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.Plot 142 POST-POP CINEMAsummaries tended to emphasize the last two words of the title more than thefirst one.The prospect of John Malkovich, or any well-known actor, playinghimself in a movie about people crawling inside his head made good fodderfor a celebrity-obsessed age.But while Malkovich both as a persona and acast member is essential to the film with any other performer, it would bea different movie in all kinds of ways he is also a red herring, or at least aMacGuffin.The movie is not really about being John Malkovich, or aboutbeing a celebrity (the Malkovich in the movie, at least, is a very peripheralcelebrity anyway; a lot of people haven t heard of him, and the ones whohave keep getting his movies mixed up with other people s).It is mostly aboutthe chance to be someone else, anyone else.It is a not altogether upliftingcontemplation of identity, art, and the search for transcendence.It s also,fortunately, very funny.The main character, more or less, is Craig Schwartz, a frustrated slacker-artist type.His art, improbably, is puppetry a form that, even more improb-ably, has a significant public following in the world of Being John Malkovich.Craig watches grumpily as a rival puppeteer stages spectacular televised events,like suspending a 60-foot puppet of Emily Dickinson from a bridge for a per-formance of The Belle of Amherst.Craig is kind of a morose jerk, and isbrusque with his neurotic wife, Lotte, who works to support both of them.But his puppetry is actually very good, full of balletic effects and achinglyromantic themes.(Its suggestive sexuality tends to get Craig assaulted byangry parents on the street, after children stop to watch.) Craig s work es-tablishes the theme of the film; as he explains at one point, the appeal ofpuppetry is perhaps the idea of becoming someone else for a little while,being inside another skin, thinking differently, moving differently, feelingdifferently. That is the experience offered by the portal into Malkovich s brain thatthe film revolves around.Craig finds the portal after taking a filing job ina records firm on the 71/2 floor of a Manhattan office building.(The originof the low-ceilinged half-floor is explained in an orientation video that is aspot-on parody of corporate training films.As he demonstrated in his music-video send-ups of TV shows and musicals, Jonze is a gifted mimic.) Movinga filing cabinet, Craig happens on a small door that leads into a dirt-flooredtunnel.Crawling in out of curiosity, he suddenly finds himself sucked deepinto darkness, and then into what turns out to be John Malkovich s head.He spends about 15 minutes there, watching through Malkovich s eyes as hereads The Wall Street Journal and eats breakfast, before being dumped outonto a scrubby slope alongside the New Jersey Turnpike. CHARLIE KAUFMAN, SPIKE JONZE, AND MICHEL GONDRY 143Jonze uses deliberately primitive effects to convey all of this.The experienceof being inside Malkovich is conveyed by simply painting a black oval on thelens (to suggest the restricted vision of someone sitting a little distance behindMalkovich s eyes) and muffling the sound slightly.And, crucially, most ofwhat people who enter Malkovich experience is mundane: Malkovich takinga shower, Malkovich ordering a rug from a catalog, Malkovich having dinner.Because it is someone else s mundane life rather than their own, the peoplewho pay Craig and his business partner Maxine for the privilege of enteringthe portal find it exhilarating.When Lotte enters the portal, the excitingexperience of being a man convinces her that she is a repressed transsexual.Significantly, Maxine, the movie s most confident, self-possessed character,does not enter the portal (at least, not until near the end, when Lotte chasesher into it).She isn t curious about being someone else, although she getsturned on by the idea of controlling other people.Her manipulation of Lotteand Craig when they re inside Malkovich is just an extension of the way shemanipulates people in her daily life.And that s the dark side of the movie s fantasy, the way the relativelyinnocent impulse to merely escape one s self changes easily into the impulseto subjugate others.What starts out as a search for transcendence becomesa search for control.Malkovich is hijacked and exploited, first by Craig andMaxine and then by the group of people (assembled by Craig s employerDr.Lester) who move into Malkovich to escape their own mortality.In afurther twist on the transcendental urge, Craig ends up trapped inside thehead of Maxine and Lotte s daughter, as a passive observer unable to exert anyinfluence over her.(His lack of control is conveyed by an even smaller visualportal, as if he is looking out her eyes at the end of a long tunnel.) In contrast,the only lasting interpersonal connection in the movie is made between Lotteand Maxine, who realize finally that they can be happy with each other asthey are.It is a fairly straightforward moral for such a convoluted fable, butthat is true of most of Kaufman s stories.The cast gives admirably unlovable performances.The characters are byturns needy (Craig and Lotte), narcissistic (Maxine) and egomaniacal (Dr.Lester).Cusack a fan of the script who told his agent to let him know ifanyone ever got around to making it gamely buries his casual good-guycharm under Craig s scruffy insecurity.Cameron Diaz, who was fresh off hersparkling role in There s Something About Mary, is nearly unrecognizable inLotte s frizzy hair and frumpy wardrobe, her effervescence channeled intoanxiety.And Catherine Keener is flinty, sexy, and sadistically inaccessible asMaxine, an openly contemptuous object of desire.She softens somewhat by 144 POST-POP CINEMAthe end, of course, but Maxine s happy ending is still notable: Not many malewriters or directors have ever conceived such a brashly emasculating femmefatale without feeling the need to punish her.(Keener received an Oscarnomination for supporting actress and, one imagines, a lot of masochisticfan mail.)The most important performance, and the most complex, comes fromMalkovich.Not only does he have to play Kaufman s version of himself, buthe also has to play himself as inhabited by, first, Craig, and then by Dr.Lester.Just being willing to make the movie at all marked Malkovich as amore than good sport, especially considering that the script calls for a sceneof ungraceful, half-naked dancing; but he is also, of course, a terrific actor.His natural inclination toward understatement works with the material thesame way Jonze s flattened visual style does; a more frenzied approach mighthave made the movie merely ridiculous rather than compellingly strange.Hemakes the moments when he is fighting for control of his body with Craigsimultaneously funny and frightening.(They recall Steve Martin s similarloss of physical command in All of Me
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