Being John Malkovich is an almost certainly intentional, not to mention deliberately parodic, riff on film theory. As I am not the first to point out, the movie gleefully presents the viewer with mirror images, women who want the phallus, explicit sadistic fantasies of control, identification with the gaze, identification through the gaze, and a chimpanzee with a traumatic backstory —all couched in an absurdist narrative. At one point we even get a tour through John Malkovich’s subconscious which begins (of course) with a primal scene as young John watches his parents do that thing that Freudian parents do.
It’s pretty clear that writer Charlie Kaufmann and director Spike Jonze are both referencing and undermining Laura Mulvey’s gaze theory. On the one hand, Craig Schwartz, the protagonist, is the protoypical sadistic viewer — he is a puppeteer by profession, and he explains at some length how he loves to get inside other people, to enter their skin and feel what they feel. This speech is made by Craig to Maxine, a woman with whom he is sexually obsessed — and soon thereafter he makes a puppet of her to play with, so the fetishistic content is not exactly subtle. Craig wants to enter others as a way of fucking others; empathy and identification are for him a means of sadistic control.
At the same time, the film messes with Mulvey’s formulation, in which the male viewer is supposed to be the subject of the gaze and a female character is supposed to be the object. For instance, the person Craig inhabits and controls is not a woman, but a man, John Malkovich. In the movie’s main absurdist conceit, Craig finds a secret, moist tunnel in his office which literally leads into Malkovich’s consciousness. This not only feminizes Malkovich (the tunnel is literally referred to as Malkovich’s “cunt” at one point) but it also feminizes Craig. In the first place, he’s engaged in male-male sex too; Maxine calls him a “fag.” And furthermore, towards the end of the film he essentially experiences a full-body castration, giving up his own life and self in order to inhabit and become Malkovich.
The film also critiques/parodies Mulvey by handing the male gaze over to a woman. Craig’s wife, Lottie, also uses the tunnel into Malkovich’s head — and she finds the experience both exciting and sexually stimulating. Indeed, after entering Malkovich while he’s taking a shower, desire and identification flip, and she decides she wants to be a man. Later, she goes into Malkovich again, and rides along as he receives a sexually charged phone call from Max…with whom both Lottie and in consequence Malkovich instantly fall in lust. The sadistic male gaze, therefore, becomes a sadistic female gaze, giving women access to the phallus and (not coincidentally) to objectification of other women.
The point is further driven home (if that’s the right metaphor) by the fact that Max reciprocates Lottie’s affections — but only when Lottie is in Malkovich. Malkovich is the phallus himself, but he cannot have the phallus — just as is supposed to be the case for women in Lacan. Actual women, on the other hand, can hold the phallus and wield it for their own pleasure — the only caveat being that to hold the phallus they have to hold the phallus. Masculinity and mastery, contradictorily, seem to inhere, not in men, but in women. Even paternity becomes a female prerogative — Max becomes pregnant when Lottie is in Malkovich, not when Craig is. Lesbians, it seems, are better men than men are.
The film, then, in some ways seems to deliberately mock masculinity — or at least, Mulvey’s formulation of masculinity. In other ways, though, its position is less clear. In particular, it seems significant that Malkovich’s castration is in many ways actually a kind of apotheosis. Malkovich is, after all, famous for being other people. The film, then, becomes an extended allegory of his talent; Malkovich is everyone, and everyone is Malkovich. The very funny scene in which Malkovich goes through the passageway into his own head and ends up in a restaurant where he is literally all the people in the room, whether women, dwarfs, waiters or patrons, definitely ridicules his persona. But it also elevates that persona into existential dilemma. Similarly, Malkovich’s vituoso performance as Craig inhabiting John Malkovich becomes the ultimate version of disappearing into a role. No costume, no props, and yet he is magically (and convincingly) doing a quadruple-layered acting feat, playing John Cusack playing Craig playing John Malkovich playing John Malkovich. This is in part about Lacanian misrecognition, where even your self is someone other than your self. But it’s also about method acting. To not be who you are may be a traumatic crisis of selfhood, but it’s also, as an actor, the mark of mastery. The more castrated Malkovich is, the more his phallus grows.
