Thesis Title: Filmic Representation of Carnal Inter-subjectivity:

A Study of the Reciprocal Relation between Charlie Kaufman’s Films

and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology

The Graduate Program of the Department of

English Language, Literature and Linguistics

An Abstract of a Thesis for the Degree of Master Arts

Providence University 94th School Year

Graduate: Yu-Ling Erin Chou

Advisor: Dr. Ming-May Jessie Chen

Key Words: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Charlie Kaufman, body-subject, flesh,

phenomenology of perception, reversibility, intersubjectivity,

embodiment

Abstract

Since French philosopher Réne Descartes advocated Mind-Body Dualism in the

seventeenth century, the way how the movement of body and mind carries out their

interaction has become an inextricable controversy. Among these controversies,

Merleau-Ponty should be the first philosopher who should be given a needed

acknowledgement for the importance of the human body to the philosophical study.

He proposed that human body can not be regarded as pure subject or object. He

explained his philosophy largely through living experience such as seeing and

touching as well as artworks such as paintings and films to clarify his theory. In this

regard, film as a ground of the representation of images can be a valuable text to

examine Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. By applying Merleau-Ponty’s

phenomenology to Kaufman’s films, this study hopes to explore the profound

meaning deeply buried under the appearance of images and Kaufman’s thoughts.

ii
 The thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter One introduces the

philosophical context of the mind-body problem and the development of the

relationship between phenomenology and cinema. Chapter Two focuses on

Merleau-Ponty’s concept of body-subject and the notion of flesh and their application

to Kaufman’s film works. Chapter Three investigates the reversibility of carnal

inter-subjectivity as a feature of representation in Kaufman’s films. Chapter Four

examines the representation of embodied subject in hope of finding some alternative

perspectives on the understanding of the self. Chapter Five concludes that film and

philosophy can reciprocally benefit each other through the interdisciplinary study.

Through exploration of the information of body, this study finds an endless yet

meaningful “conversation” between Merleau-Ponty and Kaufman and also believes

that “marriage” of philosophy and film should be very promising.

iii
 Chou 1

Chapter I

Introduction

The movies are peculiarly suited to make manifest the union of

mind and body, mind and the world, and the expression of one
in the order. . . . Therefore, if philosophy is in harmony with
the cinema, if thought and technical effort are heading in the
same direction, it is because the philosopher and the
moviemaker share a certain way of being, a certain view of the
world which belongs to a generation.

-- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Sense and Non-sense 49

Philosophy is often regarded as austere thoughts concerning abstract problems, which is

definitely not as concrete and direct as what is illustrated in the cinema. However, the use of

visual images is also adopted by philosophers as a means of indicative expression to their

philosophical ideas. In this regard, Plato is one of the best representatives who illuminates his

own philosophical position with his vivid portrait of the “Parable of the Cave.” The image

Plato uses to illustrate his philosophical discourse, as Christopher Falzon points out, “serves

as pathway to the understanding of his philosophical thinking” (4). Therefore, the use of films

as a “vehicle” for philosophy brings philosophy itself down to earth when the philosophical

concerns are introduced to daily experience. In “Beyond Mere Illustration: How Films Can

Be Philosophy,” Thomas E. Wartenberg points out that “the last decade has seen significant

growth in the amount of attention that philosophers have paid to film” and “philosophers with

many different interests and specialties are using film as a means to access a broad range of

philosophical topics” (19). One interesting feature of this trend is that even popular films of

Hollywood engage themselves in this recent philosophical activity. As Wartenberg observes:

“Not only has the art film been eclipsed as an avant garde film practice, but contemporary
 Chou 2

philosophic work on film has moved beyond it as well” (Film and Philosophy 140). On this

premise, this study does not only turn to films in order to help illustrate philosophical

concepts in Charlie Kaufman’s screenplays made into films, but also intend to explore a new

way of seeing by means of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical concepts.

Due to his noticeable personal stamp, I would argue that Charlie Kaufman is the

“screenwriter as auteur” in terms of Richard Corliss’s definition. Auteur theory, initially,

holds that it is the director who is ultimately the creative “author” of a film, making the writer

tends to be the least noticeable part of the creative process. However, film critics such as

Corliss believes that screenwriter can also be the true author of a film. American screenwriter

Kaufman proves this assumption. 1 His films are, as Brian Johnson noted, “wildly imagined

that, no matter what the director and actors are up to, keeping up with the plot is like taking a

whitewater ride through the writer’s mind” (43). Kaufman is absolutely qualified to be one of

rare screenwriters whose name can be popularly recognized by audiences.

In this chapter, the background information related to the relationship between

phenomenology and cinema will be reviewed after the statement of problems. Besides, a brief

introduction to the philosophical context of the mind-body problem is to be delivered, and

then followed by the illustration of the development regarding the relationship between

phenomenology and cinema. The basic ideas of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy, as theoretical

approaches of this study, will be introduced in brief. The detailed exposition and definition of

phenomenological terms will remain to be discussed in each chapter, mainly in Chapter Two,

before which Kaufman’s three screenplays will be illustrated with a summarized description.

1
For more examples of “screenwriter as auteur,” see Richard Corliss, The Hollywood Screenwriters: A Film
Comment Book (New York: Avon Books,1972).
 Chou 3

A. Statement of Problems

Highlighting the mind-body problem, Charlie Kaufman’s screenplays made into films

can be located with more profound meanings through a study of Merleau-Ponty’s existential

phenomenology. The central themes of existentialism play a significant part in

Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy. Focusing on the “lived body” to deal with mind-body problem,

he claims that human body is both physical and spiritual, which subverts the conventional

understanding of the central problem of epistemology, the body-mind dualism. Likewise,

using mind-body relationship as a motif in his works, Kaufman actually blurs the binary

opposition of subject/object, reality/fiction, and mind/body. Seeing that they both intend to

subvert the dualism by focusing on human body, I assume Kaufman’s works can be

profoundly analyzed by applying Merleau-Ponty’s concepts regarding body, and meanwhile

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology could be demonstrated by Kaufman’s works as well.

This study intends to be an investigation of Charlie Kaufman’s screenplays made into

films, including Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002), and Eternal Sunshine of

the Spotless Mind (2004). The goal of phenomenology is to turn the experience into the

description through an act of reflection (Sobchack, Carnal Thought xvii). By way of the act

of reflection, the philosophical ideas, fantastically revealed in layers of descriptions, have

been permeated through Kaufman’s screenplays. Through being “in and out of the brain,”

audiences follow the vision or illusions of characters’ point of view, which have been

repeatedly shifted from one person to another in Kaufman’s films. Applying Merleau-Ponty’s

theory of perception to the analysis of Kaufman’s screenplays made into films, this study

intends to examine how these films provide better clarification of Merleau-Ponty’s

phenomenology of perception.
 Chou 4

B. Theoretical Approaches

The philosophy of mind has been a constant core of philosophical concern. With the

extensive inquiry of the mind-body problem, the way how the movement of body and mind

carries out their interaction has become an inextricably controversy since French philosopher

Réne Descartes advocated Mind-Body Dualism in 17th century. Mind-Body Dualism is “the

doctrine that a person is essentially a non-physical mind and contingently a non-mental body”

(Priest 57). Descartes holds that spirit and material are completely two different substances,

while materialism and idealism are two opposite categories of monism, which holds that

spirit and material are of the same arche. 2 Materialism regards a person as a complicated

physical object and all the mental facts are logically dependent on physical facts. On the

contrary, idealism considers that a person is a non-physical mind and all the physical facts are

logically dependent on mental facts (Priest 57).

Both dualism and materialism or idealism are crucially flawed ontology of the person,

as Stephen Priest explains: “Materialism reduces the mental and the subjective to the physical

and objective. Idealism reduces the physical and the objective to the mental and the

subjective” (57). As for dualism, Stephen Priest goes on interpreting that it “seems to capture

both the objective physical facts and the subjective mental facts but leaves wholly

unexplained the relation between them” (57). Regardless of controversial unsettled arguments,

one point that can not be denied is that body and mind sustain an inseparable relationship

between them. With regard to the philosophy of mind, Merleau-Ponty’s major contribution to

philosophy lies in his account of bodily being-in-the-world, which relocated human being in

the world by reconstructing the role of human body in the construction of the world.

Merleau-Ponty’s being-in-the-world contains three essential matters: self, the world and the

other. Toward a fulfillment of the “being-in-the-world,” Merleau-Ponty clearly expresses his

concerns about “the union of mind and body, mind and the world, and the expression of one

2
Namely “origin,” the ancient Greek philosophical notion.
 Chou 5

in the order” (Sense and Non-Sense 49). Moreover, it is also apparently that he supposes that

the movies are the peculiar communication to make manifestation of “being-in-the-world.”

Thus, Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of “body-subject” and “flesh of the world” will be

illustrated by comparing to Charlie Kaufman’s screenplays, particularly in Chapter Two,

including the characteristics of the bodies presented in the films and the examination of the

ambiguous selfhood and identity. Through the description of the experience of “life world” in

Charlie Kaufman’s screenplays, the relationship between reversible perception and the

perceived world is to be examined in Chapter Three. Then, Chapter Four deals with the

cinematic representation of Kaufman’s ultimate concern--the self. By exploring the way

Kaufman represents the visible and invisible worlds on the screen, this study attempts to

examine the metaphysical thoughts embodied by visual images on the basis of

Merleau-Ponty’s visual philosophy.

The “marriage” between philosophy and cinema has been revealing the potentiality, and

yet this relationship today is becoming closer than ever to be a very promising combination.

Regarding the movie as a manifestation of philosophy, film critic Robert Stam expounds:

In postwar France film theory marched hand-in-hand with developments in

philosophical phenomenology, the dominant movement of the period. Following up on

Edmund Husserl, philosophers returned to ‘things themselves’ and their relation to

embodied, intentional consciousness. (Stam 80)

In “The Film and the New Psychology,” Merleau-Ponty considers the phenomenology of the

cinema as a “temporal gestalt” (Sense and Non-Sense 54). 3 Merleau-Ponty names the

dynamic relationship between the subject and its related surroundings “gestalt,” which means

the connection and the interaction of the whole. Furthermore, he applies a synthesis of Gestalt
3
Merleau-Ponty suggests that we can apply the perception of human body in general to the perception of film if
we consider the film as a perceptual object. He believes this point of view could illuminate the nature of the
movies, which should not be regarded as “a sum total of images but a temporal gestalt.” He sees the temporal
gestalt as the configuration of film and argues that this new psychology is supposed to lead to the “best
observations of the aestheticians of the cinema (Sense and Non-Sense 54). For further description of “Gestalt
Theory,” see page 36.
 Chou 6

psychology and existential phenomenology to cinema. Stam explains that it “would provide a

psychological basis for the basic structures of the cinematic experience as a mediated

experience of being-in-the-world” (81). He recounts that Merleau-Ponty observes a kind of

“match” that is “not only between the film medium and the postwar generation but also

between the film and philosophy” (81). Canadian academic Donato Totaro asserts that there

is one particular comment by Merleau-Ponty which foreshadows one of Bazin’s most

important aesthetic and moral credos--the presentation of spatial unity/integrity. According to

Merleau-Ponty, “The joy of art lies in its showing how something takes on meaning--not by

referring to already established and acquired ideas but by the temporal or spatial

arrangements of elements” (Sense and Non-sense 59). Taken together, “the phenomenological

parameters of the cinema as a ‘temporal gestalt’ whose palpable realism was even more exact

than that of the real world itself” (Stam 81).

Inspired partially by phenomenology, as Stam suggests, “the ‘filmologists’ sought to

organized various academic disciplines--sociology, psychology, aesthetics, linguistics,

psychophysiology--around the project of a comprehensive and scientific theory of film” (82).

Stam further enumerates a number of later theorists who built on their Merleau-Ponty-style

phenomenology in his Film Theory: An Introduction--Henri Agel in Le Cinema et le Sacre

(1961), Jean Mitry in his two-volume Esthetique et psychologie du cinema (1963-5), Amadee

Ayfre in Conversion aux images (1964), Jean-Pierre Meunier in his Les Structures de

l’experience filmique (1969), Major Film Theories (1976), Dudley Andrew in “The

Neglected Tradition of Phenomenology in Film” (1978), and Alan Casebier in Film and

Psychology (1991). Stam summarizes these efforts on Merleau-Ponty-style phenomenology

by underlining Vivian Sobchack’s book, “The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film

Experience (1992). Sobchack used Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological interpretation to

suggest that:

The film experience not only represents and reflects upon the prior direct perceptual
 Chou 7

experience of the filmmaker by means of the modes and structures of the direct and

reflective perceptual experience, but also presents the direct and reflective experience

of a perceptual and expressive existence as the film. (9)

The “perceptual” film experience, as Sobcheck notes, contains its expressive purpose

including the representation of the direct experience of the filmmaker and presentation of the

reflective experience of the film. The direct and reflective experience of perception should

favorably be represented by film, whose “way of seeing” is similar to the phenomenological

“way of thinking” to some degree. Accordingly, this study finds that Merleau-Ponty’s

phenomenology can be properly adopted as an approach to appreciate Kaufman’s works.

Inevitably, the success of Kaufman’s screenplays should be attributed to their directors as

well. Without a doubt, film directors’ excellent and creditable techniques play important roles

in the filmic representation of Kaufman’s whimsical ideas by transforming the metaphysical

and obscure concepts into visibly embodied images on the screen. However, to avoid being

carried too far away from the major focus, this study should put its focus on Charlie Kaufman

and his three screenplays, Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002), and Eternal

Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004).

 Chou 8

C. Charlie Kaufman as Auteur

As noted earlier, a screenwriter, rather than a director, can be the true author of a film.

Movie goers would think that “it is Charlie Kaufman’s film” instead of telling the names of

film directors, Spike Jonze or Michel Gondry, even though the two directors are both

acknowledged as acclaimed and respected directors. With reference to the relationship

between director and screenwriter, in 1970, the collaboration between Herman J. Mankiewicz

and Orson Wells on Citizen Kane (1941) can be regarded by Corliss as the most combustible

writer-director combination in Hollywood history. However, the reputation was attributed to

Wells while Mankiewicz’s name was forgotten. He points out that almost everyone chose to

ignore the fact that “they are really the inseparable halves of a work of art” (26).

Regarding the concept of authorship, the most representative dispute is the argument

between proponents of the “director as auteur” led by Andrew Sarris and proponents of the

“screenwriter as auteur” led by Corliss. In The Hollywood Screenwriters, Corliss argues that

“unless he writes his films as well, the Hollywood director is essentially an interpretive artist

who steers the script, the actors, and the camera in the right direction. He is less an architect

than a foreman, less a painter than an illustrator, less a composer than a conductor” (10).

Director Michel Gondry, who directs two films based on Kaufman’s screenplay including

Human Nature (2002) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), pays Kaufman a

high compliment, telling that scripts had to be boring until he read Being John Malkovich.

The reason why he likes most about Kaufman’s scripts is that they do not read like scripts;

rather, they read like really good books. Carl Foreman says: “The screenwriter knows that

there is nothing more ludicrous than a director without a screenplay he can auteur, like a Don

Juan without a penis” (Carliss 33). This metaphor unexpectedly yet appropriately echoes

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, which stresses on being as “flesh” of the world that

interacts with each other in the synergy of organic unity. Being such a “vital organ” as a

symbol, Kaufman indeed plays an important role in “reproducing” the films through the
 Chou 9

synergy with directors. Therefore, it is possible and necessary to treat Kaufman the

screenwriter as an auteur who, in Corliss’s words, “through detailed script indications of

camera placement cutting, and acting styles, virtually ‘directs’ his own films” (19).

Since 1999, there have been five movies whose screenplays were written by Charlie

Kaufman, and all of these movies maintain highly recognizable features of his typical anxiety.

He admits that in a way each of his male character would be a stand-in for him, saying “I do

tend to write a certain kind of guy, and probably a lot of it has to do with who I am and what

my experiences are. It’s the only thing I can really do kind of, um, honestly” (Feld 136). Born

in 1958, Charlie Kaufman studied film and graduated from New York University. After

working in the circulation department of the Star Tribune, Kaufman moved to Los Angeles in

hopes of establishing a career as a writer. Since 1990, he has written many TV scripts for the

offbeat television sitcom Get a Life and worked as both writer and producer. Kaufman

promptly developed his reputation with his initial screenplay Being John Malkovich, which

was originally considered brilliant but “unproducible.” As a matter of fact, the screenplay

aroused quite an attention around Hollywood, but producers were too scared of the story’s

oddness to actually make it. Not until the musician and artist Michael Stipe bought this

screenplay and the noted music video director Spike Jonze was signed on to direct, did Being

John Malkovich have its opportunity to be screened. Being John Malkovich turned out to be

an unforeseen success, and Kaufman won almost every award as a screenwriter in 1999. 4 As

Kaufman suddenly became famous for his whimsicality, in 2002 three films based on his

4
Being John Malkovich was nominated for Best Screenplay in both Academy Award and Golden Globe Award.
Winner of Best Screenplay: Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards, Boston Society of Film Critics
Awards, Chicago Film Critics Association Awards, National Society of Film Critics Awards, USA, Toronto Film
Critics Association Awards, Las Vegas Film Critics Society Awards, Chlotrudis Awards, Writers Guild of
America, USA. Winner of Best Original Screenplay: Online Film Critics Society Awards, BAFTA Awards, San
Diego Film Critics Society Awards, Santa Fe Film Critics Circle Awards. Charlie Kaufman was Screenwriter of
the Year in London Critics Circle Film Awards.
 Chou 10

screenplays were released to theaters: Human Nature, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and

Adaptation. All these three films were nominated when the Nation Board of Review named

Charlie Kaufman Best Screenwriter of 2002. With his highly praised screenplay Eternal

Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kaufman eventually won the “Best Original Screenplay” at

the 77th Annual Academy Awards. His works have been compared with the novels of the

existentialist Kafka or Lewis Carroll’s The Wizard of Oz; however, he insists on replying that

his movie is “about nothing,” which Kaufman craftily responds in various occasions to avoid

being tied down to fixed perspectives by interviewers. “I really don’t have any solutions and I

don’t like movies that do,” said Kaufman in the interview by Sragow, “I want to create

situations that give people something to think about.” Playing with the mind-body problem in

most of his screenplays, Kaufman is apparently fond of indulging himself in depicting

inter-human event through lived experience.

In Being John Malkovich, the character John Horatio Malkovich is starred by the real

actor John Gavin Malkovih. Kaufman lets almost all the characters in the play enter John

Malkovich’s mind, in which the audiences can also catch sight of Kaufman’s fantastic vision

and originality. With the perception of body including visual sensation, audiences are thereby

allowed to follow characters in the movie going in and out of John Malkovich’s head. In

addition to John Malkovich’s head, Kaufman’s head is also available for audiences to go into

in his second screenplay, Adaptation, in spite of the suspicious authenticity. In Adaptation,

the protagonist and narrator, starred by Nicolas Cage, is actually the screenwriter of this

film--Charlie Kaufman himself. Moreover, Kaufman creates a twin brother, also starred by

Nicolas Cage, whose personality and desire are diametrically opposed to each other.

Adaptation, beyond producer’s expectation, turns out to be a story rather about a

screenwriter’s struggle for adapting a book than just an adaptation of a book. Accordingly,

Kaufman’s films force audience to think about the relationship between reality and truth,

telling the truth of his personal journey of adaptation, the truth of the way he sees Orlean, and
 Chou 11

the truth of the process he combines everything together. However, these subjective truths

through Kaufman’s description are actually neither truthful adaptation of Orlean’s book nor

fictional re-presentation of reality. Rather, he collages various aspects of realities to make up

a picture of impression on relative truths. Besides Adaptation, Kaufman keeps audiences

further meditating on the similar issue in Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind, in which most of

the scenes are presented in protagonist’s recollection instead of his real life.

The main character of Being John Malkovich is not John Malkovich but a puppeteer

named Schwartz Craig who does street-corner theater. One day Craig discovers a door in his

office that allows him to enter the head of John Malkovich, who is a famous actor both in this

film and in reality, for fifteen minutes. By entering the portal, Craig can see, hear, and feel

whatever John Malkovich is doing for fifteen minute, and then he falls out by the New Jersey

Turnpike. Craig’s charming and practical co-worker Maxine turns the portal into a small

business by selling each trip for two hundred dollars. Craig is mad about Maxine, but she is

more interested in Craig’s wife, Lotte, however, only when Lotte is inside John Malkovich.

John Malkovich later finds out their invasion of his body and attempts to stop it, but Craig

regards the portal as his success as a puppeteer and he has gradually learned to master John

Malkovich’s body. In the meantime, Dr. Lester, the old boss of Craig’s company, has a dark

secret relating to the portal: He wants Malkovich’s body as a kind of retirement plan, and in

fact his current body was acquired the same way. But his plans have been threatened by

Craig’s full-time possession of Malkovich. In the end, not only Lester but whole crews of

senior friends are all together “reborn” as John Malkovich.

