Charlie Kaufman Week: Being John Malkovich (1999)

2 years ago

Charlie Kaufman Week: Being John Malkovich (1999)

TOO INSIDERY?

by Sarah Malone

When Being John Malkovich was fresh from the New York Film Festival, if you worked in advertising and promotions you were almost certain to have it presented to you by a client for inspiration, dubbed to VHS or 3/4” tape as a graveyard shift favor. You would think, “What conceivable relation does this have to what we’re advertising?” What you would say was, “What shot were you thinking of, in particular?”

The client would be visibly frustrated that you had failed to recognize his genius, but he—it would always be a he—would be able to shuttle the tape to an exact frame within the exact scene he wanted to replicate. That scene would be one in which Craig (John Cusack) first peers into the portal on the seventh-and-a-half floor of the Mertin Flemmer building, or the scene in which Craig first takes his wife, Lotte (Cameron Diaz) to crawl down the portal and spend fifteen minutes in John Malkovich before landing beside the New Jersey Turnpike, or the scene in which Craig watches with his crush and business partner, Maxine (Catherine Keener), while Malkovich himself enters the portal, ending up in a cabaret of infinite Malkovichs.

Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich. The name gets funnier each time it’s said, and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze—in 1999 the film was more likely to be known as a Spike Jonze film—know it. We’re on a first-name basis with Maxine and Lotte, but every character refers to Malkovich by last name from the moment he enters… or, from the moment we enter him.

“It raises all sorts of philosophical type questions,” Craig tells Maxine after his first, inadvertent trip into Malkovich. “About the nature of the self, the existence of the soul… Am I me? Is Malkovich Malkovich?”

That’s the last time anyone in the film asks about the nature of the self. They’re not interested in philosophical questions. They’re interested in desire. What can this portal do for me?

The portal could seem like a gimmick in the press buzz and admonitions that you must see this film, but, in the film itself, though the portal is the fulcrum for everything that transpires, the explanation we’ve been waiting for since the main title, it is only one of many oddities. Kaufman is profligate with them, and who’s to say which of them is qualitatively weirder? The film keeps shifting, undercutting everything it presents.

Craig at first clearly seems to be the protagonist. He even confides to us directly, and we see him first, or, a puppet version of him. He’s an underemployed puppeteer performing his routine to rapt applause… applause that turns out to be on the recording he has set his routine to. The routine actually seems fantastically adept, if portentously titled “Craig’s Dance of Despair and Disillusion.” But Kaufman is subtler than to make Craig unskilled at his passion. Instead he gives Craig high-art ambition that would seem laughably inappropriate for puppetry—except that the film takes place in a world in which a rival puppeteer can make the news by staging a giant puppet “Belle of Amherst” from a bridge in Westchester county, and by the end of the film, when Craig-as-Malkovich has spurred a renaissance in puppetry, Sean Penn is predicting that he and many other actors will shift into puppetry. We can never trust that we know by how much Kaufman is shifting the ground beneath us.

Craig and animal-lover Lotte need money, so Craig takes a job as filer with LesterCorp, on the seventh-and-a-half floor of the Mertin Flemming building. Of course it’s not only a matter of strange numbering—the ceiling is actually half-height. How did this come to be? An orientation film pseudo-explaining lets Kaufman introduce the nineteenth century Captain Mertin, he of Mertin Flemming fame. The story of the building’s origin is, Maxine tells us, “complete bullshit,” but we never get a true version. Mertin, we find out, still lives, inhabiting the body of Dr. Lester. Lester is a ‘vessel,’ as is Malkovich. Those who enter the portal at midnight on a vessel’s forty-forth birthday get to supersede the vessel’s actual soul. Repeat when the next vessel turns forty-four, and you’ve got immortality—immortal middle and old age. Malkovich’s forty-fourth birthday is only eight months away. Lester is biding his time, until Schwartz comes along and finds the portal, boarded up behind a cabinet.

