he generates a fluent output. Asked by the president about the economy, he replies that in a garden growth has its seasons, that “as long as the roots are not severed,” all will be well. The president is impressed and quotes him in a speech. The sentence is well-formed, contextually apt, and refers to nothing but shrubs; its wisdom is manufactured entirely on the receiving end. Kosinski dramatized in his novel what Searle later formalized in his paper – Chance is the Chinese Room made flesh.
Translate this into the vocabulary of the present and nothing needs adjusting. A system is trained on an enormous archive of language, while its access to the world remains indirect and constrained. Prompted by others, it completes their patterns. Economic questions receive garden replies, because gardens are what the training data contains, and the answers arrive with perfect confidence. When a reply refers to nothing – grammar without grounding in reality – we now have a word for it: hallucination. The insight extracted from these replies is supplied by the users themselves; they arrive needing answers, and the system’s inherent blankness is exactly what lets them find it. The tendency to attribute humanlike consciousness to computer programs based solely on how they communicate is known as the ELIZA effect, named after the very first chatbot. This is our reality now, through every question we type into a blinking prompt. Tokens in, tokens out, no one in between.
The two versions of Being There divide the labor of Searle’s argument. The novel – which turned 55 this year – takes a subjective approach from inside the room, showing us the workings of Chance’s cloistered mind. This is Searle’s privileged vantage, the position from which one can declare there is no real understanding. The film – with a screenplay by Kosinski himself – shifts to an objective view from outside the room. This is the seat of Alan Turing’s interrogator, the human judge tasked with determining whether an intelligence is human or artificial. We never hear Chance think in voiceover; uncredited script doctor and frequent Ashby collaborator Robert C. Jones wisely excised all internal monologue from Kosinski’s draft. The viewer receives exactly what the film’s other characters receive – a calm face, a beautiful suit, a measured voice – and is invited to draw the same inferences. If the novel proves the room is empty, the film demonstrates why, from outside the room, that proof is unavailable.
The film adds the perfect actor for the role. Two years before the film, Peter Sellers appeared on The Muppet Show, where Kermit suggested he relax and be himself. Sellers replied that he could never be himself, because there was no self to be: “There used to be a me, but I had it surgically removed.” He had said versions of this for years; he told Ebert himself he had “absolutely no personality at all.” Gimmick, wound, or both, what matters is the fit – a man who described himself as an absence, a performer assembled from absorbed voices and accents, playing a man assembled from absorbed television. Even his preparation resembled a training run; he recorded his own voice over and over, iterating through styles until he converged on a deliberately blank delivery. His biographer Roger Lewis said Sellers “put all the nothingness he had” into the part. Chance’s affectless speaking voice resembles nothing so much as cinema’s most famous AI, HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey; intentionally or not, Ashby nods to this through his inclusion of Eumir Deodato’s jazz-funk arrangement of “Thus Spake Zarathustra” when Chance first steps out into the larger world. The film’s outside view is thereby doubled – a surface behind which there may be nothing, performed by an actor who insisted on the same of himself.
The endings of the book and film complete the division. Kosinski’s is a refusal of answers; Chance slips away from a reception into a garden, and the book closes without revealing how much he has actually understood. That’s the skeptic’s verdict on the machine; the room is empty, and even its author declines a final look inside. With almost too-perfect irony, Kosinski spent his last years dogged by charges that his novels had been assembled by uncredited editors – the inventor of a man with no real substance accused of being one himself.
Ashby replaced this with a miracle. Chance casually walks away across the surface of a pond, Christlike. Ebert, teaching the film, rejected every student’s attempt to rationalize the image with an unseen sandbar or submerged pier. Since the film shows no pier, he ruled, “there is no pier.” That’s the functionalist’s verdict; if collective belief is strong enough, the question of what lies beneath is irrelevant. But the film shows us we can never be sure from where we sit – and where we sit now is outside the room, reading the slips as they come through.
Works Cited
Being There. Directed by Hal Ashby, United Artists, 1979.
Ebert, Roger. Review of Being There, directed by Hal Ashby. RogerEbert.com, 1997.
Kosinski, Jerzy. Being There. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971.
Lewis, Roger. The Life and Death of Peter Sellers. Applause Books, 1994.
The Muppet Show, season 2, episode 19, Henson Associates/ITC Entertainment, 1978.
Searle, John R. “Minds, Brains, and Programs.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3(3), 1980, 417–24.
* * *
All images are screenshots from the film.
