Being John Malkovich and Living Forever in the Portal of Despair

by Christopher Barr

“[Voice] is part of the body but because it traverses the body, because it disposes of it, it retains almost nothing of it, comes from elsewhere and goes elsewhere, and in passing it may give to this body a locus but does not depend upon it […] insofar as ‘its own place’ is sexually determined […] Voice can betray the body to which it is lent, it can make it ventriloquize as if the body were no longer anything more than the actor or the double of another voice, of the voice of the other, even of an innumerable, incalculable polyphony.” 

– Jacques Derrida

Being John Malkovich is a hauntingly beautiful film directed by Spike Jonze and written by the always brilliant, eccentric Charlie Kaufman.  The film opens with one of Craig Schwartz’s puppet show tragedies.  Craig, the puppeteer, starts out as a melancholic figure, a depressing man, a man lost in the world, a man in search of escape, an ungrateful man, a pitiful man.  He is a man without purpose and is thus a man without hope, with nothing to live for but too egotistical to die or fight back.

“You don’t know how lucky you are being a monkey, because consciousness is a terrible curse.”  Craig says to his wife’s chimp, Elijah under the same existential breathe as the narrator in Dostoevsky’s Notes From The Underground.

Craig lives with his sins namely pride, lust, sloth and his defining sin, envy, as if they were pets that he feeds and cleans up after.  They are ghosts that surround him as he attempts to understand his existence from a solipsistic, confined disposition.

“Consciousness is a terrible curse.  I think….I feel….I suffer…..”

Is Craig doomed to his grim state of being because, as he puts it, “I raise issues.” Or does he raise issues because of his jealousy toward celebrated action versus his own arrested inaction?  He is a man that lies on his couch and does nothing while simultaneously wanting to be celebrated for who he thinks he is.

The great tragedy of Craig is he is talented; he does have something to say about oppression and love, about city life and angst.  But yet his journey to find answers to the fundamental questions of existence becomes fleeting as his focus is constantly pulled toward vanity.  Resulting in, the horror he sees in the world, he himself is participating in.

“They know what they do, but they do it anyway.”

The great tragedy of the modern age.

In one of his little puppet stage productions on the side of the street, a man and woman, both ‘puppet’ servants of god, sit in separate rooms longing for connection, longing for the freedom to act on their desires.  Craig puts his desperate play on as a little girl watches, what she would likely perceive as two little dolls humping the wall that is dividing them.  The father sees the perverse puppets and punches out the puppeteer.

Craig, upon sound advisement from his wife, looks for a job, he sees an ad in the paper, “Looking for a man with fast hands; short statured file clerk with unusually nimble and dexterous fingers needed for speed filing.” 

LESTER CORP.

Craig goes to see about the job and must get out on the seven and half floor of the Manhattan office building.  He gets out on the floor where he has to bend over to walk around because the ceilings are so low.  Here we begin to see the absurdity of existence and the many times where confinement is used to elicit a sense of claustrophobia, to show how selfish, self-absorbed and narrow minded the main characters actually are.  He’s even applying for a job that’s only focus is to find order in chaos – filing.  Filing attempts to clean up the mess of the world, the mess of the people trying to find meaning in a meaningless universe.  Existence is not definable in the way that most believe it to be.  On the contrary, existence, like the low ceilings, does not have to comfort anyone.  Existence is impartial to humanity and all its rules and laws, all its beliefs and rituals.  Existence reminds us that we are a species of animal that is born and lives with the purpose of procreation and then dies.  Existence is sort of like a virus that has only one interest; to better what has come before.   

“Existentialism is an attitude that recognizes the unresolvable confusion of the human world, yet resists the all-too-human temptation to resolve the confusion by grasping toward whatever appears or can be made to appear firm or familiar…. The existential attitude begins with a disoriented individual facing a confused world that he cannot accept.” 

 - Robert Solomon

Craig sits in with an old man named Dr. Lester for his interview, a man convinced he has a speech impediment that he clearly does not possess.  But because his “executive liaison” secretary does and is unaware that she does, somehow Lester believes that he’s the one with the problem.  This is one of the many points in the film, when dealing with how, not only one communicates in the world but how one is communicated back to as well.  Here it is suggesting that reality in the world and reality of the mind exists primarily on two, if not more, opposing frequencies.  This exchange between Craig and Dr. Lester becomes some absurd labyrinthine semantic drift like in Kafka’s Castle, where the rhetorical games are part of the problem of getting anywhere.   Here we see how language fails reality and becomes a passing back and forth of linguistic slippage leading nowhere.

In all this talk of time

Talk is fine

But I don’t want to stay around

Why can’t we pantomime, just close our eyes

And sleep sweet dreams

Me and you with wings on our feet.