After Being John Malkovich was awarded the best original screenplay of Oscar, Charlie

Kaufman was hired to adapt the book The Orchid Thief to the screen. Written by New Yorker

columnist Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief is a non-fiction book about the history of

collecting orchids, orchid hunters, and the flower itself. Although The Wall Street Journal

praises that Orlean is “a poetic observer” and her book is “a swashbuckling piece of
 Chou 12

reporting” with “visionary passions and fierce obsessions,” the fact remains that the narration

of The Orchid Thief actually lacks of dramatic elements to be adapted into screen. However,

the last thing Kaufman likes to do is to write out some conventional plots like gun fighting,

car chasing, or heart-stirring romance to cater to popular taste. Owing to Kaufman’s

resistance to conventional Hollywood formula, Adaptation turns out to be a movie based on a

true story of a screenwriter called Charlie Kaufman, who endeavors himself to produce a

screenplay for the novel The Orchid Thief. When Kaufman had found that he was unable to

adapt Orlean’s writing about flower to screen successfully, Kaufman decided to write out his

anxiety into the script. On the other hand, the movie also gives account to Orlean’s writing

process as a parallel story line. She interviews the orchid thief John Laroche, who with three

Seminole Indians are arrested on a charge of stealing rare orchids in the Fakahatchee Strand

State Preserve. Orlean was so fascinated by Laroche, and she admits that “he is also the most

moral amoral man” she has ever known (The Orchid Thief 6). Laroche’s enthusiasm for

orchid makes Orlean feel ashamed of her living in a lie; for example, she does not even like

her own job of writing as a report. Presented with stream of consciousness of writer’s

personal experience, Adaptation was originally meant to destroy Hollywood’s best-selling

formula; nevertheless, none of the clichéd formulas is absent in the end--violence, drugs, gun

shots, a man killed in an awful car accident, another eaten by an alligator, and a seemingly

happy ending with epiphany.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is about a desperate guy who enters his own

memory and starts an exile in order to prevent his beautiful memories with his ex-girlfriend

from deletion. The story proceeds with a flashback. Accordingly, in the beginning they do not

realize that respectively they have had each other erased from their memories. One day, Joel

wakes up with emotional emptiness and he feels the impulse of going to the shore instead of

working. After spending a cold day alone on the beach, he meets Clementine on the station

and they are soon attracted to each other. Joel and Clementine do not know that they were
 Chou 13

mate for years in the past. It is Clementine who goes to Lacuna Inc. first in hope of erasing

the heart-broken memories with Joel when their tumultuous relationship ends. Joel is thus

overwhelmed by the fact that his ex-girlfriend Clementine has had her memories with him

erased. Out of desperation, Joel appeals to Lacuna Inc. to erase his memories of Clementine

and then agrees to undergo the procedure as well. During the erasing process, however, Joel

becomes astonished and regretted when details of this memory world begin to disappear.

Fighting for keeping the memories of their moments from vanishing, Joel attempts to escape

the procedure from deep within the recesses of his brain. While his memories are bit by bit

being sent to the Trash Bin Folder of the doctor's computer, Joel starts smuggling Clementine

away into parts of his memory where she does not belong to. Joel grabs Clementine, or at

least the memory of her, and frantically flees to the dark alleys of his mind. Almost

everything we see on the screen only happens in Joel’s recollection as Dr. Howard and his

crew chase him through the maze of his memories. In respect to the finale, film critic Jeffery

Overstreet commends in his review: “The chase is one of the most exhilarating and original

scenes in the history of chase scenes.”

Taken together, Charlie Kaufman, a screenwriter as an auteur, whose screenplays

distinctively take on his personal stamp, is going to be examined by means of his three

screenplays made into films briefly delineated above. By the exposition of Merleau-Ponty’s

thought, this study aims to see in what way Merleau-Ponty’s concept can be illuminated by

appreciation of Charlie Kaufman’s astonishing screenplays, and further provide a different

perspective on cinematic experience with the phenomenological interpretation of

contemporary film studies. It is believed that through an application of Merleau-Ponty’s

phenomenology, the interdisciplinary study between film and philosophy should find a new

and encouraging perspective on each other.

 Chou 14

Chapter II

The In-formation of the Lived-Body 5

We never cease living in the world of perception, but we go

beyond it in critical thought--almost to the point of forgetting
the contribution of perception to our idea of truth.

--Merleau-Ponty, The Primacy of Perception 3

One of the significance of Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to philosophy lies in his

original interpretation of body, which is clearly dissimilar to that of Descartes’.

For Descartes, the body is like a corporal machine of the brain and the mind is what runs the

machine. Unlike Descartes’ soulless account of human body, Merleau-Ponty considers body

not a machine but a living organism by which one is possible to carry out oneself in the world.

For thousands of years, the role of human body, in contrast to the transcendent mind

performing various functions, has often been underestimated by the philosophical tradition

which tends to regard body as simply an object. The anti-body idealism 6 has been so

ingrained in western philosophical tradition that it is difficult for philosophers to appreciate

what capacity and potency the body really has. However, most 20th-century philosophy has

acknowledged that our bodies are not just parts of the world external to our minds. Professor

Simon Blackburn relates: “The nature of our perception of our own bodies, and the place of

our bodies in perceiving other things, has been most resolutely pursued by phenomenologist,

particularly by Merleau-Ponty” (45). Using the subject-body of its lived experience as the

5
According to Merleau-Ponty, perception is a behavior affected not by consciousness but by the body. Such a
body is a lived living body, not as a piece of the physical world. For detailed description, see Part I of
Phenomenology of Perception.
6
Opposite to realism and materialism, idealism posits that ideas are the basis of reality. In brief, physical things
exist only in the sense that they are perceived because all the reality is a product of mind. George Berkeley was
known as the first idealist who defends his “immaterialism” on empiricist ground while Immanuel Kant offers
his argument over “transcendental idealism.” During the nineteen century, American philosophy is dominated by
“absolute idealism” of Hegel and F.H. Bradley.
 Chou 15

basis for thought and consciousness, Merleau-Ponty asserts that our consciousness is not

locked up inside the head; instead, it is inherent in human body. His theory of “body-subject”

emphasizes that body is the primary locus of all human intentionality, and he further proposes

a standpoint for this “carnal thought 7 ”--human beings become aware of the world in a

pre-reflective bodily encounter (Structure of Behavior 188).

On this aspect, Merleau-Ponty points out: “This way of thinking belongs to philosophy;

it is not implied in immediate experience” (188). The distinction between soul and body

which has been accepted as philosophical ground for the epistemology of mind is assumed

and concluded by human beings, as Merleau-Ponty notes, not primarily inherent. When

Merleau-Ponty says “The unity of man has not yet been broken” (188), he means that before

“reflection” human beings have not been divided into mental and physical substances.

Based on Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of “before reflection,” the subjective consciousness of

human beings should not be regarded as either the mental activity or the physical movement;

rather, it should be reconsidered as the “carnal subjectivity,” which is much more closed to

the pre-reflective knowledge in nature. As a result, I propose the way human body function in

Charlie Kaufman’s films takes on certain characteristics identical to Merleau-Ponty’s concept

of body rather than Descartes’. To explore Merleau-Ponty’s extraordinary conception of body

in Kaufman’s films, the “in-formation of the body,” including formation and information, will

be revealed and examined by means of two major themes--“Being as Body-Subject” and

“Being as Flesh of the World.” 8

7
The term is taken from the title of Vivian Sobchack’s book, Carnal Thought: Embodiment and Moving Image
Culture in which all the essays focus on the lived body. Sobchack stresses that this book aims to provide a
description of what Merleau-Ponty puts it: “the animation of the human body” and “the body as the body of the
spirit.” For a detailed account, see Sobchack, Carnal Thought (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: U of California P,
2004): 1-9.
8
Merleau-Ponty makes a shift from the analysis of the “body-subject” in the Phenomenology of Perception to
the concept of the “flesh” in The Visible and the Invisible. The flesh refers not only to the human body-subject,
but also to the corporeal world in which the body-subject exists. With the notion of flesh, Merleau-Ponty shifts
his concern away from the perception of body-subject to focus on the relationship between self and the world,
implying that the world is flesh and human body is the flesh of the world.
 Chou 16

A. Being as Body-Subject 9

Taking Being John Malkovich as a main focus on the discussion of body-subject, the

idea of “being” will be analyzed by “being as a body-subject” since one can only become a

subject through being his/her body. To “be” John Malkovich for a surreal period of fifteen

minutes, one may “enter” John Malkovich’s body through a portal behind the filing cabinet.

This “being” means not only seeing through Malkovich’s eyes but also experiencing the

world through Malkovich’s sense organs. In Being John Malkovich, Kaufman seems to

borrow the idea of “body” from Merleau-Ponty, attempting to present the character John

Malkovich, “neither as a thing, nor as a consciousness” (Phenomenology of Perception 198).

From time to time, John Malkovich is being “entered” by different people in his daily life.

For this reason, the one named Malkovich can not be recognized as merely a bodily

appearance, but a body with varied consciousness of mind.

Being John Malkovich has already attracted the attention of several philosophers. Mary

Litch, in her instructive textbook Philosophy Through Film, employs this film to illustrate

various theories of personal identity, including Same-soul theories holding the spiritual

substance of “Cartesian dualism” and “Physical continuity theory” grounding personal

identity in material substance (67-86). Daniel Shaw, in his “On Being Philosophical and

Being John Malkovich,” comments on Litch’s application of physical continuity theory,

saying that it “seems much simpler and more plausible; what makes us the same identifiable

person on this view is our continuing physical presence over time” (114). However, Shaw

believes that Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman define personal identity “by the will as agent

acting on the body as instrument,” proposing his “explanatory hypothesis”:

The key to being John Malkovich was to be the will behind the actions of the

9
Regarding the concepts of “Being as Body-Subject,” Being John Malkovich is employed to illuminate the idea
of body-subject. Adaptation is to be examined mainly on the intertwining relationship between body-subject and
the world, and Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind is to be surveyed by means of the characteristics of
Merleau-Ponty’s notion of flesh.
 Chou 17

Malkovich vessel. It would actually be a kind of existential theory of personal

identity: we are what we do, and the real identity of Malkovich is defined by what

he does, and by the reasons and values that explain why he chooses to do what he

does. (115)

Focusing his discussion on the concept of identity, Shaw emphasizes that what Malkovich

does define the real identity. 10 Concerning more about the subject than the identity, I suggest

that Shaw’s explanatory hypothesis should be flawless by adding Merleau-Ponty’s view on

body. If we take “the will behind the action” as subject, “the Malkovich vessel” which lives

up to the subjectivity can accordingly corresponds to the subject-body. Hence, this

“subject-body” who carries out various subjects embodied as different characters in the film

is John Malkovich who incarnates these “body-subjects.” In this manner, Kaufman locates a

comparable subject corresponding to Merleau-Ponty’s assertion that mind is inseparable from

our bodily and physically nature. If it were not for the body, human intention can not be

fulfilled, communication with others can not be realized, and subjectivity can not find its

location.

1. Body as a Puppet on the String

As one of the motifs of Being John Malkovich, the “puppet on the string” can be

regarded as an embodied subject communicating as an extension of puppeteer’s body. There

is a scene where Malkovich (with Craig inside his brain) is lecturing on how to manipulate a

puppet and then watching a student trying to make a puppet on the string look sorrowful.

Holding the idea that it is not by thinking of the mind that one can animate the puppet but by

perception of the body, Malkovich appears to be displeased by that student’s heartless

manipulation, saying: “You’re making it weep but you’re not weeping.” Malkovich also says

that any puppetry without affective devotion could be only a vulgar mimicry. What he means

10
With respect of identity, further analysis remains to be explored in Chapter Three.
 Chou 18

is that a puppet could never live out its life unless the puppet becomes an extension of the one

who vitalizes it. Precisely, without perception the puppet would simply remain an object. In

this sense, Merleau-Ponty, in Phenomenology of Perception, states that it is through the body

that we have access to the world; therefore, our body should be conceived as the means of

communication with the world, rather than merely as an object of the world (148).

Furthermore, he believes that the human body has its own way of knowing and this knowing

is not possibly achieved by seeing the world from a distance because human body is part of

situation. Merleau-Ponty explains his notion of body-subject by referring to the perceiver

connected to its background:

For the normal person, every movement has a background, and that the movement

and its background are ‘moments of unique totality.’ The background to the

movement is not a representation associated or linked externally with the

movement itself, but is immanent in the movement, inspiring and sustaining it at

every moment. (Phenomenology of Perception 110)

With reference to body’s involvement with its background, Merleau-Ponty intends to

explicate that one’s body is the background of one’s movement as well. In an essay entitled

“Bodily Knowing: “More Ancient Than Thought 11 ,” Winifred Whelan interprets this idea of

background and then further relates perception to “a precognitive knowledge,” saying “the

subject-body has its own bodily way of knowing and responding to its surroundings which is

not cognitive, nor is it purely a reflexive, involuntary action” (186). Whelan explain that it is

by incorporating the other body of the world and making it part of one’s own body itself that

one’s own body as a body-subject can reach its way of knowing.

In Being John Malkovich, Craig the puppeteer has a monologue about his obsession

with puppetry. Failing to win Maxine’s heart, Craig hides himself in his workshop and works

11
Before its publication in 1994, this article was presented by the author at the Association of Professors and
Researchers in Religious Education Conference in Ft. Worth, November 1993.
 Chou 19

the Maxine puppet and the Craig puppet. Craig impersonates Maxine’s voice to ask the Craig

puppet to tell her why he loves puppetry, the Craig puppet gives the following answer:

“Perhaps it’s the idea of becoming someone else for a little while. Being inside another skin.

Moving differently, thinking differently, feeling differently.” With the puppetry, he provides

himself a channel of communication with the world to reveal his uncompleted self-expression.

Craig expresses himself by controlling the puppeteers with strings because it is only through

such “body-object” can he present himself. Relating to the idea of body-subject,

Merleau-Ponty suggests that we are our bodies and he further enriches the concept of body by

its inherent capacity of carnal consciousness. In Being John Malkovich, Craig the puppeteer

himself accounts for the Craig puppet itself. However, it does not mean that Craig’s body is

equal to an object available to read-through. Actually, Merleau-Ponty tries to distinguish

physical objects from intentional objects, and indicates that one’s body is distinguishable

from the table or the lamp and one “can turn away from the latter” seeing that one’s body is

“constantly perceived” (Phenomenology of Perception 90). He, again, gives a brief account of

the object: “Its presence is such that it entails a possible absence” (90). In other words, one’s

own body is not an object since it can not be moved away from oneself while an object can

ultimately disappear from my field of vision. On the basis of Merleau-Ponty’s distinction

between body and object, Craig the puppet can be taken as Craig the puppeteer, however,

only when Craig is holding the strings on his hands. As Malkovich notes, “only if the puppet

becomes the extension of you,” and it echoes Merleau-Ponty’s idea in “Synthesis of One’s

Own Body,” referring to the metaphor of blind man who carries a stick:

Once the stick has become a familiar instrument, the world of feelable things

recedes and now begins, not at the outer skin of the hand, but at the end of the

stick. . . . The pressures on the hand and the stick are no longer given; the stick is

no longer an object perceived by the blind man, but an instrument with which he

perceives. It is a bodily auxiliary, an extension of the bodily synthesis

 Chou 20

(Phenomenology of Perception 152).

Because phenomenology centers on descriptions not explanation, Merleau-Ponty describes

the experience of one’s own body to offer a distinct difference from the experience of any

other object in the world; or rather, he describes complicated synthesis of what he designates

as a body. Like the stick itself in this instance, the Craig puppet as an extension of the body is

not an object but a means by which a human being can communicate and interact with the

world.

2. Self as a Meaningful Core

Making a detailed description of the spatiality of one’s own body, Merleau-Ponty

defines that the bodily experience forces human beings to acknowledge an “imposition of

meaning” because body is a “meaningful core” which exists in a condition of being

“susceptible to disease” (147). Being an embodied subject, human body carrying its lived

experience in the world takes up both space and time. Therefore, the meaning of objects can

be grasped by an embodied subject through perception of the subject-body. In this regard,

Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation takes on this synthesis of body and its surrounding as the

major motif of the film. After numerous false starts of adapting Susan Orlean’s book The

Orchid Thief for screen, Kaufman’s solution is to write himself into the screenplay. Namely,

Kaufman inserts his own writing predicament into Orlean’s true story, and yet the whole story

is still about a flower. Kaufman, agitated and humiliated, has a voice-over after he declines

editor’s invitation to meet Orlean:

Who am I kidding? This is not Susan Orlean’s story. I have no connection with her.

I can’t even meet her. I can’t meet anyone. I have no understanding of anything

outside of my own panic and self-loathing and pathetic, little existence. It’s like

the only thing I’m actually qualified to write about is myself and my own self.

Blaming himself for being “self-indulgent,” “narcissistic,” and “solipsistic,” Kaufman also
 Chou 21

compares himself to Ourobouros, a kind of snake that swallows its own tail. With such an

indulgence in the screenplay, Kaufman points out an important idea of phenomenological

concern; that is, one can not understand anything outside oneself because one person’s

understanding of the others is actually from a perspective of one’s own. Relating to the

subject involved with the world, Merleau-Ponty refers to the deep connection between the

subject and the world when he touches upon subjectivity. He suggests that “this blind

adherence to the world” is saturated with human being’s every perception, and “is resumed at

every instant” (Phenomenology of Perception 254). In the very beginning of the film, when

opening credits are playing at the bottom of a black screen, Kaufman has a succession of

voice-over presented as stream of consciousness:

Do I have an original thought in my head? My bald head? Maybe if I were happier,

my hair wouldn’t be falling out. Life is short. I need to make the most of it. Today

is the first day of the rest of my life. . . . I’m walking cliché. I really need to go to

the doctor and have my leg checked. There’s something wrong. . . . Why should I

be made to feel I have to apologize for my existence? Maybe it’s my brain

chemistry. Maybe that’s what’s wrong with me--bad chemistry. All my problems

and anxiety can be reduced to a chemical imbalance or some kind of misfiring

synapses. I need to get help for that. But I’ll still be ugly, though. Nothing’s gonna

change that. (Adaptation 2002)

These self-absorbed murmuring stream of consciousness shows that all he concerns about is

his own self-doubt existence, which may “resume at every instant” like Merleau-Ponty’s

illustration of the relationship between subject and the world. By asking himself “do I have

an original thought in my head,” Kaufman reveals his awareness of human being unceasingly

correlating and interacting with each other. Being an “adapter,” Kaufman illustrates his

involvement in the process of adaptation, including the adaptation of a book and adaptation

of himself to the world, where he is perceived by the other characters and perceiving the
 Chou 22

world as well.

Accordingly, Kaufman’s implanting into the context of Adaptation can be viewed as

demonstrative of one’s bodily being in the world by way of the representation of carnal

inter-subjectivity, making “a communication with the world more ancient than thought,” a

term used by Merleau-Ponty in Phenomenology of Perception (254).

3. Irresistible Impulse of the Body

The memory-removal technology in the film does not exactly allow those characters

who have undergone the brainwashing procedures to obtain the “eternal sunshine” referred in

the title. On the contrary, there’s a sense of tragedy in Joel’s realization while he has been in

the middle of the procedure refusing to lose the memory of Clementine. Knowing that after

Joel’s heartbreaking memory is erased he will be eventually ignorant of the loss, viewers

would compassionate Joel’s sadness so much that the gloomy tone of the film is not a bit

released. Even worse, his sadness turns into “the awareness of the future ignorance,” as film

critic Christopher Grau puts it, that he will soon realizes that “to be clueless is no cause for

celebration” (120). For example, Dr. Howard explains the memory-removal procedure to Joel:

“Technically, the procedure itself is a brain damage, but on a par with a night of heavy

drinking. Nothing you’ll miss.” With the aid of the memory removal, the heartbreaking

memory is literally erased from mind; however, it is by no means flawless. At least, the three

main characters, Clementine, Joel and Mary, prove that even if the “processed spotless mind”

can be achieved by eliminating the unbearable memory, the unnamable heartache and sense

of loss they consciously feel still remain unbearable. Accordingly, memory is not only

inscribed upon one’s mind but also perceived by one’s whole body, which appropriately

explains how the unspeakably sense of sadness persists throughout the film.

The incomplete memory-removal procedure results from its neglect of body perception

since the memory is not simply kept in rational thoughts, or rather, it should be learned by the
 Chou 23

carnal thoughts of the lived body. Therefore, while certain thoughts are technically removed

from the mind, certain perception could still remains because things are memorized when one

lived through certain experience with one’s body as subject. As noted in the previous

exposition, Merleau-Ponty disagrees with the division of mind and body, suggesting that

“[t]he unity of man has not yet been broken; the body has not yet been stripped of human

predicates; it has not yet become a machine; and the soul has not yet been defined as

existence for-itself” (Structure of Behavior 188). He argues that the distinction of the mental

and physical is but an outcome of reflection upon experience. In this regard, holding the idea

of the memory as a purely mental activity is unfit for both Merleau-Ponty and Kaufman.

Stephen Priest’s interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s concept regarding the body provides an

understanding of body-subject which is also applicable to Kaufman’s film: “The body is a

subject: the subject of its own action, experience and acts of thinking” (67).

Throughout the film, the irresistible impulse of the body invisibly dominates the

characters’ ways of action and even their acts of thinking. As in a dream-up waking in a

morning after erasing sad memory, Joel suddenly runs out of the train bound for the direction

of his office. He decides to take a train out to Montauk, where he first met Clementine, but

actually he has no idea of this sudden decision. Coincidently, he meets the memory-lost

Clementine again, who is troubled by unknown anxiety as well. In addition, the receptionist

Mary, whose memory about her affair with Dr. Howard has also been removed by her own

decision, is once again obsessed with Dr. Howard. While saying “I’ve loved you for a very

long time,” Mary has not yet realized that it is longer than she thought. What she says and

what she does seem to be overpowering beyond her self-control because of the inherent

spontaneous “carnal thoughts.” Such carnal thoughts, often articulated by the irresistible

libidinal impulse, is also illustrated throughout Adaptation in which Kaufman manages

himself to negotiate for a compromise with his own self-constraint. In Eternal Sunshine of

Spotless Mind, the characters can no longer be restrained but swayed or induced by the
 Chou 24

irresistible urges. Such an irresistible impulse of the body-subject in the film reinforces what

Merleau-Ponty keeps reminding us: “It is not a part of pre-reflective common sense to think

of one’s soul as inside one’s body, ‘nor does it put the soul in the body as the pilot in his

ship’” (Structure of Behavior 188).

 Chou 25

B. Being as Flesh of the World 12

In his last work The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty introduces the notion of

“flesh” to substitute for the “body-subject” adopted in his former works to reach a further

interpretation of the “lived body”, 13 suggesting that the flesh is not material or spiritual

matter, nor “a representation for a mind” (139). He believes that the flesh is “a sort of

incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being” (139).

