Charlie Kaufman Play It Again Sam Play
W hen Charlie Kaufman was seven years old, he knew what he wanted to be when he grew up. He knows because he went as far as to write it downwards. "Actor, doctor or fireman," he says, and laughs. He concluded up beingness, at to the lowest degree briefly, one of those things – but he'south best known as the screenwriter and/or manager of some of the trippiest and about metafictional films in recent history: Being John Malkovich, Accommodation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York.
At present, with the publication of his first novel, Antkind, he's also the writer of a trippy and metafictional book. This isn't some sort of Hollywood big-name vanity project of the sort on which Sean Penn lately came unstuck: Kaufman wrote the book, he says, because he couldn't get work in the movies. "I got the contract to write it in 2012," he says. "The moving-picture show and Television receiver concern wasn't really working out for me at the time."
What? The Bafta and Oscar-winning Charlie Kaufman? The guy whose directorial debut was described by Roger Ebert equally the all-time moving-picture show of the decade? The neurotic screenwriter "Charlie Kaufman" as adorably characterised past Charlie Kaufman in Charlie Kaufman films? That Charlie Kaufman?
"My films don't make money," he says. "In 2008, the first movie that I directed, Synecdoche, New York, came out, and information technology lost money. And at that time the flick industry, coincidentally, fell apart considering of the economical crisis and studios stopped making movies and started making superhero franchise things. The sort of mid-budget movie that I've been working on, there was no outlet for it any more. It just didn't exist."
He's non the sort of writer who could suck it upward and make an Atomic number 26 Human flick as the cost of making his passion projects possible? "I thought about it," he admits. "But I've never gone by thinking about it. I don't recollect I could go that kind of task. No i would hire me for that. And if they did hire me for that, I think probably I would cease up giving them something that they didn't recollect was usable, because my listen doesn't work that way."
When nosotros talk, Kaufman is in a fairly Charlie Kaufmanish situation. He'southward alone in lockdown on the due west side of Manhattan (his wife and kid, for reasons he won't become into, are back on the west coast): "I'm sort of stuck in a sublet apartment in New York. I don't know where I'm going to cease up, merely information technology'southward non my place, not my things. Not my books, you know, not my bed. I spend nearly all my time in this place considering, y'all know, in that location'southward nowhere to get and I'm very broken-hearted about getting ill." And he's writing – what else? – a script about a virus.
His novel, also, is an extremely Charlie Kaufmanish suggestion. It begins with a description of the discovery of the real-life "St Augustine Monster" – an unidentifiable mass of organic material, or "globster", washed up on a beach in Florida in 1896. It then takes 700-odd pages to tell the story of B Rosenberger Rosenberg, a baldheaded, lavishly disguised and very thwarted film critic who, relatively early on, encounters an eccentric elderly human being called Ingo Cutbirth. Ingo has spent the whole of his long life making a terminate-movement boob picture show with a running time of iii months. Just Ingo abruptly dies of old age, and his masterpiece is destroyed in a burn down leaving only one frame – from which B now hopes to reconstruct the film with the aid of a succession of hypnotists.
Then information technology gets properly strange. B is shrinking. He ends up sleeping in his psychiatrist'south sock drawer. He constantly falls into manholes. He has his nose reconstructed against his wishes. He spends a dandy deal of time in hypnotic or hallucinatory or asleep states, and reconstructs a number of unlike versions of the movie. He has an unsuccessful career in shoe retail. A meteorologist (or "meaty-horologist") discovers a means of predicting the time to come. We spend time with a fictional 1940s comedy duo called Mudd and Molloy, who survive a murder attempt by Abbott and Costello. A war is fought between the Slammy's burger chain and an army of android versions of President Donald Trunk (sic). The Cake Theory of the universe, the Kentucky Meat Shower, time-travelling clones and clown fetishism besides characteristic. And that's earlier we become to the hyper-intelligent far-future ant who may or may not have accidentally invented a virus that travels backwards in time.
The way Kaufman describes the process, the novel sort of grew and mutated as it went. The germ of it, he says, was that "I wanted to deal with time travel in many different forms – all of them mutually exclusive." It reads, sometimes but non e'er in a practiced mode, similar the piece of work of someone who has spent an awful lot of time with John Kennedy Toole and Thomas Pynchon (and we're talking the Pynchon of Against the Day rather than the Pynchon of Inherent Vice); with, in the chimerical-movies section, perhaps a glancing acquaintance with Mark Z Danielewski's House of Leaves and David Foster Wallace'due south Space Jest.
Did his editor, I ask every bit tactfully as I can, not say words to the upshot of: "What the hell?" Apparently not. "He was open to ... he liked the book." He told Kaufman that a 900-pager (the manuscript was longer) would exist a hard sell, and so Kaufman cutting it back as far every bit he could without compromising it – "I think they wanted information technology to be 500 pages" – and the editor pronounced himself satisfied: "Actually, at that point, having read it over again. I think he felt similar he understood information technology meliorate."
