Charlie Kaufman is Life
Oscar-winning screenwriter and director Charlie Kaufman is known simply by some for creating quirky, out of the box concepts. Armchair philosophers and film school nerds on the other hand, would argue he serves devastating truths about the human condition. Truths through the lens of white male privilege of course, but truths nonetheless. (I’m on the side of the armchair experts and film nerds by the way.)
Fans will be hugely excited to learn that he has a debut novel due for release in July 2020. Available to pre-order now, Antkind is ‘a searing indictment of the modern world’ and ‘a richly layered meditation on art, time, memory, identity, comedy, and the very nature of existence itself―the grain of truth at the heart of every joke’. Funny, because that’s how you could describe many of his films, too. In anticipation of Antkind, I was compelled to reappraise the work of this somewhat underappreciated genius.
Synecdoche, New York
After multiple re-watches, I still haven’t fully cracked this one and I think that’s the point. Like life, you’ll never fully understand its whole meaning. You might come very close, but then you’ll die. I won’t offer my theories here, as like any work of art, people will take their own meaning from it. And there is almost too much to understand in this film – every frame, let alone every scene, has deeper significance that you won’t catch on the first watch. Even the title, Synecdoche, isn’t what it first appears.
We follow Philip Seymour Hoffman as a struggling theatre director named Caden Cotard (again, not just a name), who is trying to make a play that will be his magnum opus. He attempts to capture the truth of all (his own) life experience through art, but the art ends up mirroring or even recreating his life in minute detail. It gets bigger and bigger until the stage takes over the entire city. His life becomes indistinguishable from the art, which is a metaphor for Kaufman’s own experience in making this film.
One of my favourite elements of this is its dark humour. Caden’s love interest Hazel (Samantha Morton) buys a house that’s on fire. As she looks around with the realtor, her assessment is classic: ‘I like it. I do! I’m just really concerned about dying in the fire.’ Joking aside, this is an important point about Hazel’s character – unlike Caden, Hazel has accepted that one day she will die, but decides to enjoy what life has to offer anyway (even if it is a burning mess).
I could go on forever about this film, but there is one scene I absolutely have to mention. Later on in his production, Caden watches a funeral scene where the pastor (Christopher Evan Welch – taken before his time) delivers a moving and darkly funny speech concluding with ‘F everybody, Amen.’ At this point, another director has taken over from Caden and achieved what he had spent years trying to convey about life, in just two minutes. Even if you pass on the rest of the film, watch this.
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Tennyson, not Shakespeare, said ‘Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all.’ Kaufman explores this concept in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which is based on the idea of an invention that erases the memories of romantic relationships post break-up. The literary title is derived from an Alexander Pope poem, Eloisa to Abelard, which contemplates lost love.
The end is in the beginning – our protagonist, Joel (Jim Carrey), has already broken up with Clementine (Kate Winslet) when they meet and embark on a relationship. With his memories erased, he goes on to make the same ‘mistake’ again. There lies the conceit of the film – if we have our memories erased, we lose the pain but we also lose the joy, and we will never learn from our mistakes. Wasn’t it a worthwhile experience to meet Clementine, to open up and learn more about himself, even if it didn’t end well?
Being John Malkovich
So, on first look this sounds like the acid-induced fever dream of a deranged lunatic. Essentially, the premise is that an unemployed puppeteer (John Cusack) takes up residence in the mind of actor John Malkovich in order to achieve romantic and career success. It might seem bizarre and meaningless at first, but then you find yourself asking the question – are we just meat puppets being inhabited by some enduring consciousness, entirely incongruous with our physical form..?
Adaptation
This film features Nicholas Cage. (I really wanted to end the review there because, sold.) In arguably the best performance of his career, Cage plays Charlie Kaufman himself, trying to adapt Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief (great book, worth reading) into a screenplay. Writer’s block is a central theme as the neurotic ‘Charlie’ finds it impossible to adapt this book, while his twin brother Donald (who is much more ‘simple’ in every way) picks up screenwriting and runs away with it immediately. He completely changes the meaning and content of the original work – adding in multiple clichés, drugs, sex and an alligator fight. All of this is of course an ironic comment on the Hollywood machine – what sells isn’t necessarily ‘good,’ true or meaningful, and conversely, watching a screenwriter struggle over his art doesn’t make good entertainment. I’m not saying this is a bad film, it’s a film about making a bad film!
One of the highlights has to be Brian Cox’s impassioned rant: “Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day. There’s genocide, war, corruption. Every fucking day, somewhere in the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else. Every fucking day, someone, somewhere takes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People find love, people lose it. For Christ’s sake, a child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church. Someone goes hungry. Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman. If you can’t find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don’t know crap about life! And why the FUCK are you wasting my two precious hours with your movie? I don’t have any use for it! I don’t have any bloody use for it!” Charlie looks up, destroyed, and mutters: “okay.. thanks.”
I have yet to see Kaufman’s latest film, Anomalisa, because the puppets creep me out, but I’m looking forward to I’m Thinking of Ending Things, due to be released this year and I will definitely be reading Antkind.
“We’re all hurtling towards death. Yet here we are, for the moment, alive. Each of us knowing we’re going to die. Each of us secretly believing we won’t.”
― Charlie Kaufman, Synecdoche, New YorkReview: The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak
Elif Shafak is a prolific and internationally renowned British-Turkish author. Her most recent novel, 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World, was nominated for the 2019 Booker Prize.
Shifting between the present day and 13th century Konya, The Forty Rules of Love explores the relationship between the wandering Sufi mystic Shams of Tabriz and the now more widely known Persian poet Rumi. After his death, Rumi’s followers founded the Mevlevi Sufi Order, also known as the ‘whirling dervishes’.
In this novel, Shafak chronicles Rumi’s life-changing transformation into a mystic and poet through his close relationship with Shams. This is framed by the eponymous ‘Forty Rules’ created by Shams – profound ruminations on the nature of life, love and our connection to God. One such rule is particularly relevant to the nature of their relationship: “Eventually it is best to find a person, the person who will be your mirror. Remember, only in another person’s heart can you truly see yourself and the presence of God within you.”
To make this story more relatable to our everyday lives, Shafak brings us back to the present day through the character of Ella, a dissatisfied housewife looking for deeper meaning in life and love. For me, this element was unnecessary as I found myself completely transported by the history and mysticism explored in the main story.For anyone interested in finding out more about Rumi and Sufism, I would recommend this as a good starting point.
“You can study God through everything and everyone in the universe, because God is not confined in a mosque, synagogue or church. But if you are still in need of knowing where exactly His abode is, there is only one place to look for him: in the heart of a true lover.”
Review: Birds Without Wings by Louis de Bernières
As it says on the cover, this book truly is a masterpiece. Birds Without Wings is an incredibly insightful and well researched piece of wartime history, shining a light on the customs and daily life of people in Greece and Turkey during the early twentieth century. De Bernières captures the foibles and the beauty of the human condition from birth to life and in death. Some of the passages were so moving they brought me to tears. I would recommend this to anyone interested in the great Turkish leader Ataturk, this period of history and the culture of Greece and Turkey during this time. Even if you have no knowledge of this time or region, it will resonate with anyone simply interested in what it means to be human.