The Class of 1999: 'Being John Malkovich'
Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman's absurdist comedy makes a strong argument against solipsism.
1999 was a historically great year for film and dramatic narrative as a whole. I’m using my 2024 to look back at, reconsider, and celebrate these stories as they all celebrate their 25th anniversaries. I recently re-reviewed Fight Club; next up… it’s time for…
Being John Malkovich - directed by Spike Jonze - written by Charlie Kaufman - October 29, 1999
Being John Malkovich was initially released to rave reviews and mediocre box office, grossing about $23 million worldwide on a budget of more than half that.
In defense of the moviegoing public, the film’s premise is more than a little bizarre, and while stars John Cusack and Cameron Diaz were both a big deal, they’re (deliberately) made to look less-than-glamorous here. Mainstream audiences primarily knew Malkovich as the villain in action thrillers like In the Line of Fire and Con Air, which Being John Malkovich was decidedly not (I also suspect some people may have assumed, based on its title, that the movie was a documentary).
Plus, hard though it is to believe today, neither director Spike Jonze nor screenwriter Charlie Kaufman were big deals at the time. Neither had made a feature yet. Three Kings co-star Jonze had directed some of the most popular music videos of the decade, but 99% of the public didn’t pay attention to who directed music videos1.
As for Kaufman, he was a television writer for short-lived programs like The Dana Carvey Show and Ned and Stacey.
So. Yeah. Arthouse audiences showed up. But mall multiplexes were ghost towns.
Of course, in the end, everything turned out alright for everyone involved. Jonze and Kaufman are now household names (which is especially amazing in the case of Kaufman, because he’s one of like five or six living screenwriters who the general public has heard of), and Being John Malkovich is a bona fide classic.
It may also be the most thematically complex movie in this retrospective. Like so many of its Class of ‘99 peers, Being John Malkovich centers around themes of middle-class dissatisfaction and personal identity.
But if we understand drama as a philosophical argument, then Being John Malkovich isn’t really “for” or “against” anything except solipsism. It’s an inconclusive exploration.
Which, come to think of it, may be another reason why audiences shunned it.
Being John Malkovich is a postmodern absurdist comedy about Craig Schwartz (John Cusack), an unemployed puppeteer speciaizing in marionettes. He lives in New York City with his wife, Lotte (Cameron Diaz), who is passionate about her menagerie of pets (including a chimpanzee named Elijah) and desperately wants to have a baby. But Craig seems distant from his spouse and disinterested in starting a family.
After getting his ass kicked while performing an erotic all-puppet adaptation of Letters of Abelard and Heloise on the street, Craig decides to seek real employment. He finds this working as a file clerk at Lestercorp, a company located on the Mertin-Flemmer’s building 7½th floor . Which is exactly what it sounds like. Cue recurring jokes about “low overhead.”
(Craig locates this floor, by the way, with some help from a not-yet-famous Octavia Spencer.)
Lestercorp is owned by - who else? - Dr. Lester (Orson Bean), a quirky oddball (to put it mildly) who quicky takes a shine to Craig, thus inappropriately confessing his unrequited lust for his “executive liasion,” Floris (Mary Kay Place).
While working at Lestercorp, Craig meets Maxine (Catherine Keener), who works for another company occupying the 7½th floor. Craig instantly becomes obsessed with Maxine, but his affections are not reciprocated (once more, that’s putting it mildly).
After dropping a file behind a cabinet one day, Craig accidentally discovers a small, hidden door. He crawls inside, where he is sucked into a tunnel that takes him inside the mind of the actor John Malkovich (John Malkovich) for 15 minutes before deposing him on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. Desperate for attention from Maxine, he tells her about the door; she subsequently concocts a plan to sell tickets to the portal, which Craig goes along with because, y’know, he wants to hook up with Maxine.
Lotte, too, soon learns of the portal, and insists on giving it a try. Craig obliges her, and the experience changes her life, leading her to consider transitioning to being a man.
