I’ve written before, recently even, about the screenwriting genius of Charlie Kaufman. Sure, there are obscure writers hidden off in the corners doing weird things. Charlie Kaufman, if not actually mainstream, can probably be considered mainstream adjacent. His works aren’t spectacular blockbuster hits, but they do get released and are consistently reviewed by mainstream critics.
I recently decided to do a dive into his work. I’ve seen several of his films fairly recently. I re-watched those that were either new to me or that I have not watched within the last several years. The one exception is Human Nature. It was an especially obscure release that had, at best, mixed reviews from both critics and the public.
I decided to rank them, from the least amount of mind fucking to the greatest amount. Note that all of them had at least a moderate amount of such fuckery. Kaufman seems incapable of writing a straight forward screenplay.
6. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind
If this was any other screenwriter, this would probably be the weirdest film on their list. This is an adaption of the ‘unauthorized’ autobiography of Chuck Barris. It tells the story of how Barris became a renowned creator of game shows like The Dating Show and The Newlywed Show and became a television celebrity for being not only the creator but also the emcee of the The Gong Show. Oh yeah, at the same time that he was doing that, he apparently was a prolific hit man for the CIA.
It is definitely a strange premise and a strange film. What made it not so mind fuckerish is that it was a fairly straightforward adaptation of Barris’ autobiography (if you call it that). A lot of the weirdness was already baked into it, so Kaufman didn’t really add that much.
5. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
It really seems strange to me that this fell so low on the list, because it has a significant amount of mind fucking.
The film opens with a couple doing a cute meet on Long Island. By the end of the first act, it appears to be a standard romantic comedy.
And then it gets weird. In this reality, there is a process that allows a person to completely erase another person from all of their memories. Previously, the woman had erased the man from her memory. The man, desperate in grief, decides to erase his memory of her. Once the process starts, the man regrets his decision, and as his mind slowly erases all of his memories of her, he tries to figure out to back out of the already started process.
Wrapped up inside this nonlinear plot are all kinds of themes running through it like love, loss, technology, inevitability, and, of course, memory.
All of this and, at its heart, it’s a romantic comedy.
4. Anomalisa
This is such a hard exercise! Again, I can’t believe that this, in mind fuck rank order, is in the middle of the pack. After all, it’s a movie about anatomically correct puppets that, among other things, have graphic sex.
Michael, a consultant in customer service, travels constantly and lives a drab life. Every single person that he encounters, male or female, looks and sounds alike. One day, he meets a woman that’s completely different. Entranced, he falls in love with her. Over time, as his love wears off, she becomes the same person as all of the others.
This is The Man in the Gray Suit territory. It’s all about the drabness and banality of the cookie cutter life of the modern world. There is no escape.
This is the Kaufman classic. A struggling street entertainer puppeteer gets a Brazil like corporate job. There he finds a tiny door. Going through the door, he enters the mind of John Malkovich. He begins to charge others for the experience. He uses his puppeteer skills to take over both the mind and the body of Malkovich. Malkovich himself enters the portal and ends up in an Anomalisa like world where everyone is Malkovich.
It is truly brilliant madness.
Major themes here include celebrity, gender fluidity, agency of actors, and identity.
2. Synedoche, New York
I just recently watched this for the first time. I’m still processing it. It’s Kaufman’s directorial debut and it is truly a world class mind fuck.
A stage director’s sculptor wife, taking their daughter, abandons him to live in Europe. The director is distraught and is at loose ends. Shortly after that, he wins a MacArthur genius grant. It comes with a substantial prize. He decides to use the money to create a play like no other play ever before.
He rents a huge warehouse. In that warehouse, he recreates the city that it resides in. Over time, it becomes painstakingly realistic. He peoples it with actors. The actors have no script. The director just feeds them story ideas and they must live their lives according to those ideas. Realizing that he is a character in the play, he casts an actor to play himself. Realizing that the actor playing him is also now in the play, he casts an actor to play that actor.
I’m guessing that you can see where this is going. It recurses in on itself. The warehouse that the play is staged in becomes part of the set and the city gets replicated inside of the inner warehouse (and theoretically, so on until turtles are reached (insider software developer joke)). At times it’s not clear if the action is taking place in reality or within the stage set. This goes on for the rest of his life. His last stage direction is to die, which he does.
This is truly world class mind fucking. This goes into the nature of reality, life, death, hypochondria, play in a play, psychology, and probably a billion other things that I missed.
This is some seriously deep, murky water.
1. Adaptation
If you’ve seen this film, this will not come as a surprise that it came out at number one in mind fucking. Kaufman was tasked to adapt the novel The Orchid Thief. The main problem with this task is that The Orchid Thief, to put it charitably, does not have a plot. It’s much more of a series of meditations. How to do you convert that to film?
The answer is that you can’t. Kaufman, suffering from paralyzing writer’s block, ended up writing himself into the story. In the adaptation, he is suffering from writer’s block trying to write The Orchid Thief. His twin brother, Donald, tries to help him write it. Donald, in his way a much more practical person than Charlie, tries to convince him just to write a standard screen play.
Doing so involves having The Orchid Thief’s author, Susan Orlean, start an affair with the book’s protagonist, John LaRoche. Their affair devolves into usage of a drug that is compounded by orchids. When Charlie discovers this, Orlean and LaRoche decide that they have to kill him. The adaptation ends with gun shots and a car accident. Donald is dead. LaRoche gets killed by an alligator. Orlean is arrested.
Obviously, none of this happened. Kaufman turned in the screenplay fully expecting that it would never get made. He was just trying to meet his commitment. When the screenplay was given to her, Orlean, a respected writer, was horrified at her representation in the script and barely granted consent.
The screenwriting credit went to Charlie and Donald Kaufman. They were both nominated for the adapted screenplay Academy Award. Charlie does not have a twin brother named Donald. Undoubtedly this was the first time that a fictional character was nominated for an Academy Award.
This is such a postmodern screenplay with mind fuckery taking place in nearly every scene (even including scenes in the film from Being John Malkovich) that it would be hard to imagine it ever being knocked off its top perch.
dorkenstein 