ReFocus: The Films of Spike Jonze 9781474447638

Citation preview

ReFocus: The Films of Spike Jonze

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ReFocus: The American Directors Series Series Editors: Robert Singer and Gary D. Rhodes Editorial board: Kelly Basilio, Donna Campbell, Claire Perkins, Christopher Sharrett and Yannis Tzioumakis

ReFocus is a series of contemporary methodological and theoretical approaches to the interdisciplinary analyses and interpretations of neglected American directors, from the oncefamous to the ignored, in direct relationship to American culture—its myths, values, and historical precepts. The series ignores no director who created a historical space—either in or out of the studio system—beginning from the origins of American cinema and up to the present. These directors produced film titles that appear in university film history and genre courses across international boundaries, and their work is often seen on television or available to download or purchase, but each suffers from a form of “canon envy”; directors such as these, among other important figures in the general history of American cinema, are underrepresented in the critical dialogue, yet each has created American narratives, works of film art, that warrant attention. ReFocus brings these American film directors to a new audience of scholars and general readers of both American and Film Studies. Titles in the series include: ReFocus: The Films of Preston Sturges Edited by Jeff Jaeckle and Sarah Kozloff ReFocus: The Films of Delmer Daves Edited by Matthew Carter and Andrew Nelson ReFocus: The Films of Amy Heckerling Edited by Frances Smith and Timothy Shary ReFocus: The Films of Budd Boetticher Edited by Gary D. Rhodes and Robert Singer ReFocus: The Films of Kelly Reichardt E. Dawn Hall ReFocus: The Films of William Castle Edited by Murray Leeder ReFocus: The Films of Barbara Kopple Edited by Jeff Jaeckle and Susan Ryan ReFocus: The Films of Elaine May Edited by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas and Dean Brandum ReFocus: The Films of Spike Jonze Edited by Kim Wilkins and Wyatt Moss-Wellington edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/refoc

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ReFocus: The Films of Spike Jonze Edited by Kim Wilkins and Wyatt Moss-Wellington

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organization Kim Wilkins and Wyatt Moss-Wellington, 2019 © the chapters their several authors, 2019 Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun—Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13 Ehrhardt MT by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 4762 1 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 4763 8 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 4764 5 (epub) The right of Kim Wilkins and Wyatt Moss-Wellington to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

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Contents

List of Figures Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: Jonze Between the Lines Kim Wilkins and Wyatt Moss-Wellington

vii viii xi 1

Part 1 Authorship and Originality 1

Adaptation in Adaptation in Adaptation in Adaptation Wyatt Moss-Wellington

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2

“I’ll eat you up I love you so”: Adaptation, Authorship, and Intermediality in Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are Eddie Falvey

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3

Converging Indiewood: Spike Jonze, Propaganda Films, and the Emergence of Specialty Film Giant USA Films Yannis Tzioumakis

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Part 2 Psychology, Identity, and Crisis 4

“You can be John Malkovich”: Celebrity, Absurdity, and Convention in Being John Malkovich Kim Wilkins

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5

“I can’t sleep. I’m losing my hair. I’m fat and repulsive”: Crises of Masculinity and Artistry in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation Julie Levinson

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5½ Spike Jonze’s Screenwriting: The Screenplay Wyatt Moss-Wellington

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CONTENTS

Part 3 Her 7

“Are these feelings even real?” Intimacy and Authenticity in Spike Jonze’s Her Peter Marks

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8

Machinic Empathy and Mental Health: The Relational Ethics of Machine Empathy and Artificial Intelligence in Her Frances Shaw

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9

The “tedious yammering of selves”: The End of Intimacy in Spike Jonze’s Her Richard Smith

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Part 4 Beyond the Feature 10

Spike Jonze Shorts Stories Cynthia Felando

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Spike Jonze, Propaganda/Satellite Films, and Music Video Work: Talent Management and the Construction of an Indie-Auteur Andrew Stubbs

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Spike Jonze’s Abbreviated Art of the Suburbs Laurel Westrup

Index

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213 231 248

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Figures

4.1

Craig and Maxine on the 7½ floor

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4.2

“Being” John Malkovich as he orders bathmats

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5.1

The glum Charlie with his cheery doppelgänger, Donald

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5.2

The overstuffed brain of Charlie Kaufman confronts the blank page

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10.1 I’m Here: Sheldon

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10.2 I’m Here: Sheldon and Francesca

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Notes on Contributors

Eddie Falvey completed his AHRC-funded Ph.D. project on the early films of New York at the University of Exeter, where he taught in the department of English. Since finishing his Ph.D., Eddie has been a lecturer in contextual studies at Plymouth College of Art, specializing in animation. He is co-editor of a forthcoming collection on contemporary horror and has incoming chapters and articles on horror, animation, and fandom studies. He is currently working on developing his thesis into a monograph. Cynthia Felando graduated with a Ph.D. in Critical Studies from the School of Theater, Film and Television at UCLA, after which she worked as an art house and film festival programmer. Now a member of the faculty in the Film and Media Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, her primary teaching and research interests include American film history, youth culture and media, women and film, and the history and criticism of short films. In addition to several journal and anthology publications, her book, Discovering Short Films: The History and Style of Live-Action Fiction Shorts, was published in 2015. Julie Levinson is Professor of Film and Chair of the Arts and Humanities division at Babson College, USA. She is the author of The American Success Myth on Film, editor of Alexander Payne: Interviews, and co-editor of Acting, which is part of the ten-volume Behind the Silver Screen film history series. Her publications in journals and edited collections focus on a wide range of topics including genre and gender, documentary film, metafiction, and narrative theory. She has been a film curator for arts institutions including Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, the New England Foundation for the Arts, and

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

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the Boston Film/Video Foundation. She has served as an editorial consultant for many documentary films and as a panelist for such organizations as the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. Peter Marks is Professor of English at the University of Sydney. His books include George Orwell the Essayist: Literature, Politics and the Periodical Culture (2011), Imagining Surveillance: Eutopian and Dystopian Literature and Film (2015), and Literature of the 1990s: Endings and Beginnings (2018). Wyatt Moss-Wellington is Assistant Professor in Media and Communication Studies at the University of Nottingham Ningbo China. He is the author of Narrative Humanism: Kindness and Complexity in Fiction and Film (Edinburgh University Press). Moss-Wellington received his Ph.D. from the University of Sydney in 2017. He is also a progressive folk multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter, and has released four studio albums: The Kinder We (2017), Sanitary Apocalypse (2014), Gen Y Irony Stole My Heart (2011), and The Supermarket and the Turncoat (2009). Frances Shaw is a researcher and writer based in Tasmania, Australia. She is a social theorist and qualitative researcher in the area of media and technology, with a background in media studies and politics. More recently her work has focused on the ethics and politics of social media and mobile device interventions for mental illness, with a particular focus on surveillance and consent, algorithmic accountability, and the allocation of moral responsibility in mHealth and eHealth. She conducted this research as a postdoctoral researcher in applied ethics with the Black Dog Institute. Previously she researched the expression of emotional distress on social media at the University of Edinburgh, and how trust and empathy is established in online spaces. Her primary research interests include digital ethics, social media cultures, digital methods, health cultures, digital embodiment, and the self. Richard Smith lectures in the film studies program at the University of Sydney, Australia. Richard’s current research interests include cinematic time, transnational and global cinemas, national cinemas, and the new philosophies of film. Richard is currently supervising doctoral dissertations in topics ranging from online film criticism, to the reappraisal of apparatus theory, to the concept of “trash cinema.” Andrew Stubbs is Lecturer of Film, Media and Communication at Staffordshire University. His Ph.D. thesis, completed in 2018, was titled “Managing Indie Auteurism in an Era of Sectoral Media Convergence,” and explored

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

the roles that producers and talent managers play in packaging and promoting specialty or high-end content using indie authorial branding strategies in film, television, music video, and advertising. He is the author of “Creation as Recreation: Steven Spielberg and the Remake,” in David Roche (ed.), Steven Spielberg: Hollywood Wunderkind and Humanist (Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2018). Yannis Tzioumakis is Reader in Film and Media Industries at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of five books, most recently of Acting Indie: Industry, Aesthetics, and Performance (co-authored with Cynthia Baron) (Palgrave, 2019), and co-editor of six collections of essays, most recently of United Artists (Routledge, 2019). He also co-edits the Routledge Hollywood Centenary and the Cinema and Youth Cultures book series (both for Routledge). Laurel Westrup, Ph.D. is a Continuing Lecturer in Writing Programs at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is co-editor, with David Laderman, of Sampling Media (Oxford University Press, 2014), and her work on media and popular music has also appeared in the journals Spectator, Projector, and Film Criticism. She is currently working on a manuscript that traces the genealogy of music video and an edited collection, with Paul N. Reinsch, on soundtrack albums. Kim Wilkins is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Screen Cultures at the University of Oslo, Norway, where she researches national and cultural identity in postreunification Berlin screen cultures. She has published widely on American indie cinema and is the author of American Eccentric Cinema (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). She has also published work on contemporary television.

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Acknowledgments

“Half Light I” Words and Music by Arcade Fire © 2010. Reproduced by permission of EMI Music Publishing, London W1F 9LD “Modern Man” Words and Music by Arcade Fire © 2010. Reproduced by permission of EMI Music Publishing, London W1F 9LD “Sprawl I (Flatland)” Words and Music by Arcade Fire © 2010. Reproduced by permission of EMI Music Publishing, London W1F 9LD “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” Words and Music by Arcade Fire © 2010. Reproduced by permission of EMI Music Publishing, London W1F 9LD “Suburban War” Words and Music by Arcade Fire © 2010. Reproduced by permission of EMI Music Publishing, London W1F 9LD “The Suburbs” Words and Music by Arcade Fire © 2010. Reproduced by permission of EMI Music Publishing, London W1F 9LD

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This book is dedicated to Ketan Joshi and Sophia Harris

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Introduction: Jonze Between the Lines Kim Wilkins and Wyatt Moss-Wellington

T

he title of this collection may, at first, appear misleading. We promise it is not. Readers may expect a collection with the title “The Films of Spike Jonze” to present a fairly traditional auteurist study. Claiming films to be “of Spike Jonze” identifies Jonze as an author, and as such echoes the enthusiasm established by the young Cahiers critics whose politique des auteurs celebrated those “[men] of the cinema” whose work could be elevated to the status of high art.1 Indeed, the critical discourse tracking Jonze’s feature film career conforms to this narrative. From his debut feature Being John Malkovich (1999) to his latest film Her (2013), Jonze’s work has been regarded as inventive, surreal, quirky, genius, and, above all, distinctly original—the hallmark of auteurism.2 Of Being John Malkovich, Roger Ebert wrote, “Every once in a long, long while a movie comes along that is like no other. A movie that creates a new world for us and uses it to produce wonderful things . . . Either ‘Being John Malkovich’ gets nominated for best picture, or the members of the Academy need portals into their brains.”3 Although Being John Malkovich did not receive a nomination for Best Picture, it was nominated in three other categories, including Best Director.4 In addition to the originality of his films, Jonze has been increasingly regarded as a deeply personal filmmaker. Reflecting on Jonze’s adaptation of his children’s book Where the Wild Things Are, author Maurice Sendak said, “I’ve never seen a movie that looked or felt like this. And it’s [Spike Jonze’s] personal ‘this.’ . . . He’s a real artist that lets it come through in the work.”5 Jonze’s status as a “real artist” with a “personal” vision was a recurring theme in the critical reception of Her—supported by Jonze’s singular writer-director credit.6 As much as we might take issue with traditional auteurist designations as a means for describing film labor or evaluating a canon (and contributors in

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this volume certainly do), we can still find value in tracing artistic recurrences across a filmmaker’s oeuvre without presuming a singular vision heroically transmitted in isolation from—or despite—production collaborators. How, then, could we begin to define Jonze’s “personal” reference points, those aesthetics and stories the filmmaker continues to return to? We might suggest that across Jonze’s four features, a unique style is indeed discernible: that he blends the outlandish and fantastical with mainstream Hollywood conventions, or that his films are philosophical, or that he repeatedly centers his narratives around lonely male protagonists. We might also examine the production histories of his feature films to interrogate his relative autonomy with respect to notions of independence that often accompany auteurism—and indeed, many chapters herein traverse this exact terrain. However, where auteurist accounts of filmmakers focus on directors as artists and authors of feature films, to limit our discussion in this manner would mispresent Jonze’s expansive oeuvre. In fact, feature films comprise only one facet of Jonze’s creative output. Prior to Being John Malkovich, Spike Jonze (born Adam Spiegel in October 1969) was known predominantly for his explorative work in music videos for artists including Björk, Sonic Youth, the Beastie Boys, Puff Daddy, Weezer, R.E.M., Ween, Daft Punk, The Chemical Brothers, Pavement, The Notorious B.I.G., and Fatboy Slim. Jonze began his career as a BMX photojournalist and directed a number of influential skating videos, including Video Days (1991). He would maintain a concurrent career in digital media production, TV, and online journalism right up to his current role as creative director of Vice Media. This is typical of Jonze’s crisscrossing, transmedial reach. His roles in the film industry might be substantial—as director, writer, actor, and producer—but Jonze’s creative range connects nodes between many other industries, including television production (in particular the Jackass franchise), commercial work, and journalism. Thus, rather than delimiting Jonze’s creative identity to “director” (or even “filmmaker”) he is a creative with more in common with the contemporary “slashie” workers who “straddle industries and disciplines, defining themselves by several professions.”7 Jonze has always worked between the lines of commercial and subversive imperatives, philosophy and genre entertainment, independent and Hollywood modes of production, short work and features. As such, this volume focuses not simply on the feature films of Jonze, but on his work as a transmedia practitioner in the age of convergence. Where the “auteur” designation has been reserved for singularly distinctive feature film directors—and common parlance employs “film” as shorthand for “feature film”—this collection understands these terms more broadly. The term “film” refers to Jonze’s short form audiovisual work, both the commercial and noncommercial, as much as it does his features. The realigned focus on Jonze as a transmedial practitioner is just one of the ways in which this volume presents his work as “in between,” and precipitates

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a shift in the consideration of film as art—and art as autonomous—particularly distinct from commercial imperatives. As Fabian Holt and Francesco Lapenta write, autonomy is a sine qua non of creative work.8 However, the development of the contemporary creative industries within which Jonze operates challenges romantic notions of the artist and autonomy because: [it] involves a rationalisation of artistic practices into creative products such as media work and design. Artistic work is generally contingent on the rules of art characterised by an emphasis on artistic autonomy and originality, but also a greater resistance to the industrial system. Both creative and artistic work, however, tend to be restrained but never eliminated when absorbed into industrial production . . . A certain level of autonomy is necessary to produce creative products of cultural and economic value, but autonomy is not a monolithic concept. Rather, it is constituted in complex relationships between these contradictory and unstable forces.9 While film, in the Hollywood tradition, has always been a commercial art, the proponents of auteurism have often circumvented or overtly disavowed their selected filmmakers’ commercial imperatives. Of course, positioning art in opposition to commerce is not distinct to filmmaking. Citing Pierre Bourdieu, Angela McRobbie notes that for many creatives financial failure is often taken as a marker of artistic success or integrity.10 Stephanie Taylor and Karen Littleton term this opposition “the art-versus-money” repertoire wherein creative work and money-making are not only viewed as incompatible, but the latter is considered to pose a variety of threats to the former, even while it may in fact sustain it.11 One of the other focuses of this collection is a fusion of seemingly binaristic themes and ideas that characterize Jonze’s films; metaphysics and play, sentimentality and existentiality, speculative fiction and naturalist aesthetics all coexist and at times vie openly for prominence. For instance, one might note the tone of Being John Malkovich as wryer or cheekier than the majority of philosophy pictures released in 1999, which tended to more somber affective landscapes. Being John Malkovich set some emotive groundwork that would sustain: a union of the playful with unabashedly philosophical excursions marked his future filmmaking, from the metafilm as existential comedy in Adaptation (2002) to meditations on early development and the seriousness of play in Where the Wild Things Are (2009), and finally the fusion of leisure and entertainment (and even a Jonze-voiced videogame) with our most intimate selves in Her (2013).12 Similarly, a flirtation with—and gradual embrace of—narrative sentimentality extends throughout these four pictures. After the relatively unsentimental Being John Malkovich, Adaptation probed some critical uses of sentimental Hollywood modes, Where the Wild Things Are mobilized

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this sentimentality in talking through youth and familial disturbance, and Her remains reflexive about media and sentimentality, while admitting sentiment as part of a common phenomenal experience in our daily machine–human interactions. This growing acceptance of the sentimental can be witnessed across some of Jonze’s most substantial short film work, too: I’m Here (2010), for instance, is a distilled and unrestrained romantic sentimentality again mapped onto a near science fiction future.13 In addition to Jonze’s incremental admittance of sentimental modes, another intriguing component in these pictures is a moral ambivalence that runs throughout. After Being John Malkovich, which presents characters who are terrifyingly quick to dismiss the ethical dimensionality of inhabiting the other, appropriation and embodiment, Adaptation dramatized Charlie Kaufman’s open and unresolved question regarding the kinds of stories he ought to be telling as a Hollywood screenwriter; Where the Wild Things Are found a way to adapt the sweet-natured relativism of affordances we make to youth during their moral development that anchors Sendak’s source material; and Her neither moralizes at its audience about their attachment to new media, nor unthinkingly accepts it.14 Finally, working in between worlds of speculative fiction and aesthetic realism is another nexus that characterizes Jonze’s work.15 The familiarity of the office spaces in Being John Malkovich is offset against its more outlandish spatial convolutions; Adaptation moves between fantastical imagery of Earth’s development and a more mundane domesticity; Where the Wild Things Are explicitly crosses from the real world to the make-believe, yet the lingering influence of each of these worlds remains inseparable, while cinematographer Lance Acord’s naturalist lighting helps blur their distinction; and Her works in the tradition of humanistic science fiction that presents a future in which everyday interactions remain ordinary, even while technological change renders their iteration extraordinary.16 All of Jonze’s features retain traces of science fiction, but splice their speculation with realist aesthetics and concerns that are relevant to our quotidian ethical selves. These diverse films have been categorized by critics in many ways, not simply as works of an auteur, but as works of resistance against a populist mainstream, as part of an American “smart cinema” or even a filmic “new sincerity.”17 There is, of course, trouble with attempts to slot Jonze neatly into a movement, as again, he crosses filmmaking modes: which two films could be more different than Bad Grandpa and Her, projects Jonze worked on concomitantly?18 We might note small amounts of “leakage” between the different genre worlds that Jonze traverses. The most widely adopted theorization of the formal and aesthetic strategies indie-auteur filmmakers employed around the turn of the millennium is Jeffrey Sconce’s “smart cinema.”19 Alongside Jonze, Sconce identified Todd Solondz, Neil LaBute, Alexander Payne, Hal Hartley, Wes Anderson, P. T. Anderson,

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Ang Lee, John Herzfeld, Doug Liman, Atom Egoyan, Todd Haynes, Richard Kelly, and Richard Linklater as filmmakers whose work responded to the increasing prevalence of irony and parody in cultural discourse. For Sconce, these auteurist films demonstrated a smart cinema sensibility through “a predilection for irony, black humour, fatalism, relativism and, yes, even nihilism.”20 As many of the authors in this collection find, however, Jonze’s films do not exhibit strong nihilist or even fatalist inclinations. Rather, they navigate feelings of isolation, the tribulations of interpersonal relationships (with both human and nonhuman subjects), and existentialism. Nevertheless, Jonze’s work can be read in concert with the prevalence of ironic expression in American popular culture, and the fusion of mainstream generic conventions with philosophical considerations that characterize many “smart” films. Indie cinema rhetoric tends to echo these sentiments by positioning its practitioners in a quasi-oppositional relationship to the dominance of Hollywood, emphasizing distinctive economic models, modes of production, storytelling and audiovisual aesthetics, and variances in distribution, exhibition, and audience reception.21 Michael Z. Newman writes that this relationship to Hollywood in turn creates and perpetuates an indie film culture that sees itself as more culturally legitimate and sophisticated than mainstream cinema, in that it has the potential for counter-hegemonic representation and political change.22 This formulation has perpetuated the “indie-auteur” ideal, which identifies specific (overwhelmingly male) filmmakers as “mavericks” or “rebels” whose work deviates sufficiently from mainstream conventions that they are—ironically—said to “take back” or legitimate the Hollywood system of filmmaking.23 Jonze was identified as a member of such a group of “renegade auteurs” that emerged in the 1990s. These filmmakers where seen to be “tweaking the system”24 by creating films that emphasized their “braininess” over mainstream genericity through intertextual engagement with popular culture, reflexivity, achronological plot structures, and overt use of irony.25 Yet even in comparison to contemporaries, Jonze’s cinema exhibits distinctive tendencies that can be mapped across his oeuvre, both in terms of style and thematic interest—and it is the divergences rather than the similarities that intrigue. Jonze’s works are full of contradictions that refuse to be tamed so easily, which is what makes his films ripe for closer study. As Claire Perkins writes, the “smart” indie-auteur harks back to the New Hollywood era “of 1967–75, whose male mavericks, like Arthur Penn and Terrence Malick, have been similarly cast as forging an adventurous new cinema that linked the traditions of classical genre filmmaking with the stylistic innovations of European art cinema” and is often “credited with the transformation of commercial filmmaking into a better, more artistic type of popular fare.”26 Much of the critical discourse around Jonze and his work supports the “maverick myth” and thus facilitates assigning him indie-auteur

