Watched Being John Malkovich

 

Last night, Michal and I watched Being John Malkovich on Netflix. I originally saw in on dvd about 13 years ago -- long enough to remember I liked it; but, also, long enough that I did not remember very much about the movie. If you have not seen the movie let me quote a few words of what Roger Ebert wrote about the film in 1999:

The movie just keeps getting better. I don't want to steal the surprises and punch lines. Even a Charlie Sheen cameo is inspired. At one point Malkovich enters himself through his own portal, which is kind of like being pulled down into the black hole of your own personality, and that trip results in one of the most peculiar single scenes I've ever seen in the movies. Orchestrating all this, Cusack's character stays cool; to enter another man's mind is of course the ultimate puppeteering experience.

Every once in a long, long while a movie comes along that is like no other. A movie that creates a new world for us and uses it to produce wonderful things. "Forrest Gump" was a movie like that, and so in their different ways were "MASH," "This Is Spinal Tap" (1985), "After Hours," "Babe" and "There's Something About Mary." What do such films have in common? Nothing. That's the point. Each one stakes out a completely new place and colonizes it with limitless imagination. Either "Being John Malkovich" gets nominated for best picture, or the members of the Academy need portals into their brains.

 

OK. Let me make a transition to a related subject.

Yesterday I checked out Antkind by Charlie Kaufman, author of the the Being John Malkovich screenplay, from my local public library. I have not looked at the book yet, but I do enjoy the occasional experimental novel, so I think I might like it. Here is how Jon Baskin described the book in the New Yorker:

Although “Antkind” runs to just over seven hundred pages, the major plot points can, “Molloy”-like, be summed up quickly. The mind wrestling with itself belongs to B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, a flailing middle-aged film critic on a research trip to St. Augustine, Florida. Rosenberg’s neighbor in his hotel is a reclusive amateur filmmaker named Ingo Cutbirth, an African-American who claims at one point to be a hundred and nineteen years old. Cutbirth convinces Rosenberg to sit for a viewing of his life’s work, a film whose run time is three months. Rosenberg quickly judges it a masterpiece—the “last great hope of civilization.” Ditching his research, he determines to bring the film back to New York, sure that in promoting it as a “holy text” he will finally find the approval and fame that has eluded him. (He really means the film is his last great hope.) Then, less than a third of the way into the showing, Ingo dies. After arranging a hasty funeral, Rosenberg loads the film stock into the back of a rented truck and begins driving home. When he stops for fast food, the truck catches fire. Burning himself in a doomed attempt to save the film, Rosenberg wakes up weeks or months later (it is impossible to know) in a hospital. For the rest of “Antkind,” Rosenberg attempts to remember what he saw of the film and to re-create what he didn’t, often with the aid of a dubiously qualified hypnotist named Barassini.

To render the above events even with this modest level of clarity, however, is misleading. It is never obvious if Ingo actually exists, if the film exists, if Rosenberg really stops for fast food, if there has been any fire. Secondary characters and even the cultural touchstones that Rosenberg harps on—some recognizable (he’s a huge Judd Apatow fan), others fictionalized (like Ingo’s film)—echo thoughts we encounter earlier in Rosenberg’s internal monologue, such that we suspect them of being psychological projections. For a time, Rosenberg delivers sandwiches and laundry to a woman he is infatuated with named Tsai. Later, he believes himself to be a prisoner in Plato’s cave, occasionally speaking with a Nazi propagandist (also named Rosenberg) about filmmaking. Later still, he murders what he believes to be a robot that is impersonating him, then moves into the robot’s apartment with its wife.

 

So, that gives some idea of what to expect of Kaufman's novel.

I am always in the middle of at least one book. I am currently reading two: The Puttermesser Papers by Cynthia Ozick and Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid, but I would like to start the Kaufman novel soon. I may not finish Kaufman's novel, but I think it would be fun to at least sample some of its strangeness.