PULLING
throughout his career. In the film that first
THE STRINGS
Charlie Kaufman’s brilliant,
funny, self-reflexive philosophical
investigations trade on a neurotic
vision of the self that is perpetually
on the verge of catastrophic collapse
By Jonathan Romney
Since the turn of the millennium, critics
have had a very useful second ‘K-word’ to
use as an alternative or a complement to
‘Kafkaesque’. Both terms carry some of the
same connotations: an overwhelming anxiety
about the human condition, elaborated in
precise and powerful metaphors; a peculiar,
not to say perverse, relationship to the
artforms practised by the artists in question;
and a commitment to philosophical inquiry
through fiction. That latter quality is all the
more notable in the case of Charlie Kaufman,
since he operates in a field – the fringes of
mainstream American cinema – in which
overt philosophical content is usually
considered surplus to requirements.
That latter quality is something Kaufman
Coming of age: Samantha Morton and Philip Seymour Hoffman in Synecdoche, New York (2008)
has eagerly drawn our attention to
earned him notoriety, Being John Malkovich
(1999), characters keep telling each other
excitedly that their discovery – that people
can literally get into John Malkovich’s head
– has massive philosophical repercussions.
The films written or directed by Kaufman
offer rich food for abstract reflection, and
their scripts make sure we know. His way
of signalling his themes is self-conscious in
both senses: self-reflexive, but also carrying
a tinge of embarrassment and anxiety, as
if Kaufman can’t believe that he’s getting
away with philosophising in an American Being John Malkovich (1999)
comedy and fears he won’t be allowed
to get away with it for much longer. Gondry, 2004), which is nicely paradoxical,
Indeed, Kaufman’s directing debut given that its characters are all puppets.
Synecdoche, New York (2008) could easily Kaufman’s return to puppetry, so
have put a stop to his game. It was a prominent a theme in Malkovich, reaffirms an
recklessly anti-commercial venture and the awareness that runs through his fictions: that
perception, held by many, that Kaufman characters in a film are never autonomous
was over-reaching – in a film about a man entities, however much we want to believe
over-reaching – appeared at once to halt that they are. Rather, they are empty spaces to
his meteoric rise and leave him creatively be invested with real-seeming life, potential
winded. Now Anomalisa shows Kaufman beings temporarily embodied by living actors
restating his characteristic preoccupations on screen. But someone else makes those
to eloquent and surprisingly moving effect actors move, speak, emote in a certain way
– it’s his most human-seeming film since – a writer or a director, or both. And
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel beyond that, it’s ultimately the viewer
March 2016 | Sight&Sound | 29
CHARLIE KAUFMAN
who makes the actor’s contortions
mean something. But the power of
such hidden manipulators is lampooned
mercilessly in Malkovich, in which puppeteer
hero Craig is a nebbish, hopeless at running
his own life, yet prodigiously talented when
he gets inside the head of Malkovich and
starts to ‘direct’ him. The film – about the
possibility of literally entering a movie
star’s head – is a trenchant parable of viewer
identification, about the projection of our
desires into the fantasy bodies of screen
actors. But it’s also a warning that we
should be aware of how our fantasies work,
lest we project ourselves into a delirium
that demolishes our own sense of self.
In Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002), Kaufman
demystifies the process by which films are
made, showing how much sheer delusion
and compromise goes into making a fiction,
starting from the bottom up, from the
fundamental level of story. The screenwriter’s
apparent self-portrait(s) – as neurotic
struggling screenwriter ‘Charlie Kaufman’,
and his brash, commercially astute twin
‘Donald’ – tells us outright something that,
with most films, it’s so easy to forget: that
behind every movie is a writer or writers,
although they rarely get to claim the creative
credit they consider their due. Based on the
fictional Charlie Kaufman’s attempt to adapt a
real book by the real Susan Orlean, Adaptation
is arguably the most self-dissecting American
commercial movie ever, the US mainstream’s
equivalent to, say, Godard’s Passion (1982).
The film agonises over the dominance of the
rules of screenwriting espoused by Robert
McKee (himself a character in the drama),
and destroys those rules by putting them
preposterously to work in front of our eyes.
The success and the peculiarity of Being
John Malkovich established the existence of the
phenomenon known as a ‘Charlie Kaufman
movie’, making him that rare phenomenon, a
writer whose auteur stamp overshadows that
of his directors (we don’t necessarily think of
Malkovich and Adaptation as having the ‘Spike
Jonze’ touch, because we still don’t really
know what that might be, nor do we think of
Eternal Sunshine as primarily a Gondry film
because, mercifully, it’s less Gondryesque
than some of the director’s other work).
Even a film that seems less extravagantly
idiosyncratic than the others, Confessions of
a Dangerous Mind (George Clooney, 2002),
the digressive anti-biopic of TV gameshow
supremo and soi-disant spy Chuck Barris, is
very much a writer’s film, since it is so acutely
conscious of the ways that writers (the film is
based on Barris’s unreliable memoir) create
themselves as both voice and persona.
It is tempting to celebrate Kaufman as a
creature of infinite novelty and invention,
a naturally expansive imagination. Yet his
30 | Sight&Sound | March 2016
Forget me not: Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
real insight is into the way that the mind
so easily contracts, gets trapped in its own
loops. Eternal Sunshine is a comedy about
forgetting, about the dangerous temptation to
erase painful memories: the film dramatises
problems of the self, asking what happens
when we choose to let our mind, imagination
and emotions shut down. Gondry’s exuberant
visual language eloquently explores the
script’s classic philosophical question
of who and what a person is, beyond the
memories, dreams and aspirations they cling
on to so precariously. The self in Kaufman’s
work is always on the verge of caving in on
itself: even such a supposedly monumental
thing as the ineffable being of a movie star,
we learn in Malkovich, can be shut down
when the visiting voyeurs inside his head
appropriate him for their own purposes.
Charlie Kaufman is that rare
phenomenon, a writer whose
auteur stamp overshadows
that of his directors
Nicolas Cage, in duplicate, in Adaptation (2002)
Synecdoche, New York explores a different
premise, examining the contradictions both
of self-expression and realism. It mocks its
artist hero’s aspiration to magnum opus self-
portraiture à la Proust or Harold Brodkey (you
can’t help wondering whether Norwegian
author Karl Ove Knausgård has seen this
film). But the dominant image is that of
the map imagined by Jorge Luis Borges,
which, as it approaches a maximum of
representative accuracy, becomes exactly the
size of the territory it depicts. In Synecdoche,
theatre director Caden Cotard attempts
to stage a version of his own life, but the
set expands to gradually engulf the world,
leaving Cotard ever less in control – and
perhaps less ‘himself’ than is the manifest
non-lookalike actor he hires to play him.
After Synecdoche’s maximalism, Anomalisa’s
recourse to a table-top world of stop-motion
puppetry might seem like a retreat – although
this Kickstarter-funded project also represents
a brilliant escape from a career impasse.
The extravagant strangeness of some earlier
Kaufman projects seems muted in this simple
story of mundane characters’ experiences in
a mundane hotel, except that the strangeness
– dream sequences notwithstanding – has
largely been absorbed into the very texture
of the film, and into the way we are bound
to perceive it, as we constantly measure
Duke Johnson’s puppets against the
imaginary presence of the ‘real’ people who
never show up. Erasing human presence
from all but his soundtrack, Kaufman has
paradoxically made the film of his that
feels closest to an everyday experience that
we can all recognise – real life, but shrunk
to eerily enclosed snow-globe scale.
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