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status. However, as Yannis Tzioumakis and Andrew Stubbs explain in their respective chapters, the production realities of Jonze’s work complicate and push back against the neat application of this idealized label. Furthermore, Jonze’s openly collaborative practice in both his feature films (most notably with writers Charlie Kaufman and Dave Eggers) and, more overtly, in his short form films complicates the notion of the “personal vision” of a “renegade” artist. There is no easy way to identify Jonze in the either-or terms of art versus commerce. Jonze is, of course, the creative director of a commercial media company who continues to direct spots for dominant brands, and at the same time makes films that invite the viewer to question the very foundations of media and technology convention. Static narratives neatly summarizing Jonze’s career seem slippery given counter-evidence that is always lurking nearby. This spirited battle, regarding the ways in which we might comprehend Jonze as commercially bound or artistically distinct, runs as an open dialogue throughout the collection. In light of such debates, we would like to suggest one other phenomenon within the space of millennial American filmmaking that Jonze’s work exemplifies. At the turn of the millennium philosophy came to the fore in a subset of popular American cinema. Films including Donnie Darko (2001), I Heart Huckabees (2004), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), and Linklater’s expository dialogue in works like Waking Life (2001) gave philosophy on film a starring role; not just in character dialogue or as a background to on-screen events, but as part of the fabric of the narratives themselves. So within this canon, we suggest that there could be another designation, too: the millennial “philosophy film,” comprising features overtly wearing philosophic ambitions on their respective sleeves. As Indiewood historians have pointed out, 1999 presented something of a watershed moment for the intersection of aesthetics and thematic content inherited from independent cinema with Hollywood modes of production.27 Given that temporal landmarks generally spur searches for personal meaning, it might seem unsurprising that such interrogative cinema developed when it did.28 Yet no matter how they might have dated, the films of 1999 would resonate as landmarks in cerebral filmmaking for years afterwards: consider Magnolia, American Beauty, The Sixth Sense, The Virgin Suicides, Three Kings, and those prominent fusions of the visceral and cerebral Fight Club and The Matrix, for instance. It was within this milieu that Jonze directed Being John Malkovich, a film simultaneously identified as a high-minded example of a contemporary “absurdist” cinema, working from the likes of Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), and a work of “pure-pop fantasia,” all of which points to a generic and affective cross-pollination evident in Jonze’s philosophy-on-film.29 These are just some of the thematic, aesthetic, and industrial in-betweens explored across the present volume. In short, Jonze’s film work explores the

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intermedial, the fuzzy, and the transitional, just as his career spans varied media. As Cynthia Felando puts it in her chapter on Jonze’s shorts, “Jonze’s career demonstrates the depth and breadth of a filmography that ranges not only from shorts to feature films, but fiction to documentary (including mockumentary), blackand-white to color, and live-action to animation.” Jonze truly works between the lines in ways that are sometimes original, and sometimes troubling. The twelve essays in the collection are divided into four parts. The first two, “Authorship and Originality” and “Psychology, Identity, and Crisis,” group some of the major concerns that recur throughout Jonze’s film oeuvre. “Authorship and Originality” looks at the questions of narrative process embedded in his cinema, including concerns of industry, auteurism, and adaptation, as well as some reflection on the production history that made Jonze’s early feature experiments possible. Wyatt Moss-Wellington opens the collection with a close look at Adaptation’s treatment of Darwinian themes, exhuming from the film an ambitious theory that aligns biological and narrative evolution. His analysis prompts questions regarding Darwin’s use in the humanities (in literary and cinematic Darwinism), and ultimately asks how we can know when we are engaged with original thinking, or when we have created something hermeneutically new. Eddie Falvey’s chapter on Where the Wild Things Are then describes a particular instance of textual hybridity; the chapter bridges the concerns of narrative theory and narrative industry, inquiring into the fruitful exchange between literature and cinema as they fuse with the reverence that is distributed around classic texts—in this case, a picture book that has assumed mythic proportions. Yannis Tzioumakis closes the section, moving from concerns of authorship to those of industry, and fraught notions of American independent cinema. Tzioumakis historicizes the production history of Jonze’s first feature Being John Malkovich, situating the film within discourses on the emergence of an “indiewood” cinema. Following this, “Psychology, Identity, and Crisis” homes in on themes of human psychology, masculinity and loneliness, schism and celebrity, and existentialism that recur across his works; these essays aim to tease out some of the latent motifs and formal properties of Jonze’s cinema. Picking up on Tzioumakis’s historical work on Being John Malkovich, Kim Wilkins extends the debate around “indiewood” to consider claims of innovation, convention, and celebrity that frame Being John Malkovich, in its structure and content as well as its reception. She describes Craig’s (John Cusack) inability to connect with others as indicative of Jonze’s lonely male protagonists—a character convention that Julie Levinson then describes in detail. Levinson’s chapter on Adaptation makes a strong case for understanding the film within the canon of male midlife crisis comedies. This chapter finds that masculinity in crisis was a thematic strand many of Jonze’s contemporaries returned to across the early 2000s. If you stop after reading Levinson’s chapter and tilt your head a little, you might catch a glimpse of an original screenplay nestled halfway between

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parts of the book. This chapter follows up on Moss-Wellington’s opening piece, putting the “Adaptation” thesis into practice: it hybridizes the rigor of scholarly style and the imaginative openness, action, and atmosphere of the screenplay, asking questions of Jonze’s screenwriting, collaboration, and the editing process. This explorative chapter reflects another facet of Jonze’s filmmaking that conventional works of criticism might not easily access: his playful experimentalism. The penultimate section is dedicated to Jonze’s most discussed and celebrated film, Her. Being the only feature to date that Jonze has both written and directed, Her represents a crystallization of the filmmaker’s diverse aesthetic and philosophical interests and offers a rich indication of his authorial tendencies, elaborating on many of the philosophic interests broached in his previous three features: issues in identity and personhood, gender relations, mental health, and the origins of life, for instance, are fused with contemporary questions of technology and data, industry and surveillance. The first two chapters, contributed by Peter Marks and Frances Shaw respectively, can be read as a dialogue on the film’s representations of empathy, intimacy, and technology, while Richard Smith closes the section with a broader overview of the ways in which Her extends aesthetics developed by Jonze across his shorts and previous three features. Marks’s chapter uses the film to ask how we can distinguish the authenticity of emotions in a mediated age that renders the genesis and ownership of emotions diffuse; along the way, he addresses the increasing corporate role in mediated intimacy, problems in the attribution of “feeling” to machines, and the borrowing and repurposing of emotions in the age of big data. Shaw then queries the ethics of big data as they relate to another intimately personal quality: our mental health. Most importantly, she asks what fantasies of artificial intelligence underscore our attempts to outsource therapeutic and empathic work to machines, and explores how these imaginaries relate to other problems within the film, such as the gendered nature of emotional labor and relational surrogacy. Smith outlines three kinds of “movement” that have recurred across Jonze’s work and their emergences in Her: the lines of motion created by a skateboard, ontic movement between real and imaginary worlds, and social “movements” through which former modes of communication are displaced and reevaluated. Smith’s analysis of the similarities between Her and Jonze’s short works bridges this section to the final part of the book. “Beyond the Feature” looks further into Jonze’s work in short forms, in particular music videos and the short film. These concluding chapters examine his position as a filmmaker on the blurred boundaries between studio and independent modes of production, and the multi-skilled nature of his practice across media. Cynthia Felando offers an overview of Jonze’s short film work, documenting his recurring themes and aesthetics, and making a case for some of the original ideas the filmmaker brought to the short form. Andy Stubbs

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then contests this originality, positioning notions of artistic autonomy squarely as marketing discourses proffered by the music video production companies that represented Jonze during his early career—Propaganda and Satellite. Stubbs argues that these companies relied upon a narrative of their talents’ creative progress toward filmic “indie-auteur” statuses that ultimately devalues the work of music video and short filmmaking. Finally, Laurel Westrup takes a close look at Jonze’s collaboration with Arcade Fire on The Suburbs short film and music video, considering notions of nostalgia, suburbia, and youth in America along the way. Westrup explores the in-between spaces of adolescence, as they exist in Jonze’s collaborative music work. The twelve chapters that make up this collection are varied in consideration and approach, as warranted in a study of a multifaceted creative like Jonze. Yet this is not to suggest that it is an exhaustive or definitive account—not least because Jonze continues to expand his oeuvre. Instead, “The Films of Spike Jonze” seeks to understand Jonze and his work as it exists “in between” established sociocultural, philosophical, industrial, and theoretical frameworks. Rather than a diagnostic auteurist study that may encourage a unilateral relationship between author and reader, the chapters that follow are best approached as a live network of intersecting conversations. Although this book has a finite number of pages, the conversations they establish, we hope, are ongoing and multidirectional; in the spirit of Jonze’s filmmaking, we invite all readers to explore and extend this dialogue into their own conversations in their own worlds. NOTES 1. François Truffaut, “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods, Vol. I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 224–37. 2. See for instance David Germain, “At the Movies: Being John Malkovich,” Associated Press, October 26, 1999, (last accessed March 10, 2019); David Ansen, “Meta-Movie Madness,” Newsweek, December 8, 2002, (last accessed March 10, 2019); Rodney Appleyard, “Wild at Heart,” Inside Film: If 127 (December 2009), pp. 26–8; James Bell, “Computer Love,” Sight and Sound 24: 1 (2014), pp. 20–5. 3. Roger Ebert, “Being John Malkovich,” Rogerebert.com, October 29, 1999, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 4. Best Supporting Actress (Catherine Keener), Best Director (Spike Jonze), Best Original Screenplay (Charlie Kaufman). 5. Maurice Sendak quoted in Chad Perman, “Wild at Heart: On Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are,” Bright Wall/Dark Room 47: Childhood, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 6. See Mara Reinstein Bell, “Oscars 2014: The 5 Must-See Films,” US Weekly, January 11, 2014, (last accessed March 10, 2019); Christoper Orr, “Why Her Is the Best

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7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

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Film of the Year,” The Atlantic, December 20, 2013, (last accessed March 10, 2019). Rachel Olding, “Straddle, Not Struggle, as Slashies Prove Ultimate Multi-Taskers,” The Sydney Morning Herald, April 23, 2011, (last accessed March 10, 2019). Fabian Holt and Francesco Lapenta, “Introduction: Autonomy and Creative Labour,” Journal for Cultural Research 14: 3 (2010), pp. 223–9. Ibid. p. 225. Angela McRobbie, British Fashion Design: Rag Trade or Image Industry? (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 6. Stephanie Taylor and Karen Littleton, “Art Work or Money: Conflicts in the Construction of a Creative Identity,” The Sociological Review 56: 2 (2008), pp. 280–2. Cf. Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications, 1982). See also Eric Eidelstein, The Suburbs (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), passim. Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are (New York: Harper & Row, 1963). There are relatively few articles about the place of Jonze within filmic science and speculative fiction, although Eva-Lynn Jagoe touches on this area in “Depersonalized Intimacy: The Cases of Sherry Turkle and Spike Jonze,” English Studies in Canada 42: 1 (2016), p. 170. For more on the naturalist aesthetic of Where the Wild Things Are, see Mary Anne Potts, “Where the Wild Things Are: Nature Calls the Shots on a Wild Rumpus in Australia,” National Geographic, October 23, 2009, (last accessed March 10, 2019). Jeffrey Sconce, “Irony, Nihilism and the New American ‘Smart’ Film,” Screen 43: 4 (2002), pp. 349–69. In film studies, “New Sincerity” usually refers to Jim Collins’s description of Nineties genre cinema as a rejection of irony and return to sincerity. See “Genericity in the 90s: Eclectic Irony and the New Sincerity,” in Jim Collins, Hilary Radner and Ava Preacher Collins (eds.), Film Theory Goes to the Movies (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 242, 245; Mark Olsen, “If I Can Dream: The Everlasting Boyhoods of Wes Anderson,” Film Comment 35: 1 (1999), pp. 12–17. However, Jonze’s work does not reject irony in favor of sincerity—instead his films bind irony and sincerity. As such, Jonze (like many of his contemporaries) more accurately fits the form of “New Sincerity” theorized by Adam Kelly to describe the work of authors such as Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace. See Adam Kelly, “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction,” in David Hering, Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays (New York: Sideshow Media Group, 2010), pp. 131–46; Kim Wilkins, American Eccentric Cinema (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019). Tim Robey, “Spike Jonze Interview,” The Telegraph, February 3, 2014, (last accessed March 10, 2019). Sconce, “Irony.” Ibid. p. 350. Michael Z. Newman, Indie: An American Film Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), pp. 1–2. Ibid.

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23. See Sharon Waxman, Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System (New York: HarperCollins, 2015); James Mottram, The Sundance Kids: How the Mavericks Took Back Hollywood (London: Faber and Faber, 2006); Emmanuel Levy, Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Film (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Derek Hill, Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood’s Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists and Dreamers: An Excursion into the American New Wave (Harpenden: Kamera Books, 2008). 24. Armond White, “American Soul, Aisle Five,” New York Press 39: 17 (2004), n.p. 25. See Wilkins, American Eccentric Cinema. 26. Claire Perkins, “Beyond Indiewood: The Everyday Ethics of Nicole Holofcener,” Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies 29: 1 (2014), p. 140. 27. Geoff King, Indiewood, USA: Where Hollywood Meets Independent Cinema (London; New York: I. B. Tauris, 2009), pp. 191–2. 28. Hengchen Dai, Katherine L. Milkman, and Jason Riis, “Put Your Imperfections Behind You: Temporal Landmarks Spur Goal Initiation when They Signal New Beginnings,” Psychological Science 26: 12 (2015), pp. 1927–36; Adam L. Alter and Hal E. Hershfield, “People Search for Meaning when They Approach a New Decade in Chronological Age,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111: 48 (2014), pp. 17066–70. 29. Dennis Lim, “Brain Humor: Playing Head Games with the Director, Writer, and Star of Being John Malkovich,” Village Voice, October 26, 1999, p. 46; Rebecca Ascher-Walsh, “Being John Malkovich,” Entertainment Weekly, August 20, 1999, p. 44.

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CHAPTER

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Adaptation in Adaptation in Adaptation in Adaptation Wyatt Moss-Wellington

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here is a moment early on in Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002) in which the fictive Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) has a truncated epiphany: he envisions his own place within the evolution of life on earth. This would seem to explain many of his own problems; he is subject to selective and fitness pressures, which generate the psychological and cultural conditions he struggles within. When he goes to translate this realization to the page, however, there is no meaningful information to convey. As Joshua Landy puts it, “there is no such thing as the story of everything; a story about everything is a story about nothing.”1 The epiphany was short-lived, and seems not so profound after all. I recognize this moment. I have been through it before in my own life, but also my own scholarship. In fact, it is a central challenge in the work of literary and cinematic Darwinism. While it may be true that evolution explains life’s manifold iterations, what can it then contribute to our understanding and humanistic documentation of complex human culture and storytelling practices? In effect, our adaptive origins explain everything about life, and yet nothing at all. Jonze and Kaufman use Adaptation to explore our subsequent searches for meaning, and their collaboration yields a filmic model for understanding how and why stories can feel original to us when working from seldom fused influences. This chapter offers a close analysis of the film Adaptation, and Jonze and Kaufman’s treatment of Darwinian themes. It uses Adaptation to prompt questions regarding evolution’s use in the humanities, and ultimately asks how we know when we are engaged with original thinking, or when we have created something hermeneutically new: how is meaningfully new information made?

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I demonstrate first the methods through which Adaptation draws equivalence between biological and narrative heredity.2 Such a reading, however, throws up new questions; asking what use Darwinian theory is in cultural analysis prompts us to query how we draw meaning from nature, which offers us no prescriptive guidance in itself. I argue that “passion,” as it is described in both Adaptation and Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, is a process by which we draw meaning from nature—passionate narratives describe in affective terms our responses to natural environments. Hybridizing passions can create new stories. I conclude with a model for understanding the genesis of original ideas and information based on these notions of human and narrative hybridity. Ultimately, Adaptation’s passionate originality demonstrates a powerful realization of the philosophies of self-agitation and effortful intersubjectivity that underscore Jonze and Kaufman’s work together—and can be read as an analogue for the collaborative labor inherent in filmmaking processes. Rather than blending calcified and familiar genre conventions removed from their relevant contexts, Adaptation amalgamates passionate components of a range of other people’s narratives that feel alive because they respond to current environments and their social pressures. For example, the film hybridizes the conflicted sentimentality and sincerity of millennial Hollywood filmmaking, the unbridled philosophy of concurrent Indiewood filmmaking, for which Jonze had so quickly become a figurehead, Orlean’s insecurities from The Orchid Thief, and Kaufman’s insecurities from inauguration in an industry that appears antithetical to his most cherished values. The problem initiated by Charlie’s3 epiphanous moment—that our adaptive origins explain both everything about life and nothing at all—is also central to the skepticism leveled at literary Darwinist theory. Chief among these objections is that it appears to close off channels of narrative inquiry by making them subject to the more spurious and speculative universalisms of evolutionary psychology;4 it finishes the debate by telling us what our lives are, rather than speculating what they could be, or questioning how to live, ethics that are at the core of humanistic narrative concerns. In Adaptation John Laroche (Chris Cooper), for example, motivates Darwinian explanations for all manner of events, and they often conflict with one another. It is no coincidence that when John calls mutation “the answer to everything,” the conviction then permits him a pseudoscientific self-superiority, as he continues: “When I was a baby I was probably exposed to something that mutated me, and now I’m incredibly smart.” At other times in the narrative, we will see, he moots entirely contradictory views on natural selection. But this is precisely what Charlie finds out: that conceiving of narrative’s ongoing evolution in the context of human selective pressures and adaptive variation is a beginning, not an end per se. It is the entrée to further work. This is where Jonze and Kaufman’s creative process begins, as does the hermeneutic work of Darwinian theory. In effect, if one ends with an assertion of survival

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pressures, we get bad results: narratives of unilineal progress, social Darwinism, and eugenics all cease their exploration into human evolution and claim some naturalized version of its ends. These notions are evoked early in the film when John listens to a tape advocating an axiom of Darwinian “progress towards perfection.” But we should look instead to the use of evolutionary biology today: the fight against infectious diseases asks open questions regarding our ongoing coevolution with viruses, and the way we might manipulate the environments in which the disease thrives to shape the way it lives with us;5 we continue to use evolutionary evidence to enrich rather than finish our narrative of human pre-history, how our ancestors moved across the globe and the cultures that developed as a result;6 we use the biological evidence of these histories to tear apart the closed narratives of racial essentialism;7 and Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb represent a vanguard in detailing the symbiotic relationship between the “soft inheritance” of culture and biological heredity, which we will return to later.8 The apprehension of our rich cultural lives as shaped by evolutionary pressures can render our narratological conversations precise as it furnishes us with a more reasonable understanding of human behavior, social psychology, and capacities for change. Sociobiology is an open rather than a closed field of inquiry. THE FILM BECOMES HYBRID

Adaptation follows Charlie Kaufman’s fraught attempts to adapt Orlean’s new journalistic novel The Orchid Thief.9 It is ostensibly the story of the creation of the film we are watching; it is also Jonze’s second and final feature film in collaboration with Kaufman, after Being John Malkovich in 1999. In Adaptation, Charlie struggles to write an original work that simultaneously lives up to his artistic ideals while appeasing his Hollywood commissioners. Meanwhile, Charlie’s fictional, laidback twin brother Donald thrives in Hollywood, attracting romantic partners and writing a successful, conventional thriller script called The 3. The narrative is interwoven with an increasingly fantastical version of Orlean’s own writing process and her interactions with subject John Laroche, the nominal “orchid thief.” Eventually Charlie invites Donald to help him with the Adaptation script, and the film we are watching begins to emulate many of the Hollywood conventions Charlie had initially tried so hard to resist. So how do these concerns of hybridity play out in Adaptation, the film? To begin answering that question, let us first skip to the end. Adaptation’s closing act has been read as strictly ironic10 or self-contradictory11 in its endorsement of those conventions Charlie, and perhaps his presumed audience, have stood against: the trappings of Hollywood entertainment. Yet these readings overlook the sincere gestures embedded in the film’s latter third. The first thing I want to demonstrate is that this ending is not so simple; it is a blend of narrative

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modes rather than a sharp transition between art film and emotionally corrupt entertainment. For instance, when Susan (Meryl Streep) cries, “I want to be a baby again, I want to be new,” upon the death of her lover, the sentiment rings true and appears to belong to the earlier half of the picture in its referencing of human development (likewise philosophies of intersubjectivity linger in Charlie and Donald’s latter conversations). This moment also reaches past Susan’s transformation from erudite and unattainable femininity to adulterous murderess,12 putting an end to Donald’s film’s reduction of its female lead to dichotomous male fantasy. Streep’s performance, similarly to those of Cooper and Cage, attempts to incite genuine emotion amongst the silliness of car chases and alligators, in which one might glimpse a tension between the screenwriter’s sense of emotionality13 and the director’s,14 especially as Jonze’s later oeuvre and short filmmaking embraces sentimentality as a narrative device, an issue Kaufman has struggled with. The affective narrative pleasures Charlie had railed against as antithetical to “real life” now appear to be permitted. All of the characters express genuine sadness and self-doubt in the midst of chase sequences, and this affect is blended with the suspense, the horror, and the reflexive humor of these sequences, especially in the onagain-off-again incidental music, incorporating satirical “nature sound” loops reminiscent of musique concrète alongside a more conventionally emotional orchestral score. Before they attempt murder Susan and John both hesitate at length, betraying real struggle, as if Donald and Charlie’s scripts were grappling internally within the characters. We care for Charlie as the first half of the film has so thoroughly documented his rejections and failures, and the film has speculatively constructed the inner lives of Laroche (depicting a traumatic car accident) and Orlean (depicting an imagined alienation from her social scene). Perhaps most of all, Donald and Charlie’s final conversation centers upon love and care and heart, Hollywood’s obsessive values that might not work so well when stated simply on their own, but grafted onto a richer narrative can gather eudaimonic meaning, or a sense of narrative fulfillment and truth-seeking purpose that are not bound simply to hedonic spectatorial and emotional gratification.15 The point is that our reception of these events is mediated by and charged with the philosophical film that we have just sat through. The popcorn conventions are now loaded with the weight of that memory. Adaptation’s various stories are not in opposition but are complementary because our memory renders them comparative; the film has become hybrid. The philosophy is enriched by the emotionality of its conclusion, and the audience works to read the conventions of the closing act within the context of the film’s setup, each prompting reflection on the other. Equally, the seeds of this ending were in the film from the beginning: Susan’s romantic attachment to her subject begins at his first Darwinian aside.16 The first time we see John on screen, he is being