The same is true of Craig. Early on we see Craig performing a puppet show of Abelard and Heloise. Abelard was, famously, castrated. In the puppet show, however, his incapacity is supplemented, or superseded, by Heloise’s insistent sexuality — the puppet humps the wall between her cell and Abelard’s. The blatant display, performed by Craig on a street corner, is so convincing it prompts an irate father to hit him in the face. Craig is castrated like Abelard…but like Malkovich, his belittlement becomes the sign of his mastery. And that mastery is routed through the inhabitation of female desire.
Which raises the question…is the lesbian relationship in the film a rebuke to male fantasies of possession? Or is it an embodiment of them? At one point, Craig enters Malkovich when Maxine thinks Lottie is inside; as a result he weirdly gets to have lesbian sex — a not at all uncommon male fantasy. At the film’s conclusion, Craig is presented as trapped in the consciousness of Lottie and Maxine’s child, staring out impotently forever at the two women he can never have. Again, though, the masochism is perhaps just a little too convenient. Are we really supposed to believe he is not getting off on this fantasy of being inside a woman — and, more, inside the sexual relationship of two women? Who is pulling whose strings, exactly?
In one of his puppet plays, Craig’s doll (made in his own image) looks up deliberately, as if seeing the man who controls him. Being John Malkovich, too, with its absurdist, self-referential plot constantly reminds the viewer of its status as fiction — and of its status as tour-de-force. Writer Charlie Kaufman’s script is as auteurish as Malkovich’s performance, and in the same way. When Malkovich and Kaufman erase and feminize themselves, it is only so that they can be all-the-more controllingly present, all-the-more wielders of the phallus. Masochistic lesbophilia seems, from this perspective not so much an upending of patriarchy as it is a means of creating a more all-encompassing phallic order. Perhaps that’s why there is, running through the film, an air of smug, over-determined self-congratulation. Despite its cleverness, and its deliberate eschewal of traditional storytelling, it still comes across as surprisingly conventional Hollywood narrative cinema, less problematic for Mulvey’s theories than any B-movie slasher.
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As a brief addendum, I just saw Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which painfully confirms my sense that Kaufman’s absurdist trickery conceals all-too-typical masculine self-pity and predictable Hollywood idiocy. The film’s heroine/love object Clementine claims several times that she’s not just a cipher for male desire and dreams, but again alas the fact that she’s a self conscious magic pixie dream girl doesn’t make her less of a magic pixie dream girl — quite the contrary, in fact. Maybe if there were some vague effort to balance the amount of time we had in our drab hero Joel’s head with the amount of time in bouncy, unpredictable Clementine’s I’d believe that the film saw her as her own person. But virtually all her screen time occurs either when she’s with Joel or when she’s not even herself, but is instead (and significantly) a mental projection inside his head. And, of course, we’ve got not one, but two romances in which Hollywood-hot younger actresses turn down attractive men their own age in order to aggressively seduce significantly older, character-actor-homely men. The PKD meditation on memory and self looks a lot like a feint to distract from the puerile, self-serving wish-fulfillment.
Is there any similar quirky, high-concept, mainstream American film that is told primarily from the point of view of a woman? There may well be. Chalie Kaufman sure isn’t going to write it, though.
“Is there any similar quirky, high-concept, mainstream American film that is told primarily from the point of view of a woman?”
Femme Fatale? If we’re including really old movies my favorite is probably The Ghost & Mrs. Muir.
Not familiar with either of those…brief summary, maybe?
Femme Fatale is a self-consciously-trashy thriller where Rebecca Romijn plays a criminal who dreams a convoluted Brian De Palma thriller (starring Antonio Banderas as a noir dective/dupe who she manipulates) before choosing a second alternative path (which of course might also be a fantasy). If you’ve seen Body Double or any of De Palma’s other thrillers you probably have some idea what to expect, but I recommended it because it’s a bit quirkier than most of the others and the p.o.v. character is female even though there’s another (male) p.o.v. character in her dream.
