protagonist is an introvert trapped by a sense of his own inexorable interiority. Instead of achieving "external" goals like love, knowledge or validation, he pursues externality itself. Put another way, he is engaged in a fevered escape attempt from the oppressive confines of his own head. As Kaufman puts it: "I guess . . . perception is reality, and also your prison" (cited in Feld, 2002, 126). To this end, the absurdist tropes that Kaufman employs become the narrative equivalent of the forced-perspective tricks that artist M.C. Escher uses to create visual gestalts: the in suddenly becomes the out. The irony to such an abstract escape plan, an irony that Kaufman underscores to varying degrees in each film, is that gestalts are reversible. In Kaufman's scripts, the gestalt of self/other (or within and without) becomes a sleight-of-hand labyrinth where an infinite exterior can become an infinite interior without any ontological change. Kaufman films are twisted moebius strips. They start in the tight, closed, personal space of their protagonist (lonely, depressed, frustrated, incarcerated) and expand through the twist in the strip into their opposite -- expansive (sometimes overweeningly so) kaleidoscopic vistas. The moebius strip is a good visual analogue for Kaufman's exploration of claustrophobic subjectivity. Most objects have at least two sides: a back and a front (inside and out). Because of its twist, a moebius strip only has one side. Move along the "inside" and you find yourself "outside"; move along the "outside" and you find yourself "inside" again. I