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tailed both by an ominous score that suggests the opening of a thriller movie, and a policeman casting criminal doubt on his collection of rare plants. This imagined scene prefaces the originary court trial of The Orchid Thief, yet we also see evidence of drug-induced behavior in John and his colleagues long before Charlie invites Donald onto the script and “turns” to his more histrionic narrative vision. Within this structural reciprocity, and the metaphor of Kaufman as twins, we might ascertain that we start our lives as hybrid, but can choose to accept and explore this hybridity or disavow it. This would mean, too, that in the spirit of Kaufman’s self-critique, we cannot strictly separate Donald and Charlie to damn just the one. The purpose of the end is not to make clear the failings of a particular narrative type embodied by Donald. They are co-dependent, part of the same machinery and indeed the same Hollywood, the same Academy that embraced the present film, so any attempts to simply abhor a narrative type and its conventions are undermined. In a way, in consistently returning to Kaufman’s failure to produce art from principles that reject other arts, Adaptation upbraids the hypothetical viewer’s very own elitism that would like to make it easy to separate corrupt narrative pleasures from the rest.17 As Kaufman himself put it simply, “What I wanted to end up with was a discussion rather than a conclusion.”18 We might note, too, that by its conclusion the film has never quite embraced those Hollywood conventions as a replacement or direct contrast, but instead twists them into something new and more moderated, something hybrid: Charlie does not quite get the girl; he does not drive off into the sunset but rather grey LA; Charlie’s voiceover returns, yet still retains a hint of the narcissism and fretting that opened the film as he considers having Gérard Depardieu play his role; the flowers are not orchids in an exotic setting, but the more humdrum daisies that go about their everyday nodding to the sun on a median strip; the floral time-lapse returns us to comparative philosophical work in the very juxtaposition of plant and human temporality;19 and we should remember that the song that plays over the credits, “Happy Together,” is not only arch in its eccentric performance20 or its thematic relation to the film text, it also features Flo & Eddie of The Turtles, who went on to work with Frank Zappa—they represent a hybrid of pop and avant-garde. Many iterations of the song culminate in that iconic and twisted version of the vocal round as fragments of the tune are layered together, a melody that doubles back on itself to create harmonic newness, a hybrid created from a singular melodic source or a “happy togetherness” of asexual reproduction. The theme of asexual reproduction is also borne out in the overlapping dialogue of Cage’s humorous performance as twin brothers, the tongue-in-cheek phenomenology of the final bromide (emphasizing the “bro” in “bromide”) that “you are what you love, not what loves you,” and the film’s copious onanistic metaphors;21 not just masturbation, but all manner of interruptions to the sexually reproductive.22 As Lucas Hilderbrand points out, “Even

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the lyrics of ‘Happy Together’ are not actually about being together but about fantasizing” and as it has appeared previously as a love song between brothers, “it functions as an ode to oneself since Donald functions as Charlie’s imagined alter-ego.”23 The film also establishes interest in the cross-pollination of melody into harmony during a scene in which Susan asks John to recreate the sound of a dial tone by humming with her (which also occurs after Donald’s intervention but appears to belong to Charlie’s half of the film). In any case, “Happy Together” appears as a conventional pop song but speaks back to the film’s philosophy and its facetiousness not only poetically, but in its musicality as well. On one hand the message here should be clear: hybridity is a lived experience. It is unavoidably the stuff of life; it is what happens to us rather than merely a philosophy to consider. But if this is the case, what benefits might exist in being aware of the Darwinian adaptation within story adaptation? Can we gain a fruitful and relieving acceptance of our own selfhood as hybrid, can we enrich our relations with others using the new philosophy that develops, and can we have some autonomy or interactivity and shape its impact on our lives? In splitting himself into two characters, Kaufman suggests that both of these narrative interests exist within us, so it is a matter of how much we allow these creative imaginings to coexist rather than erect strictures that prevent us from drawing on a wider range of external narrative sources. Popular screenwriting guru Robert McKee is somewhat lambasted for these strictures (both the “Ten Commandments” drawn from Story and his antagonistic oratory upend any claim to “guiding principles” rather than strict rules), which prevent story cross-pollination (like being bound to concretized genres or archetypal narratives) and essentially inhibit the ability of narrative to mimic the eternal adaptive cross-pollination of life, and thus, hopefully, feel alive.24 In turn, however, the fictive Robert (Brian Cox) is permitted to lambaste Charlie for his own dogma regarding a “real world.” In his cynical and self-regarding conviction that in reality “nothing much happens” and “people don’t change,” Charlie reveals condescension toward the lives and quotidian dramas of others in the world. He then realizes how the narratives he tells in screenwriting are intimately related to the narratives by which he lives his life. By the end, we see that Kaufman and Jonze have used every other narrative at their disposal to craft something new: Robert’s diatribe against voiceover causes Cage’s narration to disappear from the film as we are watching it, provoking us to reflect on what Charlie’s autobiographical musings brought to the narrative as a whole;25 Donald’s notion of “split personalities” using “trick photography” winds up in the narrative as Kaufman twins rendered in “split screen photography”; everything from studio executive Valerie’s (Tilda Swinton) gentle prodding to agent Marty Bowen’s (Ron Livingston) horrific sexism have an impact on the kind of romances that the screenplay ends up scrutinizing. So likewise, if we maintain strictures against the emotionality and plot devices associated with Hollywood

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storytelling, we might miss their use in a variety of other contexts. Adaptation does achieve originality in a creative “loading” of narrative elements. Perhaps, then—just perhaps—the more hybridized a narrative, and the more it draws from a range of sources, the more interesting it becomes, simply because there is more metacognitive work for the viewer to do. This, I believe, is the demonstrative argument of Adaptation. The more psychological argument regards our existential acceptance of hybridity. Before moving on to answer some of my broader questions of Darwinian narrative theory, first I turn to look at the film’s treatment of those thoughts that get in the way of such an acceptance, chief among them fantasies of originality and sole authorship in the creative process. W E A R E H Y B R I D I N N A R R AT I V E A S I N B I O L O G Y

The film’s first few images, a facetiously cinéma vérité reconstruction of the Being John Malkovich shoot, pillory assumptions of authorial dominance, its inevitability or desirability,26 by providing some manner of hostile directorial role to the film’s nominal celebrity. This prologue also carefully excises the figure of Jonze from the film—he is not present in the story of either film’s creation, a knowing wink that gently undermines auteurist readings. In its affecting of documentary-style footage, Adaptation announces that it is taking on a fantasy of and a presupposed “idea” about realness, or more specifically, that particular comfort we derive from presuming that we can witness signifiers of authentically captured reality.27 The scene may seemingly introduce a gag regarding the industry’s disinterest in a key creator in the filmmaking process—the writer—yet it also suggests the way we use our more idealistic visions of creative processes to disavow hybridity’s place in our lives. If narrative is where we go to fantasize, a key fantasy that we tend to engage with is that of life as more authentic when we do not have to hybridize our thoughts, our lives, our very being with others. The scene evokes debates around auteurism and documentary realism, and gently undermines them, to introduce its key theme: our metacognitive thinking about hybridity. At the beginning, Charlie is also beholden to this idea when he claims to Valerie that he wants to avoid an “artificially plot-driven” narrative and challenges himself to write a film “simply about flowers.”28 Of course, all of the plot points he mentions in this early scene as examples of inauthentic narratives will end up occurring in his own script, and will twist the narrative of Adaptation in surprising ways. In fabricating a binaristic ideal of two narrative modes and putting them in opposition, though, he has set himself up to fail, as the history of narrative is the history of hybridizing inherited stories—there can be no binary oppositions here. He imagines a lack of outside influence as true originality, but

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again there is no definitive originality, only constantly amorphous thoughts following from thoughts. When we follow the lineage of the present story, we see that Kaufman has adapted Orlean’s book into something new, just as Orlean has employed the new journalistic method to craft a narrative—the originating New Yorker article and then The Orchid Thief—from John Laroche’s life, which she draws from and balances against the heroic narratives John distributes of himself and connects to other narrativized lives including key figures in the tradition of orchid hunting.29 Finally, when we see a later version of John espousing self-realization platitudes and get-rich schemes, we recall that John’s life will similarly be informed by cultural narratives we will never bear direct witness to, but have been adapted somehow into his own experience. Yet Charlie is not just drawing from The Orchid Thief—he is cross-referencing against Darwin’s own writings,30 he is drawing inspiration from his experiences on past work like Being John Malkovich, he is working in his autobiographical narrative (as did Orlean before him, and Darwin before her), he is influenced by the interjections of tandem authorities like Valerie or Robert, and of course he is including some ideas for an action-thriller script that exists elsewhere in Kaufman’s imagination, as a more reckless and intrusive twin of the philosophic self he more closely identifies with, for a large part of the narrative acting as a doppelgänger who psychologically hounds him.31 “We share the same DNA,” Charlie laments of Donald when he says something stupid, the irony being that they are both Kaufman, both characters representing components in his imagination: we are hybrid beings in narrative just as in biology. D R AW I N G M E A N I N G F R O M N AT U R E

In this very real sense, a literary Darwinism appears germane. Yet the discipline is not simply concerned with using evolution as a metaphor or concept to play with, it is concerned too with historical work (explaining the emergence of stories and genres within environments with varied challenges to our continuity) and hermeneutic work (reading narratives within the context of how they speak to our motivating selective pressures). Different stories emerge in different environments. For example, “Donald’s ability to adapt to the Hollywood environment allows him to succeed quickly,”32 and his willingness to fit in shapes the kinds of stories he tells. Jason Mittell writes: We can see Charlie’s character arc as evolutionary, as he learns to adapt to the hostile habitat of commercial Hollywood and survive by writing a script suitable to be filmed; additionally, he proves to be more adaptable and resilient than his twin brother, surviving while Donald dies, and thus he is able to “reproduce” through the creative means of filmmaking.33

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On the other hand, Charlie’s opening thoughts immediately connect philosophical-narrativized goals to the evolutionary fitness pressures that drive them, and then to the existential questions that open up in reflection of these connections: “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.” As Peter Marks puts it, “Intimately aware of his own mortality, operating in a filmmaking environment threatened by novelty, and with a crippling sense of his lack of originality, Kaufman in his own mind faces forms of personal and creative extinction.”34 And then, I might add, he deals with this existentiality through narrative, and this is what we witness throughout the remainder of the picture. But it is not just narrative as a coping mechanism that the Darwinist might study, nor the way our fictions talk to themes related to our survival (in Charlie’s case a social survival connects very directly to his sexual survival), we want to know too how acts of narrative communication and fictive imagination of themselves might serve our evolutionary continuity: storytelling’s function. These scholarly goals of course run the very real risk of intentional and natural fallacies, of romanticizing nature, and of using evolutionary assumption to close debate. The problem is that we are often romantically motivated, and we might need to reduce multi-faceted knowledge to a manageable prescription, or in Susan’s words, to “whittle it down” to a passion in order to derive meaning from complex information. Adaptation explores some of these tensions, too. At a nature show, John, who has previously been petty and insularly concerned, surprises Susan (and hopefully the spectator) with a soliloquy that does articulate with clarity the wonders of coevolution: the mimicry of the orchid, attracting the “lovemaking” of insects that pollinate them, and how an entire planet of life depends upon their mutualism in a way they will never be cognizant of; at the same time, he infuses his monologue with a romantic sensibility when he anthropomorphizes natural processes into an expression of “love,” insinuating natural design and deific order in his claim that “by simply doing what they were designed to do . . . they show us how to live” [emphasis added] and concluding with a personally prescriptive appeal: “now when you spot your flower, you can’t let anything get in your way.” The soundtrack sways with him, as the strings rise and the vocal sound “changes dramatically (clearly this part was recorded in a studio, without the ambient noise of the set).”35 John’s chief example is a more palatable cooperative coevolution rather than, say, a parasitic coevolution, which also comprises co-dependent life on earth. John turns his realization of natural sciences into prescriptive meaning making; his musings even include that famous line at the foundation of human ethics, “how to live.” This moment causes us to wonder how we might do the same, translating our comprehension of natural phenomena into codes for living.36 John will later wax lyrical about the mutability of orchids as an indication of their ability to “figure out how to thrive in the world” (again attributing

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human intent to nature when he personifies the plant), but Susan has had time to think and talk back now. The difference in human adaptation has something to do with our memory, she suggests. Susan gives voice to Charlie’s concerns of narrative adaptation in a broader Darwinian context when she retorts that adapting is “almost shameful, like running away.” The remark speaks again to that other adaptation of the film’s title: Kaufman’s (and perhaps narrative absentee Jonze’s) struggle to adapt to the Hollywood community, and the values of cultural evolution that, for him, are at stake; and again, a human ethic is drawn from nature, which is something we all must do in order to live even while nature offers us no such guidance. Questions of responsibility run deep in this film, but what I want to focus on now is Susan’s other realization when attempting to draw moral meaning from natural mutation: “Yeah but it’s easier for plants,” she says. “I mean, they have no memory.” Due to our extraordinary capacity for memory, human motivations are complex; they are contradicted by competing information and competing ethics, as well as co-dependencies with other life that must be balanced against self-interested survival needs. Memory creates dissonance and conflicting incentives that are elaborated into complex culture, just as our memory of the first two-thirds of the film creates narrative dissonance by its close. But this is just the beginning. We also have communication occurring across millennia through the narratives of recorded history. Jablonka and Lamb call this “symbolic inheritance” which feeds back into the environments in which our genes are expressed, introducing latent, translatable, and mutable information from our past.37 Their point is that such a cultural inheritance is inseparable from genetic, epigenetic, and behavioral inheritance (they call these the “four dimensions” of evolution). These different hereditary variables interact to shape who we are. Evolutionary biology has some powers to explain both individual and cultural variation, but in the humanities we can still ask: given this information, how ought we live? T H E O T H E R S I D E : A H O R RO R O F N O R E F L E C T I O N

A brief digression would be worthwhile here to explain the sources of the film’s horror, opening as it does one of Adaptation’s central ethical and affective hybridities—that of the horror comedy. From the first sequence depicting a four-billion-year history of Los Angeles, a dissonant score and murky imagery both figure prehistory as dark, mysterious, and terrifying. This mystery is carried through such imagery as DP Lance Acord’s naturalist night lensing, especially in car interiors during which he exaggerates the reflections in the actors’ glasses and eyes, making them appear somewhat alien. These flourishes clearly bring out the mortal dread of reflection on our place in the universe,

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but even more so, the film includes gender, class, and indigenous politics as sites of horror. The film’s horror suggests an “ought” question by articulating its antithesis: it depicts various unethical acts, how not to live. Kaufman may have adopted some Hollywood conventions at the end of his script but he still points to many of its abject cultural conditions, suggesting aspects of Hollywood’s culture that he would not like to sustain. The clearest example is an absurd male hyper-sexuality and objectification that intrudes unpleasantly upon the film, especially in the character of Charlie’s agent Marty, the brisk appearance of whom triggers perhaps the clearest embodiment of the film’s “meta-machismo,”38 or the burying of unremarked-upon sexism in its meta-narrative. However, the horror here arises from Marty’s complete lack of self-reflexivity around his sexism; it is precisely the point that objectification is so compulsive as to be intrinsic to the environment he exists within. His lines about anal sex sound like they are derived from one of Hollywood’s male fantasy sex comedies—a Seth Rogen film, perhaps—but they are out of place in a movie that calls for reflection, they fall flat; and drained of humor, these lines reveal the horror undergirding callous dialogue that we are so often encouraged to receive as playfulness. Thus Adaptation’s gender concerns, class politics—especially as expressed within Susan’s literary community39—and the seldom remarked upon indigenous politics all represent places of horror in the script for their lack of reflection. They serve as a reminder that Charlie does indeed have real and reasonable gripes with the communities he has to work within. But complex thinking without clarity also has its own horror attached. As Sergio Rizzo points out, the disinterest expressed by the Seminoles of Adaptation is a far cry from Orlean’s account of complex interactions between white and indigenous communities in The Orchid Thief (including the politics circulating the Fakahatchee, the detail of Laroche’s nursery plans, and his patchwork alliance with the Seminoles).40 In essence, the Seminoles belong to Donald’s plot, but their inclusion works because it permits them to express disdain back towards colonizing legal institutions from the outset. John and his indigenous colleagues initially attempt to talk their way out of trouble with the law using a sarcastic relativism, making a joke of legal dissonances that native peoples must navigate: they are supposed to perform their authentic indigeneity in order to make rights-based legal claims, but here they roll their eyes and refuse to take them seriously. The production of this disdain—the only reasonable response to complete removal of their cultural autonomy—is another kind of horror. Their response has the potential to call into question notions of static nativism that have plagued indigenous activists the world over, in that indigenous peoples must perform a singularly authentic—and thus unchanging—version of their culture in order to argue for their legal status in systems that cannot reconcile their right to ongoing cultural evolution with their

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claim to a historic relationship with the land;41 in Adaptation, even those legal arguments are in service of John’s whims rather than their own autonomous needs. Indeed, the Seminoles are seen studying their fingernails during the court trial, almost completely removed from proceedings. The unmitigated aloofness of the Seminoles in the Adaptation script, relieved only by a fictional drug, crafts horror from an utterly sad and utterly reasonable detachment, exaggerated into a stereotype of mutual disdain. Ultimately the indigenous politics of the book (that we only catch glimpses of in the film) supports Jonze and Kaufman’s thesis by pointing to its converse: if we do not allow one another’s narratives of self-identity to be alive to mutation and change, our relations calcify into exploitation. Unlike the nonfictive book, however, the Seminoles, and likewise Charlie’s agent and Susan’s social scene, are completely imaginary, but this same problem in each case is hyperbolized to a horrific extreme. Stereotyping figures while pointing to their unreality—from Charles Darwin (Bob Yerkes spluttering over a manuscript in a desaturated hovel) to the Seminoles, to Kaufman’s own agent—is one way the film produces horror. Similarly, when Charlie and Donald take on some bastardized version of Susan’s former investigative role, she takes on their more depraved earlier roles. All of this horror occurs before we even catch a glimpse of the comic deus ex machina alligator, at which the cerebral and visceral possibilities of the horror comedy collide. PA S S I O N C O N N E C T S I N F O R M AT I O N T O M O RTA L LY F E LT C O N S E Q U E N C E S

So one of the paramount horrors in Adaptation—from Marty’s offhand anal sex references and the reasonable detachment and disdain of the Seminoles to the uncaring classism of the New York literati—is a lack of reflective passion. This vivifies the other world Kaufman has envisioned to fight against. He wants his own screenplay to represent the very opposite of its dispassionate and unambitious passivity, and that, for him, would be a creativity in imaginative resistance, and an originality of thought in its refusal to adapt to the worst clichés surrounding the screenwriter in Los Angeles. So now, let us at last follow his journey through until we arrive at the genesis of original thought. To begin, Adaptation wears its narratological deconstructions on its sleeve, making it appear that self-referentiality is its originality, when in fact its particular metafictive address—the self-creating narrative—has innumerable precedents on screen and on the page.42 If all of our new narratives are amalgams of pre-existing narratives, Adaptation explicitly asks, how do we avoid the ouroboros in our creative thoughts? A favorite theme of both Jonze and

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Kaufman—being trapped inside one’s own mind, or the existential sadness of our intersubjective limitations—here becomes an admission that even when we attempt fidelity to somebody else’s story, we are telling our own. The ouroboros Charlie mocks in Donald’s script becomes the central conceit of his own: we rehash old stories to make something new, and this will always feel unoriginal and be subject to self-doubt. It would be all too easy to say that the source of originality is hybridity. Much like the film’s central failed epiphany, it encapsulates everything and so explains nothing. What is it, then, that must be “whittled down,” and if passion is inherently reductive, what kind of profound originality are we then capable of ? Passion connects with our search for meaning, and when we face up to passion’s ephemerality (Laroche’s abandonment of every passionate cause), it is to admit to the very limits of personal meaning making (one of Orlean’s “sweet, sad insights”). But passion is not foremost about acquisition or obsession, like finding and owning rare flora and fauna—using these tools it is always doomed. Passion instead connects us to others. Passion motivates a search for connection without which Charlie has no need to tell a story, no drive to even be original in the first place. That is why he must begin with something he cares about. Passion is what “whittles the world down to a more manageable size.” It is Charlie’s turnaround moment: he can begin reductively and then work outward to include other narratives. In Adaptation, passion produces the germination of originality, but not its realization. Where Orlean has a passionate interest in detailing the lives of others, Kaufman realizes he is mostly passionate about himself, and begins his narrative from there. He has now “whittled it down” to find a beginning, but to end there would make Adaptation boring like Kaufman’s latter films, his almost completely self-absorbed directorial work. He then merges his own passions with those of others, including Orlean, Laroche, and even those muchmaligned Hollywood executives, to craft something new. The Orchid Thief was interested in what Ted Conover calls the “monomania of collectors.”43 But, he observes, creativity regularly works outward from monomania into its complication, putting it in tension with other passions until they unite. In the narrative arts, we require more than the connecting of various stories to hybrid forms, we require the connected passions of various narratives to make hybrid passion, somewhat like the proliferated cerebral and emotional passions at the end of Adaptation. This is the difference between what I have been distinguishing as “new information” and “meaningfully new information.” For what is passion but the way these stories connect to our deepest hopes and fears, driven by our most mortally felt consequences—adaptive pressures refracted through the myriad symbology of cultures steeped in narratively recorded histories? Stories describe, often in affective terms, what it is like to live the experiences that evolutionary biology explains, making them meaningful to us.

