Charlie Kaufman Week: Human Nature (2000)

1 year ago

MORE HUMAN THAN HUMAN

by Alicia Kennedy

When I start to think about a movie seriously—especially one I did not like—I have a tendency to drag myself down a particularly useless hole of thought by worrying that I read it wrong, that its problems were intentional and doing something beyond my shallow comprehension. It’s even easier to do this when the movie was written by someone whose work I’ve come to believe is superior and directed by someone incredibly inventive.

That is to say: I did not like Human Nature, written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Michel Gondry.

The story is told through three flashbacks: Lila is being interrogated by police. Puff is giving testimony before Congress. Nathan is in a powdery white purgatory with a bloody hole in his head. Lila has hormonal imbalance that causes ape-like hair to cover her body and lived many years in the woods until feeling the need for a man, which is when she leaves and meets Nathan, a prim scientist doing research into teaching rats table manners. Their dispassionate courtship leads them to a hike, on which they discover Puff, a man who was raised among monkeys. Nathan decides to make him his research subject, make him human.

That setup is probably too perfect, too obvious. The film wants to say something about our idealization of nature and the purity of animals. It also wants to say something about gender and sexuality. And it says these things—explicitly and without any trace of emotion. Humans desire sex; men are conditioned to not want women with body hair; only stuffy people give a shit about which fork is the fish fork. It’s all very tidy and ha-ha, without giving us anything new about human nature.

Lila and Nathan’s relationship goes to hell after he discovers her in their bathroom covered in shaving cream and runs into the arms of his faux French assistant. Lila loses it, shaving all the hair off of her body and head and attempting to be the perfectly civilized feminine mate. Then Kaufman goes on to really drive this point home by having different characters point out how “soulless” she is now.

They all arrived in their current locations after Lila gains back her soul by working out, putting on a Sarah Connor outfit, and breaking Puff out of Nathan’s lab. Finally, they’re in the woods together where they belong, until Nathan finds them and Puff kills him. Lila takes the blame.

These caricatures are just uncomfortable to watch because they’re never taken into the realm of the completely ridiculous and farcical, where perhaps something fresh could be done with them. Basically, there’s nothing strikingly Kaufmanesque about the film; there’s nothing, at the time of its release, would’ve made you think it had come from the same mind that wrote Being John Malkovich or, later, the same team that created Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Mediocrity happens, even to our most brilliant minds, and I’m just going to take comfort in that rather than worry it went over my head.