R.E.M

Lyrical excerpt from “The Great Beyond”

Craig goes to orientation after landing the job and is subjected to a surreal video explaining, why the seven and half floor was built that way in spite of the, “Low overhead, my boy, We pass the savings on to you.”  This is where Craig first meets Maxine.  A beautiful, confident modern woman that has clearly grown jaded and become bored with her unchallenging life, surrounded by people beneath her, she wears her sexuality next to her claws as she, without real direction, forges through the murky swamp of existence.

Craig goes home to his banal caged life where his wife Lotte, an aspiring optimist, and he talk about their animals.  Their apartment is filled with a number of animals such as a dog, birds, lizards, a ferret, a chimpanzee and who knows what else is crawling around, while the neighbors yell and scream from their apartments to keep the racket down.  Lotte expresses her interest in having a baby with Craig but he says it’s not a good time right now because of their financial problems.   In actuality, Craig doesn’t even want to be there, he wants to be transported to another place, to a different reality.  He’s not even a fan of the animals, he tolerates them because Lotte loves them and they distract her from him.

We live in a society where we have a deep compassion for animals but are unevolved when we seek connection with each other.  We love animals because they can’t judge us, they don’t have the intellectual capacity to see us for who we really are.  Their love is unconditional; the likely reason for this is they don’t wish to bite the hand that feeds them, literally.  As much as animals are warm and cuddly, they are not a substitute for human connection.  Our relationships with them are simple and that’s what we love about them.  We feed them and they protect us if they are dogs and remain snobs if they are cats.

We love animals because they are not messing up our lives; they are not messing up this world.  They seem quite grateful and content with what they have and most of them are able to show this gratitude.  Animals also can’t talk which means they can’t yell at us and tell us what to do.  They can’t insult our intelligence or tell us how to live our lives.  One of the main reasons we love them is because they are honest, there is very little to no scheming with animals, unless they are playing.  They just make us feel important and at the end of the day, like us for who we are.  They also rarely ever leave because as much as animals lovers wouldn’t like to admit, their animals are there for the food.

Craig later on fails to impress Maxine, and then he and Dr. Lester talk about Dr. Lester being 105 years old but with the heart and the drive as a young man, with everlasting lust and desire for women.  Craig is in love with Maxine or at least the idea of loving Maxine.  These main characters are confused about love and lust, they want to force love even though the fundamental ingredient of love is to 'compare thee to a summer's day'.  Love can't work if it is forced, it must be the breeze in the wind and the sun on your face, it must feel free and never feel confined, for that's how love suffocates.   

Craig meets up with Maxine for drinks and is rejected after he tells her he’s a puppeteer.  This being too weird for the modern women, Maxine, like many like her, are looking for a resume of money and real estate, properties and multiple cars, then after all this checks out and is verified, maybe a little insight on personality and where they grew up.  Craig looks at her as a way out, a way out of the trenches of despair that is within himself, that lonely place that dreams go to die.  He’s willing to drop his caring wife for something superficial and uncertain, clearly at this point, the last thing he wants to do is live his life, in his skin, with his wife and in their animal infested apartment.

The animals in the apartment are suffering various levels of sickness.  Here we see that captivity has a damaging effect on people in the congestion of cities and in the confining file cabinets of high rises, but also in the animals they keep for their own selfish need for a surrogate connection.  Society is sick and as a result we are infecting everything around us.  The natural world is becoming irreversibly sick as a result, as the virus of humanity spreads its wings around the globe.

In his workshop, Craig repaints one of his puppets to look like Maxine, as we see that Lotte’s puppet of her likeness has been discarded in a dark corner in the shadows.  He puppeteers his puppets of himself and Maxine and picks up their earlier conversation at the bar but this time he makes Maxine interested in his puppeteering.  He talks to her about how wonderful it is to be in someone else’s skin so he can think what they think, feel what they feel.

Here we begin to see the insane direction our self-loathing society has lapsed.  On an epidemic level, modern man hates himself, he feels unfulfilled and worse – unwanted.  We live in a fast-food society of underdeveloped, intellectually challenged drifters, wondering around in the fog of desolation.  Man has built a cage for himself to suffer in, a place where imagination is robbed and ideas are mutated and assimilated.

Craig wants love but he’s been inadvertently taught by the administers of information in society to seek outwardly and not within.  Craig can’t find love because he can’t feel love within himself.  This is what he and Maxine have in common in spite of their ignorance of that fact.  Lotte conversely, has lots of love to give but has a husband that is unable to receive her gift.  Maxine just sees Craig as pathetic and in this case, as shallow as she is, she’s right.

While filing papers in a confined, congested room at the office, Craig finds a small wooded door behind a file cabinet and is curious, so he opens the door and looks into the darkness that spills out.  He finds Alice’s rabbit hole, but instead of it going to Wonderland, this portal leads to the consciousness of actor John Malkovich.