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The Orchid Thief, too, reflects on its method of immersion and learning so that an object of interest becomes “part of your life.”44 Yet in new journalism and its correlate scholarly practice, ethnography, it is after the fieldwork and participant observation that one returns to the various narratives of their own everyday and compares them back to another culture’s sense of being that produces a new, informative outlook.45 One could mix one’s own particular passions together into something new, but an interest in the passions, the lifeworld, and the knowledge of another might formulate a new and more surprising union of ideas—originality. Humanistically enough, this could include those whose passions we struggle the hardest to see the value in, like those of Hollywood’s more formulaic storytellers. Together, they mutate into a kind of humility, which might seem surprising given Kaufman’s insistence upon his own narcissism. This is humility not just in that Cage wears a fat suit with a mock-balding pate, but in Kaufman’s portrayal of himself as stumbling upon rather than generating an original narrative, in concert with others. It was his very ambition to convey the evolutionary genesis of passionate thoughts and feelings that led him to this collaboration, and provides one more lesson in Adaptation: that to be ambitious is not to be resolute. For this, is it not, is the great fear of cultural analysts who shy from the turmoil of contemporary Darwinian debates: that in our ambitious questions of the very nature of life itself, we might concoct another eugenics. Marks motivates Stephen Jay Gould’s warning against the ills of unilineal progress in evolutionary thinking to make the claim that we should “limit our application of Darwin to the film, or to culture in general, for in an essential way, his ideas are irrelevant to the cultural world.”46 But this exceptionalist notion of human culture ignores that natural selection has produced the environments in which current cultures flourish, and so surely can tell us something about how those cultures operate (if not ever why they operate). Cultural theorists on the whole reject Darwinian analysis because it appears to finish the debates they have tried so hard to open; this is only because they are looking in the wrong place. Darwinian philosophy as holistic explanation might be closed, as in the pitfalls of the most deterministic evolutionary psychology, but evolutionary biology, like all sciences, produces answers only to find more questions behind them, and those questions allow us to become more specific. We map the human genome, but then behind that is the complexifying epigenome. Epigenetics in turn begins to explain how genes modify their expression given the environments they respond to—this is crucial, as it renders nature/nurture debates unspecific enough to be redundant. It is, in fact, evolutionary research that has propelled us past such dichotomous thinking. At worst, this is extended into a call for static arts rather than narrative arts as somehow more real and more nourishing, the suggestion that we fetishize change to our detriment, which appears to me to confirm Charlie’s initial

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unworkable binary of authenticity versus artifice: “a victory for the nonnarrative (the static, the cyclical) over the narrative.”47 Landy rejoices that the film “leaves us, in the end, with the powerful, unchanging beauty of flowers and the strange, unchanging beauty of Charlie Kaufman’s soul.”48 It is in fact Darwinism that is open to change, and the determination to locate and describe immortal beauty and objective intellect—expressed in the highest terms as “soul”—that is not. Roger Ebert wrote of Adaptation, “To watch the film is to be actively involved in the challenge of its creation.”49 If that is what we want in theory, to be actively involved in the challenge of our own creation, it makes little sense to omit what we know of the biological dynamisms that birthed us. There is dishonesty afoot when we do not accept the place of our life in an adaptive continuum with selective pressures that produce fears and anxieties and behaviors that attempt to prolong the self in various ways (like recorded narratives), the complex iterations of which in turn produce complex culture, and that dishonesty can seize attempts to generate meaningfully new information. This is true of any kind of storytelling, the narratives of film or film scholarship, fiction or causal analysis. When, in scholarship, we make polemical claims, analyze story meanings, politicize hypothetical lives, or work towards prescriptive ethics, if we do not acknowledge sociobiology we miss that part of the story which talks to our genuine capabilities, to our deepest driving motivations, not just how we respond to our environment, but a “gene-culture coevolution,”50 in which we might locate our agency for change. T H E G E N E S I S O F O R I G I NA L I T Y

Let us finally return to Charlie’s abbreviated epiphanous moment: the point is not just to understand evolution as meaningful in a totalizing sense, as explaining at once all there is to meaningfully know about life. Poor evolutionary theory—in some cases harmful, as in social Darwinism and eugenics—and poor analytical work will end there. In reprieve from evolution as conclusive epiphany, we might address those lines represented as the closing thoughts of The Orchid Thief, that express one kind of “essence” Kaufman and Jonze have drawn from the book and have chosen as the object of their adaptive work. They serve as a reminder that we can accept evolution, mutation, and hybridity, explore these natural processes, but never master or totalize their ineffable power: “Life seemed to be filled with things that were just like the ghost orchid—wonderful to imagine and easy to fall in love with but a little fantastic, fleeting and out of reach.”51 With respect to these limitations, what can literary and cinematic Darwinism do? Kaufman and Jonze’s argument is first for accepting the hybridity of narrative, and thereafter embracing and creatively exploring it, which, in their case,

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does indeed produce something unfamiliar and original. My argument is the same for intellectual work, and what I ask is that the descriptive narratives of science and the prescriptive narratives of humanistic scholarship continue to be merged, as they both evolve, into something open, explorative, and new. I am not just drawing the parallel between narrative and biological adaptation: that selective hybridization produces variation to create original stories, as it equally produces experimentally new life. Adaptation has already done that. I am using the film to make a passionate and value-laden appeal: that we remain alive to how other people’s narratives are alive. I ask that we keep ourselves epistemologically open not just to the knowledge and narratives of others, but the way the knowledge and narratives of others change, and this includes evolutionary analysis as an open field of debate that is constantly updating, not as an end that explains everything. This is the source of human originality; it is how meaningfully new information is made. NOTES 1. Joshua Landy, “Still Life in a Narrative Age: Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation,” Critical Inquiry 37: 3 (Spring 2011), p. 501. 2. Cf. Martin Price, Forms of Life: Character and Moral Imagination in the Novel (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). If narratives provide our best ambassadors for our sense of being, then it makes sense to think of our stories as a kind of life. 3. I use first names for characters and last names to suggest their non-fictive counterparts. 4. See Malcolm Turvey, “Evolutionary Film Theory,” in Ted Nannicelli and Paul Taberham (eds.), Cognitive Media Theory (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 46–61. 5. Sharon Moalem and Peter Satonick, Survival of the Sickest: The Surprising Connections between Disease and Longevity (New York: William Morrow, 2007). 6. E. J. Michael Witzel, The Origins of the World’s Mythologies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 7. See the American Anthropological Association’s “Race and Human Variation” webpage, based on the work of Jeffrey Long, Understanding Race (2016), (last accessed March 10, 2019). 8. Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005). We should remain aware that this Lamarckian view of “phenotypic tailoring,” too, is an open field of debate, apropos Thomas E. Dickins and Qazi Rahman, “The Extended Evolutionary Synthesis and the Role of Soft Inheritance in Evolution,” Proceedings: Biological Sciences 279: 1740 (2012), p. 2916. 9. Also known as “creative non-fiction,” new journalism tells semi-fictionalized accounts of social phenomena, usually by narrativizing the reporter’s immersion in their object of study. See in particular Tom Wolfe and E. W. Johnson, The New Journalism (New York: Harper & Row, 1973). 10. Peter Marks, “Adaptation from Charles Darwin to Charlie Kaufman,” Sydney Studies in English 34 (2008), p. 19; Julie Levinson, “Adaptation, Metafiction, Self-Creation,” Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture 40: 1–2 (2007), p. 175. 11. Lucas Hilderbrand, “Reviews: Adaptation,” Film Quarterly 58: 1 (2004), p. 42.

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12. Sergio Rizzo, “(In)fidelity Criticism and the Sexual Politics of Adaptation,” Literature/ Film Quarterly 36: 4 (2008), p. 311. 13. Charlie Kaufman, “Why Charlie Kaufman Doesn’t Watch Movies Anymore,” interview by Michael Koresky and Matthew Plouffe, Reverse Shot, March 23, 2004, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 14. Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman, “Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman Discuss Adaptation,” interview by Spence D., IGN, December 5, 2002, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 15. Cf. Mary Beth Oliver and Arthur A. Raney, “Entertainment as Pleasurable and Meaningful: Identifying Hedonic and Eudaimonic Motivations for Entertainment Consumption,” Journal of Communication 61: 5 (2011), pp. 984–1004. 16. Marks, “Adaptation,” p. 38. 17. It also renders absurd the normative critical position of keeping hawkish lookout for reliable and fixed indicators of a film’s artistic credibility or signifiers of “quality,” which make little sense here. 18. Quoted in Levinson, “Adaptation, Metafiction,” p. 176. 19. Landy, “Still Life,” p. 500. 20. The original music video in particular prefigures glam rock; Jonze is also an adept music video director and enthusiast. 21. Hilderbrand, “Reviews: Adaptation.” 22. Donald also raises the song a number of times in relation to its “belonging” in a narrative, suggesting that its own blend of influences make it a difficult fit for any other film that works in a singular dramatic mode. 23. Hilderbrand, “Reviews: Adaptation,” pp. 41, 42. 24. Robert McKee, Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting (New York: Regan Books, 1997). 25. As Jason Mittell puts it, “by highlighting the conventionality of Donald’s writing and McKee’s guidance, Adaptation reminds us to pay attention to its own unconventional techniques.” Jason Mittell, Narrative Theory and Adaptation (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 96. 26. Cf. Andrew Sarris, “Towards a Theory of Film History,” in Bill Nichols (ed.), in Bill Nichols (ed.), Movies and Methods, Vol. I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 246. 27. As one might expect in a Jonze film, confusions between the represented and the real recur throughout the narrative, such as the scene in which Donald first outlines his multiple personality serial killer script treatment and Charlie is unable to explain to Donald the difference between diegetic consistency and representational devices or “trick photography.” 28. Here Charlie bundles all the conventions of genre entertainment together into a mundane whole, presenting them as a static entity. Thus car chases come to be an equivalent fantasy to “learning life lessons,” and both in need of unequivocal rejection. 29. Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief (London: Vintage, 2000), pp. 65–6. 30. Marks, “Adaptation,” p. 20. 31. Levinson, “Adaptation, Metafiction,” p. 172. The film’s final “quote” from The 3 and dedication to Donald in the end credits both point to its collapsing of distinctions between various people and the stories that attach to them—we are all made of the same stuff— just as the storytelling process itself becomes indistinguishable from Adaptation’s story or plot. See Mittell, Narrative Theory, pp. 117–18. The 3 is also representative of the Jonze/ Kaufman appetite for embedding little metaphysical jokes in their work together; there are many groups of three to be found in Adaptation whose distinctions have been collapsed.

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32. Marks, “Adaptation,” p. 28. 33. Mittell, Narrative Theory, p. 90. 34. Marks, “Adaptation,” p. 22. This chimes with the assumptions of terror management theory. For a meta-analysis, see Brian L. Burke, Andy Martens, and Erik H. Faucher, “Two Decades of Terror Management Theory: A Meta-Analysis of Mortality Salience Research,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 14: 2 (2010), pp. 155–95. 35. Landy, “Still Life,” p. 506. 36. Charlie performs this same anthropomorphic work when he transplants women’s faces over the orchids and instead of talking to the orchids’ specificity, reveals that he is actually thinking sexually about the women he observes through the orchids. 37. Jablonka and Lamb, Evolution, pp. 199–203. 38. Stephanie Zacharek, “‘Adaptation’ and the Perils of Adaptation,” Salon, December 16, 2002, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 39. Rizzo, “(In)fidelity,” p. 304. 40. Ibid. p. 305. These narrative elements still become secondary to Orlean’s fastidious documentation of the history of Floridian botanical crimes. 41. See Rob van Ginkel, “The Makah Whale Hunt and Leviathan’s Death: Reinventing Tradition and Disputing Authenticity in the Age of Modernity,” Etnofoor 17: 1/2 (2004), p. 59; Benjamin R. Smith and Frances Morphy (eds.), The Social Effects of Native Title: Recognition, Translation, Coexistence (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2007), passim. 42. Levinson, “Adaptation, Metafiction,” p. 172. 43. Ted Conover, “Flower Power,” New York Times Book Review, January 3, 1999, p. 10. 44. Orlean, The Orchid Thief, p. 344. 45. Robert S. Boynton, The New New Journalism: Conversations with America’s Best Nonfiction Writers on Their Craft (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), pp. 271–92. 46. Stephen Jay Gould, Life’s Grandeur: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin (London: Vintage, 1997), p. 140; Marks, “Adaptation,” p. 39. 47. Landy, “Still Life,” p. 509. 48. Ibid. p. 514. 49. Roger Ebert, “Adaptation,” Rogerebert.com, December 20, 2002, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 50. Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), p. 139. 51. Orlean, The Orchid Thief, p. 41. This passage actually refers to Laroche’s life rather than life in general. The book ends with weary disappointment: the scene in which Orlean and Laroche are lost in the swamp. Like the film, the book charts disappointments, which is one of the themes Kaufman has adapted from The Orchid Thief into his own life.

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2

“I’ll eat you up I love you so”: Adaptation, Authorship, and Intermediality in Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are Eddie Falvey

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hile widely employed across film studies, the term ‘adaptation’ is not without its complexities. Beside its basic description of the relationship between a film and its source text, adaptation studies brings to light the various cultural influences, be they historical, political, or industrial, that impact an adaptation’s characteristics. The current chapter will mount the argument that Spike Jonze’s 2009 film adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s illustrated children’s book Where the Wild Things Are presents a relatively unique case for adaptation studies. Not only does Jonze muster a feature film from a mere 338-word picture book, his film demonstrates how notions of authorship shift considerably across media platforms and between different contexts of production. Therefore, this chapter will frame Jonze’s film against questions of authorship and intermediality that emerge out of its compositional qualities and from the distinct cultural moment of its formulation. In doing so, the current chapter will contend that Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are does more than merely adapt Sendak’s book. Rather, Jonze’s film operates as an interactive and pointedly cultist mode of reception which conveys the cultural currency that Sendak’s book continues to maintain across generations. It seems fitting that the book’s most famous line, “please don’t go, we’ll eat you up we love you so”—restyled in the film in K.W.’s desperate plea to Max (Max Records) to stay: “I’ll eat you up I love you so”—not only predicates the theme of violent affection that is key to understanding protagonist Max’s anger, but moreover characterizes an act of textual consumption

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of a culturally significant text being passed between generations and various stations of authorship. For the purpose of this chapter, these stations of authorship are Jonze’s 2009 film and Dave Eggers’s novel of the same year, The Wild Things, based upon his and Jonze’s screenplay. Adaptation, as it operates in these two works, functions as a mode of reception based upon personal interactions with the text that are specific to each of the adapters. This idea is encapsulated by Eggers: I found other pathways into and out of the island [. . .] The children’sbook Max is, after all, a version of Maurice, and the movie Max is a version of Spike. The Max of this book is some combination of Maurice’s Max, Spike’s Max, and the Max of my own boyhood.1 Here, Eggers highlights the way in which an adaptation can function as an intimate response to a text imbued with both personal and wider cultural significance. While the particularities of Jonze’s or Eggers’s re-imaginings do not undermine the cultural currency of Sendak’s book, their reworkings express the near-mythical impact that it has had upon certain readers. This chapter aims to shed light on how Jonze’s and Eggers’s adaptations emerge as sites of contested authorship which convey intertextually and intermedially how Sendak’s book has been utilized across generations as a yardstick by which readers have measured their own childhood experiences. M E D I AT E D A U T H O R S H I P : W H E R E T H E W I L D T H I N G S A R E A S A DA P TAT I O N

But the wild things cried, “oh please don’t go— we’ll eat you up—we love you so!”2 As insinuated by the quotation, violent affection sits at the heart of both Sendak’s beloved children’s book and its successive adaptations. As one of the central motifs of Where the Wild Things Are, the destructiveness of love manifests in both overt and covert ways after the disgraced Max, having been punished with a forfeiture of supper and banishment to his bedroom for misbehavior, journeys to the land of the wild things where he learns tangible lessons about anger and self-discipline. It is for these reasons that Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are makes for such a curious adapted work. Indeed, Jonze’s adaptation has left critics somewhat perplexed when determining the film’s target audience. Writing for the Boston Globe, Ty Burr notes that while Sendak’s book “is a parable about self-control [. . .] Jonze’s film visualizes the process of learning control.”3 Indeed, Jonze’s depiction of a young boy

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grappling with existential concerns stands as evidence that Jonze was not especially seeking a younger audience. This could be explained by the fact that Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are is thematically in keeping with his feature filmography. Leaving aside his extensive music video output, from Being John Malkovich (1999) to Adaptation (2002) and, most recently, Her (2013), for which Jonze won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, Jonze’s films exhibit a preoccupation with how the world impacts upon identity formation, especially in the case of outsider male protagonists. The world of Where the Wild Things Are ultimately serves as a reflection of the internal process of Max’s development. The space of that world is highly allusive, not to mention diegetically unstable. Given that large portions of the film’s action play out in a space that might be read as Max’s imagination, the diegetic fluidity afforded by that recognition allows the space and characters to literalize different aspects of Max’s current crisis. Such themes resonate across Jonze’s oeuvre. In Being John Malkovich, for example, a portal into the actor’s mind transforms Malkovich’s head space into occupiable diegetic space, allowing Jonze to indulge the topic of male neuroses that characterizes much of his cinema. Indeed, Jonze’s filmography reveals an ongoing fascination with male neuroses, rendered once again in his characterization of Max. From Being John Malkovich to Where the Wild Things Are, Jonze’s cinema reflects a recurring interest in the alternative realities that emerge from non-normative mental states, a theme that forms from his tendency to manipulate cinematic space as a means of rendering these “realities.” It is for these reasons that Jonze’s choice to adapt Where the Wild Things Are makes sense in terms of the thematic preoccupations of his filmography. Indeed, Sendak’s depiction of metaphorical spaces which convey and comment upon the nebulous neuroses of a maturing pre-teen are revealed through his book’s visual and thematic composition. That Sendak leans heavily on the works of Sigmund Freud (especially The Interpretation of Dreams) and Jean Piaget—whose conceptualizations of formative intellectual development were being widely circulated by the 1960s4—has been acknowledged by existing scholarship, which largely assumes a psychoanalytical position to Sendak’s book. Such scholarship has made much of the Sendak’s fascination with psychoanalysis. Kenneth Kidd writes that “in Where the Wild Things Are [. . .] we see the importance of feelings, both in a residually Freudian sense and in the context of humanistic psychology.”5 This psychoanalytic position treats the book’s thematic and aesthetic properties as allegorical currency that conveys Max’s developing psychic state. Accordingly, much existing scholarship, including the work of Geraldine DeLuca, has found these allegorical readings to be fundamental to the novel’s sustained transcultural significance.6 Elsewhere, other scholars have commented upon the subsumption of psychoanalytical interests into the book’s iconic aesthetic. A. Moseley, for example,

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considers how the spatial dynamics of the illustrations (consider, for instance, Max’s transforming room) are emblematic of the book’s primary theme of adolescent dislocation.7 Alternatively, J. Shaddock has scrutinized Sendak’s implicitly imperialist narrative, claiming that Where the Wild Things Are has antecedents in the works of Joseph Conrad, whose impressions of colonial expansion in novels such as Heart of Darkness instituted a literary tradition in which voyages into largely unmapped and unknown wildernesses conveyed an ongoing cultural coming to terms with the knotty legacy of imperialism.8 An awareness of scholarly responses to Sendak’s book illustrates how an adaptation might be positioned and understood as a mode of critical response in itself. In his expansion of the psychoanalytic subtext of Where the Wild Things Are, Jonze brings to light a dominant, not to mention scholarly, method of reading Sendak’s book. Rather than rebuke any of the critical positions outlined above, this chapter will instead explore the ways in which Jonze’s adaptation has read, revised, and repurposed Sendak’s book for a new context and audience. In an interview shared between Jonze and Sendak for Dazed and Confused magazine, Jonze states that “what [he] was trying to hold on to was the feeling and the soul of the book, and the way the book is dealing with how it feels to be wild and to be a nine-yearold.”9 Jonze’s emphasis on feeling speaks to the nature of his adaptation; it is neither a verbatim imagining of Sendak’s book (what Dudley Andrew might call an adaptation “to the letter”10), nor is it a film for which textual fidelity serves no purpose. Rather, it operates fluidly as a work that is highly creative with, just as it is interpretive of, its source text. Instead of having Max’s bedroom transform into the world of the wild things, per Sendak’s intuition, Jonze’s Max must run away from home and find his way there. Such a divergence from the source text may seem to be a small distinction, yet it is an important one. The interiority of Max’s bedroom contrasts significantly with the exteriority of the outside world. If, indeed, Max’s journey is taken to be a metaphorical, introspective adjudication of his need for self-control, then it is important to note that in the book he never actually leaves the safety of his bedroom. By contradistinction, in the film, after a scuffle with his mother (Catherine Keener) during which he bites her, Max flees from home. “It’s not my fault!” he screams at his mother in response to her asking what is wrong with him. After tearing through the streets and out of sight, Max finds a clearing in which he lets his wild impulses reign, thrashing at trees with a stick and howling like a wolf into the night. Beyond the clearing, Max finds the boat with which he will sail to the unknown kingdom of the wild things; there, he boards the boat and braves the rough seas before finding refuge on the sunlit shores of the distant land. The important difference here is that in the film, Max’s journey is not wholly imagined. Jonze’s Max occupies a highly unstable, pointedly unprotected space. If the time spent with the wild things is in fact spent in a clearing of a remote,

