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Confinement and Control: Being John Malkovich

Human existence is at once exhilarating, exhausting, and perplexing, and so it is common to wonder, and even believe, that life may be simpler and more clear if it were lived through the eyes of someone else. But those thoughts are merely wishful, and instead we are resigned to writing, acting, dreaming, and sharing stories in an effort to understand the perspectives of others – to obtain and experience something beyond ourselves.

Being John Malkovich takes this simple truth of existence and upends it, creating an eerie universe in which, for only a few minutes, you can embody and become one with someone else. In this world you do not become just anyone, but instead the enigmatic star John Malkovich. While it may sound like Mr. Malkovich is the primary actor and protagonist, he instead exists as a vessel through which a remarkably witty story, packed with hard-hitting questions concerning human interiority is delivered.

Set in the final decade of the 20^th century, we find ourselves in the near-vacant cellar of a New York City apartment. It is a dark, brooding scene in which we are greeted by the stiff facade of a wooden doll, masterfully contorted into a desperate and disturbed dance. However it is the puppeteer wielding the strings from above who we soon understand to be tormented. Craig Schwartz claims his sole purpose is as a performer – transcending himself and creating a new reality, one in which he is the sole master; but Craig has no audience, and what is a performer without an audience? He continues to be confined to his own mind, serving only himself.

Soon Craig is out on the city’s streets acting out a passionate puppet show in which forbidden lovers lust after one another. Here we see the development of his first audience; a young girl looks on as the puppets gyrate. Her father takes notice and pays Craig accordingly, with a fist to the face. A peculiar scene, whose absurdity leans towards comic. It is also the first of many scenes in which profound questions are posed in distinctive ways. We begin to question the roles and relationships of artist and audience; Craig’s suggestive show may have found a welcoming audience in a packed theater under the right circumstance, but instead a little girl stumbling by took a naïve interest in something unfit for her eyes. Where can such a show take place, who can see it, and what obligation does the artist have to adjust their work for a given, or even unknown, audience?

While Craig searches to escape from his own confinement via the contortion of inanimate objects, his wife Lotte searches for similar solace in her control over living beings. She tenderly cares for and supports Craig with a maternal instinct, just as she cares for the creatures that line the walls of her pet store. In their apartment, the couple are accompanied by an iguana, birds, a dog, and a chimpanzee. Through her care of these creatures, Lotte gains a sense of importance and meaning that cannot be attained internally. She treats each of these animals as well as she does Craig, if not better, clearly mapping out the differences, or lack thereof, between humans and other animals; the film too makes references to the chimpanzee’s consciousness, his lingering childhood trauma, and his visits to a shrink. It is at once lighthearted and thought-provoking.

Craig eventually takes on a temporary job as a filer, thanks to his rapid fingers. In the office he meets Maxine, a coy beauty who ceaselessly toys with him. It is here that Craig discovers the portal to Malkovich, which he then promptly shares with Maxine. Maxine, in conniving fashion, determines that the two must partner together and charge $200 per 15-minute trip into the mind of Malkovich; after all, who doesn’t want to experience the world through a different lens? We are again prompted by further questions of artist and audience: Malkovich as the unknowing artist, providing a show for all of those who pay to accompany him. Here the show provides great meaning to the audience, a miraculous glimpse into a consciousness beyond the one they have always known. Isn’t that the very essence which art attempts to capture?

In a similar sense, this expansion beyond the self is exactly what each character strives for. They each have a distinct way to achieve contentment, coming through varying methods of control over something or someone else. Simply put, a way to escape the confinement of their individual mode of perception. While Craig directs dolls and Lotte influences animals, Maxine finds meaning through the manipulation of other people and their emotions. Each character is looking for control and influence that reverberates outside of themselves.

Malkovich is no different on a surface level. He is an actor, exerting control over roles that are outside of himself, and prompting emotions and reactions from those around him. While Craig does so with no audience, no respect, and no understanding of himself beyond validation from others, Malkovich does so with total self-awareness. He is confident in who he is and has a complete understanding of his place in society. He knows himself to be John Malkovich. A man with an audience, a name, and plenty of respect.

However Malkovich’s sense of security becomes lost when Craig enters the portal, and with his own puppeteering skills is able to exercise complete control over Malkovich, eventually gaining the ability to inhabit him indefinitely. It is here that the aforementioned questions of audience and actor take on a twisted meaning. Craig, the possessor, becomes the actor, while Malkovich, the possessed, becomes the audience, bound to watch events play out on his very own stage.

Eventually Craig is forced to exit Malkovich’s shell. Upon doing so he cannot cope with his own existence and believes he must again embody Malkovich to be loved, so he rushes back to the portal at once. However a convoluted chain of events has turned Malkovich’s portal into a tunnel leading to the mind of a young girl. Here Craig finds himself imprisoned for eternity with no agency. Worse, this young girl is being raised by Lotte and Maxine, the two women that Craig once pined after. It is fantastical and maddening, as Craig finds himself the audience of his own tragedy; condemned to witness a happy existence in which he has no place.

