Charlie Kaufman and the Human Brain

When I grow up, I want to be Charlie Kaufman. Or Aaron Sorkin, but that is a different story.
Before I started researching Charlie Kaufman, I imagined him as a short, chubby, bald guy running around the streets of New York or Los Angeles, nervously scribbling in his notebook with an evil smile under his nose. But I had to face the fact that he has lots of curly hair, is thin and maybe even tall (no reliable information about this so far). It is possible that he does run around the streets with a little notebook – no reliable information about this either.

I heard Charlie Kaufman’s name for the first time when I saw the movie Being John Malkovich (1999), for which he wrote the screenplay. The movie, in short, is about a poor New York puppeteer (John Cusack) who finds a job at the 13.5 floor of an office building, where he by accident discovers a tunnel leading to the actor John Malkovich’s (playing himself) mind. Those who brave the journey into the tunnel will be John Malkovich for 15 minutes and will afterwards be thrown out onto the side of the road off the New Jersey turnpike. The puppeteer shares his secret with a colleague (Catherine Keener) on whom he and his wife (an unrecognizably ugly Cameron Diaz) both have a huge crush, and who in return tortures both of them by only wanting to sleep with them when they are inside John Malkovich.

The movie is full of subtle humor. For example, when John Malkovich realizes that it might not be him who sometimes governs his own deeds and thoughts, he asks Charlie Sheen – of all people – to come to his apartment and give him advice. My favorite scene is when John Malkovich himself goes down the tunnel to his own mind and finds himself in a restaurant, where every guest is John Malkovich, every waiter and every item on the menu also. I guess that Jung would have imagined the subconscious of huge egos somewhat similarly.

The absurd does not end with the drama of the particular individuals: it turns out that there is a group of selected people who are traveling from body to body through time using the before mentioned secret tunnel and after taking control over the bodies, they live through centuries this way. (Kureishi’s book The Body has a similar theme.)

Charlie Kaufman wrote his alter ego into the movie Adaptation (2002) in the form of twin brothers. Nicholas Cage is both Charlie and Donald Kaufman, who are screenplay writers, both bald and overweight. Charlie has high standards, is not very successful, has low self-esteem and can only long for women. Donald is successful, overly self-assured and narcissistic and turns up for breakfast with several gorgeous women (the brothers live in the same house). Charlie is trying to write a screenplay from Susan Orlean’s book The Orchid Thief, with little success. Finally, he makes up his mind that he has to meet her and travels to New York, where only Donald is brave enough to actually talk to her (Meryl Streep). The movie and the adaptation Charlie is working on melt at this point and we realize only at the end that we are watching the adaptation itself, which, influenced by Donald, becomes full of violence, drugs and pornography.

Besides Nicholas Cage, Meryl Streep also excels, because her character also changes rapidly during the movie. Chris Cooper, who plays the orchid thief John, is a real jewel. He drives an old, rusty car, wears dirty clothes, has no front teeth (the story about loosing his teeth is a great one itself) and when he takes the writer for an orchid hunt, he gets lost in the wetlands. One of the most memorable scenes is when Meryl Streep’s character, in a somewhat elevated mood caused by an orchid based drug, calls the orchid thief and asks him to join her imitating a phone dial tone. Their success will be the source of enormous happiness.

Charlie Kaufman in this movie writes the way he lives: with difficulty. Donald lives the way he writes. Susan, the writer, writes about life, but does not live it. The life of the orchid thief John is a book that needs adaptation.

Charlie Kaufman’s newest movie, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), isn’t short of surprises either. I was a bit prejudiced seeing Jim Carrey’s name on the posters, but I was pleasantly surprised by his performance. Even more so was I pleased by Kate Winslet, who stole the movie playing a character that was more complex and rich in challenges.

We meet Joel (Jim Carrey) one morning on a train platform in Long Island, when he decides not to take the train to work, but to take the one that goes to Montauk. It is on this train that he meets Clementine (Kate Winslet). Their romance is going well, until one day Clementine decides that she wants to erase all memories of Joel from her brain. She visits the offices of Lacuna Inc. which happily obliges her wishes. It takes a night to do the procedure and Clementine no longer knows Joel the next day.

After Joel realizes what has happened, he decides to order the same procedure for himself and most of the movie happens while Joel’s memories of Clementine are being erased from his brain.

Because we see the story of Clementine and Joel unfold backwards (the freshest memories are being erased first), we see the whole picture only at the end of the movie. The film has very few characters and by the end of the movie the strings get tangled and it resembles a soap opera in which everybody takes advantage of everybody. Joel wants to stop the procedure while it is happening. But that is, of course, impossible. Here comes the most enjoyable part of the movie, in which Clementine and Joel try to hide from the eyes of the computer doing the erasure to save Joel’s memories of Clementine. The stage of his memories dissolves around them as they get destroyed and they try to hide among Joel’s childhood memories. We saw similar scenes in Being John Malkovich, when he wanders among his childhood memories, although these were mostly nightmares.

The real Charlie Kaufman was born in 1958 in New York state and studied film at New York University. In 1991, he moved from Minneapolis to Los Angeles, to be a writer on a sitcom. He lives in Pasadena, California with his wife and child. He does not give interviews and hates public appearances, although he was on The Charlie Rose Show and NPR in 2004.

Obviously, this man spends most of his time asking questions such as: Where is the human consciousness located? What is our identity comprised of? Who and what can influence our consciousness and identity? How do we know who we are and what we remember, and what motivates our feelings and deeds? The movies written by Charlie Kaufman address these questions. Nobody will be able fully to answer them in our life time, so we can look forward to many funny, surprising, intelligent screenplays coming from Kaufman’s kitchen.


(Published in Kalendarium, a traditional almanac, in Hungarian in Slovakia, 2005)