What happens if you crawl into your own brain?

Rating: 8/10 (15 December 2009)

I agree with the absolute majority of the hundreds of commentators who have honored this movie that its appearance has, in my words, a similar importance for the future movie-making as "Citizen Kane" had at the beginning of the talkies. In short, there are movies before and after "Citizen Kane", and now, there are movies before and after "Being John Malkovich". Since meanwhile 10 years have passed since BJM was broadcast, this prediction has proved to be right.
I personally doubt that still in the 80ies it would have been possible to lance a box office hit based on a scenario solely consisting of metaphysics, and of metaphysics in its purest form: the question of the Self. But since then, especially in the genre of horror movies, we recognize more an more elements which go back to cybernetics, semiotics, non-Aristotelian logic and related topic. The generation of the movies before were restricted to Einsteinian physics. When "Stars Wars" came to and end, when people got tired of traveling through the universe, BJM came, and people became more interested in traveling into the self. By the way, the Self is a universe of its own.
However, what happens if you crawl into your own brain? Correctly speaking, the basic problem with the identity-eliminating corridor in the movie starts already when other people crawl into your brain: Do you realize that or not? It seems that Malkovich does not feel it. This would mean that he disposes of an alter ego with is not in communication with his ego. Furthermore, this alter ego is not recognizable for the subject as a (common) object. If this would be true, Malkovich would be unable to recognize himself as a subject, since not only can subjects recognize alter egos, they are even characterized by iterating themselves, thus creating subjects of subjects of subjects ... . So, if you crawl into your own brain, you correctly see - as depicted wonderfully in the movie - a large number of Yours who are yourself and at the same time not yourself. (Of course, since the tunnel is an identity-elimination device.) This idea, by the way, is from E.T.A. Hoffmann, mentioned in his diaries and henceforth quoted in many philosophical, psychological and psychiatric studies. Unfortunately, at that point, the movie stops (thematically), and it would be highly interesting to see how a director would deal with the fact that one person is dissolved into several egos without drifting into the false concept of schizophrenia. A logic, in which this splitting of individuality is possible, is a logic which transcends by far the Aristotelian light-switch logic and leads into a universe whose discovery will be infinitely more interesting than the time-travels through worm leaks or Einstein-Rosen-Bridges with which old-generation Science Fiction has entertained us during decades.