Everyone seeks freedom from the infinite confinement of their own consciousness, and Being John Malkovich makes the case that art, as well as the relationship between art and artist, allows us this escape even if only for a moment. To do so, there must be an acceptance of the self and of our own consciousness as the one true mode of perception. Transcendence beyond the individual can be feigned for a moment to provide joy and relief, just as a 90-minute film serves as a valuable distraction from the pains of life, but dragging that brief moment into an indefinite reality can be destructive, as it is for Craig.  

Lady Bird's Coming-of-Age Journey

“I wish I could live through something,” states the protagonist of Lady Bird at the beginning of the film. As the titular heroine, Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson, rides in the car with her mother, Marion, she expresses this desire to attach a grand meaning to her life. This meaning, we quickly learn, does not exist for her in Sacramento, her hometown. “I hate California. I want to go to the east coast,” she says, and a close-up shot of her looking out the car window emphasizes how she yearns to be across the country, far from the colleges that she and her mother have just taken a road trip to tour. The flat, dull and unchanging landscape that the car moves through helps frame her desire for escape. 

This desire of Lady Bird’s launches the first conflict in the film: an argument between her and her mother, who sees it as an example of her daughter’s selfishness and lack of gratitude. The addition of this conflict in the scene is subtly matched by Marion’s turning of the car; their previously straight path and corresponding fluidity have been disrupted. They begin talking over one another, and their eyes fail to meet for the rest of the scene, as the camera alternates between individual close-ups of each of them. These elements serve to establish their opposing points of view; in this conversation, they are not truly listening, but simply speaking, reacting, and revealing their frustrations with the other. To free herself from this fight, Lady Bird jumps out of the moving car — an action that both comically and strikingly encapsulates her feelings of confinement. Marion screams, and the film quickly cuts to a close-up of a hot pink cast on her arm, with the words “fuck you mom” written on top. The cast matches her dyed pink hair, and both serve as markers of her individuality throughout the film.

These initial few minutes set up a focus on mother-daughter conflict and an adolescent’s struggle for what they want, which is a central theme of the film. In the first part, we continue to see that Lady Bird feels her life is lacking in several ways, some small and others large. For example, she and her best friend, Julie, walk through a wealthy neighborhood after school, with quick cuts of them longingly looking at the grand, beautiful homes. Then she wants her mother to buy her a magazine, so she can read it in bed as “rich people do”, rather than having to borrow it from the library. It is this dissatisfaction with her environment, and her to desire to leave California, that most prominently ties her to her mother. The film uses their perceptions of Sacramento, and their movements through it, to distance them at the beginning and connect them at the end. 

Early on in the film, Marion drives home from work, and there are several small, simple but beautiful cuts of Sacramento on her ride home. Shots of Marion are interspersed, and John Hartford’s “This Eve of Parting” plays. Marion is constantly grounded in reality, and an abrupt cut from the song to a slamming of her car door, reminds us of this at the end of the sequence. Before that, though, there appears to be her peaceful, almost romantic admiration of setting. 

Lady Bird, on the other hand, is focused on escape. She constantly rejects Sacramento, an act which Marion ostensibly takes to be a rejection of everything she has tried to give her. These opposing perspectives of their home, and what Lady Bird’s place in the world can be, push them apart. However, the end of the film brings them back together by recalling Marion’s drive in a couple of ways. When Lady Bird receives her acceptance letter for a school in New York, “The Eve of Parting” plays again. Marion, angry that Lady Bird had secretly applied to east schools, has ceased speaking to her at this point. But the song functions as a poignant reminder of their bond, and how Marion has to come to terms with Lady Bird’s departure. At the very end, after Lady Bird has arrived in New York, she calls her parents. As she speaks, the film cuts to shots of the same drive in Sacramento, and then it alternates between Marion and Lady Bird each driving alone in the car. As Lady Bird looks out of her window, there is a clear appreciation of and comfort in Sacramento that she never held before. Here, there is finally a resolution where we become aware of Lady Bird’s growth and her connection with her mother.

What is also interesting to me about Lady Bird is how much of her identity is ill-defined. She isn’t particularly interested in or good at one thing, but she hopes to be, which makes her a more ordinary yet more dimensional character than typical coming-of-age protagonists. For example, it’s her senior year and she sits in the office of a nun at her Catholic school, where she says it’s her tradition to run for student government, but she knows she won’t win. Similarly, she says she’d like to join the math olympiad team, to which the nun says: “But math isn’t something you’re terribly strong in.” The nun also pushes her to audition for the theater group’s fall musical, which Lady Bird didn’t even know existed until now. She gets a minor role in the musical, but complains: “The part I got was basically not getting in.” Then she abandons the group in the spring, refusing to audition for the play. 