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densely wooded area (not to mention beside a lake), then the shelter of Max’s bedroom, the ultimate setting of the book, is pointedly absent here. In the wooded area, Max is in uncharted space; his coordinates are unknown and, if his journey is taken to be the manifestation of a neurotic state of mind, then he is highly unbalanced. In Jonze’s film, Max has immediate spatial verisimilitude with the wilderness into which he is headed. This is just one example of the creative license that is employed by Jonze in his adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are. In Max, Jonze presents a highly distorted and singular worldview that evokes his changing interior state through the shifting physical spaces of the diegetic world. There is a case to be made that these spaces figure interdiegetically, as both real and imagined spaces, which are the platform for Max’s growth and illustrate, in their changing nature, both the particularities and universalities of a young child’s journey towards emotional maturity. In an interview with Sendak from around the time of the film’s release, the author claims that Jonze has turned [Where the Wild Things Are] into his Wild Things without giving up mine, but embodying mine with Spike Jonze [. . .] he’s done it like me [. . .], but in a more brilliant, modern, fantastical way which takes nothing from my book but enhances, enriches my book.11 In support of Jonze’s re-imagining, Sendak convivially articulates the dynamics that emerge from their respective works. Key to Sendak’s approval of Jonze’s film is his recognition of the importance of enhancement and enrichment, a notion that echoes Jonze’s aforementioned desire to capture the feeling of the book. Take into account Dudley Andrew’s claims regarding the difficulty of spiritual fidelity, and the generosity of Sendak’s endorsement comes to light. Indeed, Andrew expresses the complications of rendering “fidelity to the spirit, [to] the original’s tone, values, imagery, and rhythm, since finding stylistic equivalents in film for these intangible aspects is the opposite of a mechanical process.”12 It would seem that Jonze’s imperative to convey the feeling of the book, matched with Sendak’s recognition of the film’s enhancement and enrichment of it, is perhaps evidence of what Andrew was looking for. After all, Linda Hutcheon describes adaptation as a resourceful and imaginative process, one that “always involves both (re-)interpretation and then (re-) creation.”13 Critically, Jonze’s film adopts and expands upon Sendak’s narrative cues, enriching the story with emotional detail that goes largely unstated in the original text. Hutcheon stresses both the importance and veritable vastness of context, writing that “an adaptation, like the work it adapts, is always framed in [one]—a time and a place, a society and a culture; it does not exist in a vacuum.”14 Echoing Eggers’s claim that “the movie Max is a version of Spike,” it is certainly possible that

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Jonze’s process of adaptation relocates Sendak’s story within the context of his own autobiography. In Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are, the filmmaker depicts a moment of developmental crisis in Max as the young boy confronts the trauma of his father’s disappearance—notably, Jonze himself is a child of divorce. It is not this chapter’s intention to overstate the film’s autobiographical implications, nevertheless Jonze’s adaptation subtly alludes to the aftermath of parental separation throughout, grounding the film in a universe of feeling that can be mapped onto Max’s interactions with the wild things who at times assume parental roles (Carol and K.W.’s relationship most clearly resembles a marriage in disarray). Following Hutcheon, a critical imperative emerges to trace the various forces that determine the nature of an adaptation. But rather than reduce the process of adaptation to a simple handing over of authorial reins, perhaps it is more fitting to consider the implications of the authorial constellation that has since formed around Sendak’s original book. Jonze’s film, beside Dave Eggers’s novel The Wild Things, demonstrate through their similarities and differences how an adapter’s reverence of a text need not stand in the way of their decision to diverge from it. This is what Robert Stam has termed the “dialogics of adaptation”: One way to look at adaptation is to see it as a complex series of operations: selection, amplification, concretization, actualization, critique, extrapolation, analogization, popularization, and reculturalization. The source novel, in this sense, can be seen as a situated utterance produced in one medium and in one historical context, then transformed into another equally situated utterance that is produced in a different context and in a different medium.15 In line with Stam’s reasoning, Jonze and Eggers’s adaptations may both be regarded as newly situated “utterances” of Sendak’s source text, utterances that are replete with their own culturally inflected particularities. Not only do Jonze and Eggers demonstrate Where the Wild Things Are’s sustained cultural significance, they reposition it at the center of an intertextual, intermedial system of mediated authorship to which they contribute. I N T E RT E X T UA L I T Y A N D I N T E R M E D I A L I T Y : A DA P TAT I O N A S A M O D E O F R E C E P T I O N

Stam makes the claim that adaptations function as a form of transcultural dialogue, that film adaptations “are caught up in the ongoing whirl of intertextual reference [. . .] an endless process of recycling, transformation, and transmutation with no clear point of origin.”16 Understanding an adaptation as a mode of reception provides a lens by which one may observe not only the transcultural significance of texts such as Sendak’s, but a means of framing the reasons for its

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substantial reputation. It is the case that all adaptations, especially popular and/ or acclaimed ones, bring new dynamics to the cultural identity of their source. For example, there are no doubt many who can no longer separate Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings trilogy from Peter Jackson’s film adaptations (2001–3), such is their ubiquity. Rather, they coexist dialogically, affecting, governing, and generating readers’ means of viewing the adjacent text. Granted, Lord of the Rings is an ostentatious example of this phenomenon, yet it is nevertheless illustrative of the ways in which adaptations curate new modes of reception for culturally significant texts. In fact, such was Jackson’s commitment to his adaptation that his Lord of the Rings trilogy illustrates how adaptations themselves can be reflective of cultist modes of reception. Not only did work on The Fellowship of the Ring begin as early as 1997,17 Jackson mined extratextual sources such as the novel’s appendices to enrich his adaptation (a tactic evident in his excavation of Aragorn and Arwen’s romance). Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton have observed that “if one takes into account some of the salient features of the production, content, style, and receptions of blockbusters, and study how these interact to form reputations and cultural statuses, we not only see the same mechanisms as with cult cinema, we actually observe cinema cultism at work.”18 Such a formulation is useful for understanding how a widespread cultural phenomenon such as the Lord of the Rings, with its pre-existing fandom, might require the meticulous work of an adapter with cultist credentials such as Jackson. But how might such a framework lead to a greater understanding of Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are? In an interview, Jonze admits that his “motivation for the film was just loving what it stirred up in me, connecting to what I felt as a kid.”19 In one sense, then, it is possible to conceive of Jonze’s adaptation as a highly affected response to a ritualistic childhood experience of Sendak’s text. That he could draw so much from so little text speaks to the same forms of enrichment that characterize Jackson’s adaptation of Aragorn and Arwen’s romance in his Lord of the Rings. If, as Mathijs and Sexton argue, a substantial part of the Lord of the Rings’ cult appeal extends from its mythic world-building, then Jonze’s substantial expansion of Sendak’s storyworld expresses a similarly cultist commitment to embellishment. It is possible, therefore, to situate Jonze’s film in relation to a markedly cultist investment in Sendak’s source book. J. Shaddock has identified traces of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness in Where the Wild Things Are, noting the significant cultural legacy of colonialist narratives.20 It is curious that Shaddock recognizes the ghost of Conrad’s novel in Sendak’s book. If Where the Wild Things Are can indeed be read as a latent progenitor of the culturally mythic narrative of imperialism, then it is interesting to consider how it too has been mythologized by a generation of readers that includes Jonze and Eggers. If Jonze’s adaptation is illustrative of cultist modes of consumption, then it is apt to consider that Sendak’s book has mythic properties for those who hold it up as he and Eggers do. Desmond Manderson has

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written that “children’s fables are without a doubt pedagogical and normative [. . .] and they are profoundly influential in the child’s constitution.”21 Building upon Shaddock’s identification of Where the Wild Things Are’s narrative antecedents, Manderson’s position brings to light the ways in which particular texts chosen for adaptation may latently reveal mythic cultural touchstones through intertextual reference. That Sendak and, subsequently, Jonze and Eggers, utilize an imperialist quest narrative as a metaphorical vehicle for child development reveals just how deep Stam’s dialogics of adaptation run. In his arguably cultist adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, Jonze conveys the mythic cultural utility that such narratives have had for Western readers across generations. Andrew suggests that “we need to study the films themselves as acts of discourse. We need to be sensitive to that discourse and to the forces that motivate it.”22 Taking adaptations to be newly situated forms of reception, one can observe the ways in which an adaptation can alter a text to mean differently after the time and cultural circumstances of its initial impact. Given that Jonze’s film coincided with the release of Dave Eggers’s novel The Wild Things, one can see how the two adaptations might be understood relationally to each other. Lars Ellestrom, writing on the subject of adaptation and intermediality, contends that while the field of adaptation studies should account for matters of media interrelation, “there are certainly relevant issues for adaptation studies that are not, as such, intermedial, but rather, say, historical, sociological, or aesthetic.”23 Clearly, critical engagements with adaptations need not dismiss one context at the cost of another. Rather, an adaptation’s intermedial identity may be understood as another facet to be considered alongside any historical, sociological, and aesthetic aspects that characterize it. As a means of observing salient differences between the various iterations of Where the Wild Things Are, one may consider the subject of Max’s father. If Max’s father is wholly absent from Sendak’s book and only tentatively implied in Jonze’s film, then he has a significantly more pronounced role in Eggers’s novel. During Max’s journey to the land of the wild things, he is, by his own understanding, bound for his father: He hoped that somewhere in the night the bay would become rational again and the city would reappear. He would have to tell his father about this strange elastic stretching of the bay! But the city was disappearing altogether. For a while it was no more than a twinkling of dwindling lights, and shortly thereafter, it was gone.24 It is curious that in Eggers’s version of Max’s journey, Max’s father embodies a particular vision of comfort for him. In Max’s imagination, his father and the city (in which we are told he lives) are a stable image of domestic security.

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The reader knows nothing of Max’s father, aside from the fact that he is absent from Max’s primary home, but for Max, engulfed by the storm of his grief and anger, his father functions, for a short while, as a relatively secure opportunity for a new life away from his mother. Max decides that his father would “be astounded and impressed” at his navigation and that “they would live together from then on.”25 In all three texts Max’s newfound independence affords him vital lessons about his internal crises; however, in Jonze’s and Eggers’s adaptations, Max’s reconciliation with his mother is central to his growth (by contrast, their reconciliation is absent in Sendak’s book, save for a hot meal that suggests that she was there). The various degrees of parental presence insinuated by the three texts offer interesting intermedial dynamics reflective of the different methods by which each author wishes to explore Max’s anger and isolation. In the process of observing the three texts collectively, the differently accented narratives provide prisms by which one might discern the particular interests and intentions of each author. The matter of Max’s father is one example through which such a notion can be explored. Correspondingly, if one considers Sendak’s evocative illustrations in which Max’s bedroom is engulfed by a growing wilderness (the frame literally enlarges) next to Jonze’s close framing of Max’s mother’s boyfriend, they will find overlapping, yet distinct impressions of Max’s mounting dislocation expressed differently across media formats. Jonze’s alignment with Max allows the audience to watch his mother’s boyfriend as he does from the shadows of an adjacent room; it is a method that utilizes the camera to display Max’s pressing unease with a man that he resolutely considers not to be his father. The interiority of Eggers’s prose provides yet another impression of Max’s attempts to make sense of his fluctuating feelings towards a pressing parental absence. Together, these three iterations of the beginning of Max’s journey into the wild provide a constellation of representations of a young boy’s personal crisis and his drastic attempts to come to terms with it. OF MAPS AND MONSTERS: READING JONZE’S MAX

For the likes of Stam and Hutcheon, textual fidelity is of significantly less interest than textual interactivity. This chapter has considered how textual interactivity, manifested in intermedial treatments of the same story, reveals the ways in which adaptations bring to light particular aspects of a story that an adapter finds most resonating. This section will offer a reading of Jonze’s adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, considering the spatial dynamics of his diegetic world and how it impacts on his construction of Max. A suitable praxis for reading Jonze’s adaptation is in regard to his spatialization of Max’s internal process; both Jonze’s film and Eggers’s novel have a prescribed interiority that

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is largely inconsistent with the worlds that they construct. For both, the world of the wild things is an affected response to Max’s falling out with his mother, the manifestation of a highly imaginative id (as per Freud)26 that is at times considerably unbalanced. Such an assessment of Jonze’s film is in keeping with this chapter’s position that it is equal parts an adaptation and a critical examination of Sendak’s book. Kenneth Kidd has suggested that the spatial dynamics of Sendak’s book invite a queer reading of it. He writes that such a reading has the potential to recast observations made in scholarship regarding Max’s hybridity, passion, and performativity: “Max may well be (or may have become) an exemplary subject of humanist child-rearing and child psychology, but he is also queer to some degree—hard to manage, independent, animal-identified.”27 Casting aside the question of whether or not Where the Wild Things Are can, or ought to be, read as a queer narrative in the traditional sense, Kidd’s speculations regarding the text’s inherent queerness are illustrative of yet another mode of reception that the text invites. If the space of the text is indeed Max’s psychic plane, then one might imagine how that space could indeed be understood as queer. More than merely his imagination, the space of Where the Wild Things Are is a symbolic literalization of Max’s intellectual, emotional, and imaginative faculties, a developmental space in which Max’s various fears and anxieties are actualized, played out, and reconciled to varying degrees by each narrative’s end. In keeping with anthropologist Victor Turner’s hypothesis that rites of passage can be conceptualized as “liminal” experiences,28 it seems fair to speculate that the mind of a child is, by an adult’s measurements, a decidedly queer space in that it operates outside of the social, cultural, and legal codes and conditions that determine one’s conduct out in the world. The “reality” of the space of the wild things further brings a possible queerness into view. Of course, the “reality” of this space is indeed relative to its function in the film’s narrative. In one regard, the land of the wild things is home to a “real” ocean and forests and deserts; on the other hand, these spaces are only “real” insomuch as they are an embodiment of Max’s state of mind. Accordingly, the space of Max’s psychic plane remains fundamentally unbalanced and spatially untethered, simultaneously real and imagined. Ultimately, the land of the wild things is intangible, placeless head space that symbolically renders Max’s moment of crisis. If the space is mappable, then it is only so through its capacity to hold a mirror to Max’s fraught psychological state. If the liminality hypothesis offers a framework for Max’s rite of passage, then the space of Max’s inner world is somewhat heterotopic, as per Michel Foucault’s theorization of the “placeless places” operating outside of dominant modes of hegemony. Foucault demonstrates his notion through a rationalization of the space of a mirror. He writes:

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The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy.29 Such a reading of the physical space of Max’s world might lead to a better understanding of its function in relation to Max’s growth across the course of the film. In fact, Foucault’s utilization of the mirror as an instrument for self-actualization is highly applicable when considering how the inner spaces of Max’s journey operate. In much the same way that Foucault’s mirror represents an “unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface,”30 the space of the wild things operates as a reflective surface on which Max is able to contemplate his own nature. His journey is fundamentally a developmental process through which he will gain the formative faculties for emotional self-regulation. In some ways the unmapped space of the wild things functions as a landscape of emotional desire for Max. However, any “residually Freudian” aspects, such as those identified by Kidd, are absent here;31 the desire of Jonze’s psychological terrain is tangibly asexual, aromantic, and is founded principally on Max’s acute desire for love, support, and companionship, beside his pressing need for self-identification. If each of the wild things embodies a particular impulse in Max, then it is useful to consider who aligns with which aspect of his character. If Carol represents Max’s tendency to let his emotions get the better of him, then K.W. captures the opposite, a sweet loner of the group who embodies Max’s dislocation and, importantly, his heart. It is intriguing that Carol and K.W. have something of a romantic investment in one another. The ambiguity of the terrain, and their relationship, offers a platform to consider Carol and K.W. as symbolic of Max’s imagined lack of parental love and understanding. Alternatively, Carol and K.W.’s antagonism towards one another might be taken to be illustrative of an as yet unclear sexual identity forming in Max. In line with the film’s narrative of self-discovery, it is perhaps most appealing to read Carol and K.W.’s hostile relationship as Max’s unconscious identification of the need to strike harmony between the warring aspects of his character. Douglas’s sense of reason, Ira’s gentleness, Judith’s extroversion, Alexander’s failure to be recognized, and Bernard’s stoicism each characterize further elements of Max’s identity that must be reconciled before his journey’s end. The process of identifying the allusive substance of each character is less important, however, than recognizing the symbolic purchase of the community that they form.

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Foucault’s mirror is a particularly apt means of tracing and understanding Max’s inner world. The mirror offers a unique yet fractured image of the self, doubling its user and allowing them to see a facsimile of themself in its reflection. Standing before a mirror, one is arrested by the strange spectacle of their own form which they are only capable of seeing in specific conditions— another being a photograph, which exacts an altogether different and considerably more affected relationship with the self ’s image. The land of the wild things enacts, in many ways, the cinematic equivalent of the mirror. In Jonze’s film the space is both real and not, a heterotopic world that functions outside of real space and represents a symbolic culmination of a young boy’s journey towards emotional self-regulation and adulthood. At the outset, this chapter claimed that Jonze has demonstrated a recurring interest in making films that convey and comment upon non-normative mental states. For an adult reflecting on a key part of their childhood—that is, coming to terms with the need for emotional maturity and stability—Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are functions as something of a rite of passage for both the filmmaker and the countless others for whom the intermedial formation of Where the Wild Things Are has a special significance. By enhancing Sendak’s book in the way he does, Jonze draws attention to the way in which the stories of one’s childhood become lore. Thus, his Where the Wild Things Are stands as a critical examination of a text that has personal resonance for him. Jonze’s presentation of Max’s highly subjective worldview manifests in the shifting spaces of his world, which operate as both real and imagined platforms upon which he comes to understand his own nature. For Jonze and Eggers, who clearly share personal investments in Sendak’s book, they each find their own pathways through Sendak’s source, pathways that express their own experiences of being young boys faced with the journey towards emotional and intellectual stability. The fact that Max’s “inner” world finally represents a space of growth for him comes to emblematize Jonze’s own interactions with Sendak’s book. His adaptation is expressive of the ways in which children inhabit the stories of their youth before carrying them into adulthood. It is clear for Jonze and Eggers that these stories continue to function as a means for self-reflection on their own rites of passage, providing terms with which they can chart their own childhood development. NOTES 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Dave Eggers, The Wild Things (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2009), p. 281. Maurice Sendak, Where the Wild Things Are (New York: Harper, 1963). Ty Burr, “Where the Wild Things Are,” The Boston Globe, October 16, 2009. See Jean Piaget, Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood (New York: Norton, 1962). Kenneth B. Kidd, “Maurice Sendak and Picturebook Psychology,” in Freud in Oz: At the Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Children’s Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. 122.

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6. Geraldine DeLuca, “Exploring the Levels of Childhood: The Allegorical Sensibility of Maurice Sendak,” Children’s Literature 12 (1984), pp. 3–24. 7. A. Moseley, “The Journey Through the ‘Space in the Text’ to Where the Wild Things Are,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 1 (1986), pp. 96–101. 8. J. Shaddock, “Where the Wild Things Are: Sendak’s Journey into the Heart of Darkness,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 22: 4 (1997), pp. 155–9. 9. Spike Jonze, “RIP Maurice Sendak: 2009 Interview by Spike Jonze,” Dazed and Confused Magazine, May 9, 2012. 10. Dudley Andrew, “Adaptation,” in James Naremore (ed.), Film Adaptation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 31. 11. “Interview with Maurice Sendak,” DVD feature on Where the Wild Things Are, dir. Spike Jonze (USA: Warner Bros., 2009). 12. Andrew, “Adaptation,” p. 32. 13. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 8. 14. Ibid. p. 142. 15. Robert Stam, “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation,” in James Naremore (ed.), Film Adaptation (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), p. 68. 16. Ibid. p. 66. 17. Gary Russell, The Art of the Two Towers (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), p. 8. 18. Ernest Mathijs and Jamie Sexton, Cult Cinema (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 2012). 19. Quoted in Kyle Meikle, “Adaptation and Interactivity,” in Thomas M. Leitch (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 549. 20. Shaddock, “Where the Wild Things Are.” 21. Desmond Manderson, “From Hunger to Love: Myths of the Source, Interpretation, and Constitution of Law in Children’s Literature,” Law and Literature 15: 1 (2003), p. 91. 22. Quoted in Jack Boozer, Authorship in Film Adaptation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), p. 21. 23. Lars Ellestrom, “Adaptation and Intermediality,” in Thomas M. Leitch (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), p. 513. 24. Eggers, The Wild Things, pp. 85–6. 25. Ibid. p. 82. 26. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id (Vienna: W. W. Norton, 1923). 27. Kidd, “Maurice Sendak and Picturebook Psychology,” p. 125. 28. Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Piscataway, NJ: Aldine Transaction Publishers, 1996). 29. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” in Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (October 1984), pp. 46–9; translated by Jay Miskowiec in Diacritics 16: 1 (Spring 1986), pp. 22–7 (p. 4). 30. Ibid. p. 4. 31. Kidd, “Maurice Sendak and Picturebook Psychology,” p. 122.

