Charlie Kaufman’s screenwriting career burst into full bloom with his first produced screenplay, 1999’s surreal Being John Malkovich, directed by Spike Jonze. Beneath the off-beat and brazenly quirky surface of the film lie deep seated questions of identity and self, as well as an exploration of what happens when one attempts to abandon oneself and become someone else. Themes of questioning memory, identity, and destiny (or connectedness) are central to Kaufman’s body of work, despite the apparent differences between surface subject matter and directors. (Kaufman has worked primarily with Jonze, and with French director Michel Gondry.) In films such as Human Nature (2001), Adaptation (2002), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) Kaufman explores these themes through a variety of settings and situations, as well as another, more subtly overriding theme.

During the climactic scene near the end of Human Nature, the once-feral man known as Puff (Rhys Ifans) is about to murder the man who “civilized” him, Dr. Nathan Bronfman (Tim Robbins). In the midst of Puff’s rambling attempt to explain the harm that Bronfman has done to him, Puff has what seems to be a slip of thought, which leads to the following exchange:

PUFF: Does anyone know the definition of simultagnosia? I was intending to look it up before Lila saved me.

NATHAN: It’s the inability to perceive elements as components of a whole.

This small and apparently unrelated exchange reveals what could be called the main character flaw of so many of Kaufman’s characters, and sheds light on the complex relationships that these characters have not only with one another, but with memory, identity, and destiny.

In Being John Malkovich, puppeteer Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) discovers a portal that leads into the mind of actor John Malkovich (played, of course, by himself). Craig and his co-worker Maxine (Catherine Keener) quickly cook up a business venture called J.M. Inc., and begin to sell trips through Malkovich’s portal at a cost of two hundred dollars per fifteen minutes. Craig’s wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz) soon wants to experience Malkovich for herself, and a bizarre love-quadrangle of sorts results. (Craig and Lotte both fall in love with Maxine, whose only interest in Lotte at first revolves around making love to Malkovich while Lotte is “inside” of him, and who has no interest whatsoever in Craig.) This messy romantic entanglement is closely tied into the depiction of Malkovich’s identity as being fluid, and to Lotte’s desire to leave behind her own body and “become” someone else. This is precisely how Maxine and Craig sell the Malkovich experience to the public; the ad that Maxine places for J.M. Inc. begins, “Ever want to be someone else? Now you can.”

While Craig and many others enter Malkovich, it is Lotte who is most deeply affected by the experience. Her desire to become something more than what she is, to escape the doldrums of her marriage to Craig and to fulfill her desire for a child (illustrated through her obsession with animals) are powerful pulls for Lotte. Through Malkovich, she is able to experience the sexual and emotional desire that seems to be lacking from her marriage. As Maxine tells her after one of their experiences together (via Malkovich):

"... Lotte, I'm smitten with you, but only when you're in Malkovich. When I looked into his eyes last night, I could feel you peering out. Behind the stubble and the too-prominent brow and the male pattern baldness, I sensed your feminine longing peering out, and it just slew me."

Becoming Malkovich in this way does not, however, fundamentally alter who Lotte is; by the end of the film, Lotte and Maxine are a couple, with a child together, and in a stable relationship. They have accepted one another on their own terms and for who (and what) they truly are. Lotte is who she is; in her attempt to Be someone else, she inevitably became more herself, solidifying her own identity by coming to a deeper understanding of her true self. With the exception of Maxine, who never enters Malkovich’s portal (and who seems to be the most self-possessed character from the beginning), and of Malkovich himself, nearly every character in the film follows this pattern of development; their very attempts to be or to become Malkovich further illuminate them for what they truly are, and these discoveries draw them with increasing firmness toward their individual and unavoidable destinies. Their identities are not mutable, and their destinies are linked – each individual functions as part of a whole, revolving around the central character of Malkovich, and leading to an inevitable conclusion.

While the narrative structure of Being John Malkovich is fairly linear, the structure of Human Nature further illustrates Kaufman’s notions of identity determinism (if not biological determinism). Human Nature begins by telling the audience the outcome of the story – Dr. Nathan Bronfman has been murdered – and then proceeds to illuminate the events that led up to his death. Human Nature also presents multiple characters that are working to shift and adjust their identities, and these characters operate around the central fulcrum point that is Nathan Bronfman himself. (Nathan, like Maxine, is the central character in the narrative precisely because he does not attempt to change himself or to shift his identity.)

At the beginning of the narrative, the three major characters (Nathan, Lila, and Puff) are content and have accepted themselves for who and what they are. When these characters are introduced to each other, however, events are set in motion which prompt Lila and Puff to question themselves and eventually to take drastic measures to fundamentally change who they are. Lila, who suffers from a genetic abnormality that has covered her body in hair, strives to hide her true self from Nathan in order to maintain their romantic relationship. She shaves all of her hair, begins to wear a wig, and gives up all of her beliefs in order to please him and to attempt to conform to what she perceives as his ideal. Puff, acting perhaps more out of a survival instinct than anything, strives to become exactly what Nathan expects of him; he quite calculatingly does whatever it takes to appease the person who has power over him. (Later in the film, just after Lila “saves” him, Puff initially tells her, “But I like being human now.” When she responds by using his electric collar to deliver an intense shock and asks him a second time, he immediately responds, “I want to be the way I was before.”) Even Nathan’s mistress, Gabrielle (Miranda Otto), is pretending to be someone she’s not in order to get what she wants.

