ABSTRACT
In Bean: The Ultimate Disaster Movie Rowan Atkinson’s hapless character is mistaken for a leading English art expert at an American gallery (in fact he is merely a security guard). At the end of the film he is required to give a lecture to celebrate the fact that the gallery has acquired the famous American painting ‘Whistler’s Mother’. The audience, knowing Bean’s near incapacity with words, can see no way out for him: he will be exposed. However, to much applause, he begins by explaining, ‘I sit and look at the paintings’. (An earlier generation of filmgoers had witnessed something similar with Chance the Gardener, the Peter Sellers character, in Hal Ashby’s 1979 film of Jerzy Kosinski’s novel Being There, where Chance’s banal utterances are taken for profound philosophy.)
