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I like a little mystery in my movies. There’s no fun in something you get right away, certainly no intrigue in understanding it all at face value. Too many movies operate on mundane calculated formulas, such as the usual romantic comedy. And the thrillers and action movies with astounding special effects – ie Transformers, have somehow become mundane because we’ve seen it all before. While watching the extravagant preview for Roland Emmerich’s 2012, I had the realization about 40 seconds in that throughout all of the crashing buildings, collapsing wonders of the world and staggering destruction I had not flinched, gasped, or reacted in any way whatsoever.
Shattered Narratives and the Desire to Connect
Charlie Kaufman, the gifted screenwriter known for his idiosyncratic hand in creating such films as Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, stands out as one of the few people in the film industry today who creates stories far more nuanced than the average Hollywood flick. But what is it about these Kaufman films that make them so re-watchable? It’s certainly not sunshine and daisies. No, it’s the deep explorative nature of these films—their descent into obscure and murky waters, such as the mind and imagination, unreality versus reality etc. and the wild abandon (brimming with beauty and truthful emotion in particular) with which they are explored that brings the audience back for more.
Real Mindfulness, Communication Breakdown, and Twin Affinities
Kaufman has one main subject: the human mind, and similarly has one stream of abstracted plotlines: the mind and its various manifestations of “reality”. In Adaptation (2002), Kaufman’s penchant for dealing with complicated mental terrain is evident. Personifying the existential and moral crisis of the artist – to sell out or not to sell out – the film depicts Donald (an eerily way too peppy Nicolas Cage) playing direct foil to Charlie (also Nicolas Cage, here serious and intellectual). They are opposites in just about every sense: world view, life philosophy, approach to women, writing, and so on. 
The casting of Cage as both characters makes us wonder: is Donald really there? Yes; but the personality differences between the two Nicolas Cages— (both bizarre, overweight and balding) are so perfectly opposing that one could in fact be the projection of some inner id from within the other’s overwrought super-ego.
Throughout the film, the boundaries between depictions of reality blur to the point that the two (reality, and its depictions) collide and intertwine. Before we know it, our “twin” protagonists Charlie and Donald, along with the characters involved in the “novel-world” Charlie is adapting for film, are entangled in a wild and ultimately fatal confrontation amidst the Florida marshes. The narrative becomes dizzying as it leaps through time and location. The result is exhausting but fascinating, and at the film’s end, the viewer is not quite sure what has happened. But the film is such that it will make the curious and self-motivated (ie, you want to understand, and you want to make sense of complicated concepts) movie-watcher revisit it. This alone is a noteworthy condition of Kaufman’s style. Today, most people do not take the time to re-visit a film they don’t “get” on first viewing. And yet, Kaufman requires this of his viewers – he necessitates our involvement in his intricate text, and has been successful in doing so. And by now, we know this before we go see a Kaufman film, we understand we may not understand.
Spotless Mind Gets Us Every Time
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) adopts a similarly sprawling narrative arc, zigzagging through time and consciousness. Kaufman’s atypical yet intriguing plotlines rope you in early and keep your attention. Somehow they make viewers actually care to unravel the mystery, without being anywhere near mystery genre. The film opens with a couple—or something like that—Jim Carrey brilliantly cast as the fidgety and stumbling, constricted Joel, and Kate Winslet, blue-haired and almost violent in her outspokenness, as Clementine, involved in an odd interaction. Before we know it, they share a ride home after an inexplicable trip to a snowy Montauk beach. Cut to the next sequence and its nighttime, Joel is sobbing as the rain casts polka dotted shadows on his face while he drives the same car —but now Clementine is gone. What has happened? What has changed? He paces and shakes his head, wrings his hands, recounts a moment to friends: “[And then] she looks at me like she doesn’t even know who I am.” The friends exchange worried side-glances. “Why would she do that to me?” he asks in desperate disbelief.
It turns out Clementine has had Joel wiped from her heartbroken memory at a clinic called Lacuna. The unfurling of this secret leads Joel to seek the same ”memory erasure”— self-induced brain damage for the sake of self-preservation. And once the process is deep underway, with Lacuna’s technicians (Mark Ruffalo and Elijah Wood) stomping through Joel’s memories as he lay unconscious in bed, Joel realizes that he no longer wishes to go through with it. He then decides he must do whatever he can to stop the process. In one tellingly powerful scene, Joel hopelessly begs the technicians in voice over to let him keep this memory, just this one memory as he kisses Clementine under the covers, telling her over and over again, “[she’s] pretty, of course [she’s] pretty.”