The Ghost & Mrs. Muir is a 1940s Joseph Mankiewicz supernatural romance. A single mother rents a house that is haunted (potentially in her imagination – though I’d have to see it again.) by its previous owner – the ghost of a grizzled sea captain. In order to make ends meet, she writes his autobiography (high seas adventure stories being popular) and they end up falling in love. Nowhere near as perverse as Being John Malkovich or Femme Fatale, but it’s a somewhat quirky film (if not as much as, say, Hellzapoppin).
It’s interesting that both of these “female-perspective” films actually have nested p.o.v’s, one male, one female. I’ll try to think of some more with a strictly-female p.o.v. (3 Women?) but those are the first ones that came to my mind.
Hmmm…that reminds me of “Ghost”, that Demi Moore film…though that’s actually from the perspective of the ghost, isn’t it? And there’s a man having lesbian sex in that too… I hated that film at the time. I suspect I’d hate it still, though I’m not positive.
The Wizard of Oz might qualify in some sense.
Good call on The Wizard of Oz.
My grandmother took me to see Ghost on the big screen when I was 10 (I think I tried to talk her into seeing Die Hard 2 instead!) so I don’t remember much about it. I think the Mankiewicz movie is a littler closer to The Innocents (based on The Turn of the Screw by Henry James) but without the malevolence/horror. Both those movies are told largely from the female protagonist’s perspective. Also in both of those, it’s possible to read the ghost as a point-of-view or an audience surrogate (as a disembodied watcher – kind of a blunt metaphor but I think you understand what I mean) or the women could be read as unreliable narrators in which case they’re imagining a male gaze (benevolent in one, malevolent in the other). The introspection in these movies is perhaps a little more slippery/less overt than in Kaufman’s scripts but there’s a possible counterpoint there. Another more recent thriller with a sort of slippery introspection with a female p.o.v. is In Dreams (1999) – kind of a slightly arted-up The Innocents-meets-A Nightmare on Elm Street thriller, with some gorgeous cinematography.
To get back on topic, it kind of struck me that in your essay you were asking for a female equivalent of/alternative to Woody Allen? That’s a tough one.
It doesn’t exactly have to be a female Woody Allen, but yes, the fact that it’s hard to find a female Woody Allen is not unrelated to this discussion.
I think it may actually be easier in some ways on television than on film. For instance, the protagonist of Weeds in some ways maybe?
not (quite) Hollywood but Amelie is an obvious one that is super-quirky. I have to admit I probably prefer Synechdoche N.Y. (though possibly not Being John Malovich or Eternal Sunshine).
“It doesn’t exactly have to be a female Woody Allen, but yes, the fact that it’s hard to find a female Woody Allen is not unrelated to this discussion.”
Yes, that’s what I meant.
You might dislike it just as much, but a few years back there was an adaptation of an old Wallace Shawn play, Marie and Bruce, starring Julianne Moore and Matthew Broderick. Moore is the dominant protagonist/narrator I think, and it’s kind of comparable to a Woody Allen movie except that the gorgeous wife is extremely, extremely mean to her self-absorbed and un-charming husband. To be an actual female alternative to Allen or Kaufman I think it should ideally be written/directed by a woman though. It also wasn’t quite Hollywood since in spite of the name actors it was an obscure movie from the very start.
To really flip the woody allen film, too, I think the woman would have to be less attractive, or at least not strikingly more attractive, than the guy.
That doesn’t happen very often either…though sort of in sixteen candles….
“To really flip the woody allen film, too, I think the woman would have to be less attractive, or at least not strikingly more attractive, than the guy.”
It also would help if the woman wasn’t “crazy.” To get back to what you were saying about tv, I haven’t seen Weeds (or much else in the last 10 years) but from what I’ve seen 30 Rock is another possible example.
“That doesn’t happen very often either…though sort of in sixteen candles….”