While Lotte ponders this, she and Craig have dinner Dr. Lester at his home. There, Lotte accidentally discovers a room filled with Malkovich memorabilia, raising the question: what does Dr. Lester have to do with the acclaimed thespian and the portal into his brain?
Maxine, meanwhile, arranges a date with Malkovich, and Lotte, learning of the date and also now totes into Maxine, goes inside Malkovich to experience the encounter. Maxine is also into Lotte, but only when Lotte is Malkovich. She eventually arranges to have sex with Malkovich while Lotte is in the actor’s mind.
Craig learns of the affair and becomes enraged. He locks Lotte in a cage and forces her to make another Malkovich booty call with Maxine… only this time, unbeknownst to Maxine at first, it’s Craig inhabiting the actor, not Lotte. At this point, Craig realizes that his experience as a puppeteer allows him to crudely control Malkovich.
Malkovich, however, is understandably perturbed by his abrupt loss of agency over his own body, and suspects that Maxine might know more than she’s letting on (this is also around the time we learn that Malkovich is best friends with Charlie Sheen, which may be the most fantastical element of the whole plot). Malkovich tails Maxine and finds her and Craig charging admission into the portal. The man who portrayed Teddy KGB demands that he try it himself, and briefly becomes trapped in a Malkovichian nightmare.
Malkovich demands that Craig seal up the door, but Craig won’t comply. Simultaneously, Elijah the chimp frees Lotte, who calls Maxine and clues her into the fact that Craig has been inhabiting Malkovich. To Craig’s delight, however, Maxine is turned on by his ability to control Malkovich, and agrees to stay with him as long as he remains in Malkovich’s body.
Lotte goes Dr. Lester and begs him to spill his guts. He subsequently reveals that he’s not Dr. Lester - he’s Captain Mertin, the dude who built the Mertin-Flemmer building in the 19th century. Turns out that Mertin found the portal and constructed the building to hide it; the “vessel body” to which it leads changes every 44 years, and whoever occupies the host at the time of that birthday takes over permanently. Mertin has exploited this oddity to extend his own life indefinitely. He also warns Lotte against entering the portal after midnight on the host’s 44th birthday, because this would result in becoming trapped in and absorbed by the fetus of the next host, doomed to forever experience life through someone else’s eyes.
With Malkovich’s 44th birthday less than a year away2, Mertin is making plans to take over the actor permanently. He plans to bring a bunch of friends with him this time, because he gets lonely occupying someone else all by his lonesome, and he invites Lotte to be one of those friends.
Cut ahead eight months. Craig continues to control Malkovich, who he has retired from acting in favor of puppeteering; Maxine, now the wife and manager of “Malkovich,” is also pregnant with his child.
The night of Malkovich’s 44th birthday, Craig takes the former actor out to deliver a puppeteering performance; while he’s out, Dr. Lester, Lotte, and their friends kidnap Maxine. They tell Craig that if he doesn’t vacate Malkovich, they will kill Maxine. Craig, however, appears to call their bluff, hanging up on them.
Maxine then escapes captivity into Malkovich’s mind; Lotte goes after her. Following a chase through Malkovich’s totured unconscious, the two women are, as always, spat out onto the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. There, Maxine professes her love for Lotte, apologizes for breaking Lotte’s heart, and reveals that Lotte is the “father” of her child (i.e., she became pregnant after having sex with Lotte-as-Malkovich, not Craig-as-Malkovich). The two women reconcile and make plans to raise the child together.
Craig, of course, knows none of this, and ultimately agrees to evict himself from Malkovich to save Maxine’s life. Ever the schmuck, once he learns that Maxine is running off with his wife, he vows to re-enter Malkovich so Maxine will love him again. He doesn’t know that Dr. Lester and his pals have already taken over Malkovich, and he never heard Dr. Lester’s warning against entering the host after midnight on their 44th birthday.
Seven years later, Dr. Lester et al. are living as “Malkovich” with Floris, and making plans to someday occupy the new host: Emily, the daughter of Maxine and Lotte.
As for Craig, well… the poor bastard has, indeed, become trapped inside of Emily, forced to forever watch Maxine through her daughter’s eyes.
