Imagine for a moment that it’s 1999, and the whole world has a direct portal into the mind of Bill Clinton. The idea would be dismissed as ridiculous, of course – science fiction, or perhaps if you were Monica Lewinsky, vindication. And yet, 20 years later, the entire planet has a portal into the mind of Donald Trump, as the 45th president of the United States uses Twitter to respond immediately to anything and everything.
On 29 October 1999, Being John Malkovich, the movie debut of director Spike Jonze and writer Charlie Kaufman, was given its full release in US cinemas. The film stars John Cusack as Craig, a greasy-haired, unemployed puppeteer whose dishevelled, pet-obsessed wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz, unrecognisable from her breakthrough role as blonde bombshell Tina in The Mask a few years earlier) encourages him to take a filing job at a strange corporation. In a classic display of Kaufman absurdity, it operates halfway between an office block’s seventh and eighth floors; employees need to crowbar the lift doors to get out, then walk about bent double because the ceilings are so low.
While working in this Kafka-meets-Lewis Carroll environment, Craig discovers a portal that leads directly into the head of John Malkovich – experiencing 15 minutes of the actor’s life before being dumped unceremoniously on the verge of the New Jersey Turnpike.
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What the portal offers can be likened to a celebrity Instagram account – albeit an involuntary one – a good decade before the photo-sharing site was invented. Craig watches Malkovich choose the colour of his bathroom towels from a catalogue, eat his breakfast, order a taxi and other mundane activities, the way that Taylor Swift or Kim Kardashian’s 100 million-plus followers might their idols today. And like today’s Instagram celebrities, Craig turns the experience into a business opportunity when he teams up with his sexy work colleague Maxine (Catherine Keener) to charge punters $200-a-go to have their 15 minutes inside Malkovich’s head.
“I think it’s about the need to escape yourself for 15 minutes that everyone feels,” Malkovich told the New York Times in 1999. “But what it’s really about is something more sinister. It’s the idea that we now lead virtual lives. We live our joys and sorrows and foibles through the lives of public people.” And that was two decades ago, seven years before Twitter launched and Facebook began collecting our memories.
“While it’s as uproarious now as it ever was,” a reviewer, Scott Tobias, wrote on the film’s American DVD re-release in 2012: “The film’s themes about identity and desire have only deepened with time, as the internet has grown into a place where personae are fluid and sometimes false, and the fantasy of accessing the minds of celebrities – or anyone’s mind, for that matter – is just a Twitter feed away.”
Kaufman wrote the script between jobs during a frustrating period contributing to TV comedies. “People would read it and tell me how funny it was, invite me for meetings, tell me nobody would ever make the movie,” he said. And then Spike Jonze, a successful maker of music videos, came on board as director, and it was off the ground. The next obstacle, of course, was persuading John Malkovich to play himself. And Kaufman was adamant (despite the film’s producers suggesting Being Tom Cruise) that he wanted nobody but Malkovich.
“When they asked me to do it, I was slightly worried,” Malkovich told Rolling Stone magazine in 2013. “Not at all about the tone or content, but the feeling of, if you do a film where your name is not above the title but in the title, then you may have some serious narcissistic tendencies which would require looking at.”
He’s brilliant, though – bringing just the right level of fame to the project so as not to unbalance it, and displaying a hitherto undetected talent for self-parody. “Malkovich has loaned himself with an absence of ego that is all the more striking in view of his work,” David Thomson comments in his 2008 book of film reviews, Have You Seen…?. “This film dwells exquisitely on the gulf between the languid hauteur of the John Malkovich… and this very patient, long-suffering head that permits a great deal of coming-and-going traffic without more than a sigh.”
Looking back from the vantage point of 2013, Malkovich himself sounds a good deal more ambiguous about the film’s legacy. “It’s kind of like if you get a blowjob from the wrong person, then your life becomes a blowjob,” was the eyebrow-raising metaphor he used in that Rolling Stone interview. “So Being John Malkovich always has to be referred to in some allegedly clever or ironic or snarky way.”
If you haven’t seen Being John Malkovich recently – or indeed ever – then I urge you to take a look. It’s as funny as any classic screwball comedy, with lovely performances from Cusack, Diaz, Keener, Orson Bean as the mysterious owner of Lester Corporation, and, of course, John Malkovich himself.
It’s also ahead of its time, not just in anticipating the way that Twitter and Instagram lend intimate access into the lives of others, but for playing with the idea of gender fluidity. “Playing” is the apposite word here, as there’s an unselfconscious lightness about Kaufman’s approach – one which the writer, for better or worse, might struggle to get away with today.
In the film, Lotte becomes as smitten with Maxine as her husband, swiftly making plans to discuss “sexual reassignment surgery” with her allergist and warning Craig, in one of the movie’s great lines, ‘’Don’t stand in the way of my actualisation as a man.’’ But Maxine has another idea, allowing Lotte to make love to her when Lotte is in the head of Malkovich. In turn, and much to Malkovich’s initial bemusement, Maxine starts calling him “Lotte” whilst in the throes of passion.
I don’t believe that Kaufman was making any serious statements here. Indeed, he was probably just playing with the possibilities and seeing where they went. But as a harbinger of things to come, Lotte’s “Don’t stand in the way of my actualisation as a man” is significant. Arguably no less so than Joe E Brown’s final line in 1959’s Some Like It Hot – released ten years before Stonewall brought gay liberation into the public consciousness. When the drag-wearing Jack Lemmon reveals he’s really a man to the amorous millionaire Osgood, he shrugs and says: “Well, nobody’s perfect.” It’s a gag, but a gag deeply suggestive of changing social attitudes.
Charlie Kaufman was nominated for an Oscar for his Being John Malkovich screenplay (losing out to American Beauty). He won five years later with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but I still think the former is the better film. As for John Malkovich, well… Despite a career that has spanned more than 70 films and much theatre, and as the actor has always feared, the movie with his name in the title might well end up being what he is best remembered for. And I’ll always thank him for that.
