The Kaufman Cinematic and Literary Universe (Preview)
by Richard Porton

Almost immediately after Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things, a loose adaptation of Iain Reid’s 2016 cult novel, landed on Netflix, a barrage of online reviews and Website listicles came to the rescue of baffled viewers. Grappling with a film peppered with narrative red herrings and quotations placed in the mouths of characters who appear to be stricken by a secular version of speaking in tongues, well-known critics in print publications, as well as obscure bloggers, implied that merely enumerating Kaufman’s skein of allusions could function as a cinematic decoder ring for perplexed couch potatoes.

The problem with this sort of journalistic foraging is that annotating Kaufman’s manic self-reflexivity only obscures how ITOET embellishes many of the themes that have preoccupied him since he first garnered attention for his script for Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (1999). Philosophers, however humorlessly, soon recognized that Being’s absurdist premise—a puppeteer gains access to a portal leading to Malkovich’s consciousness—constituted an antic effort to deal with the intractable inaccessibility of “other minds.” Similarly, Kaufman’s alternately playful and pretentious adaptation of Reid’s relatively straightforward exercise in psychological horror mirrors the comic pyrotechnics of Adaptation (2002), another film in which Jonze imbued Kaufman’s script with a great deal of comic brio. The schism between the fictionalized Charlie Kaufman, who yearns to write respectable Sundance-worthy films, and his avaricious twin brother Donald (both played with over-the-top intensity by beloved ham Nicolas Cage), a more pragmatic screenwriter who sets his sights on Hollywood blockbusters, farcically underlines the anguished fear of failure that appears to bedevil this outwardly successful writer-director.

In this vein, Kaufman’s scripts for Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and Anomalisa (2015), Kaufman and Duke Johnson’s stop-motion animated feature, are as invested in exploring failed personal relationships and debunking the myth of romantic love (that mainstay of commercial cinema) as Adaptation is in satirizing strivings for material and literary success. For the lovers of Eternal Sunshine, the fallout from a disastrous romance is so traumatizing that they go to great lengths to have their memories eradicated; the flimsy sci-fi conceit reinforces the film’s overweening pessimism.  

Gondry’s relatively light touch, however, somewhat leavens the gloom. Any residue of whimsicality is difficult to discern in the grim Anomalisa. Even though the title references the name given by the alienated male protagonist to his transient object of desire, it also evokes the sociologist Émile Durkheim’s term anomie, a concept formulated in the late nineteenth century to describe the erosion of collective solidarity and the rising suicide rate. Anomolisa’s antihero, Michael Stone, suffers from a variant of Fregoli delusion—a rare form of paranoia, often caused by a brain lesion, that leads the afflicted to believe that disparate people, including complete strangers, are, according to the sporadically reliable Wikipedia, “a single person who changes appearance or is in disguise.” Stone, the author of a Dale Carnegie-style book called How May I Help You Help Them?, only emerges from his delusional state upon meeting a young woman, whose affection suffuses him with an almost inexplicable tenderness. Kaufman and Johnson defuse incipient sentimentality with a poignant, if ludicrous, scene highlighting what critics labeled “puppet cunnilingus.”

Like Kaufman’s previous “mind fucks” (an inelegant term that nevertheless possesses staying power), ITOET is a perilous high-wire act that attempts to balance sentimentality with cynicism and displays of erudition with a certain amount of low comedy. The tragicomic narrative, which, like previous Kaufman movies, emulates some of the tics of the literary subgenre known as “metafiction,” recounts a wintry road trip taken by Jake (Jesse Plemons) with his new girlfriend (alternately known as Lucy, Lucia, and Louisa and identified in the credits as the “Young Woman” and played with great flair by Jessie Buckley) to visit his parents (David Thewlis and Toni Collette) at their rural farmhouse. It’s also fitting that the impish writer-director, already known for his impatience with literal adaptations, decided to “Kafuman-ize” his source material.

Given the plethora of potted summaries available to Web surfers, it’s probably fine to ignore the taboo against spoilers and reveal that the Young Woman, in all her disparate guises—at various points in the film she identifies herself as either a physicist, poet, painter, gerontologist, or waitress—is not only a shape shifter but an embodiment of Jake’s wish-fulfillment fantasies. The nebbishy Jake, played by an actor who recalls, for some commentators, the screen presences of both Matt Damon and Philip Seymour Hoffman, conjures up his perfect mate, as intellectually supple as she is attractive.

Just as Eternal Sunshine and Anomalisa function as bemused dissections of male angst, ITOET mines similar terrain and exposes Jake’s fragile psyche by beefing up the most banal conversations during the languorous trek to the farmhouse with allusions to literary figures such as William Wordsworth and Oscar Wilde. Risking accusations of gratuitous name-dropping, Kaufman does manage to define the chasm between Jake, a malleable Everyman, and his dream girl with the use of strategically placed homages and quotations. For example, Jake’s invocation of Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” defines him as a young man who has never entirely grown up; the poem characterizes “Earth” as female, a natural force exercising its power upon a child. The Young Woman’s “Lucy” persona, moreover, aligns Wordsworth’s paeans to a mysterious muse in his “Lucy poems” to Jake’s fusion with his inamorata’s consciousness. And Lucy’s appropriation of excerpts from Eva H.D.’s poem “Bonedog,” a lamentation on loneliness, as her own work, prompts Jake to respond that it seems as if she’s written it just for him. It’s not surprising that he attempts to appropriate her appropriation… 

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Copyright © 2020 by Cineaste Magazine 

Cineaste, Vol. XLVI, No. 1