What Charlie Kaufman Has Taught Me
A few years ago now, I built up the nerve to reach out to one of my idols (no, not Kaufman). This was a composer and performer whose music had impacted me more deeply and thoroughly than anyone else I knew of. And, on top of a few things we discussed, I asked him to share with me if there was any music he was listening to or drew particular inspiration from. The music he created was unlike anything else I’d ever heard, and I just needed something to tether it to everything else I knew, something to explain how on earth he came to create it in the first place. And to my massive disappointment, he didn’t mention a single musical artist in his reply. He mentioned an art exhibit he had recently visited, and a series of books that he had finished around the time of composing some of his music. And I felt totally let down, not because I didn’t believe those were his true inspirations, but because I had absolutely no idea what to do with that information.
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As of just yesterday, I have officially seen all of the legendary films that screen-writer Charlie Kaufman was responsible for. Without spoiling them, let me tell you what some of them are about:
Being John Malkovich: is about a man who discovers a narrow hole behind a cabinet in his work office that leads, as if through a mountain, down a long tunnel. On the other end, whoever was crawling through gets to see through the eyes of American actor John Malkovich for approximately five minutes. They can’t control him, but simply see what he sees. When their time is up, they are promptly ejected from the tunnel and suddenly spat about beside the toll plaza at exit 14C on the New Jersey Turnpike.
Adaptation: is about Charlie Kaufman himself, being hired to write a screenplay for an actually-published novel, The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean. He is portrayed by Nicolas Cage, who also plays his fictional twin brother Donald Kaufman. Charlie Kaufman struggles to find inspiration to turn a boring non-fiction book about Orchids into a movie, and so decides to make the screenplay about himself struggling to write a screenplay. This turns out to be the movie we are watching.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: features Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet as a recently split couple. Joel, Carrey’s character, finds out that Clementine (Winslet) recently underwent surgery to neurologically remove all memory of him from her mind after the break-up. He decides to get the same procedure himself, and slowly finds himself losing memory of the woman he loved.
Synecdoche, New York: is about a theater director in New York who is afraid of dying and just wants to create something amazing before he dies. He decides to write his own play, but is consistently finding more interest in real-life events than fictional ones, and simply has the cast of actors re-portray the boring, detailed day-to-day events he experiences. Eventually, the cast grows as actors are needed to portray the actions of other actors who are portraying real people, until the set has expanded to the size of a large town, running fluidly with people reliving moments, and people ready to relive them again. Eventually, it becomes impossible to tell where reality stops, or why it matters.
Anomalisa: is a stop-motion film about a depressed, lost, and lonely business guru, Michael Stone, whose published writing on customer service has led him to become an authority in the field. He offers seminars and lectures and has lost all passion in life. Only after being quite far into the film do audience members tend to notice that every character in the entire film (men, women, children, babies, voices on the radio) are all voiced by the same person. Michael does not seem to directly notice this fact, nor does anyone else in the film acknowledge it, up until he hears a woman’s voice a few doors down from him at a hotel one night. His life becomes driven to identify this woman, and understand what has made her different.
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And, if you’ll forgive that digression, I hope it’s apparent to you why someone like Charlie Kaufman is someone I find massively interesting. Time and time again, Kaufman has produced some of the most witty, unbelievable, and totally ground-breaking films in American cinema. It’s almost impossible to watch a movie with his fingerprint on it without, multiple times throughout, asking yourself, “How did anyone possibly think of THAT?” And, time and time again, he has talked about his frustration with Hollywood and film-making at large, and that successful formulas that are easy to make and that people like have ruined what the potential of movies could be. That we’ve gladly accepted a box to fit nearly everything people would dream to watch, and even create, when the realm of what’s possible is so much larger. That the limits of art are temporary, and will be expanded every time we go beyond the invisible line and realize what’s on the outside isn’t on the outside for any particularly good reason.
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And, suddenly, I quite literally blinked and realized why I was so foolish to be disappointed by this email from my own musical idol. That the very ideas Kaufman inspired in me were things I dreamed to bring to my own composition, much the same way he was surely moved from the art he mentioned to me. That a book could inspire a symphony and a film could plant the seed for a string quartet. It only mattered what the person was trying to say.
At one point, I was watching an interview with one of my favorite authors, David Foster Wallace, where he said that David Lynch’s film Blue Velvet came to him at the right time, and saved him from a literary point of view. And, when I first heard that, I was intimidated beyond all belief. I felt I had completely misunderstood the movie and was totally blind to a layer of substance it held that could somehow connect the dots between that and the book Wallace had just completed. But now I understand.
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We interact with art for that connection. To find someone who, even if they don’t come right out and say it, undeniably cares about and values the same things as us. Who can make movies about tunnels that lead to John Malkovich’s mind, and memory-erasing machines, and stop-motion puppets trying to find love, and remind us that the voice of the person telling it matters infinitely more. I have felt this before, and I hope to feel it again. But, in this living moment—when I have been moved by one of those very special pieces of art we come across and connect deeply to only a very few times in life—I hope I can remember what it feels like a bit longer, and remember what it taught me so that I won’t forget.
