Jerzy Kosinski's Being There, Novel and Film: Changes Not by Chance

Born to Jewish parents in Poland in 1933, Jerzy Kosinski survived the Holocaust and eventually succeeded as an American writer. Highly intelligent and trained to dissimulate, he saw strength rather than weakness in the revision of his works. One example of this artistic elasticity involves the novel Being There (1970) and the script he wrote for an award-winning film which appeared in 1979. Unlike most cinematic adaptations, Being There allows us to judge the writer's reconception of his own work for a different genre, or as Kosinski said, to "adapt [his] old wife to become a mistress." Although both pieces are consistent in tone, three thematic shifts reveal Kosinski's evolving attitude toward American culture: racial tensions receive more attention than Cold War politics; a minor character, Benjamin Rand, gains importance as a symbol of American capitalism, and the revised ending implies that the Fool may actually be a saint.

Although both works deride the influence of television and the videot culture it promotes, the film provokes a deeper analysis and is artistically the stronger piece. Nonetheless, thematic differences do not culminate in certainty. Truth, which Kosinski once defined as, "the temporary resolution of various contradictions," remains elusive.