I for one always found Molly Ringwald very attractive but I see what you’re saying. I don’t remember 16 Candles very well (is that the one with the Chinese exchange student?) but one of the only things I really liked in The Breakfast Club was how she was cast against type as a teen sexpot. She also played an interesting Miranda in Paul Mazursky’s somewhat Woody Allen-ish (and thoroughly mediocre) adaptation of the Tempest, which reminds me of an interesting quirky Hollywood female-p.o.v. adaptation of that play: Julie Taymor’s. She changed Prospero to Prospera (Helen Mirren). It was much better than The Mazursky version and was pretty fun though still not great. It’s an interesting play with respect to Mulvy too, so much meta-theatrical male gaze that you’re hardly even aware of the women in a lot of versions. Jarman’s (1979) is another interesting one simply because the casting seems to emphasize Miranda and Caliban more.
Molly Ringwald is absolutely attractive…but she’s at least towards the cute rather than ravishing in Hollywood terms, and the guy she was after was very good looking (and of course diegetically older/more popular.)
Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire.
I’m actually not sure if I’ve seen those or not…but I definitely find David Lynch’s take on gender less self-serving and predictable than Charlie Kaufman’s.
Fire Walk With Me is great, for example….
This is a weird one, but as I was trying to decide whether Todd Solondz’s “Welcome to the Doll House” fit the bill, I thought of “Freeway” starring Reese Witherspoon.
Here’s the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeway_%281996_film%29
I haven’t seen it in years, but I remember it as having a smart and trashy charm.
Oh yeah, I meant to comment on this, too:
“Again, though, the masochism is perhaps just a little too convenient. Are we really supposed to believe he is not getting off on this fantasy of being inside a woman — and, more, inside the sexual relationship of two women? Who is pulling whose strings, exactly?”
You could read this as a reductio ad absurdum of the power of the male gaze. To see everything he must renounce all claims to control. The male gaze is revealed as a poor surrogate for actual power. Just a thought.
Hmmm…I think it’s smart to see the last scene as Craig watching a movie. I don’t think that evacuates the male gaze, though. Rather, it just reinscribes the fact that he’s real and they’re fantasies.
His fantasies are masochistic…but I don’t think masochism is necessarily feminist, or that it necessarily even cares about women. We’re still all about Craig’s psychodrama, and they’re still just things in his dream.
I think you’re right that the lesson is lost Craig, who as you note is too masochistic to learn his lesson. I was more wondering whether it was lost on the audience, who sees him as a tragic fool. Where the movie falls down for me w/r/t its critique of the male gaze is that it doesn’t implicate the audience in it as much as I’d like. I never felt uncomfortable with myself, or implicated in the problematic he sets up, which given my status as a left thinking intellectual hand-wringer says something about the movie’s politics.
I don’t think that’s exactly what I mean….
Maybe try this way…the point isn’t that Craig fails to learn his lesson. The point is that the film never convinces me that it gives a crap about the female characters except insofar as they exist as manipulable tropes in Craig’s psychodrama.
I don’t think the film has any interest in implicating the viewer, nor really in getting outside or critiquing the male gaze. It’s emotional investment is in the triumph and beautiful tragedy of the suffering virtuoso, whether that’s Malkovich, Craig, or Kaufman. Women are just the medium through which those triumphs and tragedies are worked out. They’re not of any interest in themselves.
Having said which, the film is clever; I enjoy its virtuosity, which is in part playing with film theory, which I’m interested in. I don’t hate it…unlike Eternal Sunshine, which really is crap.
I can see how my phrasing makes it seem like I think you thought Kaufman or the movie is out to implicate the male gaze, but I realize that’s not what you were after. That said, I’m always on the alert for ways movies can come together in a way that subverts their creators’ intent, and I was sort of grasping at ways this one might do it. But like I said, I agree with you that it doesn’t do that in any substantive way, probably because Kaufman is so in control of it.
Sliding Doors? High-concept (such as it is), mainstream, told primarily from the point of view of a woman. But not American, quirky, or good.
And, of course, part of Adaptation is told from Meryl Streep’s pov, but, well, you know…
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