With His Bold First Movie, Charlie Kaufman Took Meta to a New Level

They say “Write what you know,” so it shouldn’t be a surprise Hollywood makes so many movies about the perils of being an actor. The Artist, Birdman, and La La Land were all Oscar-winning movies about trying to “make it” in show business. But those movies always center the actor as the main character, when most people see actors as unattainable higher-class celebrities living life on easy street.

But in 1999, a strange sci-fi fable told the story of an actor as his life is irrevocably shaken by an otherworldly force that turns him not into the creator of art, but the vessel of it. It’s a strange, twisted movie with a dark sense of humor and unparalleled ambition, yet it all comes together into an unforgettable cinematic experience.

Being John Malkovich was the feature debut of director Spike Jonze and writer Charlie Kaufman. It follows Craig Schwartz (John Cusack), a struggling puppeteer who lives with his exotic animal enthusiast wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz) in a dingy basement apartment. In hopes of earning a better living, he gets a job on the 7 1/2 floor of an office building as a filer, as his dextrous puppeteer hands allow him to flip through files quickly.

The office has low ceilings to account for its fractional floor number — “after all, the overhead is low!” — but that’s far from the strangest part of this office. While filing, Craig discovers a hidden door, and when he crawls inside, he finds himself inside the body of real-life actor John Malkovich for 15 minutes, before he is spat out on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. Alongside his work crush Maxine (Catherine Keener), he decides to charge people to take a ride inside John Malkovich. However, as Lotte gets more interested in the portal, Craig soon realizes that this tool is far more powerful than he had imagined.

The premise may sound strange, but anchored by the performances of Cusack, Diaz, and Keener, every shocking discovery feels like a natural evolution. John Malkovich, at that time, known for being a highbrow actor and an original company member of the Steppenwolf Theatre Company, delivers an incredibly grounded performance. He was saddled with playing not only a fictionalized version of himself but also every other character controlling him.

It was absolutely a career risk for him. “He said: either the movie's a bomb and it's got not only my name above the title but my name in the title, so I'm f*cked that way; or it does well and I'm just forever associated with this character,” Spike Jonze said of Malkovich’s thoughts on the movie to The Guardian.

In the years since Being John Malkovich, Jonze and Kaufman would both gain a reputation for being ultra-meta and cerebral, but that’s on full display even here. In one now-iconic scene, John Malkovich discovers the portal and enters into his own mind. Like a mirror in a mirror, what he sees is a crowded restaurant where everyone has the face of John Malkovich.

But at its core, Being John Malkovich touches on one of the biggest themes of Kaufman’s filmography: the concept of performance. In the movie, John Malkovich finds himself no longer an artist expressing himself, but the medium of someone else’s expression, be that Craig using John as the ultimate puppet, or Lotte using the portal to experience gender euphoria by living as a man.

On its own, it’s a fun sci-fi fable about how we define ourselves and how we can lose a sense of self. But in a greater context, it’s about how we treat actors. They’re more than just the puppets used to play all our favorite stories — they are people whose very humanity contributes to all the work we enjoy.