Being There — Narrative, Innocence, and the Magic of Agendas
The last two minutes of Ashby’s Being There contain the movie’s thesis—and most viewers miss them. The credits roll while the audience is already exiting, already calculating parking logistics, already unwinding from what they thought was a light social satire about a simpleton let loose in the corridors of power. But those final seconds are where the film stops being funny and becomes something darker: a perfect distillation of how narrative, not truth, becomes the ultimate organizing force of human belief. …