What we never doubt that she genuinely cares about, though, is the abstract idea of freedom and what her future could entail. Her desire for going to New York isn’t rooted in something specific, but just in her belief that it has “culture”. Lady Bird stands in contrast to Julie and Jenna, the “popular girl” that she befriends, who are both content to stay in Sacramento. She also doesn’t have proof that she deserves what she aspires to have, and is reminded of this at different instances, like when her counselor initially laughs at the idea of her applying to east coast schools. Lady Bird simply wants, and she shows us that that’s reason enough.

Beyond Comedy: Napoleon Dynamite

A lanky, curly headed boy stands in front of a modest one-story home. The goof wears a horse graphic t-shirt tucked into denim jeans with no belt and peers through clear-lensed aviator glasses, eyes half closed, mouth wide open. He boards the school bus and saunters to the very last row, towering over the other students, all of whom are significantly younger. A fellow student asks, “What are you going to do today Napoleon?” to which he snaps “Whatever I feel like I want to do. Gosh!” A sharp retort that is both comic in its delivery and charged with underlying anxiety. It is evident from merely a few seconds on the bus that the titular character of Jared Hess’ 2004 high school comedy, Napoleon Dynamite, is troubled. It serves as the first of many clever, oftentimes ridiculous, scenarios in which the qualms of an outcast riddled with angst, uncertain of his identity as a high school student, and his place in the world at large are carefully explored.

Each element of the film plays into an uncomfortable and unpredictable mood, while servicing the aesthetic of a rural town stuck twenty years in the past. We follow Napoleon through a day at Preston High School. Bullies shove him into lockers, he delivers a current events report on the Loch Ness monster, he plays tether ball alone, and he calls his adult brother Kip to ask for Chapstick. A day which is at once absurd and banal, yet riveting; while no particular event directly progresses the plot, we slowly become acquainted with the questions and inner machinations of Napoleon’s mind. The sense of everything being oddly ordinary yet intriguing, as well as the slow-burn character development through unremarkable events is not unique to the opening scene, and only ramps up throughout the remainder of the film.

In terms of execution, a synth-heavy original soundtrack, along with the inclusion of some classic ‘80s tunes, pair perfectly with the plot, setting, and costume design. Further, keen attention to audio aids in placing the viewer; flies audibly buzz past and cows bellow in the background.

Jon Heder’s role as Napoleon is undeniably brilliant, but he is surrounded by other notable performers. Each delivers keen facial expressions and perfectly timed delivery; in my mind, there is no role which could have been cast or performed any better. Beyond that, there is a patience to every encounter which results in expert pacing. No moment feels rushed and pauses between dialogue are often drawn out, further lending to a curated sense of uncertainty and immaturity. Each interaction holds meaning, revealing new aspects of characters’ desires and insecurities. These are conveyed with a familiar clumsiness which hearkens to the often repressed memories of youth’s struggles.

It is in this essence of adolescence, so expertly captured, in which the film begins to transcend its perceived place as a quirky, but superficial high school comedy. Every character, from Napoleon’s dare-devil grandmother to his friend Deb, reveals complex and base desires. There is nobody with more wisdom than anyone else; each character is portrayed as impulsive and elementary. Each character also grapples with questions of identity: who do they believe they are and who do they want to be? Napoleon’s grandmother goes for trips to the sand dunes with a secret boyfriend, while Uncle Rico can’t stop thinking about 1982 and what could have been. These troubles, often typical of high school, seep into the lives of every character.

This idea of an uncertain identity is infinitely relatable, seeing as such questions can never be definitively answered. Everybody is portrayed with the same confusion and infantile nature as a high school student; there is little discernible difference in maturity and authority between your eldest and youngest, most significant and most minor characters. They are all flawed and insecure.

The film’s complexity does not end with this universal infantilization. Hess also grapples with complex issues of class, custom, and gender in unique and interesting ways. Pedro, Napoleon’s new classmate and friend from México, is derided by the school’s principal for failing to understand his instructions. Further into the film Pedro is again brutally chastised for bashing a piñata in the likeness of another student, something he claims is customary in his native country; an intentionally ridiculous and comic scene, but even so it is a moment which highlights cultural differences and the principal’s blatant ignorance. Later, Napoleon’s sleazy uncle preys on his nephew’s high school classmates and attempts to sell them breast enhancement supplements, alienating young women and exposing Napoleon to further disdain. These only serve as a few examples of the more profound questions and issues which cleverly find their way into the film.

A deceptively deep film which at once brims with excitement and dread. It did not have me laughing out loud, but instead smiling throughout. Each moment is not demarcated by exciting action, place, or dialogue, yet there is a charm and a familiarity to its composition which requires nothing of the sort. And while any realistic depiction of high school, and life for that matter, is full of plenty of sorrow, Napoleon Dynamite finishes in a moment of triumph, with each character feeling secure in their identity, at least for a moment. Pedro has won the class election, Napoleon has danced his heart out to tremendous applause, Kip has a girlfriend, and Napoleon finally has a partner to play tether ball with.