The film becomes a frenzied cat and mouse chase between fleeting memories of childhood and intimate moments awaiting their obliteration. The cinematography is spectacular –Joel skids in and out of scenes, the memory he has just left collapsing into darkness – a forgotten land behind him. Faces cave into shapeless, melted blurs and building rafters crash down onto the streets as Joel desperately calls after Clementine. She disappears just as she playfully smashes snow into Joel’s hair. The style is glancing, and invigorating, as the audience is taken along for the disjointed, whirlwind ride. But, we can’t get too close to any moment because it’ll be gone in the next 
instant. This is an interesting device throughout the film – the audience’s expectations are crucial to the movement of the plot. We care about these two hapless lovers, and that’s partly because we experience their love affair much like we might recall one of our own: fleeting and misplaced and slowly slipping away.
The scenes are fanciful and melancholy at the same time, the music almost sing-songy, as their laughter rebounds joyously, but distantly. It’s a weirdly apocalyptic, sad sort of feeling. We know the end is coming as the voices within memories warp and fade, reverb and echo, and we hope Joel finds a way to avert the procedure in order to keep these precious memories he once was so willing to erase. As the film finally winds down, the screen fades to white, a departure from the usual fade to black (this is also seen in Kaufman’s directorial debut Synecdoche, New York; however, its to a different effect. Much of that film was profoundly sad, and the white fade seemed to come as a relief).
Epic Leaps and Descent Into Desolation
Synecdoche, New York (2008) is the grimmest of Kaufman’s works, but it is also his grandest, most outlandish film to date. Kaufman crafts a story about self-fulfilling failure. But even more so, it is a story that reveals itself to the audience as being about each and every one of them, and about the precarious and desperate nature of being human. When Caden (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman) tells Hazel (Samantha Morton) it has only been a week since his wife left him, she sadly and bemusedly corrects him that in fact, it’s been a year. The silent slipping away of time is something we all know too well. For Caden, a dutifully struggling and sighing and hypochondriacal playwright from Schenectady, New York, his journey is a quest to define himself authentically in an ungraspable, inauthentic world. Through Caden, Kafmann explores the flaws of human consciousness to grapple wit
h its most familiar of concepts: the self.
After his artist wife whisks their four-year-old daughter away to Berlin, Caden receives a MacArthur “genius” grant and embarks on the defining artistic endeavor of his thus-far unfulfilled life. Caden enlists dozens, then hundreds, then thousands of actors to play various people in his life over the next 40 years, restaging vignettes of memories and experiences in a sprawling Manhattan factory space. He is compartmentalizing the people in his life, organizing memories for his own need and purpose (something we all do on some level each day). Somewhere in between, the actors who are playing real-life people swap roles, and again, reality and its depiction become at first muddled and then entirely inextricable from one another. At over 2.5 hours, the film coils itself into such surrealism by its desolate end that I was left with not much more than my gut response to it: have I ever seen anything else like this movie? The answer: an emphatic “No!”
What’s It All About, Charlie?
Yes, Kaufman has created a style all his own. He is an auteur when it comes to the films he makes. He has certain stamps of habit and flair, specific subjects that clue us into his watermark over the words or actions within a film. In his masterful complications, we understand his patterns. We can detect his artistic fingerprint in each screen play, in the characters… the subject matter… in the pacing, and yet, he is by no means handing his audience his “purpose” or “meaning” with this propensity for following (though peripherally, no doubt) a certain pattern. It isn’t always the same, and so on and on the wondering goes. He works in the abstract, and he certainly works with the profound. Kaufman’s daring approach to complex concepts, and the fact that he barely ever waits around to explain himself to the audience implicates the viewer’s longing to elucidate the film. The wonderland he creates only helps to involve me in the labyrinth.
Kaufman films offer different levels of ‘enjoyment,’ specific to the viewers’ personal sentiments. Me, I like a happy ending. And if the ending is not happy per se, it’s got to be hopeful, at least a little bit. Maybe it’s my desire for 
escapism when ‘going to the movies,’ or a want to feel enlightened by the wisdom, or vision of a director or screenwriter. But whatever the reason, even if the entire film is dim and dark and stormy, a hopeful ending goes a long way for me. I loved Adaptation¸ felt deeply affected by the earnestness of Synecdoche, New York. But Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is a movie that when I first watched it, I felt inspired. I got it – or did I? That tingling uncertainty made me feel like I must have gotten something from the film. I felt heady with a newly recharged belief that all memories are precarious, beautiful things; things which to be ‘stronger’ and more ‘productive’ people, we may hope to caste off, bury under lessons learned and ‘never again’s’ (lots of people when they first see the memory erasing services offered at Lacuna in Eternal Sunshine probably will think: Ah, if only). But they are also things which can inspire us, and lead us through a reality that is too often strapped within life’s formulas.
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