Malkovich is doing mundane things as Craig looks out through the legendary actor’s point of view.  He’s in a taxi with the driver asking him if he’s that actor guy, the one in the jewel thief movie.  Craig is then unexpectedly, after fifteen minutes, sucked out of Malkovich’s mind and rudely ejected into a ditch off the New Jersey Turnpike.  

Perplexed, he gets back to the office and, while still hysterical, tells Maxine about the portal.  Maxine looks at him with a humoring disbelief, as he tries to explain the philosophical implications of such a discovery and the metaphysical can of worms this portal could be.  Maxine offers him the window to jump out of and leaves the room.  She only wants things from other people, she wants power and wealth, she doesn’t want to know, or for that matter, understand what it is to be alive.  

Likely after weighing in on her current options, Maxine opts to call up Craig later to start to sell tickets for $200 to go into Malkovich.  Here Craig becomes the puppet and Maxine the puppeteer.  Craig’s love and/or lust for Maxine has blinded him to any form of self-respect.  She’s got him in her web and he’s rolling around in it like it’s her silk bed sheets.

Craig brings Lotte to the office where she goes into Malkovich through the portal.  Inside, he’s showering and she’s feeling the sensation of the water beating off his body and as a result, she is feeling sexy.  Lotte is in love with this experience as she is ejected out into the same ditch as Craig was.  She pleads with him to go back now so she can re-enter Malkovich’s consciousness, because for her the experience is borderline orgasmic.  It’s likely, because she feels more as a person, that she is affected more by Malkovich rather than Craig, who doesn’t feel much of anything, other than his undying love for Maxine.  Lotte tells Craig that she felt who she was while in there.   

Instead of going back to the portal they go to Dr. Lester’s for dinner.  Lotte goes upstairs to the washroom but accidentally enters a room entirely devoted to John Malkovich.  There is a whole timeline of his life mapped out neatly along the walls, from the early years of his life to the present.

Later the next day, Lotte visits Craig at the office where she meets Maxine and is instantly taken with her.  While Maxine is on the phone, Lotte tells Craig that her encounter of being John Malkovich has changed her and she thinks she might get sexual reassignment.  Lotte is an open vessel of emotion so it stands to reason that her time in the portal was life changing.  Craig just wants to do what Maxine wants him to do and he doesn’t have time to deal with Lotte's enlightenment.  Either way, this marriage is one of the most bizarre, complex, dysfunctional relationships ever committed to film.  They are both off their rockers and both of them want transformation in their lives, shallow, selfish transformation.

Social psychologist Erich Fromm wrote about how modern society has become materialistic and preferred “having” to “being”.  People have been given this great promise of unlimited happiness, freedom, material abundance and the domination of nature.  This is the irony surrounding the title of “Being” John Malkovich, when in actuality, they want to “Have” John Malkovich.  Fromm believed that the “having” person is now suffering the fallout of all these promises of fulfillment of their own interests and increases in their possessions.  People should want to ponder more on “being” nature and not towards the “having” of nature.  Consumer society has got people so obsessed with “having” that “being” appears to be out of the grasp of most people living in the modern world.  As a result of this denial of “being”, people have completely lost their inner selves.

The title Being John Malkovich is itself the problem within the film. The desire To-be somebody else is to reject “being” you.  The tragedy is these people that all want to “be” John Malkovich, actually don’t.  They want to not “be” themselves, they want to “have” John Malkovich, an actor that all of them confuse with an actor in a jewel thief movie.  This is how badly most people in modern society want to escape.  None of them got what they wanted, they were told if they obey; they would get more stuff, if they go through the corporate and governmentally controlled schooling system; they would find happiness in a great job, they said if they believe in god and live by his rules, they will find love and family.  The one thing they didn’t tell them was that they lied about everything.  

Maxine meets up with Malkovich at a restaurant for dinner while Lotte is in him, looking over at Maxine through Malkovich’s eyes, she falls deeply in love with her.  Here we see the problem that we are so dysfunctional in society that we can’t even love someone else, unless they are someone else.

J.M Inc.

Maxine and Craig send their first customer through the portal and he absolutely loved it.  Malkovich was merely on his phone asking a customer service representative about different towel types and pricing.  Craig then picks up their customer in the ditch in New Jersey, who naturally wants more.  This transaction is what our society has come to; progress has led us to exploiting every discovery, every resource for as much profit that we can squeeze out of it.

Maxine is invited back to Craig and Lotte’s place for drinks, where she is subjected to Craig offering her to see his puppets and Lotte offering her to see Elijah, her chimp.  Maxine doesn’t have interest in either the puppets or Elijah when she is affectionately jumped by both, Craig and Lotte, kissing and touching her.  Maxine rejects Craig’s advancements but she welcomes Lotte’s but only when Lotte is in Malkovich.  