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3

Converging Indiewood: Spike Jonze, Propaganda Films, and the Emergence of Specialty Film Giant USA Films Yannis Tzioumakis

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n Rebels on the Backlot,1 one of several popular accounts of the emergence of contemporary American independent cinema that were published in the mid-2000s,2 Sharon Waxman describes how Seagram’s (then parent company of Universal) corporate takeover of Polygram Filmed Entertainment (PFE) in June 1998 benefited the production of Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (1999). As that takeover also included production labels owned by PFE such as Interscope Pictures and Propaganda Films—the latter a co-producer of the film—the production of Being John Malkovich took place within a sort of corporate void, which, according to Waxman, gave the team behind the film an unusual degree of freedom from studio interference.3 This was something that the production was seemingly in great need of, with film critic Scott Tobias deeming the greenlighting of a film “conceived with such brazen disregard for the marketplace” by a large company like Polygram not short of “a miracle.”4 Michael DeLuca, then production chief at New Line Cinema and the first executive to receive a pitch for the project in 1997, admitted that he “just could not get it through the system.”5 With early rave reviews labelling the film “devilishly inventive and so far out there it’s almost off the scale,”6 Waxman’s assertion that the film benefited from its surrounding corporate machinations seems to be on the mark. This chapter, however, takes almost an inverse position. Its key argument is that the complex corporate developments that were taking place “around” Being John Malkovich were shaped by and benefited from the film or, to be more precise, by the type

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of film it was, as well as by the talent involved in it. This is because Being John Malkovich was “speaking to” a number of industrial developments that were taking place in American cinema at the turn of the century, particularly the emergence of indiewood filmmaking. Indeed, the film became the flagship release of USA Films, a new major player in the independent/specialized film sector created in the shadow of the Seagram-PFE takeover. Despite its short lifespan (just under four years, 1999–2002), USA Films was an extremely influential company at a point when the independent film sector was undergoing a very specific type of transition, leaving behind the indie model of filmmaking for the more commercially appealing indiewood one. This transition would lead independent film to become increasingly integrated “into the structures of global media and finance”7 and to a converged media landscape firmly controlled by a small cadre of global entertainment conglomerates. Despite falling short of the box office gross that was achieved by a few other contemporaneous indiewood productions (especially Miramax films such as Good Will Hunting [1997] and Shakespeare in Love [1998]), Being John Malkovich was still a great early indiewood success. Beyond its inventive storytelling and interesting subject matter that invited almost unanimous praise from film critics, my discussion will show that the production of the film was also important in establishing the kind of industrial and institutional basis that helped make indiewood the most prominent type of independent/specialty filmmaking in American cinema. This is because indiewood film productions, on account of their more commercial outlook than earlier iterations of independent cinema, were designed to be better integrated in a media landscape that was becoming increasingly converged. Previous work on Being John Malkovich has highlighted its historical significance and its filmmaker’s role in engaging with a converged mediascape on a textual level.8 This chapter focuses exclusively on the film’s industrial location and the ways in which it informed and was informed by what Henry Jenkins has called “corporate [media] convergence,”9 with a view to highlighting how such convergence was also responsible for the emergence of indiewood film in US cinema. The chapter is divided into three sections. The first section examines the concept of indiewood and the extent to which it can be seen as part of larger shifts in global media industries, involving a small number of global entertainment conglomerates as they were realigning to control as many aspects of media entertainment as possible—including what had been increasingly known as “indie film” in the late 1980s and 1990s. The second section examines Propaganda Films, an influential media company in the field of commercial video through which Spike Jonze emerged as a major talent in the 1990s and which also assumed the role of co-producer in Being John Malkovich, Jonze’s debut feature film. As I will argue, the company’s expertise in commercial video, including ads and music videos, in tandem with its industrial location at the

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margins of the “official” film industry enabled it and several of its marquee directors to emerge at the forefront of a new type of American cinema. Indeed, Propaganda helped inaugurate a mode of filmmaking that partly coincided with indiewood’s place between Hollywood and independent filmmaking, and as part of a broader converged media landscape. In this respect, it is no surprise that Propaganda ended up producing the film while also helping one of its key directors branch out to feature filmmaking. The final section will bring issues raised in the first two sections together by examining in detail the establishment of USA Films and the extent to which Being John Malkovich provided the company with a concrete identity as it entered the indiewood film realm in 1999. By examining the context within which USA Films was established and its location within a converging global Hollywood, I will argue that as much as Being John Malkovich benefited from all the corporate machinations during the time of its production—circumstances that left the filmmakers free to complete the film with minimal interference— USA Films also profited immensely from the film. This was because the film’s producers delivered the company a quintessentially indiewood film, complete with the key elements that would come to define the designation: a marketable auteur, major Hollywood stars playing against type or participating in a production due to genuine interest in the material it tackled, a film grounded in genre but mobilizing both comedy and fantasy in innovative ways and with several marketing hooks that could appeal to multiple demographics.10 Being John Malkovich became the company’s flagship title until Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (2000) became a runaway indiewood success in 2000 and afforded the company its reputation as a major player in the specialty film business. INDIEWOOD

(OR

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ENCOUNTERS WITH INDIE FILM)

Although the concept of indiewood has been examined in some detail by a number of scholars, focusing both on its textual characteristics and industrial shifts in relation to American independent cinema from the late 1990s onwards,11 it has more rarely been considered as a development within a broader industrial canvas. Whether this canvas includes indiewood’s relationship to the rest of the film industry, including the major Hollywood studios that on several occasions attempted to produce indiewood-style films, or an even bigger picture that looks at indiewood under the auspices of developments related to media convergence and global entertainment industries, scholarly work on such questions has remained surprisingly limited.12 In examining the production context of Being John Malkovich, the chapter aims to redress the balance while also contributing to the study of Spike Jonze’s work from an industrial perspective.

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Given that the topic of American independent cinema has attracted a plethora of definitions and approaches, it is not surprising that one of its constituting parts, indiewood filmmaking, has also been conceptualized in different ways. In the first major scholarly study on the phenomenon, Geoff King defined Indiewood (with capital I) as a “distinct region of the recent and contemporary American film landscape” that was a “product of particular forces within the American film industry from the 1990s and 2000s” and includes films that are characterized by a “blend comprised of features associated with dominant, mainstream convention and markers of ‘distinction’ designed to appeal to more particular, niche audience constituencies.”13 These markers of distinction were associated with aesthetic approaches, subject matter, ideological positions, and other elements that have been historically related to forms of cinema seen as “alternative” to Hollywood, including but not limited to forms that emerged in the 1980s as “independent” or “indie” cinema within the American film industry.14 With the increasing use of mainstream conventions (mainly associated with the films of the major Hollywood studios) making Indiewood films more appealing to wider demographics and with indie cinema’s particular approach to filmmaking (whether in terms of aesthetic experimentation and/or offbeat subject matter), Indiewood films could still be perceived as a specialized product catering for audiences not associated with Hollywood blockbuster and franchise films, without alienating audiences that do watch and enjoy these films. For King, Indiewood is primarily associated with the Hollywood studios’ “indie/ speciality-oriented distributors and/or producers,”15 which made their presence increasingly felt in the independent film sector in the 1990s and 2000s following the crossover success of several indie films in the early 1990s. These divisions represent “the most clear cut institutional base of Indiewood.”16 The potential for commercial success in such films at times also prompted the Hollywood studios themselves to test Indiewood waters by investing substantial funds in the production and distribution of films containing radical elements, but always as part of an overall film design grounded in “mainstream narrative feature traditions.”17 Taking 1999 as a case in point, a year that saw the release of a critical mass of titles identified as Indiewood, King cites Election (1999), Three Kings (1999) and Fight Club (1999) as key examples of the studios’ contribution to the sector. However, the majority of King’s case studies represent films released primarily by studio specialty film divisions, ranging from inexpensive offbeat productions with commercial elements, including Being John Malkovich and Solaris (2002), to more expensive star-ridden productions such as Miramax’s Shakespeare in Love, to Focus Features as a specialty studio division that made its reputation releasing Indiewood titles. Although foundational in providing a context through which to understand the complexity of Indiewood as a distinct concept within American independent cinema, King’s intervention does not always distinguish Indiewood

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clearly from the term “indie.” This is not necessarily problematic, as distinctions between such terms tend to be slippery. The studio divisions often also back films that lack elements associated with Indiewood,18 while companies other than the Hollywood studios and their specialty film divisions (for example, Lionsgate) occasionally produce Indiewood films even if the rest of their slates focus on other types of pictures. Thus, it is not surprising that at the very end of his study, King is reluctant to overstate both Indiewood’s distinctiveness from indie cinema and its realization as a concept that could be “subject to any single detailed definition.”19 My own approach to the concept adopts many of the elements identified by King, but rather than privileging its location as a “distinct region” in a filmmaking spectrum, I see indiewood (with lower-case i) as a distinct phase in the recent history of contemporary American independent cinema,20 that followed the “independent” and “indie” phases. In my conceptualization, indiewood was perceived as an approach to filmmaking that took a number of key elements associated with the indie era (from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s) and emphasized them in a more substantial manner. For instance, while indie films started using former teen or veteran stars, indiewood films started to cast superstars such as Robin Williams (Good Will Hunting), Tom Cruise (Magnolia, 1999), and Michael Douglas (Traffic), among others. While adopting indie films’ niche demographic targeting, indiewood films also had the potential to attract broader and more mainstream audiences because of their increased proximity to Hollywood. While indie film directors provided strong authorial anchors to their films, a move that was increasingly exploited by marketing departments, indiewood became particularly associated with a group of successful (male) indie filmmakers who started making distinctive films both for studio divisions and the Hollywood majors (Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Wes Anderson, Alexander Payne, Spike Jonze, Steven Soderbergh, and a few others). In this sense, indiewood can be understood as an “enhanced indie,” the continuing process of further commercializing and popularizing independent cinema that started in the late 1980s when the success of such films as sex, lies, and videotape, Drugstore Cowboy (1989), and The Grifters (1990) started moving contemporary American independent cinema to a markedly different register. This eventuated after a decade of marginal production and distribution that rarely encouraged the participation of the key industry players. Locating indiewood in this manner has the advantage of highlighting the American film industry’s consistent effort to increase independent film’s commercial value, especially when the Hollywood majors started investing in this kind of filmmaking through their specialty film divisions. However, branding the period from the mid/late 1990s onwards as “indiewood” does not necessarily mean that other types of independent filmmaking disappeared—filmmaking that did not employ stars or that refused (or could not afford) links with mainstream Hollywood. On the contrary, the type of filmmaking associated with

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the “independent” and “indie” periods of the 1980s and 1990s continued as a practice among large numbers of filmmakers and small companies, especially as distribution opportunities in theaters and ancillary markets continued to increase. However, the films that dominated the scene, attracted most attention, proved the biggest commercial successes, secured theatrical distribution, garnered awards, and, inevitably, defined the sector from the late 1990s onwards are the ones associated with indiewood: Jackie Brown (1997), Shakespeare in Love, Being John Malkovich, Magnolia, Traffic, The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), About Schmidt (2002), Lost in Translation (2003), Sideways (2004), Brokeback Mountain (2005), Crash (2005), There Will Be Blood (2007), No Country for Old Men (2007), Juno (2007), and many others. The rest of this section will provide a survey of industrial developments that paved the way for the rise of indiewood, drawing primarily on the work of Thomas Schatz, who has consistently looked at independent film within a broader context.21 In a series of articles that focused on Hollywood cinema’s increasing grip by global entertainment conglomerates,22 Schatz has shown a strong interest in concurrent developments in the US independent film sector. Surveying the key changes in the film industry between the early 1990s and 2000s, Schatz argued that the landscape in the new millennium is increasingly different from the one that emerged in the 1990s due to the continuous impact of conglomeration, globalization, and digitization.23 One of the key changes Schatz identified is “the annexation of the ‘indie film movement’ by the media conglomerates, providing a safe haven for a privileged cadre of filmmakers, while leaving the truly independent film business in increasingly desperate financial straits.”24 With the indie film movement making its presence particularly felt in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the same time that a number of Hollywood studios started becoming acquired by conglomerates, Schatz argues that it was inevitable that the conglomerates would not ignore what was becoming another increasingly commercially successful market. Whether it was by purchasing formerly standalone companies or by establishing their own specialty film divisions, Conglomerate Hollywood began to “commandeer the indie movement.”25 Meanwhile some of the larger standalone companies and a substantial number of small independents continued to operate in the margins of the industry, handling anything from micro-budget films to genre-driven productions and other specialized product. As a result, Schatz argues, the industry was divided into three tiers, with the Hollywood studios (now subsidiaries of entertainment conglomerates) constituting the first tier, the specialty film divisions (also subsidiaries of the same conglomerates) being the second tier, and the remaining standalone, independent companies making the third one.26 Although Schatz is rather cautious in attaching labels to these developments, he uses the word “Indiewood” to refer to these second-tier companies,27 the very same organizations that provide a haven for a select group of filmmakers and primarily produce and distribute films that combine elements associated

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with both mainstream Hollywood and indie film. These films represent a very particular type of production, the budget of which ranged (in the late 2000s) from $25 to $35 million.28 However, when he does attempt to label these films, Schatz opts for “indie blockbuster,” primarily emphasizing their ability to be ultra-successful commercially (the examples he uses are The English Patient [2006], Good Will Hunting, and Shakespeare in Love), rather than exploring their qualitative similarities to and differences from Hollywood and indie cinema.29 Of course, all these film titles have been routinely labelled Indiewood (or indiewood) in the existing literature on American independent cinema, which suggests that Schatz’s work provided the industrial context through which a broader picture of indiewood could be discussed and understood. In his more recent work, Schatz has been more forthcoming with the use of the term. Writing specifically on American independent cinema in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Schatz identifies a peak period in the conglomerates’ grip on the indie film movement, which included not only the films made by their specialty film divisions but also occasional films made by the major studios themselves, in search of “critical prestige and hoping for a crossover hit.”30 Schatz here uses increasingly the label “Indiewood,” ending his article with the assertion that “1999 stands as a watershed year in the history of the indie film movement and the steady emergence of the Indiewood phenomenon.”31 The examples drawn on in that chapter are comprised of the usual suspects: American Beauty (1999), Fight Club, and Magnolia,32 together with studio productions The Talented Mr Ripley (1998), The Sixth Sense (2000), and the masterfully marketed independent production The Blair Witch Project (1999). Schatz’s work has been instrumental in locating indiewood and American independent film production more generally within the broader film industry. He has also teased out a few other elements that link independent film to developments associated with media convergence, such as the purchase of independent companies by conglomerates in order to exploit their film libraries in various markets;33 the strong links between the independent film sector and cable television, especially following the emergence of specialized cable players such as the Sundance Channel and the Independent Film Channel;34 and the dependence of studio specialty film divisions’ product on the conglomerates’ other subsidiaries (home entertainment; international sales) for distribution. However, these issues have yet to be explored in detail, while other important elements that have been discussed as manifestations of media convergence, such as the presence of “extensions,” “synergies,” and “franchises”35 or the efforts of media owners “to expand their output across media platforms,”36 have only been considered in survey fashion when it comes to discussing independent film. For instance, an increasing number of independent films, especially indiewood productions, have used franchise strategies to extend their presence in the marketplace: from Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy to

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sequels and television spinoffs of commercially successful films such as My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002) (My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2 [2016] and My Big Fat Greek Life [2003], respectively), while the increasing migration of independent filmmakers to television as showrunners, producers, and directors of “original” films made for streaming platforms such as Netflix and Hulu suggests an increasing convergence between film and (internet) television. As is clear, then, indiewood is very much intricately linked to a number of developments in global media and entertainment, and there is still a lot of work to be done to explore its full role within this context. Through a case study of the industrial location of Being John Malkovich, the rest of the chapter will explore one of these developments: the way in which indiewood film was increasingly perceived as important specialty content, and the companies behind it as providers of such content, especially for television. The next section will discuss the production of Being John Malkovich as connected to definitions of indiewood in the late 1990s, before the final section demonstrates how the picture gave USA Films an identity in the indiewood film marketplace despite the fact that the company was conceived primarily as a content provider for the various divisions of USA Networks (and later Universal). S P I K E J O N Z E , P R O PA G A N DA F I L M S , A N D T H E P RO D U C T I O N O F B E I N G J O H N M A L KOV I C H

The starting point for Being John Malkovich had nothing to do with Spike Jonze or Propaganda Films but was instead an original screenplay by Charlie Kaufman. Having established himself as a writer across several US television shows, Kaufman wrote Malkovich on spec in 1994 in an effort to launch his career as a screenwriter of feature films.37 The screenplay was sent to a number of production companies which, while finding the story interesting and fresh, were not convinced by its prospects for commercial success.38 It was eventually optioned by Single Cell Pictures, a production company owned by R.E.M. singer Michael Stipe and Sandy Stern that had a first look deal with New Line Cinema. But New Line Cinema’s chief of production Michael De Luca passed on the project, despite the fact that New Line had always found space for indiewood films with strong commercial potential: Boogie Nights (1997), Wag the Dog (1998), American History X (1998), and Magnolia, for example, at a time when the company was increasing its emphasis on stardriven vehicles with substantial franchise success, such as the Austin Powers and Rush Hour trilogies. Following New Line’s pass, Single Cell Pictures continued to look for a finance-production-distribution deal. In 1997 Spike Jonze was a director of commercials and pop videos based at Propaganda Films. He had been sent

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Kaufman’s screenplay and expressed an interest in making it his debut feature film as director.39 Having directed videos for major bands’ and artists’ songs, including R.E.M.’s “Crush with Eyeliner” (1995) and “Electrolite” (1997), Jonze had been developing a strong reputation as an innovative director in commercial video formats. As part of a stable of directors housed at Los Angeles-based Propaganda Films who had made notable transitions to feature filmmaking in the 1990s, including David Fincher, Dominic Sena, and Michael Bay, Jonze was seen as the next director with such a background ready to make the leap to Hollywood and feature-length filmmaking. Indeed, Jonze had been attached to direct other films before his involvement with Being John Malkovich, both via projects originating at Single Cell Pictures and especially through Propaganda Films.40 This was because the latter was a company that had established an identity as a production entity that enabled its filmmakers to follow opportunities in different areas of media making. However, such efforts had proved futile until he expressed an interest in Malkovich, which prompted Single Cell Pictures to try to finance the film anew with Jonze attached as a director. This effort eventually linked Single Cell with Propaganda. Established in 1986 as a talent management, advertising, and video production company by Steve Golin and Joni Sighvatsson, Propaganda Films had a very particular corporate history that lends weight to Being John Malkovich’s conceptualization as an indiewood production. Although the company’s core activities continued to be advertising and music video, Propaganda branched out quickly to feature film production in collaboration with Polygram Filmed Entertainment, with Private Investigations (1987), Blue Iguana (1988), and Fear, Anxiety, and Depression (1989).41 Despite the underwhelming critical and commercial performance of these films, Polygram made a new pact with Propaganda in 1988 for the production of six more features in the $3–6 million budget range.42 Given that Propaganda was doing remarkably well in other media sectors, Polygram bought a 49 percent stake of the company in the same year.43 Propaganda continued to produce films for Polygram in the early 1990s, focusing both on films that were perceived as part of the indie cinema scene of the time, such as David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990) and John Dahl’s Red Rock West (1992), and on genre productions, especially horror, that targeted a broader demographic than its indie films. At the same time, its commercial and music video arm was emerging as the leading company in those particular sectors, with a host of directors rapidly developing reputations as innovators who brought an aesthetic to their work that elevated commercial video form to an art, often favorably compared to feature film. As Annesley remarks, the company’s approach to music video in particular coincided with the period when MTV started crediting directors for their work, while the popularization of dance music in the 1990s, characterized by the relative anonymity of dance acts, helped directors conceive music videos less as a means to sell a music star

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and more as an opportunity to make interesting short films that “made the connection between music video and other forms of media (film in particular) much more readily apparent to the viewer.”44 With Propaganda quickly emerging as not just a hub for some of the most creative directors of the time, but also an extremely specialized organization that responded to an increasing “demand for videos and a professional approach to video production,”45 it is not surprising that it became a market leader in these sectors, generating significant profits for its investors, despite the fact that its feature length film production division did not produce similar results. By 1992 the company had been bought outright by Polygram (itself a division of Dutch consumer electronics company Philips), which realigned it as a key production label that would serve its plan to branch out to US theatrical film distribution through Gramercy Pictures, a new film distributor it established in collaboration with Universal. As a result of this restructuring, Propaganda’s feature film arm found itself acquiring a more stable identity than in its early years. This is because Gramercy traded primarily (though not exclusively) in the specialty film market, with a number of its films firmly associated with the increasingly popularized (in the early 1990s) indie film sector: King of the Hill (1993), Dazed and Confused (1993), The Usual Suspects (1995), Mallrats (1995), and Fargo (1996). Although none of the above features was produced by Propaganda, Gramercy’s brand identity in the second half of the 1990s started to point increasingly to indiewood, which gave Propaganda orientation in terms of the films it should try to finance and produce. With Gramercy continuing to release work by key indie filmmakers such as Ed Burns, the Coen brothers, Whit Stillman, Neil LaBute, and the Wachowskis, and as other Polygram subsidiaries such as Interscope Communications, Working Title, and ITC Entertainment had a mandate to produce genre films (Interscope) and films with a British interest (Working Title), it is clear that Propaganda was carving its own niche within Polygram. Within this context, it is not surprising that once Jonze expressed an interest in Malkovich, Single Cell Pictures approached Propaganda to co-produce the film and take it to Polygram for finance with a view to release it via Gramercy. Polygram, however, was not initially convinced of the project’s commercial potential.46 Nonetheless, once the production companies made concrete efforts to “enhance” the film’s indiewood status, primarily via star power and the casting of John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, and John Malkovich himself in the main roles, the film was greenlit by Polygram on 22 April 1998,47 with Gramercy slated to release the title in the North American market.48 However, in May 1998 and before the film started production on 20 July 1998,49 Propaganda’s parent company Polygram Filmed Entertainment was sold by its own corporate parent to Seagram, a producer and distributor of distilled spirits, and parent company of Hollywood major Universal.