In this sense, he assumes that the flesh is “an element of Being” (139) based on his

interpretation of the flesh--“the presence of the world is precisely the presence of its flesh to

my flesh” (127). Merleau-Ponty further explains the notion of flesh and its interrelation with

the world:

That means that my body is made of the same flesh as the world (it is a perceived),

and moreover that this flesh of my body is shared by the world, the world reflects

it, encroaches upon it and it encroaches upon the world (the felt [senti] at the same

time the culmination of subjectivity and the culmination of materiality). They are

in a relation of transgression or of overlapping. (The Visible and the Invisible

248)

When Merleau-Ponty says “this flesh of my body is shared by the world,” he means that

one’s body and the world are both perceiving and perceived. He posits the flesh of one’s body

12
Merleau-Ponty holds that human beings must be “primordially” seen as immersed in a world whose contours
and articulation are themselves a function of the “meaning-giving projects.” Heidegger’s characterization of
human being challenges the view held by Descartes, who “thinks” things logically independent of a world of
material substances. According to Heidegger’s interpretation of “Being-in-the-world,” human being can not be
understood apart from a world; in chorus, the world is only appreciable as human beings are “in” its context.
With the notion of flesh, Merleau-Ponty makes an allusion to the characteristics of world and its contents,
stressing on the intimate relationship with one another. For Merleau-Ponty, flesh is not presented in opposition
either to the mind or to the world, but as an element, much as air and water are elements. Thus, I use the title of
this section to imply human as “being-flesh-in-the-world.” For basic information about Merleau-Ponty, see
Robert Bernasconi, “Merleau-Ponty, Maurice” The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. (Oxford University Press
2005). Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Providence University. 29 July 2006
<http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t116.e1580> For more
information regarding “Being-in-the-world,” see H. L. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: Commentary on
Heidegger’s Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, Mass., 1991) and M. Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. J.
Macquarrie and E. Robinson (Oxford, 1962).
13
See footnote 8 on page 15.
 Chou 26

and the flesh of the world in an “intertwining” relation in which they interfere and overlap

with each other. With the notion of flesh, Merleau-Ponty indeed positively seeks to

rearticulate the intertwining relationship between subject and object, self and world, among

various other dualisms. Focused on the idea of flesh, I will explain where and how

Kaufman’s films, to a large degree, meet Merleau-Ponty’s basic concept of flesh.

1. Openness in John Malkovich

John Malkovich has an Achilles’ heel in his head, which is actually a metaphysical

portal, and this portal is a best demonstration to explicate Merleau-Ponty’s concept of flesh of

the world. Having an openness to the body, Malkovich the body-subject can be therefore

taken as not an isolated subject but an inter-subjectivity open to the world. Thus, this

openness reflects the fact that to be connected with the body of the world requires one’s body

to be engaged in the world as if the world was one’s own body (Phenomenology of

Perception 148). Concerning the idea that “the thing is inseparable from a person perceiving

it,” Merleau-Ponty says:

To this extent, every perception is a communication or a communion, the taking

up or completion by us of some extraneous intention or, on the other hand, the

complete expression outside ourselves of our perceptual powers and a coition, so

to speak, of our body with things. (Phenomenology of Perception 320)

In the passage above, Merleau-Ponty indicates that human being would experience a certain

union with the world. As Gary Brent Madison explains in his The phenomenology of

Merleau-Ponty: A Search for the Limits of Consciousness, the subject is rooted in

Merleau-Ponty’s body and “finally in the world which is quite literally his homeland, the

ground of his existence. The subject irrupts in the midst of the world and never ceases to be

situated in it” (69). In other words, this implies that human body has certain openness to the

world. Based on the idea of openness of one’s body, Being John Malkovich coincidentally
 Chou 27

echoes what Merleau-Ponty calls “coition” with the world. Having a portal as openness,

Malkovich’s body is entered by a group of people. “It’s like that he is having a vagina,” says

Lotte, who is fascinated with this unusual experience of penetrating into a man. There is a

paradoxical conversation between Lotte and Craig in regard to her reaction to her fascination

with being a man:

Lotte: All the sudden everything makes sense. I knew who I was.

Craig: You weren’t you. You were John Malkovich.

Lotte: I was, wasn’t I? (tickled)

For Merleau-Ponty, body-subject and the perceptible world are co-constituted and share in

the flesh which grounds body-subject in a primordial reversibility with the other body-subject

so as to allow intersubjectivity. On the basis of reversibility, the reversible sense of being

perceived and perceiving of Lotte allows her to comprehend Malkovich not only as

“body-object” but also as a body-subject, which she refers to her own subject. As

Merleau-Ponty puts it:

I experience my own body as the power of adopting certain forms of behavior and

a certain world, and I am given to myself merely as a hold upon the world: now, it

is precisely my body which perceives the body of another person, and discovers in

that other’s body a miraculous prolongation of my own intentions, a familiar way

of dealing with the world. Henceforth, as the parts of my body together comprise a

system, so my body and the other person’s are one whole, two sides of one and the

same phenomenon, and the anonymous existence of which my body is the same

ever-renewed trace henceforth inhabits both bodies simultaneously.

(Phenomenology of Perception 353-4)

When Lotte temporally inhabits inside Malkovich’s body, not only do their bodies overlap

with each other but their intentionality also inseparably intertwine as one whole. Attracted to

Maxine, Lotte in Makovich’s body, being “two sides of one” makes Malkovich accept
 Chou 28

Maxine’s invitation to a dinner. Saying “I didn’t think I was going to come, but I felt oddly

compelled,” Malkovich appears to be an “anonymous existence” whose ever-renewed trace

of consciousness is shared by both bodies simultaneously. In contrast to Malkovich, Lotte

presents a conscious subject to represent the phenomenon of reversible body-subject, saying

“she’s beautiful. The way she’s looking at me. At him. At us”.

2. Journey to the Reduction

Puzzling over a better start of his screenplay, Kaufman launches out his script writing

by asking how the flower gets here, and then he is suddenly inspired by Charles Darwin’s

voice-over: “I should infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever

lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form into which life was first

breathed.” Therefore, Kaufman finally decides the theme of Adaptation and talks to his tape

recorder loudly:

It’s a journey of evolution. Adaptation. The journey of we all take. A journey that

unites each and every one of us. Darwin writes that we all come from the very

first single cell organism . . . Yet here I am . . . And there’s Laroche . . . And

there’s Orlean . . . And there’s the ghost orchid . . . All trapped in our own bodies,

in moments in history. That’s it. That’s what I need to do. Tie all of history

together!

The idea of “all trapped in our bodies” implicates Kaufman’s intention to stress on both the

substantial human body and its inseparable involvement in history. Kaufman’s effort to trace

back the history of being suitably demonstrates the process of phenomenological description,

which focuses on the conscious experience of phenomena of the embodied subject. For this,

Vivian Sobchack points out that phenomenological description

returns us to the speaking subject who, from the first, is engaged in expressive acts

that literally and figuratively “lend interest” to that “acquired fortune” by drawing
 Chou 29

upon it and investing it in a particular, personal existence. The embodied speaking

subject speaks not to substitute for being or for a loss or lack of being, but rather

to extend being and its projects, to embody being’s excess beyond the discrete

situation of its body. (The Address of the Eye 44)

The moment that experience is reflected upon in the process of phenomenological description,

and consciousness is also reflected upon in the phenomenological reduction, which thus leads

to “the location of the prereflective source of the ‘qualified essence’ or invariant theme of the

phenomenon in existence” (45). As Sobchack notes that the location of essence here “is not

the end but the means,” Kaufman’s reverse journey of evolution finds himself an essence as a

meaningful core for his description. Chattering on and on about this writing predicament,

Kaufman actually manages to take advantage of description as the means of his adaptation,

probably both for the screen and himself. On the expression of personal experience,

Merleau-Ponty remarks:

It is the function of language to make essences exist in a separation, which is

actually only apparent since they still repose on the antepredicative life of

consciousness. In the silence of the original consciousness here appear not only

the meanings of words but also the meaning of things, that primary core of

signification around which acts of denomination and expression are organized.

(Phenomenology of Perception 65)

Besides phenomenological description, Kaufman centers a lot of concern on his own

existence. Since his own body is the display of his subjectivity and his location in the world,

Kauman’s writing course manifests that it is only through the body that a subject is able to

face the object, the other bodies of the world. Nevertheless, Merleau-Ponty reminds us to tell

the distinctness between one’s body as a body-subject and the other objects: “He who looks

must not himself be foreign to the world he looks at” (The Visible and the Invisible 134).

Accordingly, the body-subjects and embodied objects are thus reversible to each other. In this
 Chou 30

regard, Amelia Jones delicately provides an annotation which could clarify this abstraction,

she remarks that flesh

is definitely not a determinable, impermeable border between the self and the world

(or the self and the other) that fixes this self in a final way. As a physical membrane

that sheds and reconstitutes itself continually, the flesh is never always the same

material but always a contour in process; the flesh exists provisionally both as

permeable, shifting physical perimeter, a limbic surround of virtual containment,

and as the visible trace of the human body (whose contours are never stable in one’s

own or an other’s visual field). Metaphorically, as well as materially, the flesh is an

envelope, a “limit” inscribing the juncture between inside and outside but also the

site of their joining. (207)

On account of the permeable flesh, self and other as well as self and the world are “always a

contour in process.” In this manner, the human body is accordingly accessible to be a variant

of the flesh. At the end of Adaptation, on the black screen, several lines of white caption are

shown as a quote from Donald Kaufman’s script, The Three 14 :

We’re all one thing, Lieutenant. That’s what I’ve come to realize. Like cells in a

body. ‘Cept we can’t see each other. The way fish can’t see the ocean. And so we

envy each other. Hurt each other. Hate each other. How silly is that? A heart cell

hating a lung cell. – Cassie from The Three

The Three is a screenplay about a serial killer with a multiple personality disorder. Donald

told Charlie 15 that he put a chase sequence in which the killer flees on horseback with the girl

while the cop is chasing after them on a motorcycle, and the killer, the girl, and the cop are all

one person. In response to Donald’s request, Charlie a carelessly offers a suggestion of “a

14
In Adaptation, “The Three” is a screenplay written by Donald Kaufman, Charlie Kaufman’s fictional twin
brother, who is very opposite to Charlie in Adaptation. Donald takes Robert McKee’s famous Hollywood
screenwriting course and writes this screenplay which exactly caters to the taste of Hollywood.
15
In order to distinguish Charlie Kaufman in real life and the fictional Charlie Kaufman in film, hereafter I
would use Charlie to indicate the fictional character and Kaufman the real author.
 Chou 31

cool way to kill people:” “The killer’s a literature professor. He cuts off little chunks from his

victim’s bodies until they die. He calls himself “The Deconstructionist.” Donald adopts it

immediately and changes it a little by letting the killer cut off body pieces and make his

victims eat them. As Cassie’s lines reveal, all these characters are all one thing except they

can not see each other. The metaphor of fish and ocean appropriately reflects

Merleau-Ponty’s view on universe as one great mass of flesh holding that “our body is not

primarily in the space: it is of it” (Phenomenology of Perception 148). When it relates to

ocean, it does not simply implicate a large body of water; to be precise, all the organism and

marine resources are not supposed to be excluded from the conception of ocean. Likewise,

the lung cell and the heart cell of the body capably demonstrate the idea of all being is part of

the same flesh. It exactly clarifies Merleau-Ponty’s explication: “To be a body, is to be tied to

a certain world” (148).

Besides The Three, the idea of “we’re all one thing” is presented in the other ways as

well. Donald Kaufman, in opposition to his twin brother Charlie Kaufman in every respect,

becomes one with Charlie after Donald is killed in a car crash. Their unity is presented by the

completion of Kaufman’s screenplay, which mixes Donald’s clichéd plots catering to popular

taste and Charlie’s originality of storytelling. The ending song, Happy Together, which

Donald has proposed to put into his script The Three, turns out to emerge as a theme song in

Charlie’s Adaptation. The song also implies Kaufman’s intension to integrate everything into

oneness, one concept. Susan Orlean’s voice-over articulates Kaufman’s intention as well:

There are too many ideas and things and people. Too many directions to go. I was

starting to believe the reason it matters to care passionately about something is

that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. . . . Just whittle it down.

Focus on one thing in the story. Just find the one thing that you care passionately

about . . . then write about that.

Kaufman indeed whittles his screenplay a “manageable size” by focusing on one thing that he
 Chou 32

cares passionately about--himself, who he believes is the only thing he is qualified to write

about. Stretching out from the “meaningful core” (147), Kaufman presents all the characters

and arrangement of the film exactly as Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the body as a theory of

perception--“Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps the visible

spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a

system” (Phenomenology of Perception 203).

3. Inside and Outside

Writing a film--Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind--about rescuing memories from

being deleted, Kaufman, in an interview, recalls the biggest problem to be contemplated was

how to “have somebody having memories erased, but still be cognizant of the memories that

were erased so that there’s some kind of flow to the story” (Feld, “Q & A with Charlie

Kaufman” 133). Kaufman describes that originally he thought about the idea of having two

Joels, one who’s completely in the memories and the other is completely out of the memories.

But the solution that Kaufman finally came up with was that Joel would go in and out. “The

memory would be happening, and then he would catch himself in the memory” (133). In

doing so, Kaufman discards the distinction between inside and outside, the fundamental

determinations from a Cartesian point of view. Since Descartes divided mind and body, the

subjective and the objective, modern thought has been an interminable debate between

realism and idealism. Beyond those who attempt to resolve the one sidedness by means of

dialectic, Merleau-Ponty does not intend to accommodate either transcendental or empirical

philosophy. He argues that those unresolved dualisms which divide a single flesh still remain

a mistaken abstraction. He tries to clarify his position: “What we have to understand is that

there is no dialectical reversal from one of these views to the other; we do not have to

reassemble them into a synthesis; they are two aspects of the reversibility which is the

ultimate truth” (The Visible and the Invisible 155).

 Chou 33

With the notion of flesh, which “emerges in Merleau-Ponty’s thought as the positive

outcome of a lifelong intellectual struggle against Cartesianism,” Richard A. Cohen believes

that “Merleau-Ponty succeeds where others failed to overcome modernity” (278). In his

article “Merleau-Ponty, The Flesh, and Foucault,” Cohen offers his detailed reading of flesh

which emerges as a keynote in The Visible and the Invisible. To articulate Merleau-Ponty’s

notion of the flesh, Cohen proposes the concept of flesh can be well understood in terms of

four primary and interrelated characteristics: reversibility, transitivity, style, and indirection

(279). Here the focus will be the discussion of the devise of reversibility and its

representation in this film.

The story is structured in a circle. It starts and ends with exactly the same episode, Joel

and Clementine’s first encounter, leaving audience with the feeling that the action could

endlessly repeat itself. Brian D. Johnson comments that “Kaufman designs a Mobius strip

narrative tied to an outlandish conceit” (43). Coincidentally, when Cohen borrows the images

from topology to illustrate the reversibility of the flesh, he also relates to Mobius strip:

To follow the contours of a Mobuis strip or a Klein bottle is to move from “inside”

to “outside” or from “outside” to “inside” in one continuous motion. Insides turn

into outside and vice versa. At best these discriminations are provisional and relative.

For Merleau-Ponty this perplexing mobility comes not from some inattention or

trick: it is the norm. It is, to steal a phrase, the way of all flesh. (280)

Being in and out of his memory, Joel is in a coma physically but consciously rescuing his

losing memory inside and watching his body under procedure outside. In view of “way of all

flesh” stressed by Merleau-Ponty, Joel’s physical perception and his mental activity

compound into transitional flesh, like John Malkovich’s body with openness, affecting each

other simultaneously. In addition to the transformation of Joel and his memory, Kaufman

talks about the relationship between lovers in real life: “For the most part, you’re constructing

the person. Or a great deal of who they are” (135). Kaufman emphasizes that Clementine is
 Chou 34

not really in the movie very much, and “almost everything you see about Clementine is Joel,

really” (135). Therefore, the audiences do not really know what their relationship is because

what Joel thinks about their relationship is the only thing that can be learned in the film. In

the montage of decaying memories, Joel arrives at a decayed version of his first meeting with

Dr. Howard in Lacuna Inc., yelling at him to stop erasing Clementine. Dr. Howard replies:

“I’m just something you’re imaging, Joel. What can I do from here? I’m in your head, too.

I’m you.” To be precise, not only the recollection of Clementine or the conversation with Dr.

Howard but also all the conversations in Joel’s memory is actually his talking with

“himselves.” 16 Concerning the reversibility of flesh in Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind,

Merleau-Ponty’s expression in terms of vision may provide a further speculation upon the

relationship between self and the others in the world:

He who looks must not himself be foreign to the world that he looks at. As soon as I

see, it is necessary that the vision be doubled with a complementary vision or with

another vision: myself seen from without, such as another would see me, installed in

the midst of the visible, occupied in considering it from a certain spot (The Visible

and the Invisible 134).

In brief, the subjective activity of visual possession would be objectified while being

occupied by the object because this object becomes a subjective force to the seeing subject by

catching this seeing subject’s eyes on itself at the seeing-seen moment. In Sobchack’s words,

“that makes possible both a visible possession” (Carnal Thought 143). Besides the relation

between self and other, reversibility, as a rule existing in the cinematic experience of audience,

can be adopted to explain phenomena of relationship between subject and object. As

Merleau-Ponty interprets that the modes of thought actually take on the quality that “[w]hat is

inside is also outside” (Sense and Non-Sense 59).

16
With regard to the issue of intertwining “selves,” it will be particularly examined in the next chapter.
 Chou 35

Chapter III

The Reversibility of the Life World

Charlie Kaufman is an old-fashioned Modernist. He writes in

the palaeo-avant-garde tradition that runs from the dream plays
of Strindberg and inner monologues of Proust through the
tortured identities in Pirandello and the paranoia of Kafka to
the rush of subjectivities in Wolfe, Joyce, Faulkner, Beckett,
and Bergman--that grand twentieth-century preoccupation with
the Self.

--McKee, “Critical Commentary” 131 17

Taking the microcosm in film as a miniature life world, this chapter aims at the features

of intertwining relationships and their indeterminacy presented in Kaufman’s works.

Indeterminacy, as a distinctive feature of Kaufman’s works, permeates through the plots, the

characters, and even the space and time arrangement. Owing to its definition, the term

“indeterminacy” might naturally plainly lead to the expression of post-modernity, referring to

postmodern characteristics such as ambiguities, uncertainty, displacements, incompleteness,

and undecided fluidity. However, Robert McKee paradoxically articulates that Kaufman is

“an old-fashioned Modernist” as the topic sentence of his critical commentary on Charlie

Kaufman’s Adaptation. To understand this equivocal utterance, the “collage” of names of

these modernists listed implicitly connotes the reverse of McKee’s words. Relating to the

skill of “allusion” as a form of indispensable expression adopted in Proust’s and Joyce’s

works, Lyotard has already remarked in “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism,”

17
Robert McKee wrote a critical commentary for Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation, whom Kaufman also writes
into as one of the character in this film. McKee teaches his famous “Story Seminar” class in Los Angeles, New
York, London, Paris, Rome, and other film capitals around the world. As a former Fulbright scholar, he has
written numerous television and feature films and won the prestigious 1999 International Moving Image Book
Award for his bestselling book Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting.
 Chou 36

implying that the works of Marcel Proust 18 and the works of James Joyce 19 “both allude to

something which does not allow itself to be made present” (Postmodern Condition 80). Since

“a work can become modern only if it is first postmodern,” according to Lyotard,

“postmodernism thus understood is not modernism at its end but in the nascent state, and this

state is constant” (80). Correspondingly, McKee also characterizes Kaufman’s style with

regard to postmodernism:

Although he may use the disorienting techniques of Postmodernism, he draws

upon an older, deeper creed. When he plays with randomness and unreliable

realities, when he springs the fantasized into the secular, when he fragments time

and space, he doesn’t use these devices to express Postmodernism’s indifference

to the serious or its facetious scorning of sense and values. (131)

What McKee intends to convey is not to negate the postmodern techniques but to stress that

Kaufman is exactly like those “luminaries of Modern” since he still believes that story has

certain meaning (131). Likewise, Merleau-Ponty has been involved in various dialogues of

postmodern thought 20 inasmuch as his attempt to overcome modern dualism. However, to

stick to the ambiguity of his unique philosophical perspective, Merleau-Ponty’s thought

should not fall into either a modernist or postmodernist side. Under the similar consideration,

Kaufman’s writing style might be seriously regarded as either “postmodern modernity” or

“modern postmodernism.”

The intertwining coexistence of phenomenological realities presented in films will still

be examined in light of Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “reversibility” on the whole.

