Being Charlie Kaufman

Rating: Null/10 (15 October 2010)

"It's not that there are no great writers, it's that there are no great readers any more." - Gore Vidal
Written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze, "Being John Malkovich" revolves around a lowly puppeteer (played by John Cusack) who discovers a portal which allows him to "enter" Hollywood actor John Malkovich. Once in the portal, Cusack is not only able to see and feel what Malkovich experiences (throughout the film Malkovich is portrayed as being weak willed and uncertain), but control all of Malkovich's bodily actions, completely submitting the actor to the puppeteer's will.
So what we have here is a more meta version of Hitchcock's "Vertigo" or Pixar's "Ratatouille", Cusack the artist/director who uses Malkovich to kickstart his own career going. While the various characters who enter the portal see only "memories" of Malkovich's personal history, a kind of deliberately one-dimensional and comical psychoanalysis session in which the "Freudian" and "Self-defining" moments from Malkovich's past are revisited (Malkovich frets about have seen his parents having sex as a child), Cusack is uninterested in the "Being" or "Self" of Malkovich, or even "being" Malkovich. He's concerned only about controlling the actor.
Significantly, when Cusack possesses Malkovich the "real Malkovich" disappears entirely and is defined instead by Cusack's memories and actions. Recall Nietzsche's writings in "Beyond Good and Evil": "identity" is merely based on a kind of hierarchy of dominant and less dominant power drives, our individuality based on how we prioritise our prevailing drives and how we respond to intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. In other words, Malkovich loses "Being" when possessed, while the bumbling Cusack gains "Being" when actualising his own drives through Malkovich. i.e, the artist's ego often needs a surrogate.
Like Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York", "Adaptation" and "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind", all the artists in this film thus long not only for control (only creative types are able to control Malkovich for extended periods) but for immortality through art. In this regard, one character called Dr Lester wishes to achieve immortality by literally possessing host bodies whilst Cusack wishes to use Malkovich to gain fame and validation.
Late in the film, Cusack's damaged ego is contrasted to Malkovich's who, when he enters the portal and therefore himself, sees only a kind of self-centred world populated by hordes of Malkovich characters. This scene literalizes the egos of the actor and writer/director. Everyone's the centre of their own universe, but the puppeteer/director's ego-world collapses without a puppet for the audience to watch, and the puppet/actor's ego-world degenerates into movie-star narcissism if he has no other personalities/puppets to embody or possess. In other words, the ego is always a projection.
The film can be read as a comment on contemporary celebrity culture, everyone in the film wanting to "enter" and "be" a celebrity, soaking up their 15 minutes of fame. But Kaufman goes to lengths to stress how banal Malkovich's "celebrity" life really is, modern media and peep-show reality TV removing the mystery and glamour of the famous.
The film seems more interested, though, in being a self-conscious and more specific analogy for the relationship between spectator and screen. Using POV shots, both the audience and various characters who pay to enter the portal literally "embody" Malkovich. One rather obese customer even gives his weight as a reason for wanting to become John Malkovich, the point being that cinema allows moviegoers to identify with someone or something they are not: successful, handsome, famous etc.
For the audience, this identification is a passive one. But for Cusack, passivity is not enough. He wants control. In this way, like "Adaptation", "Synecdoche, New York" and "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind", "Being John Malkovich" functions as a sort of art manifesto. Because of his creativity, and because he is an artist, Cusack is able to surpass the brevity of the Malkovich experience and actually accomplish something. The point: artists influence actions and choices, the masses are passive voyeurs, consumers or eavesdroppers "in" the artist's brain-space, and the tragedy of the artist is not only that he must often transgress moral boundaries, but that he is dead without an audience or medium.
At its best, though, the film touches upon man's obsession with validation. Whether it be the "customers" who enter the portal to escape their own lives, or Cusack and Malkovich wishing to be the centre of their own stage, everyone in this film has a narcissistic desire to be the centre of the universe. This horror is mirrored to several characters who all desire to return to a previous stage in their development in which they do not seek validation from others and in which they are unaware of their own gender (what Lacan called the division between "I" and "me"). In this regard, two characters called Maxine and Lotte embrace their homosexuality and Cusack becomes trapped in a baby. In each case these characters have stopped living "through the eyes of others", a form of ego death similar to that experienced by Philip Seymour Hoffman at the end of "Synecdoche, New York".
8.5/10 – Too quirky and surreal to generate profundity or drama. The film's zaniness allows it to touch upon more ideas than similar "puppet movies" like "Vertigo" and "Ratatouille", but this very zaniness dilutes any long lasting impact.
Worth two viewings. Makes a good companion piece to Lynch's "Inland Empire".