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For critics, this was a fortunate moment for the production of the film. While the details of a $10.6 billion sale announced on 22 May 1998 kept Polygram and Seagram fully occupied,50 the production of Malkovich allegedly progressed with no scrutiny or interference from corporate executives of either company, enabling the filmmakers to work uncompromised on translating Kaufman’s outlandish vision into a similarly unusual film. Furthermore, when principal photography for the film ended and Malkovich was being assembled in editing, the film’s production further eschewed any scrutiny from corporate powers—on 8 April 1999, both Gramercy and Propaganda (together with several other former Polygram subsidiaries that had fallen under Seagram’s corporate umbrella) as well as October Films (another Seagram subsidiary specializing in indie film) were sold by Seagram to Barry Diller’s USA Networks. As a result, the argument goes, Being John Malkovich had a complete home run from greenlight to final cut, making it one of the most “independent” films to be released in theaters at the time. While such arguments may have merit, and Malkovich may have indeed been produced without any corporate interference, such a degree of freedom was not exceptional in a maturing indie film sector where filmmakers often reigned supreme as creative forces behind the films, and as strong marketing figureheads in positioning their films in the marketplace. For instance, many filmmakers had contractually determined “final cut” and were not afraid to use it as a shield to fend off possible interference.51 Others were working in environments protected by powerful executives (such as Scott Rudin, who has developed a reputation as patron saint of independent filmmakers).52 Furthermore, several filmmakers secured finance and distribution from companies with “hands off ” policies (such as Sony Pictures Classics, whose executive team was also known for not interfering in creative decisions).53 The main reason that the corporate-owned specialty film divisions behind most indiewood films in that period were happy to accommodate a select group of filmmakers was that their films were providing these companies with prestige, awards, and often commercial success, yet they did not veer too far away from mainstream values, ideologies, and aesthetics. Even if they utilized elements associated with the indie film sector, these were usually, as King argued, “softened and watered-down,” losing even more of their potential for radical critique once they were combined “with other qualities and industrial practices more characteristic of the output of the major studios.”54 Indeed, as I have discussed elsewhere, key indiewood films such as Fight Club, which engaged with alternative political ideas (anti-corporate capitalism), or Traffic, which conveyed clearly pessimistic messages (the futility of action in the war against drugs) did so with the support of slick production values, star casts, genre expectations, and highquality entertainment that found significant success at the box office.55 Being John Malkovich was no different from the above examples. Despite critics’ views that Jonze’s films, including Malkovich, provide “a critique of

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the expectations that dominate the mainstream” that often derives from the filmmaker’s “pranksterism” and materializes in his effort “to explore metafictional and ontological questions,”56 Annesley suggests that these practices tend to remain “familiar” and “inward looking.”57 He argues that the “disruptive instincts” in Jonze films are contained easily by the Hollywood system that produces them.58 Writing specifically on Malkovich, Annesley highlights that the funding came from corporate Hollywood, that the film featured major stars in key roles, and that its thematic focus was on celebrity. In this respect, despite Jonze’s innovative and playful take on his material, “it is hard to square [his] films with any kind of ideological critique.”59 As a result, Annesley ends, “the gulf that separates Jonze from radicalism will remain.”60 Annesley could very well telegraph here the film’s indiewood status, though his interest lies in the ways Jonze’s work may offer critique through its utilization of a postmodern poetics rather than its indie film credentials. What this section has highlighted, however, is that Malkovich’s production took place within a context that was determined by practices associated with indiewood (or Indiewood) as these were emerging in the late 1990s. With its corporate Hollywood financial backing, its use of well-known stars, its innovative experiments with genre, its use of the aura of a celebrity director (and in this case an equally celebrated screenwriter) and its “familiar” games with celebrity and identity, Malkovich was a perfect indiewood film. As a matter of fact, irrespective of whether it was made with “a brazen disregard for the marketplace,” distribution executives believed that the film had potential to become a crossover hit—with one such executive predicting that it “will either be a big success or big failure,” it “will do $2 million or $20 million.”61 Such optimism became particularly justified once marketers, with Jonze’s help, determined how to sell the film. Following other indiewood films of the time that used mischievous marketing techniques to their advantage, the film’s distributor established a website that advertised a company that could offer “visits” to the minds of other people,62 only later linking it to the film and therefore inviting the blurring between fiction and reality. Jonze (who had rapidly ascended to the status of global celebrity) featured prominently in the film’s poster alongside its star actors, further confirming the film’s status as a key production in indiewood’s banner year, 1999. B E I N G J O H N M A L KOV I C H A S F I L M A N D S P E C I A LT Y C O N T E N T

Although USA Films has been acknowledged as a short-lived but very influential producer-distributor of indiewood films in the late 1990s and early 2000s,63 it was nonetheless conceived more as a company that would serve (cable) television stations belonging to its parent company, USA Networks,

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than as a bona fide theatrical film company. Indeed, while in its four-year history USA Films financed and/or distributed some key titles associated with indiewood, including Being John Malkovich, Nurse Betty (1999), Gosford Park (2001), and Traffic, it was often criticized in the trade press as a company that was full of contradictions. It had the potential to rival similar specialty film companies (but did not) and according to industry analysts, it could have given a firmer “statement of intent.”64 In hindsight, part of the reason the industry had trouble identifying USA Films’ identity at the start of the 2000s was a lack of understanding regarding the evolution of indie film into indiewood, which was in full swing. The binary between “star-driven pictures” and “smaller art or festival films” had given way to the fluidity of indiewood that Miramax in particular had helped spearhead with a series of relatively low-budget but extremely commercially successful films that featured stars and were part of the festival circuit. Although some companies established in the 1990s were not prepared to follow that path just yet, such as Fox Searchlight and Paramount Classics,65 USA Films was ready. Barry Diller was quoted in a Wall Street Journal feature interview in 2001 stating that USA Films was in the market for “cheap and interesting” films that “[were not] dependent on effects or blockbuster casts or on the expenditure of north of $50 million.”66 As the company was also not interested in “teenage films,” Diller acknowledged that “the parameters for [USA Films] were fairly narrow.”67 Once again, it is clear that Diller telegraphs USA Films as a company in the indiewood film business, with the $50 million budget ceiling allowing abundant space for the inclusion of commercial elements such as stars and strong production values that can translate “interesting” film ideas into crossover successes. According to other accounts of the company’s development and presence in the US film market, such a “game plan” did not preclude hunting for properties such as “smart thrillers, franchisable stories and the occasional superstar vehicle,”68 all of which had entered the indiewood filmmaking universe by the late 1990s. Furthermore, they were also helping this iteration of independent film participate more fluidly and fully in an expansive global media and entertainment marketplace that, as Schatz argues, had been experiencing the effects of globalization, digitization, and conglomeration manifesting under the guise of an increasing media convergence.69 However, USA Films’ focus on indiewood films to compete in the theatrical market is only part of its story. To comprehend the full picture—a picture that places USA Films within a broader media landscape—one needs to understand the company’s origins, the components that made it and the reasons why media mogul Barry Diller brought all these constituents together at the time. Such an examination demonstrates that USA Films was established primarily to serve Diller’s cable television network, which in the late 1990s was competing fiercely

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with other conglomerates’ cable divisions. Diller was looking to expand his network while at the same time exploiting synergies with other media businesses under the same conglomerate umbrella. In other words, USA Films was created to take its place in a conglomerate structure that was responding to a converging media world rather than to be one more theatrical film financer, producer, and/ or distributor. Prior to establishing USA Films, Barry Diller had extensive experience running major Hollywood studios such as Paramount and Fox before moving into terrestrial and later cable television. In April 1998, Seagram divested several of its television assets to Diller for $4.2 billion and he consolidated his holdings in order to create USA Networks, Inc.70 The deal included the USA Network (the most watched basic cable channel in primetime, available to over 75 million subscribers)71 as well the Sci-Fi Channel, which was available to 56 million.72 Both channels were very strong performers for Diller’s network at a time when his once flagship cable station, the Home Shopping Network, had remained stagnant.73 However, as both these stations needed programming, including films, Diller found himself in a difficult position as he had no production outfits when broadcast rights for commercially successful films had reached stratospheric levels.74 In order not to be “locked out of the market for theatrical pics” to serve his cable stations, Diller shifted his attention to buying film companies.75 Despite being a major player in the global media market, Diller’s USA Networks did not have the muscle to target Hollywood majors such as Paramount, Universal, and Fox, which had long been cyclically absorbed by increasingly large entertainment conglomerates. In this respect, he focused his attention on the next best thing: companies specializing in independent films which, at that time, were perceived to be a burgeoning market.76 Capitalizing on Seagram’s desire to offload some assets following its $10 billion takeover of Polygram Filmed Entertainment and its minority interest in USA Networks, Diller managed to secure a host of small production and distribution companies at an attractive price, including Gramercy, October, Propaganda, and Interscope, which had clustered under Seagram’s corporate umbrella.77 In the first instance, this gave Diller a library of forty-one film titles made since 1996—including the yet-to-be-released Being John Malkovich78—that he could use as programming fodder for his cable channels. However, both USA Network and Sci-Fi were deemed “low-brow cable” channels that were not appropriate for the indie film fare associated with October and Gramercy.79 Thus, Diller continued to look for new cable stations with a programming tradition that might be more amenable to the types of film associated with these companies. He focused his energies primarily on Cablevision’s Bravo and the IFC. However, despite reports that he was ready to “beg, borrow or steal any cable network” that fit the remit,80 he was unsuccessful.81

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Beyond this effort to use film as product to support (cable) television, Diller envisaged the films provided by his new companies (which as of April 1999 were merged into USA Films) as converging with other business segments within USA Networks. Diller was testing the direction of media convergence that was well underway by the late 1990s. He was in a position to provide enhanced synergy for his company’s products as the conglomerate’s other assets, such as the Home Shopping Network, could provide merchandising opportunities for some of his films, while Ticketmaster-Citysearch could provide internet-based services from business advertising to ticket sales. Indeed, the trade press of the time reported that The Muse (1999), one of USA Films’ key releases in 1999, benefited from cross-promotional activities with Ticketmaster.82 It is as part of this converging media landscape, practiced by USA Networks, that USA Films can find its identity most clearly. This identity is summarized perfectly in Diller’s phrase, “we are an ‘after-user’ of movies.”83 Its core market, theatrical film, was cross-promoted with other business segments; television in the first instance and, increasingly, interactive entertainment. In such a landscape, it is clear that low-budget art films had little chance of moving smoothly among the various segments brought together by Diller. As major studio productions were out of Diller’s reach at the time, indiewood films provided the only viable alternative in American cinema with the potential to perform that function—especially as a substantial number of such films became crossover successes, and therefore had a significant “after use” following the end of their theatrical release. This brings us full circle to Propaganda Films, Spike Jonze, and Being John Malkovich, but with an emphasis on the extent to which the film’s pedigree, Jonze’s background, Propaganda’s focus on creativity, and all the other factors that contributed to the film’s production can be seen as anticipating the increasingly convergent environment that was transforming Hollywood and media industries more generally. Here was a superlatively innovative film, featuring both major Hollywood stars and esteemed indie film actors, directed by a newcomer whose reputation as a creative filmmaker and mediamaker had been growing fast, which had the potential to become both a crossover success and awards recipient from independent and mainstream film associations. By the time Being John Malkovich was ready for release, USA Films had just been established and was ready to enter the film distribution arena. With the industry watching to see what the company would do and expecting from it a “statement of intent,” Malkovich, which was one of USA Films’ first releases in October 1999, delivered exactly this. In the first instance, Malkovich showed continuity with the companies that created USA Films—October, which in the late 1990s had shifted to “star-driven

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and expensive indie films,”84 Gramercy, which had made a name distributing quality films with commercial potential, and of course Propaganda, whose reputation as a company at the cutting edge of creativity and innovation was once again confirmed. More than that, Malkovich gave USA Films a paradigmatic indiewood film that placed the new company in a particular target market, forcing the industry to draw comparisons with other companies— especially Miramax, which was enjoying great popularity as patron saint of a quality indiewood cinema, dominating awards ceremonies as well as proving commercially viable.85 Indiewood cinema (and Being John Malkovich as a key example of it), however, does not end after the theatrical run of the films. It becomes “specialty media content,” as I have called it elsewhere,86 that then serves other divisions of the entertainment conglomerate that controls it, which can exploit the property anew. Serving free to air or cable networks, being released on DVD, becoming available on demand in major streaming platforms, adding to the company’s library of content and of course becoming the basis for new “original” content in the form of sequels, spinoffs, reboots, and even advertisements, the benefits are many and often considerable. Now belonging to Universal, following USA Films’ merger with Universal Focus and Good Machine in 2002, Malkovich is able to circulate and flow across a very wide range of forms and platforms. Whether as a main reference in a 2017 Super Bowl ad about buying domain names,87 or available to watch on YouTube through an agreement with Universal,88 and on Netflix and Amazon Prime (through other deals), it is clear that twenty years after its theatrical release this indiewood title has supported many “after-users of movies.” As for USA Films, despite entering the market with fanfare, it nonetheless did not manage to sustain its presence. With the exception of Nurse Betty, Gosford Park, Traffic, and the non-indiewood Pitch Black (2000), the rest of its titles did not perform well at the theatrical box office. These included films with strong commercial elements such as The Muse, One Night at McCool’s (1999), and The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001). However, once again, developments outside the company’s hands determined its future. Diller’s USA Networks was acquired by Universal’s new parent company, Vivendi, in 2001 in yet another $10 billion takeover.89 This time it was USA Films’ turn to become a component together with Good Machine and Universal Focus in a new specialty film division, Focus Features. With even more resources than USA Films at its disposal, Focus Features became a major force in the specialty film industry, focusing almost exclusively on indiewood films and becoming a significant contributor to its parent company’s diverse media business. The fact that Being John Malkovich is now part of that company’s library of titles is appropriate for the type of production it was.

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NOTES 1. Sharon Waxman, Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System (New York: Harper Entertainment, 2005). 2. Others include James Mottram, The Sundance Kids: How the Mavericks Took Over Hollywood (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), and perhaps the best-known: Peter Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film (London: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2005). 3. Waxman, Rebels on the Backlot, p. 205. 4. Scott Tobias, “Being John Malkovich,” The AV Club, October 22, 1999, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 5. Quoted in Claudia Eller, “Quirky ‘Being John Malkovich’ May Have the Last Laugh, Best Laugh,” Los Angeles Times, November 30, 1999. 6. David Rooney, “Being John Malkovich,” Variety, September 3, 1999, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 7. James Schamus, “A Rant,” in Jon Lewis (ed.), The End of Cinema As We Know It: American Film in the Nineties (London: Pluto Press, 2002), p. 254. 8. See especially James Annesley, “Being Spike Jonze: Intertextuality and Convergence in Film, Music, Video and Advertising,” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 11: 1 (2013), pp. 23–37. 9. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: When Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), p. 18. 10. For more details on the characteristics of indiewood films see Yannis Tzioumakis, Hollywood’s Indies: Classics Divisions, Specialty Labels and the American Film Market (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), pp. 7–12. 11. See for instance Geoff King, Indiewood, USA: Where Hollywood Meets Independent Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009); Geoff King, Indie 2.0: Change and Continuity in Contemporary American Indie Film (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013); and Tzioumakis, Hollywood’s Indies. 12. Some exceptions include Thomas Schatz, “Going Mainstream: The Indie Film Movement in 1999,” in Geoff King (ed.), A Companion to American Indie Film (Oxford: Blackwell, 2017), pp. 257–78; Yannis Tzioumakis, “American Independent Cinema in the Age of Convergence,” Revue française d’études américaines 136: 2 (2014), pp. 52–66; and King, Indiewood, USA, pp. 191–234. 13. King, Indiewood, USA, p. 2. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid. p. 4. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. p. 271. 19. Ibid. 20. See Tzioumakis, Hollywood’s Indies, pp. 7–12. 21. Although Schatz has focused specifically on indiewood only in one piece of work (Schatz, “Going Mainstream,” pp. 257–78), he has also written on earlier independent cinema: Thomas Schatz, “Conglomerate Hollywood and American Independent Film,” in Geoff King, Claire Molloy, and Yannis Tzioumakis (eds.), American Independent Cinema: Indie, Indiewood and Beyond (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. 127–39.

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22. Thomas Schatz, “The Studio System and Conglomerate Hollywood,” in Paul McDonald and Janet Wasko (eds.), The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), pp. 13–42; Thomas Schatz, “New Hollywood, New Millennium,” in Warren Buckland (ed.), Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 19–46; and Thomas Schatz, “Film Industry Studies and Hollywood History,” in Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren (eds.), Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2009), pp. 45–56. 23. Schatz, “New Hollywood, New Millennium,” p. 19. 24. Ibid. p. 20. 25. Schatz, “The Studio System,” p. 20. 26. Schatz, “Film Industry Studies and Hollywood History,” p. 46. 27. Schatz, “The Studio System,” p. 32. 28. Schatz, “New Hollywood, New Millennium,” p. 46. 29. Schatz, “The Studio System,” p. 32. 30. Schatz, “Going Mainstream,” p. 258. 31. Ibid. p. 276. 32. These films were also discussed as Indiewood in King, Indiewood, USA, p. 191. 33. Schatz, “Film Industry Studies and Hollywood History,” p. 49. 34. Schatz, “The Studio System,” p. 30. 35. Jenkins, Convergence Culture, p. 19. 36. Tim Dwyer, Media Convergence (Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill and Open University Press, 2010), p. 2. 37. Eller, “Quirky ‘Being John Malkovich.’” 38. Scott Repass, “Being John Malkovich,” Film Quarterly 56: 1 (Fall 2002), p. 29. 39. Martin A. Groves, “Spike Was Just Right for ‘Being John Malkovich,’” Hollywood Reporter, October 22, 1999. 40. Waxman, Rebels on the Backlot, p. 158. 41. Amy Dawes, “Propaganda Films, Polygram Intl. Ink,” Variety, September 28, 1988, p. 34. 42. Ibid. 43. Richard Linnett, “Propaganda Proposition: Sale of Stake for Partner,” Advertising Age, October 30, 2000, p. 69. 44. Annesley, “Being Spike Jonze,” p. 28. 45. Kathy DeSalvo, “Founding Fathers,” Shoot, April 21, 2000. 46. Eller, “Quirky ‘Being John Malkovich’”; Waxman, Rebels on the Backlot, p. 163. 47. Eller, “Quirky ‘Being John Malkovich.’” 48. Martin A. Groves, “USA’s Malkovich Finds a Secret Door to Success,” Hollywood Reporter, October 20, 1999. 49. Eller, “Quirky ‘Being John Malkovich.’” 50. “Seagram Buys PolyGram from Philips for $10.6bn,” The Independent, May 22, 1998, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 51. Waxman, Rebels on the Backlot, p. 285. 52. Mike Fleming, “OSCARS Q&A: ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’ and ‘Captain Phillips’ Producer Scott Rudin on Making Prestige Pics Inside and Outside the Studio Fold,” Deadline Hollywood, January 7, 2014, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 53. Yannis Tzioumakis, The Spanish Prisoner (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 62. 54. King, Indiewood, USA, p. 3.