18
Marcel Proust (1871-1922) was a French novelist, essayist and critic, best known as the author of In Search of
Lost Time, which was begun in 1909 and finished just before his death.
19
James Joyce (1882-1941) was a Irish writer and poet, widely considered to be one of the most influential
writers of the 20th century. He is best known for his short story collection Dubliners (1914), and his novels A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), and Ulysses (1922).
20
See Gary B. Madison, “Merleau-Ponty and Postmodernity,” The Hermeneutics of Postmodernity: Figures and
Themes, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988).
 Chou 37

Reversibility is the key concept of Merleau-Ponty’s existential theory in his later stage. A

Japanese critic Kiyokazu Washida 21 even stresses on the significance of reversibility as

essence of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy by showing the term “reversibility” on his book

title--Merleau-Ponty: Reversibility. Kiyokazu interprets the concept of reversibility by

relating it to “figure reversible,” a term derived from Gestalt theory. 22 As noted in Chapter

One, Merleau-Ponty considers the phenomenology of the cinema as a “temporal gestalt”

(Sense and Non-Sense 54). Gestalt theory implies that in viewing the whole, the cognitive

process takes place by means of comprehending the parts to realizing the whole. Holding the

idea that through perception a cognitive picture would be accordingly shaped in human mind,

this cognitive picture based on gestalt theory can be therefore compared to filmic presentation

of image juxtaposition. Although Merleau-Ponty never devoted himself to cinema,

highlighting on the intertwining flesh of the world, his later works could be applicably

viewed as an ideal representative in cinema’s aesthetics by mainly taking the visible and the

tangible for instances. Seeing the characteristic of flesh as an ultimate notion of his

philosophy, Merleau-Ponty writes about the reversibility in terms of “touching:”

It is time to emphasize that it is a reversibility always imminent and never realized

in fact. My left hand is always on the verge of touching my right hand touching the

things, but I never reach coincidence; the coincidence eclipses at the moment of

realization, and one of two things always occurs: either my right hand really passes

over to the rank of touched, but then its hold on the world is interrupted; or it retains

its hold on the world, but then I do not really touch it--my right hand touching, I

21
Kiyokazu Washida is a philosophy professor of Osaka University in Japan. In 1994, he published an
instructional book Dictionary of Phenomenology with the other three editors, Kinda Hajime, Noe Keiichi, and
Murata Junichi.
22
The word “gestalt” indicates that a pattern of elements so unified as a whole that it can not be described
merely as a sum of its parts, and Gestalt theory holds the principle that the whole is greater than the sum of its
parts. For a detailed description, see Petermann’s The gestalt theory and the problem of configuration (1985) or
Yontef’s Awareness, dialogue and process: Essays on Gestalt therapy (1993).
 Chou 38

palpate with my left hand only its outer covering. (The Visible and the Invisible

148)

In other words, while one hand is touching the other hand, the hand touching is either subject

or object and the hand touched is either object or subject. Subject and object are not two

opposite domains to be somehow united, but both aspects of the same flesh. With the idea of

“reversibility,” the intertwining coexistence of convertible beings in the world is to be

observed based on the interpenetrated reality and imagination and the ambiguous identity of

self and others.

 Chou 39

A. The Transitional Body

In Being John Malkovich, characters are eager to transform due to their stifling in their

own skins, weary of an indescribable emptiness. McKee notes, “characters suffer a

claustrophobia of identity” (131). They constantly think of shifting their identity to someone

else. Therefore, at first the protagonist hides behind his puppets and then even becomes John

Malkovich. Being an actor as his occupation in real life, Malkovich has to play various

characters mainly on the stages and sometimes on films. With status as a well-known

celebrity, however, Malkovich is repeatedly informed that no one in the film can think of a

single movie he has made. In this regard, the theme of shifting identities is intensified as well

as obscured by John Malkovich the actor due to his fame as a stereotype of his personality

which is easily misunderstood. In addition to the changeable selfhood, the film reveals

characters’ self-searching attempt concerning their ambiguous self. Though this ambiguous

self, as Merleau-Ponty notes, is “which he never finished exploring--the place of all

obscurities, the mystery of all mysteries, and something like an ultimate truth” (Signs 198).

1. Being a Synchronic Perceiver with John Malkovich

The human struggle for recognition of self-consciousness in Being John Malkovich is

signified by the existence of the portal. The issue of the metaphysical portal as an openness to

the flesh of Malkovich has been discussed in Chapter Two. Concerning the way how the

portal originated and how particular individuals are chosen by Dr. Lester as vessels for

occupation, however, remain unexplained in the film. Rather, the film tends to unearth several

philosophical questions circling around identity, particularly the destabilization of human

body as the agency. To enter the portal signifies to open a “metaphysical can of worms,” says

Craig,

The point is that this is a very odd thing, supernatural, for lack of a better word. I

mean, it raises all sorts of philosophical questions about the nature of self, about the
 Chou 40

existence of the soul, about the existence of a soul. Am I me? Is Malkovich

Malkovich? I had a piece of wood in my hand, Maxine. I don’t have it anymore.

Where is it? Did it disappear? How could that be? Is it still in Malkovich’s head? I

don’t know. Do you know what a metaphysical can of worms this portal is?

Occupied by a series of questions, Craig has exactly fallen into a veritable can of worms,

which signifies a source of unpredictable difficulty and perplexity. When the body is not a

reliable means of identification, human body itself is no longer essential to the personal

identity.

Malkovich’s body, as Dr. Lester explains in the film, is a “vessel” for his next

incarnation. Only two of the crucial characters in the film can remain in the “Malkovich

vessel” durably and manipulate the body. Dr. Lester is the one who apparently “owns” the

portal and he has used it for several times to transform his consciousness from body to body

in order to achieve a state of immortality. Such a transformation, according to Dr. Lester, can

occur only at appropriate moment when the vessel is ripe. Otherwise, those who enter the

portal will end up in a “larval vessel” and lose themselves, submerging and being assimilated

in the newborn infant. Craig unexpectedly discovers this portal and takes it over for his

personal pursuit--to win Maxine and his puppeteering career. After exiting Malkovich, Craig

instead enters into Emily, the newborn love child of his wife Lotte and his business partner

Maxine. In the finale, when the seven-year-old Emily is gazing adoringly at her two mothers,

a following shot from Craig’s perspective is shown with his futile whimpering. Craig, having

migrated into a larval vessel, “is destined to be a powerless observer for the rest of his life”

(Shaw 115).

In his article “On Being Philosophical and Being John Malkovich,” Daniel Shaw

believes that the director Jonze and the screenwriter Kaufman were “thinking of personal

identity as defined by the will as agent acting on the body as instrument” (115). The real

identity, according to Shaw, is defined by what Malkovich does and by the reason why he
 Chou 41

chooses to do what he does. Shaw suggests that the film appeals to be read in light of a

Nietzschean existential theory of personal identity, which “sees the self as defined by its

actions and the projects and values to which we dedicate ourselves” (117). By asking “what

has happened to the ‘real’ Malkovich,” Shaw also interrogates whether John Malkovich can

still be said to remain John Malkovich if he no longer regains control over his body. Shaw

answers this interrogation by relating to “a glimpse of real Malkovich when Lotte chases

Maxine with a gun through his unconscious mind” (115). He believes that it supports the

“psychological continuity theory” holding that what makes John Malkovich who he turns out

to be is his memories, thoughts, desires, and he is the only one who has access to these (115).

Consequently, the original Malkovich is indeed suppressed when Craig or Dr. Lester gets

control over the body; however, “no one had truly succeeded in being John Malkovich” for

the reason that “no one had gained access to his thoughts and/or memories” (115).

Shaw’s explanatory hypothesis positively has, in his own words, “substantial

philosophic and textual merit” (115). Kaufman’s remarks on Malkovich may be viewed in

support of Shaw’s points:

Well, you are inside someone else’s skin, but Craig doesn’t have the experience of

being John Malkovich, he has the experience of using Malkovich. He uses him to

be with Maxine, and then he uses Malkovich’s notoriety to get his own career

going. So it’s “Using John Malkovich.” Yeah, I’d say it’s “Using John

Malkovich.” [laughs] 23

What Kaufman says sustains the idea that no one is really “being” John Malkovich , and it

confirms Shaw’s theory that “what it is like to be John Malkovich would be included

accessing his consciousness” 24 (116). However, there is still room for Shaw’s point of view

23
From Annie Nocenti’s interview with Charlie Kaufman for Scenario Magazine. Nocenti is the editor of
Scenario.
24
This is originally in Thomas Nagel’s article “What is it Like to Be a Bat?” Daniel Shaw uses Nagel’s words to
advocate his point of view.
 Chou 42

for improvement by a further interpretation in other perspectives. To be precise, it is true that

no one is identically “being” John Malkovich’s subject, yet those who inside John Malkovich

do “experience” John Malkovich by means of their synchronic perception with Malkovich.

After Lotte’s first encounter with Maxine through Malkovich, she was fascinated with the

fact that she herself was temporally possessed by male’s bodily perception, saying it “felt

right.” What she “feels” through John Malkovich it by chance matches her internal aspiration

and thus she claims that the way she perceives herself is to have a male exterior with a strong

deep voice.

Intrigued by the whole concept of the portal, Lotte has reflected on a man’s having a

passage into itself is literally like a woman’s body by murmuring cheerfully, “He has a vagina,

and I like that.” She even yells to his husband Craig, “Don’t stand in the way of my

actualization as a man.” Moreover, when Craig is locking Lotte into a cage and she is

begging for his mercy as a husband, Craig relentlessly says: “You gave up that claim after the

first time you stick your dick in Maxine,” and Lotte also responds to the threat from Craig by

saying, “Suck my dick!” Lotte’s description of her experience reveals the fact that whoever

enters Malkovich is more than what Shaw proposes as “goggled observer” (115). In terms of

Shaw’s hypothesis, the personal identity of an individual is defined as the “will” that governs

the actions of a particular body. On this basis, all Lester’s aged companions that

transmigrated into Malkovich’s body have ceased to exist and “at best become goggled

observers of Dr. Lester’s ongoing life” (115), including Malkovich himself. If the term

“observer” refers to a person who becomes aware of things or events through the senses, the

senses are supposed to include all bodily perceptions rather than merely seeing through eyes.

As a result, though in Craig’s case he has no dominant power on Emily’s body, he still bodily

“synchronize” with her movement and senses rather than merely gaze. Therefore, the

“synchronic perceiver” may be a suitable term for whoever experiences being John

Malkovich.
 Chou 43

2. Self-identification Arisen from Naming

Viewed apart from “subjective” matter, the means of identification in the film are

ostensibly demonstrated by the physical body as a form of identity. However, the names of

characters are oftentimes at play with the signifier and the signified. In his film review, Scott

Repass 25 talks about the trapping of identity and denies body as essential to personal identity.

He argues that by taking control of Malkovich’s body Craig arrogates certain signifiers as the

body, the name, and the fame. Further, by doing so he forces these signifiers to shift their

signified, namely from Malkovich’s self to Craig’s self. Craig and Lester’s utterance are the

also examples as a symbol of their dominance over Malkovich’s body. In his debut

performance as Malkovich the Puppeteer, Craig says “I’m John Malkovich. I’m really John

Malkovich.” And when Lester and his companions have transmigrated into the body, they say,

“We’re . . . We’re Malkovich.” “Malkovich as a name loses all meaning,” Repass argues, “if

anyone or anything can ‘be’ Malkovich” (34). As an identification of identity, names have

been constantly changed, misunderstood, and arrogated. There are only two characters who

never suffer from the identity problems as the other characters do--Elijah and Maxine, whose

signifier always matches the signified. As for Malkovich, when he enters his own portal, the

name as the label of his identity becomes everything. Repass points out, “It is an actor’s

narcissism taken to the furthest extreme” (34). In contrast to all other characters in film,

Repass proposes “Malkovich sees that he is only signifier, no signified” (34).

Self-identification with naming becomes crucial for characters so as to pass from one

body to another. Regarding those characters who occupy Malkovich’s body and announce

their identities regularly, Repass indicates, “through simple, declarative sentences, they state

their professions, genders, or other aspects of themselves that are fundamental to their

beings” (34). For instance, Craig says “I’m a puppeteer” from time to time; even when he has

25
Scott Repass had been an actor starring in a TV movie, Lone Star Kid (1988). This review was published in
Film Quarterly, Vol. 56, Issue 1 (2002).
 Chou 44

taken over Malkovich’s body, he tells Malkovich’s agent “I’m no longer an actor. I’m a

puppeteer.” Lotte also has an announcement after she has a sexual awakening in Malkovich,

saying “I’m a transsexual.” Likewise, Lester declares that he is not Lester but Captain Mertin,

asserting that Lester was just another vessel. With these declarations, the characters attempt

to assert however they are perceived by others, their selfhoods are always fixed. In this regard,

self-identification becomes the only fixed means of identification (Repass 34). In contrast to

those who constantly reaffirm who they are, Maxine seems comfortable with her identity so

as to feel no needs to declare anything since how she is perceived by others is never an issue

for her. In conclusion, the action of naming verbally as well as linguistically accents the

self-understanding. With regard to the self-understanding, Merleau-Ponty states that the

subject “provides itself with symbols of itself in both succession and multiplicity, and that

these symbols are it, since without them it would, like an inarticulate cry, fail to achieve

self-consciousness” (Phenomenology of Perception 427). In other words, when we touch

upon the argument of meaning and the self, we are speaking about “interrogation and

interpretation” (Muldoon 3). In his article “Ricoeur and Merleau-Ponty on Narrative

Identity,” Marc Muldoon centers on the topic of narrative identity, which is not only key

elements of Paul Ricoer’s hermeneutical discussion but also relevant to many of

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological thought such as “the lived body, the tension of linguistic

sedimentation and innovation and the act of reading” (1). With narrative identity as the

unforeseen fruit of Merleau-Ponty, Muldoon points out that Ricoeur has further developed

Merleau-Ponty’s “long standing hermeneutical principle that any self-understanding would be

one mediated by signs, symbols, and texts” (2).

In Being John Malkovich, Craig, a struggling and frustrated puppeteer aspiring to be

someone else, turns out to be confined to smaller and smaller places gradually. At the outset

of the film, Craig shares a packed apartment with Lotte and a crowd of pets. Later he begins

to work in an office between seven and eight floor, where is supposed to be a workplace for
 Chou 45

midgets for the ceiling is half as high as normal floor. On that small-scale floor, he finds a

door smaller than usual and behind the tiny door is a dark portal. At first, the portal leads him

to the small space of Malkovich. Finally, Craig is confined in an even smaller space in Emily

with an apparently smaller perspective. Scott Repass observes the process of transformation

and derives the inference: “the smaller his universe gets, the smaller his perspectives gets”

(36). “Once Craig takes control of Malkovich’s body,” Repass notes, “we are no longer given

constant access to the internal point of view shot” (35). Craig thereby actually becomes John

Malkovich whose body synchronizes with the dominant subject of Craig while the subject of

Malkovich is suppressed. For Merleau-Ponty, body and subject are one entity. Body is the

embodied subject while subject is embodied by body. In Craig’s case, the Malkovich body is

the embodied subject of Craig, and Craig’s subject is being embodied by Malkovich the body.

Through this body-subject, human beings extend their world of perception where the space

comes into being as Merleau-Ponty introduces his own view of space as follows:

Space is not the setting (real or logical) in which things are arranged, but the

means whereby the positing of things becomes possible. This means that instead

of imagining it as a sort of ether in which all things float, or conceiving it

abstractly as a characteristic that they have in common, we must think of it as the

universal power enabling them to be connected. (Phenomenology of Perception

243)

Merleau-Ponty considers that it is misleading to think of the body-subject as “in” space.

Rather, he chooses to speak of the body-subject as “of being-in-space.” That is to say, as a

body-subject, human being has subjective spatiality of one’s own. In respect of

Merleau-Ponty’s stress on subjective spatiality, Priest makes a concise summary: “In

being-in-the-world body-subject and space are mutually constituting” (117). With the idea of

“mutually constituting,” the confining space of Craig’s may be attribute to his restrained

subject that metaphorically goes on performing “Dance of Despair and Disillusion.”

 Chou 46

B. Inter-subjectivity and Inter-corporeality

Owing to the earnest request from the publisher of his screenplay, Charlie Kaufman

promised to write something for readers of Being John Malkovich script book. However, he

doubts if there is anything he can say about screenwriting in the introduction, writting “I

don’t understand a damn second of my life. I exist in a fog of confusion and anxiety and

clutching jealousy and loneliness.” With self-negation, Kaufman’s statement actually reveals

not only his existential angst permeated through each of his screenplays but also an undertone

of disapprobation against self-righteous hypocrisy. He argues that nobody knows a thing,

implying that one should not trust those people who pretend they do. As a result, rather than

telling the ideas about writing a screenplay, Kaufman concludes the introduction by telling

who he is:

I guess the one important thing to me in my work is to tell the truth. I guess. I guess

that’s it. But why do I want to tell the truth? Maybe so I can be known as the guy

who tells the truth. Maybe it’s nothing more than that. Just more

self-aggrandizement masquerading as honesty. It’s my shtick. Hey, I’ll be the guy

who tells it like it is. Maybe then someone will love me. Maybe some women will

find that sexy. I mean, I’m not going to get them with my looks. So I’m the honest

one. Hey, look at me! I tell the goddamn truth no matter what the consequences!

What a fucking hero. I’m sorry. I guess that didn’t go where I had hoped. Listen,

I’m just an insignificant guy who wants to be significant. (Introduction vii)

Kaufman proves (or makes audience believe) that he is honest because in his works audience

recurrently witness those scenes of metaphorically “dissecting” human head--in Being John

Malkovich it is John Malkovich and in Adaptation is Kaufman himself. McKee, in his

commentary on Adaptation, admits that he was shocked as he read his first draft because

“beneath the witty wildness” he finds “a telling, indeed a confession, of nearly shameful

intimacy” (132). He does not mean those erotic scenes which have been part of Hollywood
 Chou 47

formula. Instead, he means that Kaufman’s pages “read like a filmic stream of consciousness,

an allegory starring the contentious facets of Kaufman’s psyche” (132). In Being John

Malkovich, audiences enter into Malkovich’s head, where his shameful secrets have been

entirely revealed in scenes of subconscious. Again, in Adaptation, Kaufman dissects his own

mind, scatters a mess of his self-obsession over the story, and then the story is still about a

flower ultimately.

Kaufman sets out on his journey of adaptation, however, he chooses to retrace the course

of evolution. After asking himself the questions of “Why am I here? How did I get here?” he

grabs his tape recorder and intensely describes the evolutionary process that he intends to put

in his screenplay in the outset:

Start right before life begins on the planet. All is . . . lifeless. And then, like, life

begins. Um, with organisms. Those little single cell ones. Oh, and it’s before sex,

cause, like everything was asexual. Uh, from these we go to bigger things. Jellyfish.

And then that fish that got legs on it and crawled out on the land. And then we see,

you know, like dinosaurs. And then they’re around for long, long time. And then, the

insects, the simple mammals, the primates, monkeys. The simple monkeys. The,

old-fashioned monkeys giving way to the new monkeys. Whatever. And then ape.

Whatever. And, and man. Then we see the whole history of human

civilization--hunting and gathering, farming, uh, Bronze Age, war, love, religion,

heartache, disease, loneliness, technology. And we bring it all the way to this

moment in history. And end with Susan Orlean in her office at The New Yorker,

writing about flowers, and bang! The movie begins. This is great. This is the

breakthrough I’ve been hoping for. It ties everything together. It is profound.

(Adaptation 2002)

Flower is the theme of Orlean’s book, titled The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and

Obsession. However, Orlean’s orchid story turns out to be apparently something more than
 Chou 48

reportage. She depicts her observation on various orchids in her book. Different orchids have

their different ways of pollination. With regard to human being, the idea of “survival of the

fittest” can be more complex than other species due to the civilized way of life. The moderate

changes of attitude or even transformation of oneself can be also regarded as one kind of

evolution. Orlean points out, “for me, part of the process of writing is the journey to

understanding” (“A Reader’s Guide”). As a result, readers find a fascinating tales of theft,

hatred and love, madness and obsession through Orlean’s engrossing journey. Likewise,

Kaufman’s adaptation of this orchid story turns out to be something more than an adaptation

of a book about orchid. In Adaptation, seeing that Donald is taking a three-day seminar to be

a screenwriter, Charlie warns him that “writing is a journey into the unknown. It’s not

building one of your model airplanes.” For Kaufman, it is a self-searching journey of

“adaptation” in two meanings, one for the adaptation of a book and the other for adaptation to

the environment including audience-oriented Hollywood and the pretentiously humane

society. By putting together everything he concerns with on the way of this journey,

Adaptation ends up being not only an adaptation of a book, but a journey of adaptation

concerning screenwriter Kaufman’s writing about writer Orlean’s writing about a fascinating

man Loaroch’s eccentric passion for collecting orchids.

1. The Reversibility of Subject and Object

Adaptation is a movie adapted from a book about adapting a movie from a book. Seeing

that Orlean’s The Orchid Thief is a book about ideas without action, Kaufman engages

himself and Orlean into the screenplay and recounts a tale. Though Kaufman has made her

story changed and deviated, Orlean considers that “the movie portrayed the real heart of the

book, which is about “pursuit of passion and how it shapes our lives” (The Orchid Thief xx).

However, Kaufman would not content himself with sheer manifestation of the theme of

Orlean’s book. He also represents the way she writes and her attitude toward writing. In other
 Chou 49

words, Kaufman does not willfully blur the distinction between original text and the

adaptation, reality and fiction without a reason. Actually, Orlean is the one who blends herself

into her story first, and Kaufman’s adaptation reveals his talent of mimicry. Accordingly,

Orlean and her book The Orchid Thief are both worth a brief survey in the following

paragraph.

John Laroche is supposed to be the title character of The Orchid Thief; however, he is

only its object while Susan Orlean is its subject. In “A Reader’s Guide” written by Orlean

herself, she makes up “a conversation with Susan Orlean” including sixteen pairs of questions

and answers. Hence, those superficial dialogues are, as a matter of fact, Orlean’s monologue.