Craig enters Malkovich with a board in his hand. When he’s dumped out of Malkovich along the Turnpike, the board is gone. “Did it disappear?” he asks Maxine. Is it inside Malkovich? How could that be?

There are other elements that implausibly work out. Craig is always able to get from Midtown Manhattan to the right spot on the Jersey turnpike in less than fifteen minutes. How did the portal, discovered by Captain Mertin, get into the building that Mertin supposedly built? And Mertin/Lester has invited friends to join him in Malkovich. How will that work? Will they share volition? Merge into a group consciousness? Take turns? When Lester, last of the group, enters Malkovich, the Malkovich body shudders, makes a face and says, seeming pleased to be getting used to the idea, “We’re… Malkovich.” So the others are in there, somehow.

Narratives that tinker with the boundaries of reality as Being John Malkovich does get to decide how much their characters are going to recognize the shift from what the audience knows. Is the story going to be about things getting weird? Or is the weirdness going to be a new angle on what’s recognizable?

Kaufman’s characters barely pause for disbelief before rushing in with their desires. Typically, Craig rushes to tell Maxine. “It’s supernatural, is what it is.” Maxine is disgusted with him, until she gets the idea of charging admission for fifteen minutes in Malkovich. Craig has qualms—are they really going to use something this significant just to make money?—but he is able to overcome them at the prospect of long nights after hours with Maxine. He brings Lotte to see the portal, to prove that his story—the facts of it, not his secret motivation—is real. Pulled into Malkovich, Lotte discovers she likes being in a man’s body. Maxine discovers she loves Lotte, but only when Lotte is in Malkovich—until she makes love with Malkovich and finds out that Craig was in Malkovich. Then something happens, stranger than portals and half-height floors. Maxine, whom we’ve only seen sporting blood-red lipstick, always with a comeback, sure of everything, pleads with Craig to stay in Malkovich. Allegiances turn on a dime in the film, but someone always wants something. Craig performs his dance of despair, using Malkovich as the puppet (Malkovich just happens to own the accompanying music on CD). Maxine is enraptured. When next we see her, it’s without makeup. After that, it’s eight months pregnant. The film, of course, isn’t going to give Craig a happy ending, not because he’s left Lotte and stolen the Malkovich body, but because he hasn’t taken Lester—and, as it turns out, Lotte and Maxine—into account. It does not matter in Being John Malkovich if you do the right thing. It matters if you prepare and do not get taken by surprise.

When Lester and his friends take Maxine hostage, Craig agrees to let Malkovich go. The bedraggled John Cusack who drops into the rain beside the New Jersey Turnpike, the lights of the World Trade Center towers behind him, seems like a relic.

Malkovich gets only a few breaths of freedom. It’s his forty fourth birthday (Craig-as-Malkovich had bought a cake with “Malkovich” written in blue frosting). Lester and his friends enter the portal, and, unbeknownst to Craig, the portal switches to the next vessel: Emily, the daughter Maxine conceived with Lotte-as-Malkovich.

When next we see Malkovich, he has a fine new head of white hair, much like Lester’s, and he’s showing Charlie Sheen a wall of photos of the young Emily. “What if I told you I’d found a way for all of us to live forever?” he says. “You, me… Gary Sinise, maybe.”

In the last scene, Emily looks at us. She’s swimming underwater. Maxine and Lotte are laughing poolside. But it’s Craig’s voice we hear, from deep within Emily’s subconscious, plaintively repeating, “I love you, Maxine.” Is Craig, the master puppeteer, truly trapped, as others would be? Or does he choose to stay, watching Maxine and Lotte live happily ever after?

Or not. Kaufman doesn’t let us know whether Lotte remembers, but she should know. Lester told her. Emily has until midnight, the day she turns forty-four.

The gap between the girl’s knowledge and ours is exquisitely cruel. She has no idea what’s coming. Kaufman leaves us knowing everything, powerless to act. Looking out, like Craig. It raises all kinds of questions, but not the philosophical type. They’re more elemental than that.