Craig later laments loneliness.  Consumerism and celebrity idolization are what society provides to evade loneliness.  They provide distraction and empty meaning so we avoid reflection but this doesn’t always work every minute of every day.  Often we are left alone, with our thoughts, and thanks to the horrid educational system and the shallow nature of television, these thoughts are nonsensical, they are empty and thus, these thoughts lack natural, authentic inspiration, where creativity resides.

Maxine visits Malkovich and waits for Lotte to show up in him, when this happens she hops on him and kisses him thus kissing Lotte.  While this confuses the actual Malkovich, Maxine and Lotte fall in love with each other and then make love.

Craig is unable to reconcile with their union, and even though he professes his love to an indifferent Maxine, he never the less loves/obsesses her.  In his desperation he holds Lotte, his own wife at gunpoint and makes her set a date with Malkovich.  He then drags her into Elijah’s cage, ties her up and tapes her mouth closed.  Craig leaves Lotte and her chimp alone, confined in the small space of the cage when we see Elijah’s back story.  While in the jungle, free from the confines of society, he is chased down and trapped by poachers.  He is caged into the world of the human prison.  Lotte appears to have sensed this, suddenly empathizing with her caged chimp, a being that would much rather live his life in the trees of the wilderness than there with her.

While Maxine and Malkovich/Craig are making love, Craig works out a technique to command the Malkovich body to move his hand across her breast and he does.  Craig becomes the puppeteer again but this time the puppet is a human being.

Malkovich begins to sense that something is wrong and consults a near bald Charlie ‘The Machine’ Sheen, about all the odd behavior he’s been recently encountering with Maxine.  He goes to the seven and half floor to J.M Inc. and demands to receive whatever service they provide there.

Malkovich goes to the portal and enters his own consciousness to only find Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich, singing Malkovich, waiter Malkovich, Malkovich- Malkovich.  He is then spit out into a ditch off the New Jersey Turnpike.  

It’s my heeeeaaaaad!!!!!!!

Unlike all the other main characters in this bizarre story, John Malkovich, the character, is attempting to understand his own existence, he is an artist that performs challenging plays, he reads books and lives his life in a non superficial way. It stands to reason that when he enters his own consciousness he would see a horror show, where everyone else experienced a false sense of bliss, Malkovich himself would see a nightmare.  He already looks inwardly on a daily basis so to experience this distorted view of his reality, he would see it as a violation rather than a eye-opener.  Craig and Maxine have trespassed on Malkovich's rights by appropriating the interior of his skull for their own benefit.  

Lotte tells Maxine that it was Craig in Malkovich and not her and Maxine doesn’t care.  She seems to be okay with Craig in there because he is able to control Malkovich.  They will be able to use his notoriety to make more money, be famous and continue their dream of not being ‘normal’ of not “being” themselves.

Craig as Malkovich quits acting and becomes a renowned puppeteer.  He goes on talk shows, performs in auditoriums and is finally recognized for his talents.  Maxine becomes pregnant with his child.  They appear to have achieved otherness by continuing to avoid the fundamental nature of reality.  They have become postmodern by decentering themselves from each other’s inner self.

Postmodernism is a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices employing concepts such as difference, repetition, the trace, the simulacrum, and hyper-reality to destabilize other concepts such as presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty, and the univocity of meaning.

Lotte goes and sees Dr. Lester who wants her to join the rest of them in Malkovich.  The group pushes Craig out of Malkovich and enters him, why would they do this, why would all go on the Malkovich ride just to continue to live an immortal life?  An immortal life where the individuals within the vessel would have to give up their freedom, in order to collectively exist.  These people don't want to die and are willing to give up what it means to be a human to do this.  This even furthers society's desire to not know thyself and to keep struggling with their own selfish need to live forever. 

Craig never wants to be Craig again, tragically entering the new born baby and is lost within its consciousness, without the freewill of movement or choice, he’s trapped.  Lotte and Maxine are together, kissing and hugging each other, loving each other, while Craig watches through the new eyes of a baby girl, Emily.

The tragedy here is Craig chooses a form of suicide to get what he wants, or at least what he thinks he wants.  This film deals with the obsession with celebrity just as much as it deals with the obsessive envy, people have towards possessing the body of another person, today I'm thinking plastic surgery, tattooing and other forms of body escape, tomorrow I'm thinking virtual reality and the singularity.  The story intriguingly suggests that this metaphysical view is tied up with a range of destructive attitudes toward our own deaths, romantic love and the meaning of life.  This film captures the mundane nature of celebrity that those that traveled into the mind of John Malkovich - missed.