While questioning that The Orchid Thief is actually about author herself and “it is a form of

autobiography,” she answers:

I can’t even imagine (to consciously write an autobiography). When people say,

“you always put yourself in your stories,” well, I am in my stories. It is a matter of

acknowledging it. The fact is I do not write news that must be reported. I choose

to write about whatever captures my curiosity. Simply choosing what you write

about is a subjective choice. (“A Reader’s Guide”)

The Orchid Thief has been categorized in non-literary genres, yet it is more than a sheer

reportage. 26 With her personal style of reportage-writing, she can be compared with some

journalists and essayists experimenting with a variety of literary techniques, mixing them

with the traditional ideal of dispassionate reporting. 27

26
Those who, generally emerging from 1960s, mixed literary techniques with the traditional ideal of
dispassionate reporting were called New Journalists. It can be traced back to 1973 when the term was codified
with its current meaning by Tom Wolfe’s notable book The New Journalism. Tom Wolfe (born March 2, 1930) is
an American author and journalist, best known as one of the founders of the new journalism. His distinctive
first-person reportage made him the prototypical New Journalist. For further exposition of New Journalism, see
Tom Wolfe’s The New Journalism. New York: Harper & Row (1973) and Scott Sherman’s ‘New’ Journalism.
Columbia Journalism Review (2001): 59-61.
27
In 2005, Robert Boynton wrote out The New New Journalism by which he defines what he calls The New
New Journalists, saying “this new generation experiments more with the way one gets the story.” He states that
these New New Journalists “represent the continued maturation of American literary journalism,” referring to
numbers of journalists including Susan Orlean. She reflects Boynton’s illustration of New New Journalist by
 Chou 50

In her monologic dialogue, Orlean believes “there is a mutually exploitative relationship

between a reporter and a subject” (“Reader’s Guide”). She considers that it is common to

develop a kind of intimacy with someone a journalist is writing about, and it is naïve not to

acknowledge that the reporter and the reported are each using each other for a reason.

Orlean’s argument in some degrees reflects a coherent point of view in Merleau-Ponty’s

philosophy. For Merleau-Ponty, interdependence and mutual invasion is obvious in all

aspects of perception and subjectivity. As he clarifies, “whenever I try to understand myself,

the whole fabric of the perceptible world comes too, and with it comes the others who are

caught in it (Sign 15),” Orlean’s situation should be considered in a reversed way. By

intervening in Laroche’s life, she tries to understand his (or also her) whole fabric of the

perceptible world and the others who are caught in it, and with it comes Orlean’s

understanding herself too. In other words, in describing whatever she has observed and heard

from Laroche, Orlean is actually revealing her understanding upon her own reflection. This

intertwining and the reversibility of the sensation is exactly what Merleau-Ponty has

explained with the notion of flesh.

In addition to the relationship between writers and their writing object, the intertwining

and the reversibility are better represented by the intimate relationship between orchid and

insect, which is both illustrated in Orlean’s book and represented in Kaufman’s screenplay.

Before speaking of the orchid-insect relationship, Orlean introduces two different ways of

plant’s reproduction--self-pollination and cross-fertilization. Many plants pollinate

themselves, which ensure the reproduction to keep their species alive. However, the

disadvantage of self-pollination is that they do not improve themselves since they recycle the

same genetic material again and again. While those simple and common plants like weeds

extending the time and developing an “innovative immersion” in her reporting. Robert S. Boynton, director of
the Graduate Magazine Journalism Program at New York University, is writing a book about contemporary
literary journalism. A selection of his works can be found at www.robertboynton.com.
 Chou 51

remain self-pollinated, orchids rely on cross-fertilization for they are complex plants. “Most

orchids never pollinate themselves,” Orlean says, “some orchid spcieis are actually poisoned

to death if their pollen touches their stigma” (45). Though some other plants do not pollinate

themselves either, as Orlean infers, “no flower is more guarded against self-pllination than

orchid” (45). Because of orchids’ resistence on self-pollination, each orchid speicies has to

make its appearance enchanting to attract insect. Some orchid species imitates the shape of

certain insect’s enemy to make the insect attake it; when the insect repeats the same mistake,

it can help to spead the pollen from one orchid to another. Botanists call this

pseudo-antagonism. Other species make itself looks like the mate of their pollinator, so the

pollen can also be spread by insect’s mating with one orchid and then another, which is called

pseudo-copulation (46). With the talent of mimicry, orchids succeed in attractting pollinators

elegantly. Orlean feels an admiration for orchids, and says,

no one knows whether orchids evolved to complement insects or whether the

orchids evolved first, or whether somehow these two life forms evolved

simultaneously, which might explain how two totally different living things came

to depend on each other. The harmony between an orchid and its pollinator is so

perfect that it is kind of eerie. (46)

This phenomenon between certain orchid and certain insect fortuitiously illuminates

Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of the flesh--“the synergy exist among different organisms”

while “their landscapes interweave, their actions and their passions fit together exactly” (The

Visible and the Invisible 142). If insects had not chosen to attack or mate with orchids, the

orchid species could have become extinct. Instead, “orchids have multiplied and diversified

and become the biggest flowering plant family on earth” (45). By means of cross-fertilization,

orchids have the evolutionary chance to adapt themselves accordingly to the world around

them. In the contest for existence, both orchids and insects change to adapt themselves to the

world and thus their changes are intertwined with the changes of the world as well as
 Chou 52

reversible between each other.

Based on the theme of orchid, Kaufman takes advantage of their characteristics to

develop his story in Adaptation. In an orchid show, Laroch catches sight of Angraecum

sesquipedale 28 and tells Orleans enthusiastically: “Darwin hypothesized a moth with a nose

twelve inches long to pollinate it. Everyone thought he was a loon. Then, sure enough, they

found this moth with a twelve-inch proboscis.” Darwin’s postulation proves that every one of

these orchids has a specific relationship with the insect that pollinates it. Laroche has an

appealing monologue on what makes the specific relationship between orchid and insect so

wonderful:

There’s a certain orchid look exactly like a certain insect so the insect is drawn to

this flower, its double, its soul mate, and wants nothing more than to make love to it.

And after the insect flies off, spots another soul-mate flower and makes love to it,

thus pollinating it. And neither the flower nor the insect will ever understand the

significance of their lovemaking. I mean, how could they know that because of their

little dance the world lives? But it does. By simply doing what they’re designed to

do, something large and magnificent happens. In this sense they show us how to live

- how the only barometer you have is your heart. How, when you spot your flower,

you can’t let anything get in your way.

Laroche’s monologue gives utterance to Kaufman’s view on life--something large and

magnificent would happen by simply doing what one is designed to do although no one will

even understand the significance of their actions. When Merleau-Ponty says “my body is the

fabric into which all objects are woven, and it is, at least in relation to the perceived world”

28
This orchid, largely white to greenish, has a nectar tube of 10-12 inches in length with only the distal end
filled with nectar. Charles Darwin postulated that there must be an undiscovered moth with a proboscis capable
of extending eleven inches to reach this flower. This moth was discovered in 1903, after forty-one year of
Darwin’s postulation. For details concerning orchid, see Mrele Reinikka’s A History of the Orchid. Timber Press,
1995. For descriptions with photos, see Internet Orchid Photo Encyclopedia compiled by Jay Pfahl at
http://www.orchidspecies.com
 Chou 53

(Phenomenology of Perception 235), it refers to the body, which intertwines with the world as

an embodiment of carnal thought, is no longer comprehended by one’s “consciousness.”

There is an arousing scene relating to Charlie’s fantasy when he lies awake in bed, and

flips through The Orchid Thief. He flips to the end of the book and looks at the smiling author

photo on it. Starring at the photo, Charlie murmurs, “I like to look at you.” Afterward the

author’s smile slightly broadens, replying that “I like to look at you, too, Charlie.” The photo

smiles warmly at him and Kaufman begins to masturbate. Then Kaufman and Orlean are in

his bed together, making love. The camera moves the point of view to the photo at this

moment and the photo smiles at him utterly. After they finish, Kaufman becomes alone in bed.

He looks at the still smiling photo and it seems somehow sleepy now. With regard to the

reversibility of seeing and seen, Richard Cohen points out:

Between seeing and seen, touching and touched, painting and painted, political

activism and political passivity, there is only one flesh diverging in different

directions, but always without losing contact with itself. It is the single cohesion

and dehiscence that Merleau-Ponty attempts to bring to light. (281)

Accordingly, Charlie is seen by the photo as long as he sees it. By means of being looked

back, he sees himself. Seeing the orchid thief through Orlean’s eyes, Kaufman actually

reflects his own image in her vision toward him.

2. Filmic Adaptation as a Mutation of its Source Novel

Through illustrating writers’ struggle for “adaptation” and their dilemma of being true

to themselves or being responsible to audience, Adaptation, a blend of fact and fiction, is

“simultaneously an adaptation and an original screenplay” (Stam and Raengo 1). By writing a

film that is all about writing, Charlie echoes the idea of the independence between species in

the context of orchids. Saying “epiphytes grow on trees, but they’re not parasites,” Kaufman

seems to purposely make use of “epiphyte” as metaphor to signify his intention--the

 Chou 54

screenplay derives from its source book, but it does not live on the book. Those species of

orchids that do not grow in soil but choose to get attached to a tree branch are called

epiphytes. Charlie further explains, “They all get their nourishment from the air and the rain.”

Like the tree and its epiphyte, the screenplay looks like hanging on the book, but actually the

screenplay and the book are independent organism. Orlean gives an expressive description of

epiphyte orchids:

Orchid thrived in the jungle because they developed the ability to live on air rather

than soil and positioned themselves where they were sure to get light and

water--high above the rest of the plants on the branches of trees. They thrived

because they took themselves out of competition. If all this makes orchid seem

smart--well, they do seem smart. There is something clever and unplantlike about

their determination to survive and their knack for useful deception and their genius

for seducing human beings for hundreds and hundreds of years. (The Orchid Thief

49)

Seemingly in response to Orlean’s account, Kaufman virtually makes his screenplay an

epiphyte. Adaptation makes itself thrive because Kaufman skillfully takes his screenplay out

of Hollywood formula and concurrently takes advantage of them. It is “Adaptation’s courage

to insist on a different kind of subject matter” (Bean 19) that survives the adaptation. It is also

Kaufman’s “knack” for manipulating narration. Although he makes clear that he wants to be

true to the “sprawling New Yorker stuff,” to adapt an un-cinematic non-fiction book indeed

traps him into a dilemma. Seeing that The Orchid Thief is Susan’s self-inquisition

accompanied with her reportage, he has to translate the “fact” into fiction from the original

text. As a result, there are double paradoxes in Kaufman’s screenplay, which should be

treated as a fictitious adaptation of a book as well as an “essentially true” adaptation to the

source book since the original text is fictitious itself. Consequently, he chooses to pile up his

“self-inquisition” over Orlean’s “self-inquisition” (McKee 133).

 Chou 55

Charlie Kaufman’s screenplays are largely provided with a great deal of confession,

especially in Adaptation. By way of self-loathing confession, Kaufman portrays the

unsuccessful “life-long pursuit of inner peace” which is also revealed in Orlean and Laroche.

Orlean is portrayed as a character who is used to hiding her own affections while actually her

innermost voice discloses her desire to transform into a daring person. In Adaptation, Orlean

feels ashamed of mocking at Laroche with her husband and three other couples, reflecting

that “I suppose I do have one unembarrassed passion. I want to know how it feels to care

about something passionately.” Laroche, as McKee suggests, “constantly reinvents himself,

animating with incarnation with magnificent enthusiasm followed by disaster” (133). McKee

explains in his critical commentary on Adaptation that how Kaufman’s meandering

screenplay does not alienate the audience by means of “deconstructive rhetoric”:

Here’s how it works: When Charlie berates himself as a pathetic loser, it prompts

us to think: “No, you’re not. You only imagine you are. You’re really rather

lovable.” When Charlie swears that there’ll be no violence, sex, car chases, or

epiphanies in this film, we know a set-up when we hear one, so when those scenes

arrive, we’re enchanted. After carpeting the film with wall-to-wall voice-over,

McKee rants, “And God help you, no narration!” Kaufman gets everything he

wants by confession to the contrivance. (“Critical Commentary” 133)

The “deconstructive rhetoric” in the interdependent context of narration might be also applied

to the metaphor of epiphytic relationship, referring to the inseparable correlation united as

one.

Concerning “confession to the contrivance,” Bean points out that Kaufman has made

Adaptation “an orgy of voiceovers” (19). For the most of time, Charlie’s unceasingly

self-absorbed monologues shapes up the essence of the film. After turning down the attractive

female studio executive’s invitation to dine with Orlean, Charlie sits in his car agitated and
 Chou 56

humiliated and voice-over. 29 Through a great deal of somniloquist monologue, Charlie

actually communicates with audience by means of his voice-over. Besides, Susan Orlean’s

voiceover reading passages from her book are even more discursive than Charlie’s. In order

to “adapt” Orlean to his screenplay, Kaufman shows the change in her voice-over:

What I came to understand is that change is not a choice. Not for a species of plant,

and not for me. It happens, and you are different. Maybe the only distinction

between the plant and me is that afterward I lied about my change. I lied in my book.

I pretended with my husband that everything is the same. But something happened

in the swamp that day. (Adaptation 2002)

As a matter of fact, it is conceivable that Kaufman doubts about the authenticity of Orlean’s

words, including both the story itself and the self-conducted Question and Answer in The

Orchid Thief. Therefore, Charlie sets about putting in the drama to adapt for script, following

what McKee advises him: “Your characters must change. And the changes come from them.”

Afterward, Adaptation diverts from its source book. In regard to the permeation of confession,

there are still two main characters in Adaptation, Laroche and Charles Darwin. Laroche the

orchid thief narrates his own life through the phone. The aged Darwin writes at his desk with

a quill pen. As Bean concludes: “We hear the voices, watch the characters writing, see the

words they have written, typed, printed in books, underlined, highlighted, crowded with

marginal notes--an endless flood of speaking and writing” (19). Adaptation is filled with

writing; to be precise, with writers working on their writings, including Susan Orlean writing

The Orchid Thief, Charlie Kaufman writing the adaptation of the The Orchid Thief, Charlie’s

twin brother Donald writing a commercial script The Three, and Charles Darwin shown at

writing The Origin of Species. Besides, there is still another writer, the real-life author of

Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting, in the film--Robert

McKee. Moreover, Stam notes that the film highlights the process of writing by presenting

29
For this quote of Charlie’s voice-over, see page 20.
 Chou 57

“Orlean at her computer, surrounded by the various sources--encyclopedias, botanical books,

histories--that feed into her own text” (Stam and Raengo 1). Likewise, Charlie is represented

“panicked and sweating before the blank computer screen” (1). In sum, Kaufman himself

once talked about the use of voice-over and the idea of writing in response to Rob Feld’s

interview. 30 He admitted “I like the idea of having different types of voice-over--voice-over

that’s representative of Charlie’s writing and then the voice-over that’s representative of

Charlie’s head. The clash of those two things interests me” (Adaptation 125). It is obvious

that Kaufman is obsessed with juxtaposition of two things and then intertwining their

relationship in the process, which reflects Merleau-Ponty’s thought again--to deconstruct the

binary opposition between subject and object.

In the interview with Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze, Feld inquires Kaufman about

“the idea of perception as reality” because Lynn Hershberg at The New York Times wrote that

the central conflict in Kaufman’s writing is “the push and pull of reality and hope provided by

fantasy” (“Q & A with Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze” 126). Rob Feld’s question about

perception is as follows:

Much of what you’re done entails characters defining their own world and

experience. Perception is everything. You’ve got Puff, 31 who’s raised by a man

who thinks he’s an ape (so he might be as well be), and in Adaptation, Donald 32

has a speech about owing his love, which is what defines him. He is what he loves.

As a theme or concept--the idea of perception as reality--is that something you

find yourself conscious of working with? (126).

30
Rob Feld is a filmmaker who writes on film for a variety of sources. His industry analysis, essays, and
interviews appear frequently in the Western Guild of America magazine. His interview with Charlie Kaufman
and Spike Jonze is appended to the shooting script of Adaptation. See Charlie Kaufman and Donald Kaufman,
Adaptation: the shooting script. (NY: Newmarket Press, 2002).
31
Puff is one male character in Kaufman’s another film Human Nature, where he is a person who grew up in the
forest and was brought up by a man who thinks he is an ape.
32
Donald Kaufman, a fictional twin brother of Charlie Kaufman in Adaptation, also writes a screenplay called
The Three. Please note that the screenplay The Three only appears in the film, not in real life.
 Chou 58

In response to Feld’s inquiry, Kaufman says “in that sense that I’m aware that I’m in my own

head and that’s the only thing that I know. Everything else is kind of speculation” (126).

Kaufman explained cautiously that only in this sense that perception is reality and “also your

prison” (126). In respect of Hershberg’s comment on his writing, Kaufman explains that he

tries to “write things” so that audiences would have opportunity to have various

interpretations and experiences, saying she “is right because that’s her take on it” (127). Truth,

as McKee puts it, “is not what is, but what we think about what is” (132). Adaptation turns

out to be a movie concerning life as well as adaptation. Meanwhile, it embodies the core of

its source book--the passion for the irresistible and unreachable. Film critic Robert Stam has a

statement with regard to the metaphors of adaptation:

Adaptation leaves us, then, with a Florida swamp-like profusion of suggestive

metaphors for the adaptational process: novel and adaptation as twins like Don and

Charlie, or adaptations as parasites, as hybrids, or adaptations as evidencing split

personality, or as demonstrating the interdependence of species or genres. Most

significantly, the film brings out the Darwin overtones of the word “adaptation”

itself, evoking adaptation as a means of evolution and survival. (3)

The metaphors all refer to the invisible force between two elements that are so entwined as

union, which can be related to the characteristics of flesh as what Merleau-Ponty has

explained, “[t]he reversibility that defines the flesh exists in other fields; it is even

incomparably more agile there and capable of weaving relations between bodies” (The Visible

and the Invisible 144). To survive, Adaptation makes its effort to “adapt for the fittest.” In

Adaptation, there is a scene that Laroche listens to an in-car audio called “Writing of Charles

Darwin While Driving,” the audio says “[a]s natural selection works solely by and for the

good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards

perfection.” Stam stresses that if the evolutionary process advances by means of mutation,

then filmic adaptation can be regarded as a mutation that helps its source novel survive (3).
 Chou 59

C. Coherence of Embodied Experience

1. Map of Clementine

As noted in Chapter Two, the relationship between Joel and Clementine is mostly

illustrated through Joel’s recollection in Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind. In this regard,

audience can only get the knowledge of their relationship from what Joel thinks about, rather

than what exactly the relationship is. Kaufman explains that by doing so he manages to depict

a real relationship in real life. In response to Rob Feld’s question concerning Joel’s

construction of Clementine, Kaufman articulates that it is “[the] idea that if you’re in a

relationship with somebody and they’re not there” (“Q & A with Charlie Kaufman” 135).

That is to say, Clementine in Joel’s memory is merely a memory of Clementine, not really

Clementine at all. Kaufman recalled his personal experience of memory while he was

interviewed by Channel Four, saying that when he was trying to understand memory, he

found his memories “can be powerful but they’re enormously vague.” Therefore, he came to

a realization that it is almost impossible to recall the exact memory and actually trying to

remember something is actually recreating the memory.

In Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind, the way to erase Joel’s memory of Clementine is

to create a map of Clementine in Joel’s brain. Dr. Howard explains to Joel, “[t]here is an

emotional core to each of our memory. As we eradicate this core, it starts its degradation

process.” Accordingly, the first step for Joel is to collect every single memento which has

connection with Clementine. Then, Joel is required to look at those objects one by one so that

his emotional responses to each object are recorded. With these stimuli as sources of

memories, Dr. Howard creates a blueprint of Joel’s memory of Clementine. “No literal

description. Just focus on the object,” Stan the technician tells Joel while Joel is trying to tell

stories behind those photos and gifts. In other word, Joel does not need to consciously recall

his memories because those “lived experiences” have been memorized through Joel’s body as

he lived his life. By means of body, Joel experiences the world. Besides, he grasps the world
 Chou 60

through his subjective consciousness of his body, which is also “objectively embodied” and

materially situated (Carnal Thought 188). If those mementos are literally described by Joel, it

only means that he imposes his present consciousness and judgment upon those

“things-for-themselves.” 33 By doing so, he actually lays his current memory upon the original

one. This is the reason why Stan stops Joel from describing them. In relation to the

re-presentation, this construction of a map of memory could be analyzed in view of

Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of art. He expounds the visibility in virtue of painting:

Once this strange system of exchanges is given, we find before us all the problems

of painting. These exchanges illustrate the enigma of the body, and this enigma

justifies them. Since things and my body are made of the same stuff, vision must

somehow take place in them; their manifest visibility must be repeated in the body

by a secret visibility. “Nature is on the inside,” says Cezanne. Quality, light, color,

depth, which are there before us, are there only because they awaken an echo in

our body and because the body welcomes them. (The Primacy of Perception

164)

In this sense, the memorable objects displayed before Joel “awaken an echo” in his body. In

order to prevent those “echoes” from resonating within Joel’s body, every stimulus is to be

eliminated through tracing back his memories related to Clementine. Provided that certain

stimuli of the emotional core are extinguished, the entire circuit of perceptual memory will be

dismissed from the body. This is how the memory-removal procedure works in Lacuna Inc.

In contrast to the memory-removal procedure which uses memorable object to create a

33
To return to the “things themselves” is Husserl’s injunction for phenomenological reduction, which tries to
“bracket” all cultural presuppositions of the outside world. With aims to return to things themselves, it is also a
return to the life-world which precedes knowledge. On the other hand, Sartre drew a distinction between the
mode of “being for-itself” (being of consciousness) and the mode of “being in-itself” (other things). This is not a
dualism of substances, but a view that there are two kinds of truth because Sartre holds that consciousness is not
a substance. However, like Kant's thing-in-itself, Sartre’s being in-itself is problematic because it remains
inaccessible while “being for-itself” relies on conception of consciousness. I use the term
“things-for-themselves” to combine the ideas of “thing themselves” and “being-for itself.”
 Chou 61

map of Clementine, Joel re-creates a map of Clementine to relive his memory. As his

memories are slowly being erased from his mind bit by bit, Joel becomes conscious of what

is happening so that he sets out to rescue his memories of Clementine. However, it is actually

Joel’s talking to himself when Joel has conversations with her in his own recollection. In

Joel’s memory when he is hiking in a forest with Clementine, they have the following

dialogue.

Clementine: Just tell them to cancel it then.

Joel: What are you talking about? I’m asleep.

Clementine: Wake yourself up.