In this case, it is Nathan and Lila’s inability to see the elements of human nature as components of a whole that creates the conflict. The refusal of both Nathan and Lila to understand that human beings need to achieve some balance between their “civilized” selves and their “natural” selves is the primary source of conflict in the film. Gabrielle’s character serves as a reminder that even though Nathan is the most civilized (and static) character in the film, he, too, is driven by his baser needs – Nathan’s sexual desires (and hang-ups) rule his interpersonal relationships. By failing to accept both the “civilized” and the “natural” aspects of their identities, Nathan and Lila have created the circumstances that will lead them each to their respective ends. (Nathan is dead. Lila is serving a lifetime jail sentence.) The two characters that best understand that these elements are both part of the messy (but healthy) confusion of human nature and identity – Gabrielle and Puff – end up in an apparently satisfactory relationship, together.

In Kaufman’s most recent production Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, again with director Michel Gondry at the helm, these themes of memory and the solidity of identity (even in the face of romantic rejection) are once again central. Eternal Sunshine is literally about the desire to erase the memory of a person from one’s mind, forever, and is an exploration of how our memories conspire to make us who we are. As Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) discovers, one memory is connected to another. Once the memory erasing treatment (performed by a company called Lacuna) has begun, and Joel begins to understand that he does not wish to erase his lover Clementine (Kate Winslet) from his mind, he takes his own internal Clementine and goes on the lam inside his own brain. These sequences (charmingly and imaginatively realized by Gondry) illustrate how Joel’s identity was formed, and that his love for Clementine is directly linked to his sense of self, as well as to how Clementine compliments that self.

For her part, Clementine has already erased Joel from her memory, but some fragment of those memories has not been fully destroyed. As the Lacuna tech, Patrick (Elijah Wood), attempts to woo Clementine with Joel’s words and gifts, Clementine experiences a growing sense of unease and confusion that is similar to déjà vu. This feeling of unease seems to be connected both to Clementine’s feeling of having forgotten something that is very important, and to her sense of self.

Clementine’s sense of identity is tied to her outward self-expression, most noticeably through her constantly shifting hair-color, and this is also how she expresses her state of mind. When the audience first meets Clementine, her hair is a color that she calls “Blue Ruin”. Later in the film, after Clementine has erased Joel from her memory and is feeling depressed and distraught, her hair is blue once again. At her happiest moments, her hair is a bright orange color – that of a tangerine, or a clementine – and she also seems most self-possessed and certain of who she is and what her life is about. When we see Clementine and Joel together for what we come to understand is their true first meeting, her hair is a shade of lemon yellow. The movie implies that Joel understands this aspect of Clementine’s personality by showing that Joel’s internal Clementine has hair that is cherry red. This changeability suggests that our identities, while not necessarily changeable, feel to us to be fluid and shifting. It also suggests that our identities and our sense of self grow, shift, and change slightly as we come to understand ourselves more fully.

Eternal Sunshine also demonstrates that by living, and by interacting with other people in our lives, we become who we are. The interpersonal relationships that we have shape our understanding of our selves. By exploring his memories of his affair with Clementine in reverse order, Joel not only rediscovers what he loved about her in the first place, but also sees himself revealed as someone who, at the end of their relationship, was cruel and unwilling meet Clementine in the middle. (To be fair, Clementine seems to share equal blame in this regard.) That both Joel and Clementine decide to rejoin one another, in spite of the risk that their relationship will end in the same painful way a second (or third?) time, is a touching recognition of the fact that they must both confront their true selves and learn how to live as a couple in spite of (and because of) who they are as individuals. Clementine and Joel are irrevocably connected to one another by virtue of their love for each other; similarly, the staff at Lacuna is connected to one another through complicated ties of friendship, love, and lust. Eventually, despite the fantastic memory-wiping technology at their disposal, no one in the film can escape themselves, their true feelings for each other, or their interconnectedness.

This sense of simultagnosia (to once again use the psychiatric term given in Human Nature), this failure of the characters to understand their connection to one another as part of a whole life (or in a more meta-fictional sense, as part of a whole narrative) is at the core of all of Kaufman’s screenplays. Frequently, our understanding of the characters is so inseparable from the narrative structure of the script (particularly in the cases of Human Nature and Eternal Sunshine) that it seems Kaufman is performing a kind of writing exercise laid out for all to see.

Nonetheless, his characters all exhibit a deep humanity and Kaufman effectively illustrates our own real-life connections and sheds light on our confusing and sometimes messy human natures and emotional tendencies. He does so with an off-beat sensibility that is well matched to the directors that he has primarily worked with – Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry – who seem to share with him this slightly surrealist understanding of the world around us, as well as a sense of childlike wonder (a wonder which can seem dark, but is a sense of wonder nonetheless). Through Kaufman’s films, we are able to see a kind of through the looking glass vision of ourselves as humans and as a culture. If we are willing to see the elements and people of our lives as components of a whole, Kaufman’s films can be more than merely enjoyable romps through one man’s vision of the human psyche – they can also be illuminating lessons about our connections with others, and with our selves.

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Bibliography

Being John Malkovich . Dir. Spike Jonze. Perf. John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener, and John Malkovich. Propoganda Films. 1999.

“Being John Malkovich.” First Draft Script.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind . Dir. Michel Gondry. Perf. Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, and Elijah Wood. Focus Features. 2004.

Human Nature . Dir. Michel Gondry. Perf. Tim Robbins, Patricia Arquette, Rhys Ifans, and Miranda Otto. Le Studio Canal. 2001.

"Human Nature.” First Draft Script. 20 May 1995.