The book is stuffed to its mad gunwales with gags and ideas and scattershot erudition, and my strong hunch is that readers will observe it ... challenging. But if anything, its comic sensibility is what will pull them through. Kaufman says that looking for the funny has been a constant in his work since he played a rooster in a school play at the historic period of 10. "I was a very shy kid, only somehow I managed to make my way into this production," he says, "I played a character who was funny and I got laughs from the audition – and I was just hooked.
"Beingness funny and having people laugh makes me experience validated as a homo. And it's very black and white in my estimation. If you write a scene in a picture show and people express mirth in the audience, it's worked."
The book's intellectual range of reference – from phenomenology to Jungian psychology to quantum physics to Beckett and Pirandello – is dizzying. Kaufman says that he "read a agglomeration of pop physics books when I was young ... but I was frustrated because I didn't take the mathematical background to practise the actual reading then it was all in translation – but I loved it. I love things that brand me retrieve most the universe in a way that is different from my perception of it. It'south very helpful in my work and in my life – it takes me out of myself. It makes my frame of reference larger and more circuitous than my concerns with my own problems."
That willingness to pull focus makes Kaufman an intellectual pleasure simply, it should be said, a slightly frustrating interviewee. He is scrupulously genial and polite, and happy to talk near theories of spacetime, only extremely reluctant to say anything on the record well-nigh the book's more sublunary themes and ideas.
For example, B is a sort of parodic extreme of film-nerdery – forever drawing upwardly top-10 lists consisting of ultra-obscure experimental foreign-language films and inveighing against rival critics. Do critics problems Kaufman? "I'm interested in motion-picture show criticism, and I'm certainly interested in film critics who have been very hostile to my work," he says, "And this was an opportunity to do something that I don't get to do – which is respond. But ... that sort of fell past the wayside. It isn't what interests me whatsoever more nigh the volume … That's just kind of similar a vestige of some sort."
Vestige or not, B really really hates Charlie Kaufman ("Kaufman is a monster, plain and simple ... Kaufman is Godzilla with dentures, Halloween's Mike Myers with a rubber knife, Pennywise the Clown with contact dermatitis from living in a sewer") and really loves Judd Apatow – the merely mainstream director who always appears in his lists of great works.
This Apatow affair is difficult to read. Is he a great friend of Kaufman and B's enthusiasm for his work an appreciating in-joke? Or is information technology chosen considering Apatow – equally seems equally possible – represents everything Kaufman detests about modern cinema? "I'chiliad not in a position to explain B or what he'southward thinking," he says primly. "It is what it is. You lot tin take from it what you desire. I'm not gonna comment one style or the other." All correct then: exercise you like Judd Apatow's work yourself? "I don't think that's relevant," he says, and so with a gentle annotation of reproach: "I experience similar you're asking the aforementioned question in a different way."
And then in that location are the cultural politics of the book. B thinks of himself every bit progressive – a slightly wearisome running gag has him using "thon" as a pronoun – while at the aforementioned fourth dimension being heroically crass (he prides himself on his girlfriend's African American identity no less than he vaunts himself on having gone to Harvard). The pronouns outcome is a especially hot topic. Was Kaufman worried that it would look every bit if he was making fun of trans rights? "Oh, yeah. I'm worried about everything. You know, always worried nearly everything only it is what it is." Well, OK, does he experience that some people who are punctilious almost existence politically right in their language are covering upward some rather more unworthy things?
"I've fabricated a exercise throughout my career of not explaining my intent," he says. "I feel similar, I mean, I feel similar it's irrelevant. I'k not writing an essay about race relations or virtue signalling, I'm writing a novel, and I accept a character in it, and the character has this personality. And that'south the book." I venture that this character is kind of unlikeable. Kaufman declines to address the question. "I don't recollect in those terms," he says. "I tend never to care if a graphic symbol's likeable. It doesn't interest me as an thought."
To exist off-white to Kaufman, the novel's central preoccupations are a lot more abstract than that line of questioning would propose in any case. Like his films, it gleefully unravels any sense of a stable reality. "That which the mind creates," i grapheme in information technology declares, "is also real." Perhaps in that location'southward even a timeline in the breakthrough universe where Charlie Kaufman is a fireman.
I mention Michael Pollan'due south recent book on psychedelics, and Kaufman expresses involvement but says he's never had much truck with drugs himself: "Mushrooms a couple of times when I was immature ... I couldn't do LSD. It scared me too much.
"Function of it for me may just be that I always try to call back by the original idea," he says. "Then that if I accept, for example, a portal into John Malkovich in a story, then I accept to remember of all the iterations of that, and I come to: what if John Malkovich goes into his ain portal? This thing that people say is my style ... is just the mode my encephalon works. I practice have an OCD kind of quality to my thinking."
Does he feel as though reality, then, is a stranger and more fragile thing than most people imagine?
"Jesus yes!" he yelps.
woodsonantruldis2000.blogspot.com
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/11/charlie-kaufman-making-people-laugh-makes-me-feel-validated-as-a-human
Post a Comment for "Charlie Kaufman Play It Again Sam Play"