Joel: You want me to wake up. This makes you happy if I try? Yeah, I’ll

really try hard. Here we go. There is a great idea.

Lying on the grass, Joel pulls open his eyes with his fingers and suddenly the sky above him

changes to the apartment ceiling. For a brief moment, audience can look through Joel’s eyes

at the apartment ceiling and hear vague sounds of the surrounding. With his eyes open,

however, his body is still lying on the bed in a coma. Soon after a brief connection with

reality, the point of view cut back to the sky within Joel’s memory. We realize that it is

actually Joel’s talking to himself. It is Joel who encourages himself to try, but this idea must

be embodied by Clementine’s utterance. However, the actual Clementine appears very little

in the movie. Whenever Clementine tells her ideas about getting rid of the erasing, it is

always Joel’s personal reflection. In this regard, Clementine is a fabrication.

The real experience of memory, as Kaufman notes, never comes along without

comments. He makes it clear that to recall a memory is not just like replaying a recording, but

commenting the dialogues. As for the dialogues, they can hardly be completely recalled but at

best be approximated (“Q & A with Charlie Kaufman” 138). In Joel’s apartment, the

juxtaposition of three actions, interposed each other by jump cuts, form a disorienting collage.

While Joel is engaged in his struggle inside himself, Stan and his girlfriend Mary indulge
 Chou 62

themselves in flirtation beside the sleeping Joel. In addition to Joel’s vanishing memory and

the party beside him, Patrick has a conversation with Stan relating to his mischief before

Mary comes. Patrick is the one who stole Clementine’s underwear and takes advantages of

Joel’s mementos to get her. During the erasing procedure, Joel becomes conscious of the

happenings inside and outside his body. Even Joel himself notices this combination when he

is watching himself lying on a chair, saying “I’m in my head already. Ain’t I?” Inside Joel’s

head Dr. Howard replies, “I suppose so, yes. This is what it would look like.” The divisions

of past and present, of here and there, gradually intertwine and integrate into one. In the

beginning, Joel suffers from ambivalence of his memories. He wants to keep the sweet

memories; however, the unbearable ones soon trail behind. For instance, Joel and Clementine

once argued violently over having a child in a flea market. When Joel’s recollection comes to

this scene and agony begins to penetrate him again, the deleting program timely follows up.

Consequently, the scene starts to fade and Clementine’s rant becomes vague. In response to

the fading, Joel feels released saying “Oh, thank God. It’s going, Clementine. All the crap and

hurt and disappointment. It’s all being wiped away.” Kaufman points out that this is the way

how he uses “dual dialogue” to present the issue of having the two Joels. One is in the scene

feeling or suffer from his situation and the other is watching and commenting on it.

In “The Scene of the Screen,” Vivian Sobchack examines the cinematic representation

of presence, saying that “the cinema’s visible (and audible) activity of retention and

protenstion constructs a subjective temporality other than--yet simultaneous with--the

irreversible direction and forward momentum of objective time” (Carnal Thought 151). With

juxtaposition of Joel’s memory and his comments aside, the spatial and temporal “presence”

is thereby represented subjectively in reversible directions.

With reference to the spatial and temporal simultaneity, Joel and Clementine’s

continuously attempts to escape from being erased can be regarded as manifestations. First,

Joel hides himself in where Clementine does not belong, bringing Clementine to his infancy
 Chou 63

having a bubble bath with her. Then, he manages to hide them in the deepest of his mind--his

humiliations. Clementine is therefore within the deeply-buried secret of his adolescent and

his childhood trauma. In his childhood memory, Joel is surrounded by a group of five years

old boys, holding a hammer and hesitating to hit a dead bird in a red wagon. In order to

manifest that little Joel’s ineffable difficulties and his still suffering from this recollection,

Kaufman re-presents this scene with dialogue and voice-over:

Boys: Come on, Joel. You have to. Do it already.

Joel: I can’t. I have to go home. I’ll do it later.

Joel’s voice-over: I didn’t want to do this. But I had to or they would’ve called

me a girl.

Joel’s voice-over: I can’t believe I did that. I’m so ashamed.

Clementine: It’s all right. You were a little kid.

Joel: God, I wish I knew you when we were kids. My life would’ve

turned out so differently.

Reluctantly, Joel miserably smashes the bird repeatedly with the hammer. Red jelly guts over

the hammer and the wagon button. The other boy watch Joel’s action and then hoot. Aside

from boys’ urge, Joel in the memory is actually having a conversation with himself and trying

to relieve his distress on the strength of grown-up point of view. By bringing Clementine into

his humiliation, Joel successfully takes his memory of Clementine “off the map;” however,

the mixed memories detour only for a while. When some certain words or objects are getting

to be seen or heard, they are drawn back to the memory of the map. Later, Joel even tries to

reverse and change the memory. With respect to the reverse, one sweet memory was that

Clementine sat over Joel and put a pillow over Joel’s face as they were playing. Muffled by

the pillow, Joel struggled and screamed, and then they both laughed. In order to reverse the

memory, Joel made Clementine muffled by pillow this time. As for the change, Joel finally

made up a regretful consequence with a comforting ending that he did not do it well before.
 Chou 64

In a beach house, where they first met, Clementine invited Joel to stay with her and Joel

turned down her invitation. The following dialogues take place in Joel’s recollection; they are

commenting on what they did and discuss a better way instead.

Joel: I really should go. I need to catch my ride.

Joel’s Voice-over: I didn’t want to go. It was too nervous. I thought, maybe you

were a nut. But you were exciting. You called from upstairs.

Clementine: So go.

Joel: I did. I walked out the door. I felt like a scared little kid. I thought

you knew that about me. I ran back to the bonfire, trying to outrun

my humiliation. You said, “so go” with such disdain.

Clementine: What if you stay this time?

Joel: I walked out the door. There’s no more memory.

Clementine: Come back and make up a good-bye at least. Let’s pretend we had

one.

Clementine: Bye, Joel.

Joel: I love you.

Since the memory is fluid and indirect, these make-up memories still connect to the original

memory and keep vanishing away. As a result, the only solution to the vanishing memory is,

as Joel says to himself, to enjoy the moment. Through flashbacks and flash-forwards, the

presence informed by past and future turns out to be a temporal synthesis. Sobchack makes

clear, “[c]inema’s animated presentation of representation constitutes its “presence” as always

presently engaged in the experiential process of coming into being and signifying” (Carnal

Thought 151). Therefore, the continuity of Joel’s embodied experience of is fulfilled in virtue

of the visibility of cinematic representation, and so do the audience.

 Chou 65

2. Eternal Recurrence of the Memory

Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind is structured in a circle. It starts with Joel and

Clementine’s first encounter and also ends with the same episode, leaving audience with a

feeling that the story may endlessly repeat itself. In his online review, “Moveable Feast: A

Memorable Bit of Sunshine,” Thane Peterson compares Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind

with Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. He proposes that “in the way it delves into the

nuances and subtle betrayals of memory,” the film is apparently and zanily “Proustian.”

Peterson indicates that “the movie’s literary elements are serious and quite effective” in terms

of those alternative versions of memory.

The re-presented memories are so malleable that they could be changed by being

recalled. In response to Kaufman’s idea of memory, Rob Feld adds that human beings create

memories from perception of reality. By recalling them, the old memories could be changed

or even fabricated to different memories combining something never happened (“Q & A with

Charlie Kaufman” 135). In addition, though the film is about erasing certain memories, those

who have their heartbroken memories erased do not really achieve the “spotless mind” as its

title implies. The memory inscribed on the body may be able to be erased like words on the

paper; however, the impression of perception invisibly remains. Kaufman deals a great deal

with the subjectivity of human experience in his works. Exploring the subjective experience

of remembering and forgetting in Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind, Kaufman finds a quote

about memory. As a matter of fact, the film derives its title from Alexander Pope, an

eighteenth-century English neoclassicist, whose quatrain titled “Eloisa to Abelard” (1717): 34

34
Abelard (1079-1142) was a French philosopher and theologist, Eloisa was his student. They met when he was
forty and she was only eighteen. As star-crossed lovers, their punishment for love was being the nunnery and the
monastery. They were forbidden to meet again by the church. However, they carried on an extensive and secret
exchange of love letters for years thereafter. Written by Pope in 1717, this poem was Eloisa’s plea to the God as
well as to Abelard. On one hand, she wished she could forget about him and be devoted to God. On the other
hand, she admitted that she did not regret for what she has done. As a result, her prayers to God were more out
of her lost love than her guiltiness. In Being John Malkovich, a puppet show performed by Craig by the street
was actually Kaufman’s intentional illustration of Eloisa and Abelard, which could be referred to not only their
being trapped in identities but also their irrepressible love and desire.
 Chou 66

How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot!

The world forgetting, by the world forgot.

Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! 35

Each prayer accepted, and each wish resigned.

This quote is recited by Mary the receptionist when Dr. Howard is working the equipment for

erasing the map of Clementine in Joel’s memory. When she is reading, the point of view cuts

to a scene of circus parade. It is a beautiful moment when Joel and Clementine are there

watching a group of elephants walking by. The symbol of elephants properly serves as a

figure of speech concerning a proverb, “An elephant never forgets”.36 It could imply that

having a memory like an elephant, human being could not forget the bodily perceived

experience.

The unforgettable memory inscribed on the body turns out to be the “unbearable

lightness of being” for characters in Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind. Having removed

painful memory from their brains, characters neither feel a sense of lightness nor see the

lightness of their life. On the contrary, the absence of certain memory causes them to be at a

loss as to their unnamable longings. Besides Joel and Clementine, Mary is another one who

erased her memory of a love affair with her married boss Dr. Howard. In order to draw Dr.

Howard’s attention, memory-removed Mary recites Nietzsche’s quote in front of him:

“Blessed are the forgetful, for they get the better even of their blunders.” It is ironic that she

is exactly the forgetful, who has erased a blunder and is going to make the same mistake

again. The myth of “Eternal Return” as a theme can also be found in Milan Kundera’s

Unbearable Lightness of Being. Kundera has a meditation on the idea of eternal return in the

very beginning of his book:

35
My Italic.
36
This proverb derives from Greek origin--“Camels never forget an injury.” The proverbial reference to the
elephant’s memory is relatively recent. In “Reginald: Regainal on Besetting Sins” (1904), the camel is taken
over by elephant: “Woman and elephants never forget an injury.”
 Chou 67

If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to

eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross. It is a terrifying prospect. In the

world of eternal return the weight of unbearable responsibility lies heavy on every

move we make. That is why Nietzsche called the idea of eternal return the heaviest

of burdens (das schwerste Gewicht). If eternal return is the heaviest of burdens, then

our lives can stand out against it in all their splendid lightness. But is heaviness truly

deplorable and lightness splendid? (4)

Saying “[t]he heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and

truthful they become” (5), Kundera refers to Greek philosopher Parmenides, who saw the

world divided into pairs of opposition. In response to Parmenides’ division concerning the

idea that lightness is positive and weight is negative, Kundera remains unanswered but

believes that the “lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, ambiguous of all” (5).

Kaufman’s characters can thereby prove to reflect Kundera’s premise of his novel. Though

choosing to erase memory of Clementine, Joel later discovers uncomfortable truths about the

fragility of the human being in the absence of painful memories. Given that memory is a

burden of human life, Joel decides on embracing those heavy burdens.

In a world of eternal return, an absolute return is impossible because human being can

only trace his/her memory back according to the currently existing memory. However,

memory changes all the time. Kaufman makes clear that “memories are re-created, they don’t

exist in storage” (“Q & A with Charlie Kaufman” 139). Memories are repeated in each

reflection; meanwhile they are being transformed bit by bit. As Merleau-Ponty’s interrogation

on Husserl’s phenomenological reduction, which Merleau-Ponty considers impossible to

return to the original condition. In the same way, the eternal return of memories brings out a

transient eternity, an ever-changing memory that may remain the same heaviness but loses its

former shape. With relation to this transformation, Kaufman talks about the actual situation of

remembering a relationship that is over:

 Chou 68

You have a memory of your first date with this person, and you have a memory of

your first date with this person after the relationship is over. Nothing has changed,

but your memory of the first day, after the relationship is over, it is a completely

different memory because it’s infused with what happened between this and the end.

And what went wrong, and what you didn’t see at the time, and the end. The end is

coloring the beginning, but you still assume it’s the same memory if you don’t think

about it. (“Q & A with Charlie Kaufman”139)

In the end of Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind, Joel and Clementine eventually realize what

happened between them due to listening to two unexpected recording tapes together. In these

two tapes, they respectively reveal their most embarrassing and unbearable criticism on each

other.

Clementine’s voice: I can’t stand to even look at him. His pathetic, wimpy, apologetic smile.

That sort of wounded puppy shit he does. You know? Is it so much to

ask for an actual man to have sex with?

Joel’s voice: I couldn’t talk to her about books. She’s more of a magazine-reading

girl. Her vocabulary leaves something to be desired. The truth is I was

embarrassed in public because she would pronounce “library”

“li-berry.” . . . I don’t see her sex was motivated. I saw it clear the last

night we were together. It wasn’t sexy. It was just sad. The only way she

could get people to like her is to fuck them. Or dangle the possibility of

getting fucked in front of them. I think she is so desperate and insecure

that she will soon or later go around fucking everybody. . . . I really

thought that I knew her so well. But I didn’t know her at all. What a loss

to spend that much time with someone only to find out that she is a

stranger.

With all these revelation, both Joel and Clementine still decide to start their relationship again.
 Chou 69

As Feld remarks, “[l]ife is messy, love is impure, people desperately struggle for recognition

in the face of inevitable mortality, and are damaged and irrational and liable to repeat their

mistakes and create their own problems, over and over again” (“Q & A with Charlie

Kaufman” 131). Unavoidable is the eternal recurrence; however, like what Kaufman

emphasizes in the interview as well as in the film, memory never comes without commentary.

The memory recurring is never the same one which may have been recurring for numerous

times. In “Q & A with Charlie Kaufman,” Kaufman’s utterance of “[t]he end is coloring the

beginning” (139) sounds simple but actually potent. After coloring the beginning, the end will

soon become another beginning, a means to another end.

 Chou 70

Chapter IV

The Cinematic Representation of Embodied Subject

Emerging from the symbiotic cooperation of humans and technology, the

film’s enabling body is partially mechanical and inhuman--and, as well,
partially intentional and human. Inhuman, its concrete, material body
seems scattered about space and time and is constituted in its
substantiality by metal, plastic, glass, celluloid, emulsion, and electronic
and mechanical circuitry. And yet, like the human body, the film’s body
is animated and lived with existential prospects and purpose. Indeed, the
film’s body is intentional, centered, and self-displacing in its dynamic
reversals of perception and expression and in its movement in a world,
both of which provide the bases for signifying and significant
experience.

--Sobchack, The Address of the Eyes 219

In an intentional expression of dynamic signifiers, the film with its whole elements,

bearing a resemblance to human body, lives its animated body as a representation of

existence. On the basis of Merleau-Ponty’s theory, body, as a mutually seen and seeing object,

makes many possibilities for intentional expression to display in the world as well as in the

film. Concerning expression of body, philosopher Don Ihde characterizes existential

phenomenology, which dwells on a “certain interpretation of human experience,” as a

philosophical style that “concerns perception and bodily activity” in particular (21). Vivian

Sobchack also expresses her viewpoints on phenomenology foundation, saying “existential

phenomenology is philosophically grounded on the carnal, fleshy, objective foundations of

subjective consciousness as it engages and is transformed by and in the world” (Carnal

Thought 2).

Accordingly, the objective foundation of subjective consciousness is therefore

embodied by a body-subject that entails both body and consciousness in “an irreducible
 Chou 71

ensemble” (4). The embodied consciousness as both objectivity and subjectivity, as Sobchack

indicates, is “differently weighted senses of our existence as “objective subject” and

“subjective objects” (4). By means of cinematic representation, the “subject matter” of the

irreducibly embodied consciousness is thus revealed by manifestation of bodies in film. With

its intentional and human characteristics, cinematic representation actually signifies a

miniature of real world. Sobchack also asserts that the film’s body can be regarded as

Merleau-Ponty’s description of human body as body-subject, claiming that “[w]hat our

bodies instrumentally are for us, the mechanisms of the cinema are for the film--the camera

and projector always (and usually effortlessly) engaging the world visually in the compass of

a bodily and perceptive style of being” (220). Thus, the film’s body is a lived-body as an

intentional and visual presence; it projects every image into screen with new life. On this

premise, the film body turns out to be a symbolic existence to signify the body-subject as

perceiving and perceived, as well as visual and visible.

With relation to the “subject” embodied by the representation of characters, it has been

Charlie Kaufman’s ultimate concern. Self-consciously, he relates that the only thing he can do

is to write out who he is and what his experiences are, and he believes that Joel is a “stand-in”

for him and that he can also be “likened to Craig and Charlie” (Feld, “Q & A with Charlie

Kaufman and Spike Jonze” 136). To this, Kaufman indeed has put a strong personal stamp on

each of his cinematic characters. For example, Kaufman’s male leading characters, in general,

appear to be insecure self-doubters. In Being John Malkovich, Craig is passionate about his

puppeteering work but he seems to be too straight-faced about everything. In Adaptation,

fictional Charlie requires himself of such a high standard in writing that he suffers from

writer’s block in the process of adaptation. In Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind, Joel’s job is

not clear but his quiet and serious personality completely imparts into his life as a lover.

These characters have something in common: their artistic profession and their trial to fit into

the world. Preoccupied with the self, Kaufman’s works do not mean to plainly express his
 Chou 72

absolute self in the films; rather, the films represent the self within an interwoven correlation

between male leading characters and their world. Seen from different perspectives, the

representation of each character thereby takes on varied “selves” in films. Further, through

mutters, confession or recollection, these male characters still possess the potentiality for

tempting audiences to go on watching till the end of the movies. The reason for this response

all comes from Kaufman’s ultimate concern for humans wherein the self, as an individual

being, has been reflected on each other. Concerning the representation of embodied subject as

mutually reflected selves, three characteristics of Kaufman’s works will be examined in this

chapter in the hope of seeing how Kaufman pulls “himselves” together.

 Chou 73

A. Going In and out of the Head

When it comes to Charlie Kaufman the scriptwriter, the first thing comes to film critics’

and audience’s mind would be his “heady” style of storytelling. In Being John Malkovich,

audience follows each character to enter a famous actor Malkovich’s head through a portal

and peek “in and out” through Malkovich’s eyes. Peeking out, different characters live their

experiences through Malkovich’s body. Peeking in, not only the subconscious is on display as

a background of a chasing scene inside Malkovich, but the unconscious is also represented as

an exhibition of “Malkovichs” when he enters in his own head. In Adaptation, the motif of

“getting into the head” or “under someone else’s skin” is not so apparent as Being John

Malkovich by way of physical representation. Kaufman makes himself the main character, a

screenwriter struggling to adapt a book about orchids. Metaphysically, Kaufman’s own head

is dissected by himself in his journey of adaptation on the screen. Throughout the film,

fictional Charlie Kaufman keeps on having conversations with Donald Kaufman, his fictional

twin brother. He splits himself up into two characters and thus allows audience to see his

conflicting dialogue within himself. In Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind, audience again

follows the protagonist Joel’s steps getting into his memory when those memorable traces are

getting erased from his brain. In this dreamscape of Joel, as Brian Johnson describes in a

review, the film unfolds another “head trip” within “Hollywood’s most adventurous architect

of mental space” (43).

1. Gaze 37 —To See Is to Perceive

What Kaufman attempts to achieve through such a consciously revealing exposure of the

head is, as the puppeteer Craig articulates in Being John Malkovich, to make audience “see

what others see, feel what others feel.” By seeing and perceiving, audience and characters

37
“Gaze” here is used in a neutral sense, not in the theoretical sense in which it figures in Lacanian film theory
or feminist cultural analysis.
 Chou 74

synchronize their presence through the inherently expressive nature of embodied perception.

In relation to visual experience, Sobchack suggests that the films live out a “perceptual life”

expressing “the visible inscription and gesture of its own experience (The Address of Eye

212). The articulation of a bodily way of being is discussed by Merleau-Ponty in his

description of the indirect language:

My glance toward the goal already has its own miracles. It, too, installs itself in

being with authority and conducts itself there as in a conquered country. It is not

the object which draws movements of accommodation and convergence (from the

eyes). On the contrary, it has been demonstrated that I would never see anything

clearly and that there would be no object for me, unless I used my eyes in such a

way as to make the view of a single object possible. To complete the paradox, one

cannot say that the mind takes the place of the body and anticipates what we will

see. No, it is our glances themselves, with their synergy, their exploration, and

their prospecting which bring the immanent object into focus. (The Prose of the

World 77-78)

For Merleau-Ponty, the world is flesh and human being is flesh of the world, namely flesh of

the flesh. 38 Accordingly, human being’s seeing and perceiving should be realized within a

synergy of such a flesh. Seeing this phenomenological study of Kaufman’s film from this

perspective, the representation of seeing and perceiving becomes the most significant device

in Kaufman’s works. Entitled “The Frontal-Lobe Movie House,” 39 the review of Kaufman’s

three films written by Xi Hau provides an interesting yet appropriate illustration of

Kaufman’s personal stamp. He explains that in Kaufman’s Frontal-Lobe Movie House, the

movie house is exactly audience’s own head and thereby the screen is located in the frontal
38
For detailed analysis of the notion of “flesh,” see the second section of Chapter Two titled “Being as Flesh of
the World.”
39
Xi hau. “Film Review: The Frontal-Lobe Movie House.” Online. April 11th, 2006. Available at
www.movie.idv.tw/seehow
 Chou 75

lobe 40 of audience. Seeing that the screen is the heart of a movie house, the visible and

invisible elements of images projected onto the screen are not only “seen” by audience but

also “perceived” throughout the cinematic experience. Thus it can be seen that the reality

“reflected on the frontal lobe” and “fabricated from the real world” can be regarded as

favorite themes for Kaufman to engage himself in.