A cursory examination of Being John Malkovich may conclude that the narrative’s message can best be summed up in the words of the poet William Bruce Rose Jr.: “Vicarious existence is a fucking waste of time.” Exhibits A through D:
Craig asserts that his passion for puppeteering derives from “the idea of becoming someone else for a little while. Being inside another skin - thinking differently, moving differently, feeling differently.” But his attempt to achieve fulfillment by hijacking someone else’s body and identity proves to be unsustainable (Maxine falls out of love with him even before he leaves Malkovich for good). Furthermore, his compulsion to control others is his downfall, damning him to a powerless existence as he becomes trapped within Emily.
Lotte plays out her maternal instincts with pets that act as surrogates for actual offspring (Elijah even wears a diaper and goes to therapy), but doesn’t find true happiness until she has a real child.
Malkovich commodifies his body for a living, only to literally lose agency over that body (to say nothing of the fact that this is already some mirror-world version of Malkovich: the movie posits that his middle name is Horatio, but in reality, it’s Gavin).
Maxine, is consistently the happiest character in the story; notably, she’s also the only character who never so much as samples “being” Malkovich (she enters his mind only once, to escape captivity). In fact, while Maxine is initially happy to be with the actor regardless of who is inhabiting/controlling him, her arc is to realize that she loves Lotte - the real Lotte - even when Lotte is Malkovichless.
Additionally, Malkovich embraces gender fluidity as a form of self-exploration (which was an extremely forward-thinking stance to take 25 years ago). There’s a moment where, as they’re preparing to take control of Malkovich, one of Dr. Lester’s companions declares joyously, “I’ve always wondered what it’s like to have a penis, and now I’ll know!” More significantly, Lotte toys with the idea of transitioning (“Being inside did something to me,” she tells Craig. “I knew who I was.”), and although she ultimately opts to remain a woman, her brief foray into a male body is what acts as the catalyst for her reconnection with her own body and desires (for more on this facet of the film, I highly recommend this essay by the transfem scholar Kay Alexander).
And yet the conclusions Malkovich draws are not nearly so pithy as “To thine own self be true.”
For one thing, the very fact that Dr. Lester and his friends live happily ever after flies in the face of any pro-authenticity argument; Dr. Lester is a liar when we meet him, he’s a liar by the film’s conclusion, and he builds a romantic relationship with Floris through lying. In fact, Floris herself is insincere: throughout the story, she circumvents her failing hearing by asserting that other people have speech impediments.
Similarly, the narrative both accepts and rejects the concept of superficial “success” (e.g., wealth, fame, etc.) as a path to happiness. On the one hand, the whole New Jersey Turnpike gag is just about the funniest literalization of Andy Warhol’s “15 minutes of fame” imaginable. On the other hand, there’s Dr. Lester and his buddies again, last seen enjoying Malkovich’s money and chillin’ with Charlie Sheen.
So what does the film believe?
Being John Malkovich believes that the worst possible thing that can happen to anyone is to be alone.
This is obviously true in the case of Craig, who winds up imprisoned within Emily. Confinement is another recurring theme in Malkovich, but in Craig’s case specifically, it’s the lack of support from/connection to another living being that damns him: when he locks Lotte in a cage, she is freed by Elijah after the chimp flashes back to his own captivity. Craig has no Elijah equivalent.
But the nightmarishness of loneliness is most humorously (and iconically) expressed in the scene where Malkovich enters his own head and finds all the Malkovariations. Malkovich calls it “a world no man should see.”
In other words: Being John Malkovich posits solipisim as basically the worst possible thing imaginable.
Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich. Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich. Malkovich Malkovich Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich. Malkovich? Malkovich!
The Class of 1999
Another director who cut his teeth helming music videos, Fight Club director David Fincher, cameos in Being John Malkovich as an academic who is interviewed for an in-film “documentary” about the actor.
Yes, Malkovich was 44 when he filmed this movie. I know that’s surprising, given that he’s one of those people who seems to have done all of his aging during his 20s and now perpetually appears to be in 50s, but it’s true.