Jardines de la mente. Análisis textual y sintomatología social en Bienvenido Mr. Chance de Hal Ashby

Abstract

The study consists of a structuralist film analysis of the work Welcome Mr. Chance (1970) by Hal Ashby, a film adaptation of the novel of the same name written by Jerzy N. Kosinski, which narrates the vicissitudes that sculpt the daily events of a person with intellectual disabilities, and which nevertheless manages to reach the top of the executive and economic powers of the United States. The film criticizes the ranks of contemporary society in a poetic key: against the American dream, on the one hand, and the media, on the other. A whole repertoire of cinematographic objectifications and rhetorical figures subordinated to the magic that the seventh art empowers us with. The visual text that summons us here is the sum of three very different authors: the writer Jerzy N. Kosinski, the filmmaker Hal Ashby and the artist René Magritte. We will delve into the links that tie the idea to the film material to explain what this work says, how it says it and, with this, also explain the (satirical) portrait that is made of a developmental condition that implies limitations in intellectual functioning. and on a person's adaptive abilities.