2. Body—Sense-ability and Response-ability 41

On the premise of body as body-subject, the representation of body in Kaufman’s films

can be viewed in terms of lived body’s “sense-ability” and “response-ability.” With regard to

the aspect of sense-ability, most of films represent not only characters’ subjective sense

perception but also their objective representations as lived bodies. Those experiences and

representations of lived body evoke characters’ as well as audience’s carnal response-ability.

The ability to respond to the world, as Sobchack notes, may constitute the “material

foundations” for a responsible behavior out of ethical care and consciousness (Carnal

Thoughts 8). Concerning the sensible and responsible body, Merleau-Ponty illustrates the

idea with a metaphor:

If one wants metaphors, it would be better to say that the body sensed and the body

sentient are as the obverse and the reverse, or again, as two segments of one sole

circular course which goes above from left to right and below from right to left, but

40
Frontal lobe is located at the fore part of cerebral hemisphere. It has been found to play a part in impulse
control, judgment, language, memory, motor function, problem solving, sexual behavior, socialization and
spontaneity. According to Russian neurologist Elkhonon Goldberg, “[t]he frontal lobes are the most uniquely
human of brain structures, and they play a critical role of success or failure of any human endeavor” (1-2). The
frontal lobes are also considered our emotional control center as well as home to human cognition of personality.
(Kolb & Wishaw, 1990). For details, see Elkhonon Goldberg (2002) The Executive Brain : Frontal Lobes and
the Civilized Mind. Oxford UP, 2002, and Kolb, B., & Milner, B. (1981). “Performance of complex arm and
facial movements after focal brain lesions.” Neuropsychologia, 19:505-514.
41
The terms, “sense-ability” and “response-ability,” are derived from Vivian Sobchack’s Carnal Thought:
Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (2004). In the introduction, she makes clear that she hopes to arouse
“an appreciation of how our own lived bodies provide the material premises” that enable us “to sense and
respond to the world and other” (3).
 Chou 76

which is but one sole movement in its two phrases. (The Visible and the Invisible

138)

Again and again, Merleau-Ponty repeats himself with the clarification of the reversible and

transitional body. Since Rene Descartes clarified his philosophy by saying “Cogito, ergo

sum” (I think, therefore I am), this famous saying has been in widespread use as a motto.

Human beings have been used to rely on their mind to evaluate and judge things and

neglected that their bodies actually play important roles in making human decision; moreover,

body can help to break through the limit of the mind in a way.

Kaufman deals with the inseparable synergy of body and subjective consciousness. For

instance, in Being John Malkovich, female character Lotte admits she feels all right within a

male body after living through a passionate date with another female Maxine. It is her “carnal

thought” that urges her to take action rather than an assumption coming up by way of pure

thinking. With respect to body as a thinking subject, there are more implications carried out

by the fictional Charlie, whose body oftentimes reacts against what he thinks he should do.

After several frustrating attempts to figure out a good way to start his scriptwriting, Charlie

seats himself in front of a typewriter, making up his mind to write out the first page. However,

his body in the meantime reminds him what he really wants, saying the voice inside:

To begin . . . To begin . . . How to start? I’m hungry. I should get coffee. Coffee

would help me think. Maybe I should write something first, then reward myself

with coffee. Coffee and a muffin. So I need to establish the themes. Maybe a

banana nut. That’s a good muffin.

Body speaks louder than mind. Such “stream of bodily consciousness” infuses with the film.

Another example is when Charlie is meeting an attractive female agent in a business lunch

restaurant. He sees her watching a rivulet of sweat sliding down his forehead. He quickly

wipes it with his hand, thinking to himself: “I’m starting to sweat. Stop sweating. I’ve got to

stop sweating. Can she see it dripping down my forehead? She looked at my hairline. She
 Chou 77

thinks I’m bald.” Charlie tries to conceal the nervous reaction of his body by telling himself

“not to. . .”, but it turns out to be a futile effort. All his anxiety only echoes his self-conscious

loathing to himself because followed by Charlie’s voice-over is her approving utterance: “We

think you are great.” Charlie’s speaking seldom comes along without a juxtaposition of his

inner voice. This phenomenon reflects Merleau-Ponty’s idea of body-subject which indicates

that body should be treated as a speaking embodied subject. As a matter of fact, Kaufman

depicts much more phenomena about the confrontation between human intelligence of

self-restraint and human nature of libidinal passion in another film Human Nature (2002). 42

This film ironically presents the ambivalent idea that civilized human being ought to be good

at suppressing true desire and real concerns.

As for the synthesis of the experience’s subjective and objective aspects, Eternal

Sunshine of Spotless Mind can be viewed in this regard. The embodied subject of Joel is

portrayed as a reversible body so that he is recalling and suffering from his memory on one

side and commenting his memory on the other side. As analyzed in former chapters, both

body and world are intertwined since they are grounded in and made of the same flesh.

Accordingly, Joel’s existence as a lived body is actually “body” in “Body,” an individual of

the whole. 43 Furthermore, this intertwining relationship can be seen as passion in the flesh as

Sobchack defines in Carnal Thoughts. She explains that passion is defined as “suffering” and

also as “an active devotion to others and the objective world” (288). The passion of suffering

engages Joel with his primordial “response-ability” to make a decision to erase the memory.

42
Human Nature is “a comical examination of the trappings of desire in a world where both nature and culture
are idealized.” There are three major characters involved in the story, a self-absorbed scientist, a female
naturalist, and a man they discover, born and raised in the wild. As scientist, Nathan trains the wild man in the
ways of the world - starting with table manners. Insisting that she should fight to preserve the man’s original
nature as an ape, Nathan’s lover Lila actually envies the wild man who represents freedom. In the power
struggle between the three characters, an unusual love triangle emerges. This movie exposes “the perversities of
the human heart and the idiosyncrasies of the civilized mind.” For further information, see IMBD online
available at http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0219822/
43
The capital “Body” means the world as a big body as a whole and lowercase “body” means Joel’s body as a
part of whole.
 Chou 78

However, on the other side of suffering is actually the passionate devotion, which “asserts our

corporeal and affective adherence to others and the objective world” (Carnal Thoughts 288).

In conflict with the ambivalence, Joel eventually re-cognizes in consciousness the ethical

concept followed by passion--the responsibility. As a consequence, he decides to abort the

memory-removal process by being aware of his body as an objective subject that actively

perceives and dominates, as well as a subjective object that being passively perceived and

dominated.

The following illustration can be another example in Adaptation to interpret Sobchack’s

statement of passion for material, showing a comparison between Laroche and Orlean.

Laroche is an orchid-maniac. Before being obsessed with orchid, he has indulged himself

with variously passionate pursuit, such as collecting stones, growing various nursery gardens,

and a large collection of fish. Orlean wonders why he could forsake one passion for another.

Laroche’s response is simply “done with fish,” saying that he has to move on. In contrast,

Orlean keeps suffering from her responsibility for passion. Laroche tells Orlean that his wife

divorced him the moment she woke up from a coma after a fatal car accident. Orlean tells

Laroche that if she almost died, she would do the same because the accident is like a free pass,

with which no one can blame her for her life anymore. Orlean’s social bonds as a famous

New Yorker journalist and as a wife become an intense contrast to her later transformation.

Without a doubt, Orlean has keen sense-ability as a journalist good at observation and

description, like Laroche’s sensibility to everything he concerns with. In response to passion,

Orlean and Laroche have distinct response. It may result from not only their different

attitudes to the world, but also the different reflection upon their ability to respond. Laroche

opts to embrace the passion in spite of social norms when Orlean keeps a distance from it.
 Chou 79

B. Exploring the Depth of Human Being

Generally speaking, Kaufman’s male protagonists are nearly of the same depressed

personality. Most of those male characters are portrayed as insecure and self-doubting,

especially when they get along with women. This fact refers to not only the three films

mainly discussed in this study, but also the other two films written by Kaufman. 44 In contrast

to those strong-willed female characters under his illustration, males always have more

unassertive and shrinking personality. Nevertheless, it is also because of these male

characters’ serious-minded quality that reflects their existential anxiety and metaphysical

pursuit of unspeakable desire.

Like Woody Allen, 45 Kaufman’s films are saturated with existential angst by way of

chattering or murmuring. Unlike Allen existential themes mostly concerning God and

morality, Kaufman would rather focuses on himself as a lived body in this life world, putting

one side the unanswerable questions about the existence of God. In this regard, it is

reasonable and practical to relate this way of working to Husserl’s ingenious

phenomenological method--to bracket the insoluble problems. Resulted from the

self-examination, Kaufman’s characters evaluating and judging himself in no time.

1. Confession as a Remedy for the Irreducible

The most daring representation of Kaufman’s works of his scripts is that they never

44
So far (July 2006), Charlie Kaufman has written five screenplays. All of them lead by male protagonists,
including three films analyzed in this study such as Craig the frustrated puppeteer in Being John Malkovich
(1999), Charlie the anxious screenwriter in Adaptation (2002), Joel the backwardly self-denied man in Eternal
Sunshine of Spotless Mind (2004). As for the other two films, there are Nathan the self-repressed mannerist in
Human Nature (2001) and Chuck Barris the self-reprovingly double-sided producer in Confessions of a
Dangerous Mind (2002).
45
Wood Allen (1935) is the director of Annie Hall (1977), Manhattan (1979), Hanna and Her Sisters (1986), to
name a few. His latest film is Scoop (2006). Allen’s films are permeated with contemporary metaphysical
concerns and his characters often struggle with traditional ethical value. For more information, see
Sander H. Lee, Woody Allen’s Angst: Philosophical Commentaries on his Serious Films (Jefferson: McFarland
& Company, 1997) and Eighteen Woody Allen Films Analyzed: Anguish, God and Existentialism (McFarland &
Company, 2002).
 Chou 80

shirk the human elements. Kaufman devotes himself in probing into the deepest of human

nature. By exploring the emotions and awkwardness of people who trying to connect with

other people, Kaufman’s characters, as Rob Feld notes, often suffer a great deal “in the limbo

of their humanity” (“Q & A with Charlie Kaufman” 131). Unfolding his own predicament,

frustration and unbearable trauma, Kaufman articulates the desire of being an ordinary person.

There is an old saying goes like this: “from confession flows repentance and from repentance

forgiveness.” However, the confessions of Kaufman’s characters do not really repent of

themselves. Rather, they confess in order to affirm themselves in hopes of diminishing the

potential condemnation or criticism. Applauding Kaufman for his ingenious design by means

of confession, Robert McKee explicitly explains the deconstructive rhetoric in Adaptation. 46

In consequence of such a confession, Kaufman earns forgiveness from audience ultimately,

and what is more, the respect and admiration. In Confession of the Dangerous Mind, there is a

Friedrich Nietzsche’s quote spoken by a female to the male protagonist: “Whoever despises

himself still respects himself as one who despises.” 47 By endeavoring himself in uncovering

the underside of human being, Kaufman seems to imply his view point that human nature is

beyond the duality of good and evil. In Being John Malkovich, Craig the puppeteer has ever

expressed his torment to a chimpanzee, saying “do you know how lucky you are to be a

monkey? Conscience is a terrible curse.” Struggling to free themselves from conscience,

Kaufman’s male characters maybe still have one thing in common--longing for an “eternal

sunshine of spotless mind.”

2. The Indecipherable Speech of the Incarnate Subject

To clarify the idea of body-subject, Bryan Magee explains that human body can be

regarded as both subject and object; synchronously, they are neither subject nor object in a

46
Regarding McKee’s remarks on Kaufman’s “deconstructive rhetoric,” see page 54 for the quote.
47
This quote is from Nietzsche’s book Beyond Good and Evil (1888).
 Chou 81

queer way. He gives a concise explication to clarify this ambiguity, saying “it is not a

disembodied subject of experience, because it is a physical object in the world, and yet it is

not an object in the world just like all the other material objects, for it is a self-aware subject

having experiences” (218). Therefore, the phrase “incarnate subject” indicates that lived body

as a body-subject is physically conscious of its movements when it communicates with others

and the world. As an incarnate subject, human being demonstrates his/her consciousness with

the speech of the lived body. However, saying “subjectivity is inescapably perspectival,”

Magee stresses that the body-subject is “inherently incomplete character” (218). Accordingly,

due to the unstable perspective of the subjectivity shifting with the movement of the world,

the subjectivity of the incarnate subject can only be grasped as variable meanings.

For Merleau-Ponty, lived experience is a pre-reflective experience prior to abstract

reflection. Sobchack explains it is in reflection that this kind of lived experience is given

formal significance which is “neither verbal nor literal” (The Address of the Eye xvii).

Therefore, the ambiguity and impossibility of authentic expression turn out to be

contradictory characteristics to the descriptive intention of phenomenological experience.

Muldoon articulates, “[a]s the lived body presumes transcendence to the natural world

through acts of expression, especially language, the incarnate subject fails to give a complete

account of the subject of perception” (8). With regard to the failure of giving a complete

account, Kaufman once joked about speech impediment in Being John Malkovich:

Craig： You don’t have a speech impediment, Dr. Lester.

Lester： Flattery will get you everywhere, my boy. But I'm afraid I have to

trust Floris on this one. You see, she has her doctorate in speech

impedimentology from Case Western. Perhaps you’ve read her

memoirs, “I can't understand a word any of you are saying.”

Craig： No.
 Chou 82

Lester： Pity, it tells it like it is. That’s why the eastern, read Jewish,

publishing establishment won’t touch it. That’s a quote from the

book jacket. George Will, I think. I apologize if you can’t understand

a word I’m saying, Dr. Schwartz.

Craig： No. I understand perfectly.

Lester： Thank you for being kind enough to lie. You see, I’ve been very

lonely in my isolated tower of indecipherable speech.

This is why Merleau-Ponty characterizes human existence as essentially ambiguous. To him,

“this ambiguity cannot be resolved, but it can understood as ultimate, if we recapture the

intuition of real time which preserves everything, and which is at the core of both proof and

expression”( Phenomenology of Perception 190). It is only within a cultural world that

“speech is able to settle into sediment and constitute an acquisition for use in human

relationships” (190).

Consequently, the self can only entail an identity appropriate for its own discovery in a

linguistic community in Being John Malkovich. However, in another film Human Nature,

Kaufman begins to question about the meaning of language in a more skeptical attitude:

Lila: We’re going back to nature, you and I. I’m going to retrain you. I’m

going to make you free again if I have to kill you doing it.

Puff: But I like human being now. (Lila pushes the button. Puff gets an electric

shock and falls to the ground.)

Lila: You what?

Puff: I want to be the way I was before.

Lila: Good. I’ll show you how.

(A bit later)

Puff: Nice night.

Lila: Talking is to be kept to a minimum. Eventually, when we are ready, there

 Chou 83

will be done. Language was invented so people could lie to each other

and themselves. (Puff begins to disagree but he soon stops himself,

seeing that Lila’s hand is hovering over the button.)

Puff: I agree? (confused)

Lila: Any answer is the wrong answer. (Lila shocks Puff.)

At this time, characters discard the use of language altogether because “no matter how

earnestly employed,” as Feld makes clear, “words can only approximate the truth” and

therefore lead only to more lies” (“Q & A with Charlie Kaufman” 119).
 Chou 84

C. Blurring the Borderlines

Besides the facts that Kaufman always “has a head for” his screenplays and he likes to

expose the content of the head to the screen, there is still one more key feature of his

films--he blurs the borderlines all the time. The traditional guidelines teach writers how to

construct a screenplay: first, establish the characters and their situation; second, introduce a

conflict; then resolve it. However, Kaufman’s screenplays turn out to be mixed genres that

are difficult to be defined. If it is a screenwriter’s tendency to operate by a specific set of

rules, Kaufman chooses to be an unaffected storyteller. McKee notes: “Anxious,

inexperienced writhers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master

the form” (Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting 3). On this

premise, Kaufman is neither a naïve writer nor a defiant author; rather, he is an artist--a real

auteur.

In order to blur the borderlines, the first step is to detect where the borders are in

Kaufman’s films. Following the rule of binary opposition is always the fast way to

understand the whole picture of a movie. At first, the real world and the imaginary world are

both apparently portrayed in each film so as to follow up successively inevitable conflicts.

With respect to the two different worlds, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind can be

presented as a striking example. It is not necessary to be a world inside versus a world outside.

For example, in Being John Malkovich, the puppeteer Craig believes he is an artist of talent

who remains undiscovered though actually he is only a significant and petty nobody. After

the binary oppositions have been settled, the next step is to make characters invade the other

side of world. In Being John Malkovich, for instance, the world inside Malkovich is invaded

numerously; in Adaptation, Kaufman’s inner world is open to audience; in Eternal Sunshine

of the Spotless Mind, the conscious Joel endeavors to rescue the unconscious Joel in his

dreamland. In short, Kaufman distinguishes one world from the other, making audience

believe in their diversity. Soon after the recognition, the boundaries between each other grow
 Chou 85

blurred again.

George Linden, in 1970, has ever characterized the nature of the film experience as

“dyadic” in Reflections on the Screen, which is regarded as the longest phenomenological

treatment of films in English. He interpreted the “dyadic” film experience by saying that it

consists in ‘the interdependence, coexistence, and synthesis of objective/subjective, outer

world/inner world, universal/particular relationship” (v). Blurring the borderline does not

only refer to the boundaries in films, but also the invisible wall between films and audience.

On the basis of blurring, two relevant issues are to be concerned about. First, in the aspect of

“Once upon a Now,” the eternal “present” of the cinematic time shall be discussed through

the representation of the screen. Second, in the viewpoint of “Cubist Screenwriting,”

Kaufman’s writing is to be compared with the Cubism.

1. Once upon a Now 48

The cinematic experience of movie is, in terms of phenomenology, always in the present

tense. We may spend about two hour watching a movie during the real time, but feel like one

specific character in the movie going through things of an entire life. Nevertheless, our eyes

actually synchronize with each tableau on the screen at every moment. In the article “A

Phenomenology of Cinematic Time and Space,” there is a lucid illustration concerning the

characteristic present tense of film: “The linguistic equivalent for cinematic presentation of

the past is: ‘That is how it was’; and for the future: ‘This is how it will be’” (Kolker and

Ousley 391). The paradoxical expression clearly indicates that film has no past tense or future

tense since there “is” neither “was” nor “will be” in the filmic time and space. Linden also

argues the movies are persistently in the present, saying “[m]ost stories begin ‘Once upon a

time’. Films do not. They begin ‘Once upon a now’” (2). He further says that films open

48
This phrase is borrowed from an article. See R. P. Kolker and Ousley J. Douglas, “A Phenomenology of
Cinematic Time and Space,” British Journal of Aesthetics 13 (1973).
 Chou 86

many possible worlds before us and the presentation of world is so vivid that we are able to

sense what it is to be in the filmic world. He interprets that it is the motion picture that

directly record our “ways-of-being-in-the-world,” and

the motion picture does not provide us with a mere ‘redemption of physical

reality’; it provides us with other voices, other worlds to be in. It is not primarily a

representation, but a presentation. It presents us with an illusory world both living

and lived. It presents us man alive in the concrete circumstances of his

being-in-the-world. (156)

Being John Malkovich, with its appealing movie title, may have been aroused considerable

movie-goers’ curiosity to wonder about the experience of “being-John

Malkovich-in-the-world.” Moreover, the ingenuity lies in its echo to Andy Warhol’s

well-known expression: “Everyone has his fifteen minutes.” Though this experience of being

only allows those who wants to “take a ride” on Malkovich for fifteen minutes, audiences

actually have been metaphysically “being” certain characters they would like to identify with

for one hour and forty-three minutes, the length of the whole film.

In addition to Being John Malkovich, the title of Kaufman’s second screenplay

Adaptation is also implicative and significant in its connotation. In order to remain being in

the world, one has to adapt his or her self to the environment of the present. The following

dialogue in Adaptation between Susan Orlean and John Laroche provides a quite different

interpretation of adaptation:

John Laroche: You know why I like plants?

Susan Orlean: No.

John Laroche: Because they’re so mutable. Adaptation is a profound process.

Means you figure out how to thrive in the world.

Susan Orlean: Yeah but it’s easier for plants. I mean they have no memory. They

just move on to whatever’s next. With a person, though, adapting

 Chou 87

almost shameful. It’s like running away.

For Orlean, it seems to be shameful to get away from the past so that she maybe carries too

heavy burdens with herself to move on the next. However, Kaufman makes Orlean in the film

change from a timid personality into a daring one after he listens to the advice of McKee the

scriptwriting guru, “your characters must change, and the changes come from themselves.”

Orlean turns out to be discovered taking drug and hanging around with Laroche behind her

husband’s back. At the finale, she cries out “I want to be a baby again. I want to be new.” Her

final claim is a paradox. Once she is adapted into a screenplay, she would have been born into

the screen created by Kaufman and she can not be renewed as another version. Meanwhile,

she is eternal in a sense. In this respect, it can be assumed that being in the world of present

with humiliation is so unbearable for Kaufman that he designedly reveal his intention to

deconstruct his film by Orlean’s utterance “I want to be new” when audience is about to

expect a conclusive end of the story. As a matter of fact, Orlean’s book as well as her life are

invaded and even “murdered” by Kaufman’s re-interpretation in a way. Therefore, Kaufman

may have foreseen her response before the screenplay was screened so as to convey her wish

in this utterance, which is perhaps his too.

The literal expression of Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind has made itself a fanciful

metaphor. How is it possible to keep one’s mind spotless once the “spots” are inscribed upon

the memory? In terms of Kaufman’s solution, perhaps the answer is to step on those

footprints of memories and then keep walking so that those spots of footprints would remain

eternal in the present. In regard to the scene of the screen, its presence is presently engaged in

the constitution of animated presentation. Sobchack analyzes that the cinematic

representation with its specific form of temporality “is intimately bound to a structure . . . of

accumulation, ephemerality, presentness, and anticipation” (Carnal Thought 151). Through

flashbacks and flashforwards, the representation of the happenings in Joel’s memory is

actually a presence in the present. Regarding the presence, Sobchack makes it clear that it is
 Chou 88

informed by its connection to a collective past and an expansive future” (151).

