Being There Ending: Two Endings, One Umbrella

The evidence

Two Endings on the Page

The walking-on-water scene is not in Jerzy Kosinski’s 1970 novel. The book ends with Chance slipping away to be alone in a garden. It is not in the January 10, 1979 draft of the screenplay either. The miracle came later, grafted onto a story that first resolved on a quieter gesture — and the two written endings it replaced are worth setting side by side with the one that reached the screen.

One prop bridges the two endings. On the page the umbrella shelters the seedling; on screen Chance uses it to test the pond. Whatever the walking-on-water shot means, reading the two endings against each other is the clearest way to understand the Being There ending — one version shows a man protecting something small and real, and the other shows him doing the impossible without noticing.

The soundtrack of the miracle

What the Eulogy Is Actually Saying

The scene is scored to Benjamin Rand’s own words. At the funeral, the President reads the dying industrialist’s aphorisms aloud while the pallbearers — financiers and oilmen — carry the coffin. Between breaths, they plot to put Chance in the White House. One of them lands the film’s central pun: their “one and only chance is Chauncey Gardiner.” The man’s name is the joke. Chance is exactly what these people are gambling on.

The sharpest line in the eulogy is easy to miss. Rand recalls being told as a boy that God made man in his own image. That, he says, is when he “decided to manufacture mirrors.” It plays as a capitalist’s throwaway quip, but it describes Chance precisely. He is a mirror. Everyone who meets him sees their own ambitions and beliefs reflected back, and he supplies nothing of his own to interrupt the reflection.

The eulogy ends on the line that carries over the water, and everything about the final shot answers to it. With that established, the Being There final scene opens onto at least three readings. The film confirms none of them.

Reading one · The miracle

The Mystical Reading: Chance as Holy Fool

The most immediate interpretation takes the moment literally as a miracle. Chance walks the way Christ walks on the Sea of Galilee. A man who has done nothing but garden and repeat plain observations is raised to spiritual and political authority in the same instant. The “holy fool” — the simpleton whose blankness reads as wisdom — fits him cleanly. The irony is that the elevation is hollow: an empty man becomes a vessel for whatever meaning a hungry culture needs to pour into him.

Reading two · The state of mind

The Metaphorical Reading: A Man With No Concept of “Can’t”

Read against “Life is a state of mind,” the water becomes a picture of pure, unburdened being. The title points the same way — Being There renders Heidegger’s Dasein, “being there,” which Kosinski named as a touchstone while writing the novel. Chance carries no self-doubt and no sense of limit. He has no idea that walking on water is impossible, so he does it. The seedling scene in the script is the same thought in a humbler key: Chance wholly absorbed in the act in front of him, untouched by everything the funeral guests are scheming a few yards away.

Reading three · The pier

The Literal Reading: The Audience as the Final Target

The third reading turns the satire on the viewer. Strip the awe away and the grounded explanation is simple: Chance is walking on a submerged pier the camera never shows us. Within the story’s own reality it is the only explanation that holds — he is a gardener, not a messiah. Ashby films the moment so the water breaks under his feet just enough to unsettle you, never enough to prove anything. The pier stays hidden, and the doubt does the work.

The objection

Ebert’s “No Pier” Objection

Roger Ebert rejected the literal reading by name. In his essay on the film, he recalled shutting down students who reached for a sandbar or a submerged pier. His rule was firm: you may argue about what an image means, but you cannot invent what the movie declines to show. “There is no pier — a movie is exactly what it shows us,” he wrote.

That rule is a good one for a symbol that floats free of any story, and Being There is not that. The whole movie has built an airtight realist premise. Chance is a simpleton, not a savant, and every wonder credited to him has a plain cause the powerful refuse to see. The walk is the last entry in that pattern, not a break from it. A man checking the surface with his umbrella expects footing — that is not how a prophet behaves when he is performing a miracle. The pier is not an explanation imposed on the film; it is the only one that keeps faith with the film’s logic.

And to follow Ebert here is to do something telling. Look at a simpleton on the water, decline to ask how, and you have joined the very credulity the film mocks. Ebert himself wondered whether the movie is about people reading their own wishes into religion and politics. The literal reading is simply the one that declines the miracle.