2. Cubist Screenwriting

In view of Kaufman’s writing, David Fear remarked that “it has to take a solid

foundation to write off the beaten track and still make it understandable.” Fear thus compared

Kaufman to Pablo Picasso in terms of his complex, puzzle-like narratives, saying that Picasso

was “more than capable of doing straight, realistic portraiture painting.” It was his capability

of doing the classical form of the art that allowed him to break away from it. Kaufman used

to write the traditional “three-act structure” for scripts of plays and TVs, 49 which usually

convey information directly from point A to point B. Therefore, Fear suggests that, like

Picasso, writing in that discipline gave Kaufman the basis to practice. In response to Fear’s

comparison, Kaufman’s answer in Feld’s interview seemed playful yet also thoughtful:

Cubist screenwriting! (laughs) Yeah, I see what you mean. Most screenwriting is

very formulaic writing, and the reason my stuff breaks away from that is that I’m

just not interested in the formula. But maybe it’s in there in my head, and on some

other level I do understand how I’m breaking away from it. I’ve never really

thought about it that way.

The implication of Cubist screenwriting is coincidently and reflectively compatible to

Merleau-Ponty’s use of Cezanne’s paintings to clarify his insight on vision. Cézanne has been

called the father of modern painting, whose works and ideas were influential in the aesthetic

development of many twentieth-century artists and art movements, especially Cubism.

By interpreting the way of seeing a painting with phenomenological description in view of

subjective human vision, Merleau-Ponty depicts his point of view with respect to cinematic

narrative and painting skills. “To see is to have at a distance,” says Merleau-Ponty. He further

49
For example, Get a Life (Fox, 1990-1992), The Edge (Fox, 1990-1993), The Trouble With Larry (1993), and
Misery Loves Company (1995).
 Chou 89

illustrates the “metamorphosis of Being” in one’s vision with a brief instance:

It is the mountain itself which from out there makes itself seen by the painter; it is

the mountain that he interrogates with his gaze. What exactly does he ask of it? To

unveil the means, visible and not otherwise, by which it makes itself a mountain

before our eyes. Lights, lighting, shadows, reflections, color, all the objects of his

quest are not altogether real objects; like ghosts, they have only visual existence.

In fact they exist only at the threshold of profane vision; they are not seen by

everyone. The painter’s gaze asks them what they do to suddenly cause something

to be and to be this thing, what they do to compose this worldly talisman and to

make us see the visible. (Primacy of Perception 166)

Brendan Prendeville believes that Cezanne’s work answers strongly to Merleau-Ponty’s

philosophy of perception in general, assuming that “painting is an integral place in his

philosophical project” (2). In his article “Merleau-Ponty, Realism and Painting:

Psychophysical Space and the Space of Exchange,” He proposes that Merleau-Ponty could be

termed as “perspectivalist” inasmuch as he defines spatiality in virtue of “an active

inter-involvement of perceiver and perceived” (2).

Take the example of Joel in Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind. Staying with Joel in his

dreamland, audiences are virtually in “an active inter-involvement of perceiver and

perceived.” Furthermore, film, unlike a painting that remains merely an object for vision, is a

moving picture. The representation of the objective world is “perceived as the subject of its

own vision, as well as an object for our vision” (Carnal Thought 148). In Eternal Sunshine of

Spotless Mind, Kaufman makes the most use of such exercise of perspectives. With two Joels

re-experiencing and criticizing aside together, Joel is perceived as the subject of his own

vision and meanwhile Joel sees the other Joel as an object for his own vision. Besides the

spatiality, the temporal simultaneity also extends cinematic presence. According to Sobchack,

the expansion of the space and time in Joel’s dreamland is accordingly represented by means
 Chou 90

of “visual/visible cinematic articulations as double exposure, superimposition, montage, and

parallel editing” (151). In other words, the process unfolding of Joel’s memory can also be

regarded as playing jigsaw puzzle. Joel has a complete collection of the jigsaw and then he

scatters them out of the box, his mind. What audience sees is actually the process that he

attempts to reconstruct the jigsaw with a great expectation of seeing the original image as

complete as possible. However, just like Godard’s famous maxim: “A film should always

have a beginning, middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order” (qtd. in Gilberto,

“Self-Illuminated”), the pleasure of jigsaw consists in its exploring process. The exploration

of Joel’s memory map is actually led by the way he gazes. In this sense, Joel’s recalling

memory echoes the lines in Great Expectation (1998) 50 delivered by the protagonist Finn:

“I’m not going to tell the story the way it happened. I’m going to tell it the way I remember

it.” The way we remember things is not in order, not to mention the attempt to recall from the

fragmental memories scattered around. In this aspect, Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind

represents the reality through its filmic representation under Kaufman the screenwriter’s

subjective narrative. In Merleau-Ponty’s essay “Metaphysics and the Novel,” he discusses the

relationship of literature and philosophy by relating to novels. He believes that “[t]he work of

a great novelist always rests on two or three philosophical ideas” and “[t]he function of the

novelist is not to state these ideas thematically but to make them exist for us in the way that

things exist” (Sense and Non-Sense 26). Believing that the way things exist is enough to

present themselves, Kaufman does not really “tell” the story but “show” the story instead. All

in all, the representation of Joel, as an “active inter-involvement of perceiver and perceived”

(2), resonates Prendeville’s description of Merleau-Ponty’s perspective on spatiality.

50
This film, directed by Alfonso Cuaron, is a modernization of Charles Dickens classic story. It is a story about
hapless Finn as a painter in New York pursuing his unrequited and haughty childhood love.
 Chou 91

Chapter V

Conclusion

Maurice Nadeau 51 wrote in an article in the newspaper Combat: “If

Descartes lived today, he would write novels”. With all due respect to
Nadeau, a Descartes of today would already have shut himself up in his
bedroom with a 16mm camera and some film, and would be writing his
philosophy on film: for his Discours de la Méthode would today be of such
a kind that only the cinema could express it satisfactorily.
--Alexandre Astruc, “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: La Camera-Stylo” 19

The relationship between philosophy and film deserves to be reconsidered by varying

the conventional viewpoint of film’s serving as a vehicle for philosophy. Indeed, as Paisley

Livingston puts it, “reflection about films can contribute to the exploration of specific theses

and arguments” (11). The dialogues between philosophy and film, as such, can be endless.

Moreover, film even possessed of its own philosophy in addition to enhancing certain

philosophical understanding. As noted before, philosophical ideas can be best introduced by

the representation of images. With its animated illustration of philosophical issue, film and

philosophy actually reciprocally benefit each other.

A. Filmic Philosophy—Philosophy Goes On the Screen 52

In the image-oriented society of nowadays, human body has been a significant point in

contemporary social studies. Inasmuch as the body has been regarded as an object among

other objects or even a commodity, many scholars attempt to redeem the body, however, as

51
Maurice Nadeau (1911- ) is one of Franch most esteemed literary critics, noted for his Histoire du surrealisme
(1945) and his important autobiography. For many years Nadeau has edited La Quinzaine litteraire, a biweekly
roughly comparable to the New York Review of Books but much more radical.
52
The word is applied here as a pun to refer to the phrase--“goes on the stage.”
 Chou 92

Thomas Csordas notes, “without much sense of bodiliness in their analyses” (3). Thus, it is

critical to reflect on such a biased tendency to, which “carries the dual dangers of dissipating

the force of using the body as a methodological starting point, and of objectifying bodies as

things devoid of intentionality and intersubjectivity” (4). According to Merleau-Ponty, the

lived body should be both an objective subject and a subjective object at the same time.

However, his body-subject usually takes on the property of ambiguity and indeterminacy. In

this regard, the same features can be demonstrated by Kaufman’s characters in his films.

Through making meaning out of bodily sense, the philosophical way of seeing a film

provides an alternative perspective on film studies. Further, the exploration of self can also be

realized by the lived body’s essential implication in the film.

In view of his untiring undertaking of articulating the “primacy of perception,”

Merleau-Ponty’s noteworthy contribution to philosophy consists in, not only the conspicuous

manifestation of his theory of perception, but rather the ultimate consequence of dissolving

the dichotomy, such as mind and body, subject and object, internal and external. This

intention can be seen in the illustration of his philosophy with various examples spreading all

over his works. In The Primacy of Perception, for instance, he describes the communication

of the sensation:

I will never know how you see red, and you will never know how I see it; but this

separation of consciousness is recognized only after a failure of communication,

and our first movement is to believe in an undivided being between us. . . . It is

thus necessary that, in the perception of another, I find myself in relation with

another “myself,” who is, in principle, open to the same truths as I am, in relation

to the same being that I am. (17)

He explains that because both behaviors take place within the same perceptual world and

both of them open to the same truth of the world, their subjectivity could thereby be found

within each other, which Merleau-Ponty calls “the new dimension of intersubjective being or,
 Chou 93

in other words, of objectivity” (18). This new dimension of intersubjective being is actually

the inter-subjectivity in an intertwining relationship between subjective sense and objective

one.

As Vivian Sobchack suggests, the “chiasmatic relation” 53 can be particularly favored

and accentuated by the medium of cinema “because the cinema uses ‘lived modes’ of

perceptual and sensory experience (seeing, movement, and hearing the most dominant) as

‘sign-vehicles’ 54 of representation” (Carnal Thought 74). As noted before, the cinematic body,

like the lived body, presents itself as both an objective subject and a subjective object at the

same time. Accordingly, Kaufman’s films, styled with heady form and content, can be

accessibly comprehended and further illuminated through phenomenological study of the

lived body as a practical method.

By asserting “philosophy as a branch of literature,” Bryan Magee argues that philosophy

in France has developed as part of the general literary culture in the 20th century (The Story

of Philosophy 214). As for Merleau-Ponty, however, Magee remarks that his writing presents

difficulties for the readers because of the ambiguity in his philosophical inquiry. This is also

the reason that prevents him from achieving the same fame and popularity as Camus or Satre.

There is an interesting debate between Merleau-Ponty and Mr. Brehier. The latter has an

inference in response to Merleau-Ponty’s ideas on perception: “I see your ideas as being

better expressed in literature and in painting than in philosophy. Your philosophy results in a

novel. This is not a defect, but I truly believe that it results in that immediate suggestion of

realities which we associate with the writing of novelist” (The Primacy of Perception 30). 55

53
This term is from Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible in a chapter called “The Intertwining-The
Chiasm” from page 130-155.
54
Umberto Eco uses the term “sign-vehicle” as distinguished from “sign-content” to substitute for “signifier”
and “signified,” asserted by Ferdinand de Saussure. For further information, see Umberto Eco, A Theory of
Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 52-54.
55
The Primacy of Perception contains Merleau-Ponty’s address to the Societe francaise de philosophie in 1946.
This address, followed by a discussion Mr. Brehier and the other participants, represents his attempt to outline
and defend the assertion of Phenomenology of Perception.
 Chou 94

Being applied to literature and painting in his books, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of

body, featured with its characteristics of reversibility and transitionality as part of the flesh of

the world, finds its philosophical ground to flourish. Further, this research finds the

interdisciplinary study between phenomenology and film provides a significant place in

cultural studies, and Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy has inspired an advanced realization to the

representation as an artwork.
 Chou 95

B. Philosophical Film—“Body is a body is a body is a body”

“Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose” is probably the most famous quote of Gertrude

Stein, 56 who used variations on the phrase in other writings. The sentence is often interpreted

as “things are what they are.” In Stein’s view, the sentence expresses the fact that simply

using the name of a thing already invokes the imagery and emotions associated with it. Stein

is a Cubist writer whose stream-of-consciousness experiments and rhythmical word-paintings

were designed to evoke “the excitingness of pure being.” With the variation in words, the

subtitle “Body is a body is a body is a body” also intends to evoke the “excitingness of pure

being” as a subject-body.

Cubist painters such as Picasso, Matisse, and Braque, giving up the traditional single

point of view, often presented a number of different perspectives of the same object or person

on a flat plane. Putting more emphasis on light and color, Cubism is a reaction to the

impressionist period. Cubism follows Paul Cézanne statement that “[e]verything in nature

takes its form from the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder” (qtd. in “Cezanne, Paul”). With

Cezanne’s painting, Merleau-Ponty illustrates his thoughts of visual perception:

We live in the midst of man-made objects, among tools, in house, streets, cities,

and most of the time we see them only through the human actions which put them

to use. We become used to thinking that all of this exists necessarily and

unshakeably. Cezanne’s painting suspends these habits of thought and reveals the

base of inhuman nature upon which man has installed himself. This is why

Cezanne’s people are strange, as if viewed by a creature of another species.

(Sense and Non-Sense 26).

Cézanne’s art grew out of Impressionism and then eventually challenged the

56
Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was an American writer, poet, feminist, playwright, and promoter in the
development of modern art and literature, who spent most of her life in France. The sentence “Rose is a rose is a
rose is a rose” was written by Gertrude Stein as part of the poem Sacred Emily (1913), which appeared in the
book Geography and Plays (1922). In that poem, the first “Rose” is the name of a woman.
 Chou 96

conventional values of painting in the nineteenth century. Through his “insistence on personal

expression and on the integrity of the painting itself,” Cezanne developed his own theory of

painting and style based on the reduction of every object in nature to the basic shapes

(Cezanne, Paul”). Regarding this “reduction,” Francis Lyotard also stresses on the

inexpressible art by taking Cezanne’s painting for example, indicating that “in a picture or a

piece of music the idea is incommunicable by means except the display of colors and sounds”

(150). What Lyotard tries to convey is that colors is supposed to be the matter of painting and

sounds is supposed to be the matter of music. Concerning the Cubist style of narrative, the

essential features often rest with the multiple narratives, two-way reference, interlaced

displacement of space and time. As indicated in Chapter Four, Kaufman has accidentally

refers his writing style to “cubist screenwriting.” With the characteristics such as collage,

multiple perspectives, and fragmentation, those screenplays with non-linear format written by

Kaufman are appropriately compared to cubist novels. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless

Mind, for example, the disorder of the memories and the reversal of cause-and-effect are like

a cubist painting. The film seems to be about a love story but it does not show the passion or

sweetness of love supposed to be on screen. Instead, the gloomy tone permeates throughout

the film which is mostly composed of collage of fragments of memories. It is also why

Kaufman’s films are so difficult to be confined with their genres as well as themes.

Kaufman’s films are particularly preoccupied by his final concern for the existence of

self upon either himself or the other self. Through the phenomenological research, this study

finds that since the self is always in relation with the other self, the understanding of oneself

relies on its being as intertwining selves with the world and the other selves in the world. In

order to “know thyself,” 57 this study chooses to go back to the body itself by means of

Merleau-Ponty’s theory. Therefore, this journey in search of the “self,” should begin with the

57
The Ancient Greek aphorism “Know thyself” was inscribed in golden letters at the lintel of the entrance to the
Temple of Apollo at Delphi.
 Chou 97

very entity of our existence, body. The following example may help to clarify the meaning of

knowing the self. One would not say “my body likes rose” or “my mind likes rose,” but we

would say “I like rose.” The reason is that when we say “my body” or “my mine,” it means

this body or mind are both object that can belong to me. Therefore, it is this “I” with the

subjective consciousness that thinks. This conscious “I,” as a subject who communicates with

the corporeal existence, is accordingly a body-subject. As a result, through this subject-body

(or body-subject) comes out the subjective consciousness which express itself by using the

word “I.” However, this “I” is reversal and transitional because of the changing subjective

consciousness, which goes back and forth between a conscious subject and conscious object

so that it is called inter-subjectivity or inter-corporeality, that is to say, self. In view of the

fluidity of inter-subjectivity or inter-corporeality, this self is not always recognized by “I” the

subjective consciousness, but sometimes acknowledged by the other the objective

consciousness. In sum, when I say “I like rose,” this “I” involves different selves reflected on

the idea of rose. Consequently, this study finds that through understanding of the idea of

body-subject, the self as intertwining selves can be manifested and realized in a sensible and

reasonable way.

Taken together, the purpose of this study is an attempt to make sense on the captured

images of human beings as a subject-body created by a screenwriter known as Charlie

Kaufman. The movement of the images on the screen arranged in a logical temporal order is

actually a representation as a painting or a mind map of its author. Nietzsche once indicated

the very relationship between every philosophy and its author:

Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been:

namely, the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and

unconscious memoir; also that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every

philosophy constituted the real germ of life from which the whole plant has grown.

(6).
 Chou 98

Exploring the in-formation of our body, this study hopes to make explicit the idea that we

live in the process of constant trans-formation which encourages a deeper regard for the

understanding of ourselves. Generated from “bodily involved” research, this study shall

implant “real germ of life” into the marriage of philosophy and film.
 Chou 99

Works Cited

Charlie Kaufman’s Works:

Adaptation. Dir. Spike Jonze. Columbia Pictures, 2002.

Being John Malkovich. Dir. Spike Jonze. USA Film, 1999.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Dir. Michel Gondry. Universal Studios, 2004.

Human Nature. Dir. Michel Gondry. New Line Home Entertainment, 2000.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Works:

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Sense and Non- Sense. Trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus & Patricia A.

Dreyfus. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964.

---. Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Colin Smith. London: Routledge, 1962.

---. The Primacy of Perception. Ed. James M. Edie. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1964.

---. The Prose of the World. Ed. Claude Lefort. Trans. John O'Neill. Evanston: Northwestern

UP, 1973.

---. The Visible and the Invisible. Ed. Claude Lefort. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston:

Northwestern UP, 1968.

---. Signs. Trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus, Evanston: Northwestern UP,

1964.

---. Structure of Behavior. Trans. Alden L. Fisher. Boston: Beacon Press, 1963.

Books:

Blackburn, Simon. The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford UP. 1994.

Bazin, Andre. What is cinema? Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press,

1967.

Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. New York: The
 Chou 100

McGraw-Hill, 1996.

Caserbier, Allan. Film and Phenomenology: Toward a Realist Theory of Cinematic

Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991.

Cohen, Richard A. “Merleau-Ponty, the Flesh, and Foucault.” Rereading Merleau-Ponty:

Essays Beyond the Continental-Analytic Divide. Ed. Lawrence Hass and Dorothea

Olkowski. NY: Humanity Books, 2000.

Csordas, Thomas J. Introduction to Embodiment and Experience. Ed. Thomas J. Csordas.

Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.

Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976.

Feld, Rob. “Q & A with Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze.” Adaptation: The Shooting Script.

Kaufman, Charlie and Donald Kaufman. NY: Newmarket Press, 2002.

---. “Q & A with Charlie Kaufman.” Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: The Shooting

Script. Charlie Kaufman. NY: Newmarket Press, 2004.

Falzon, Christopher. Philosophy Goes to the Movies: An Introduction to Philosophy. London:

Routledge, 2002.

Husserl, Edmund. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology.

Trans. David Carr. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1970.

Ihde, Don. Technology and the Lifeworld: From Garden to Earth. Bloomington: Indiana

University Press, 1990.

Jones, Amelia. Body Art / Performing the Subject. Minneappolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988.

Kaufman, Charlie. Being John Malkovich: Screenplay. London: Faber & Faber, 2000.

---. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: The Shooting Script. NY: Newmarket Press, 2004.

---. Human Nature: The Shooting Script. Newmarket. NY: Newmarket Press, 2002.

---. Introduction to Being John Malkovich: Screenplay. Charlie Kaufman. London: Faber &

Faber, 2000.

Kaufman, Charlie and Donald Kaufman. Adaptation: The Shooting Script. NY: Newmarket
 Chou 101

Press, 2002.

Kundera, Milan. The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Trans. Michael Henry Heim. New York:

Perennial Classics, 1999.

Lee, Sander H. Woody Allen’s Angst: Philosophical Commentaries on his Serious Films.

Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 1997.

---. Eighteen Woody Allen Films Analyzed: Anguish, God and Existentialism. McFarland &

Company, 2002.

Litch, Mary. Philosophy Through Film. NY: Routledge, 2002.

Livingston, Paisley. “Theses on Cinema as Philosophy.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art

Criticism 64.1 (Winter 2006): 11-18.

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Consciousness. Athens: Ohio UP, 1991.

McKee, Robert. “Critical Commentary.” Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: The

Shooting Script. Charlie Kaufman. NY: Newmarket Press, 2004.

---. Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting. New York:

Reganbooks, 2000.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.

Orlean, Susan. The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession. NY: Ballantine

Books, 2000.

---. “A Reader’s Guide.” The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession. Susan

Orlean. NY: Ballantine Books, 2000.

Priest, Stephen. Merleau-Ponty. NY: Routledge, 1998.

 Chou 102

Stam, Robert. Film theory: An Introduction. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000.

Stam, Robert and Alessandra Raengo, eds. Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and

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Sobchack, Vivian. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton

UP, 1992.

---. Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture. Berkeley and Los Angeles,

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Stein, Gertrude. Geography and Plays. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993.

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Articles:

Bean, Henry. “Self-made Heroes.” Sight & Sound (March 2003): 17-19.

Grau, Christopher. “Eternal Sunshine of Spotless Mind and the Morality of Memory.” The

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64.1 (Winter 2006): 119-133.

Johnson, Brian D. “Loving in Oblivion.” Rev. of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

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Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 71.1 (1997): 1-18.

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space of Exchange.” Art History 22 (1999): 364-388.

 Chou 103

Repass, Scott. Rev. of Being John Malkovich. By Charlie Kaufman. Film Quarterly 56.1

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Shaw, Daniel. “On Being Philosophical and Being John Malkovich.” The Journal of

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Wartenberg, Thomas E. “Beyond Mere Illustration: How Films Can Be Philosophy.” The

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Whelan, Winifred. “Bodily Knowing: ‘More Ancient Than Thought’.” Religious Education

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 Chou 104

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