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64 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

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Tzioumakis, Hollywood’s Indies, p. 12. Harner quoted in Annesley, “Being Spike Jonze,” p. 26. Ibid. p. 27. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Schwarz, quoted in Eller, “Quirky ‘Being John Malkovich.’” Ibid. Tzioumakis, Hollywood’s Indies, p. 11. Charles Lyons and Dan Cox, “United Slates of USA: Diller’s Mega-Indie Fine Tunes Game Plan,” Weekly Variety, February 14, 2000, p. 71. Tzioumakis, Hollywood’s Indies, pp. 134, 158. Tom King, “How Barry Diller Sees the Movies,” The Wall Street Journal, February 16, 2001, p. 4. Ibid. Lyons and Cox, “United Slates of USA,” p. 1. Schatz, “New Hollywood, New Millennium,” p. 19. Martin Peers and Benedict Carver, “Barry Bags a Bundle: Diller’s Deal Launches USA Films; Greenstein Chairman,” Daily Variety, April 8, 1999, p. 14. Richard Katz, “Diller Redoubles Bravo/IFC Effort,” Daily Variety, April 16, 1999, p. 37. Jill Goldsmith, “USA Kicks Assets: Diller Seeks Cable Nets as Realm Boosts Rev,” Weekly Variety, August 2, 1999, p. 25. Martin Peers and Benedict Carver, “Swap Meet Feels the Heat: After Myriad Trades, Duo Must Turn Deals into $,” Weekly Variety, April 12, 1999, p. 1. Alex Ben Block, “Barry’s Big Movie,” Hollywood Reporter, August 8, 1999, p. 14. Peers and Carver, “Barry Bags a Bundle,” p. 14. Thom Geier, “Diller Is Mr. October after Rounding Seagram Bases,” Hollywood Reporter, April 8, 1999. Ibid. Peers and Carver, “Barry Bags a Bundle,” p. 14. Colin Brown, “Diller Hunts Down Foreign Sales Pipeline for Start-Up USA Films,” Screen International, April 16, 1992, p. 2. Goldsmith, “USA Kicks Assets,” p. 25. Katz, “Diller Redoubles Bravo/IFC Effort,” p. 1. Block, “Barry’s Big Movie,” p. 14. Diller, quoted in King, “How Barry Diller Sees the Movies,” p. 14. Brown, “Diller Hunts Down Foreign Sales Pipeline,” p. 2. Lyons and Cox, “United Slates of USA,” p. 71. Yannis Tzioumakis, American Independent Cinema: An Introduction, 2nd edn. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017), p. 295. See “Super Bowl Ad: John Malkovich for Squarespace,” YouTube, (last accessed March 10, 2019). See “Being John Malkovich,” YouTube, (last accessed March 10, 2019). Claire Billings, “Vivendi Stakes Its Claim to the US,” Campaign, December 18, 2001, (last accessed March 10, 2019).

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CHAPTER

4

“You can be John Malkovich”: Celebrity, Absurdity, and Convention in Being John Malkovich Kim Wilkins

A

few years ago, I conducted a series of lectures on Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich (1999) in a first-year course at the University of Sydney, Australia. I wondered what these students made of a film in which the most significant plot point is the discovery of a portal behind a filing cabinet leading into the mind of a man called “John Malkovich”? Would the humorous interplay of Malkovich’s relative obscurity and celebrity status resonate with a young audience, decades removed from his award-winning performances in dramas Places in the Heart (1984) and In the Line of Fire (1994), or his curiously manic role as Cyrus the Virus in the action-thriller Con Air (1997)? The film was received with enthusiasm; however, several students informed me that “it was the weirdest film” in their viewing histories: they “didn’t expect anything that happened” because “it was not like anything [they] had seen before.” The common thread among the responses was that Being John Malkovich did not conform to the expectations students held about “normal” films—the term “normal” employed as shorthand for the narrative style synonymous with the dominant output of the major Hollywood studios.1 These responses echo much of the critical commentary around Jonze’s debut feature, where the terms “inventive,” “illogical,” “weird,” and “strange” recur as descriptors, signaling that Being John Malkovich is a film that deviates from the mainstream.2 Indeed, from its opening sequence Being John Malkovich positions itself as a film that toys with the expectations associated with the classical Hollywood style. The scene opens on a theater setting, the drapes still drawn. Unsettled

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murmurs are heard beneath a preparatory tuning-up of string instruments. The sound of applause signals the commencement of a performance. Béla Bartók’s dramatic Allegro, from Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta erupts over the soundtrack as the curtain opens on a naked male figure hunched over a table. As the camera traces the figure’s torso in a close-up, the first of many subversions of expectation that will occur throughout the film takes place. The lingering movement across the body does not emphasize the potential vulnerability of human nakedness or the tactility of skin but rather the grain of carved wood, balls and sockets, hinges, and strings. The figure is not human; instead it is a marionette. Its face, carved and painted in a permanent furrow, is framed by long hair tied at the nape and a neat beard. Where human faces are typically sites of expressivity, the marionette’s fixed facial expression divulges the illusory nature of its performance. Despite its forlorn appearance, the marionette’s outward display of emotion is not attached to any internal state. Therefore, the subsequent shot, in which the marionette faces a mirror and seemingly recognizes its reflection, can be read as an ironic wink toward Jacques Lacan’s mirror stage.3 Within three minutes of the film’s commencement, the second—more telling—subversion of expectation occurs. The marionette’s recognition of its reflection is not presented as the jubilance of an infans figure at the wholeness of its specular image.4 Instead, the marionette begins a destructive rampage.5 He shatters the mirror, hurls a glass, and overturns the table on which he previously leant. Suddenly, as though taken by surprise at his actions, the figure inspects his wrist and seemingly sees the strings that guide its movement. In a performance of self-consciousness, the camera traces the marionette’s eyeline to reveal the mechanics of his animation; the puppeteer. At this point the perspiring, bedraggled human on whom this marionette is modelled—the film’s protagonist, Craig (John Cusack)—is introduced as he manipulates his miniaturized proxy into an explosive dance. At the performance’s conclusion there is an eruption of fervent applause. Craig returns the marionette to an inanimate state. The figure so recently imbued with physicality and psychological torment now hangs lifelessly as a low hissing noise persists on the audio track, until a “click” brings about silence. This click ruptures the stability of the film’s spatio-temporal reality: what had been presented as a live theater production was, in fact, a simulation. The enthusiastic applause and attentive silences perceived throughout Craig’s puppetry performance were not the responses of an engaged audience, but rather the predetermined and replicable sound of a cassette recording. The prologue suggests a live theater performance only to undermine that reality. Throughout Being John Malkovich, reflexive narrational strategies, diegetic absurdities, and fantastical plot points seek to disrupt the expectations and viewing practices associated with the conventions of mainstream narrative

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cinema—yet Jonze and Kaufman’s film does not abandon these conventions. Being John Malkovich (like all of Jonze’s films to date) is not comfortably categorized as “arthouse” or “experimental.” Rather they fit nebulous descriptors, such as James MacDowell’s “quirky” or my own “eccentric” formulation.6 Jonze’s work employs the conventions of the dominant Hollywood norm in concert with eccentric plot devices and irony at various moments in order to subvert audience expectation, which results in an “offbeat” tone or aesthetic. I argue that the most absurd, or eccentric, narrative elements of Being John Malkovich—its ironic focus on celebrity and the ludicrous Malkovich portal— are precisely the mechanisms that enable an essentially unresolvable existential conundrum to be shaped into the conventionally linear narrative structure. Yet these utterly bizarre narrative inclusions also function as diversions; they aim to distract from or make humorous the very existential concerns they narrativize. B E I N G J O H N M A L K O V I C H A N D N A R R AT I V E CONVENTIONS

The conventions of mainstream narrative cinema have been most comprehensively theorized by David Bordwell in his work on Hollywood storytelling. Mainstream narrative conventions include: goal-oriented, psychologically motivated characters who act as causal agents that propel the film’s action; logical patterns of cause and effect that adhere to narrative cohesion; an equilibrium-disequilibrium-new equilibrium structure; a strong focus on narrative closure; and an aesthetic that adheres to the “invisible style”—an editing and cinematographic strategy that serves to further audience engagement with the narrative by effacing its own formal presence. While Bordwell’s initial formulation referred to the construction of film in the classical era (pre-1960), the principles of a three-act structure remain dominant. The first act—the set-up—introduces the story world and protagonist. It contains an “inciting event” that requires the protagonist to act in some way. The second act comprises a sequence of complications and struggles along a rising line of action that results from the act committed by the protagonist. This sequence of causeand-effect culminates in the most severe point of crisis for the protagonist. The third act maintains a “continuous climax . . . capped by a resolution signaling harmony and balance.”7 Across the three acts action follows logical patterns of cause and effect that observe narrative cohesion.8 This structural template is evident in Being John Malkovich. Act One establishes a state of equilibrium in which Craig, an unemployed puppeteer, is in a stagnant but not unloving marriage with Lotte (Cameron Diaz). Following (another) physical attack from a passer-by in response to a highly erotic puppet-theater street performance of Héloïse and Abelard, Craig responds to an advertisement for

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a “short statured file clerk with unusually nimble and dexterous fingers required for speed filing.” Craig is subsequently employed at LesterCorp on the 7½ floor of the peculiar Mertin-Flemmer building. His new employment arrangement initiates a narrative stage of disequilibrium. During his orientation at the strange company he meets his new boss, the company’s eccentric 105-year-old CEO Dr. Lester (Orson Bean), a libidinous centenarian (later revealed to be Captain Mertin, the company’s original founder) convinced he is hampered by a severe speech impediment despite his clear enunciation, and Lester’s “executive liaison” Floris (Mary Kay Place), a lascivious woman who hears clearly articulated phrases as mondegreens. Most importantly, he encounters Maxine (Catherine Keener), a mysterious and prickly femme fatale whose seductive nature is irresistible to men and women—including Craig, who is instantly infatuated with her. At the first act’s conclusion, Craig stumbles upon a portal into the mind of John Malkovich behind a filing cabinet. Those who crawl into the cavern experience a fifteenminute ride inside the actor’s mind before they are spat out at a ditch beside the New Jersey Turnpike. In a bid to impress Maxine, Craig explains the existential importance of the portal. Maxine’s interest is purely mercenary, and so a business is established selling tickets for “the Malkovich ride.” The second act presents Craig with a series of obstacles that he must overcome to achieve his immediate and long-term goals: to enamor Maxine and alleviate existential malaise, respectively. Rather than reciprocating Craig’s affections, Maxine forms a romantic union with Lotte, facilitated by her frequent use of the Malkovich vessel. Craig reacts with violent deceit, forcing Lotte to initiate rendezvous with Maxine at gunpoint, which he then attends while she is held hostage in a cage. During these rendezvous, Craig learns how to manipulate the body through his puppeteering skills. Lotte is eventually freed by her pet chimpanzee, Elijah. She attempts to alert Maxine to Craig’s villainy; however, Maxine expresses excitement at the potential power that Craig’s ability to manipulate the Malkovich body affords her, as his object of desire. At Maxine’s request, Craig agrees to remain inside Malkovich indefinitely and uses Malkovich’s celebrity to finally become a celebrated puppeteer. Dismayed, Lotte seeks solace in Dr. Lester. The third act’s continuous climax is established when Dr. Lester reveals that Malkovich is the next host vessel in a string of receptive bodies that, if colonized at the correct moment, may be used to prolong life indefinitely. Dr. Lester explains that Malkovich must not be entered any earlier or later than the eve of his 44th birthday to ensure the vessel is ripe for inhabitation. If this window is missed and an individual enters the body thereafter, they will be transferred to the subsequent vessel body: an unborn child. The portal’s expiry provides the third-act “deadline” or “race against time,” as Lotte and Dr. Lester kidnap and threaten to murder Maxine if Craig does not vacate the vessel in time.9 After much deliberation, Craig opts to leave Malkovich,

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only to discover that Maxine and Lotte have romantically reunited. Faced with an ordinary, companionless existence, Craig decides to reoccupy Malkovich, unaware that the portal now leads to the larval vessel of the next host body—Lotte/Malkovich and Maxine’s child. In the final scene, Craig is “absorbed” into the child’s subconscious. The conclusion thus offers a resolution and a new state of equilibrium. Thus, despite the eccentricity of the plot, Being John Malkovich’s narrative adheres to a conventional structure of cause and effect geared toward resolution. However, like all Jonze’s feature films to date, Being John Malkovich uses these conventions knowingly as devices to neatly resolve narrative and thematic conundrums that are in fact insurmountable. Jonze and Kaufman’s subsequent film, Adaptation, offers the most obvious evocation of Hollywood generic conventions as a reflexive narrative mechanism in the filmmaker’s oeuvre. As Julie Levinson’s and Wyatt MossWellington’s chapters in this volume detail, that film sees a fictional Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) attend a Robert McKee (Brian Cox) seminar on the principles of storytelling in a desperate attempt to complete the task of adapting Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief for the screen. Although the fictionalized McKee warns Charlie against “bringing in a deus ex machina” to resolve narrative problems, Kaufman and Jonze introduce McKee in precisely that role. McKee’s function brings about a definite resolution in line with the conventions of Hollywood cinema for a character whose initial motivation—to write a truly original screenplay that thwarts convention in favor of reflecting “real life” within the Hollywood system—appeared incongruous with the neatness of a linear narrative trajectory. Of course, the overtly ironic employment of McKee draws attention to the artificiality of the very conventions employed to facilitate resolution. In doing so, the human dysfunction of the initial state of narrative “equilibrium” is heightened. Charlie’s competing desires for authorial originality and fidelity to source material (while operating within the commercial imperatives of Hollywood’s film industry) are irreconcilable. The adherence to convention, then, enables a narrative resolution to be reached; yet by reflexively imposing these codes and traditions, the irresolvable nature of Charlie’s initial conundrum is recognized and opened out as a thematic, rather than narrative, concern. While in Adaptation the reflexive employment of the classical Hollywood structure is overt, the same tactic is at play in Being John Malkovich as a film that narrativizes Craig’s desire—and failure—to intellectually transcend existential malaise. In addition to opening out Craig’s existential crisis as a thematic rather than narrative concern, the comic absurdity of a portal into the mind of the celebrity John Malkovich serves two further functions: it establishes a humorous tone and eccentric aesthetic, while covertly enabling the film to adhere to the narrative conventions of mainstream cinema.

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C E L E B R I T Y A S I RO N I C D I V E R S I O N

I stated at the outset of this chapter that Being John Malkovich’s prologue establishes its thematic and narrational project. Craig’s existential concerns are introduced via a marionette performing what we later learn is “Craig’s Dance of Despair and Disillusionment.” The narrational strategy is also introduced as the sequence’s reframing gradually releases information, requiring the reassessment of presumed knowledge. This destabilization continues through the introduction of eccentric characters, absurd situations, and bizarre settings. Craig and Lotte inhabit a small New York apartment that has been transformed into a private menagerie housing an iguana, exotic birds, a ferret, dogs, and a chimpanzee. Craig’s workplace on the 7½ floor is only accessible by jimmying open the elevator doors with a crowbar as it passes between the 7th and 8th. The low ceilings restrict employees’ movement; they appear comically oversized, as though they’ve outgrown their environment and as a result must hunch over to fit into the space (see Figure 4.1). The visual comedy created by this setting renders all dialogue uttered within it somewhat humorous, irrespective of situational or verbal gravitas. This comic location also hosts the film’s most absurd narrative inclusion, the Malkovich portal. As Geoff King writes, the comedic nature of the portal is “not just the fact of such a bizarre thing, but its realization as a dark, wet passageway inside an office building and particularly the manner in which the 15-minute Malkovich experience ends, the occupant falling from nowhere in a heap in an incongruously prosaic location of a grassy bank at the edge of the New Jersey turnpike.”10 While some of the humor derived from

Figure 4.1 Craig and Maxine on the 7½ floor.

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the Malkovich portal is physical—arising from the rider’s interaction with its texture, size and the slapstick of the rider’s expulsion—most results from the ironic invocation of John Malkovich’s celebrity status. The ironic employment of celebrity discourse in popular culture is established in Craig’s maiden voyage. Having discovered the portal behind a filing cabinet in his office, Craig crawls into it and is propelled forward at speed until his view of the world is replaced by one framed by Malkovich, presented formally through an iris shot and a slight distortion of the audio track. In contrast to the exhilaration of the portal’s initial high-speed propulsion, Malkovich’s life is presented as mundane. Rather than entering an environment associated with Malkovich’s celebrity status—such as a film or theater set, press conference, or red carpet event—Craig experiences Malkovich reading the newspaper while eating a modest breakfast, alone. Later, a taxi driver acknowledges Malkovich’s celebrity, but only with faint interest. Far from star-struck, the driver is, at most, intrigued by the celebrity of his passenger. Driver: Hey, say, uh, ain’t you that actor guy? Malkovich: Yes. Driver: Yeah, John . . . uh . . . what is it, uh . . . John uh . . . um um . . . don’t tell me, Mapplethorpe? Malkovich: Malkovich. Driver: Malkovich! Right, right! Okay, okay, yeah. I thought you were alright in that one movie. Malkovich: Thank you. Driver: The one where you play the jewel thief. Malkovich: I . . . never played a jewel thief. Driver: No? Who am I thinking of ? Malkovich: I don’t know. Driver: It’s just, ah . . . No. No, I’m pretty sure it was you. The comedy of this exchange is predicated on reading Being John Malkovich’s interplay between casting and characterization as an ironic inversion of celebrity culture. Throughout the film, Malkovich’s credibility as a respected actor is not disputed. However, as a celebrity, he is a figure about whom the public knows, and desires to know, very little. The disjunct between Malkovich’s talent and public recognition is utilized as an ironic comment on the role and function of celebrity in contemporary popular culture. Indeed, the interest in Malkovich’s celebrity status above his artistic achievements speaks to the rise of “attributed” celebrity that is not “exclusively a matter of special talent or skill . . . [but rather] the result of the concentrated representation of an individual as noteworthy or exceptional by cultural intermediaries”11 in contrast to “achieved” celebrity, whereby fame is gained through exceptional personal accomplishment.

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The disconnection between perceived talent and celebrity appeal is directly stated on several occasions. Upon first learning of the portal, Maxine asks, “who the fuck is John Malkovich?” and, despite Craig’s claim that he is “one of the great American actors of the twentieth century,” no one is able to recall any of his work. Thus, it is not access to John Malkovich as a desired body in and of itself that Maxine identifies as a potentially lucrative product. Rather, as her initial phone call to Craig makes clear, Maxine exploits a cultural desire for non-famous people to associate with celebrity: that is, she sees his value as a commodity.12 Maxine: So, I’ve been thinking, is this Malkovich fellow appealing? Craig: Maxine! Yes, of course, Maxine. He’s a celebrity. Maxine: Good. We’ll sell tickets. Craig: Tickets to Malkovich? Maxine: Exactly! Two hundred dollars a pop. In this exchange a double-sell takes place. Craig must sell Malkovich as an appealing celebrity to Maxine, not to validate his position that the portal is “profound” or that it “opens up all sorts of philosophical-type questions about the nature of self,” but to encourage her to establish a relationship (albeit as business partners) with him. Maxine, however, is aware of her position within the sexual economy. She sells Craig the illusion of intimacy or sexual interest— coyly claiming to “need him” as “her man on the inside” and flirtatiously calling him “doll face”—purely to gain access to the portal. Yet, by the conclusion of the exchange only one transaction is realized: they will sell the promise of “being John Malkovich.” Malkovich’s celebrity status has literally transformed his body into a commercial product accessible to the public, for a price. The certainty and excitement with which Craig states that Malkovich is appealing because he is a celebrity—in contrast to a uniform lack of biographic knowledge—indicates that this utterance is intended to be received ironically. The comedic irony of this play with celebrity status is amplified by the use and casting of the real John Malkovich as the fictionalized celebrity character. As Scott Repass notes, “that this Malkovich is fictional is stressed by the fact that he is, in the movie, John Horatio Malkovich, whereas in real life his middle name is Gavin. John G. Malkovich is not . . . playing himself—he’s playing John H. Malkovich.”13 Jonze and Kaufman blur the distinction between the image of the “real” John Malkovich and a fictionalization of that image to comic effect. As Repass writes: Malkovich fits the film so well because, in part, of the image the public seems to have of him. He is described regularly in reviews with phrases like “quasi-reprehensibleness and enigmatic sexual attraction,” “does not

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seem quite normal or wholesome,” and “ambiguity of both intent and sexuality.” Malkovich himself stays out of the limelight—as much as possible for an actor—by avoiding dealings with tabloids and entertainment magazines and by not having a press agent. “I don’t really have a relation to this person called ‘John Malkovich’ who’s supposedly in the public domain,” Malkovich says. “So I’m already quite removed from ‘John Malkovich.’ He’s not even a cousin once removed.” The character was not intended to be a reflection of the real John Malkovich, but rather of the “idea of Malkovich,” the way the public perceives him. . . . Malkovich plays with the differences between who he is and who people think he is.14 In casting John Malkovich as a character named John Malkovich, it would initially appear that Jonze and Kaufman have knowingly condensed, if not erased, the incongruities between actor and character associated with Jean-Louis Comolli’s “body-too-much” problematic.15 Comolli writes that within any fiction film two bodies simultaneously coexist; the body-acted (the character) and the body-acting (the performer). Comolli claims that unlike fictive characters (for whom there are no real-life referents), the presence of real-life referents in historical fiction ruptures the actor-character relationship. While Being John Malkovich is not a historical fiction film, the decision to cast John Malkovich as a character who shares not only his name but other superficial biographical details—both are viewed as “serious” actors and enigmatic stars—places the film in playful dialogue with Comolli’s formulation. In Being John Malkovich, the slippage between recognizing the real John Malkovich in his portrayal of the fictional character is not only inevitable due to his character’s name and role but encouraged by the interactions between characters onscreen who consistently reaffirm his celebrity status. Yet, as the character John Malkovich is fictional, what this slippage ultimately facilitates is not the unique binding of a character to a real-life referent, but the inverse. The distinctive pairing of the character’s name with the particularity of John Malkovich as a performer (including the intertexts brought to bear on this performance through his previous roles and critical positioning within popular cultural discourse) is deployed ironically as “John Malkovich” proves to be ultimately interchangeable with any other celebrity. The Malkovich ride promises an intimate and specific experience of his existence and yet, for Maxine—and indeed for most of the Malkovich ride customers—the actual identity of the body they enter is irrelevant. Customers are enticed simply by the knowledge that Malkovich is indeed famous and are thrilled to experience mundane events, such as ordering bath towels or reading the paper, through his eyes (see Figure 4.2). Intriguingly, although Malkovich’s fame is positioned as a key motivation for customers’ interest in the ride, and despite the fifteen-minute time allocation for “being John Malkovich” undoubtedly referencing Andy Warhol’s

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Figure 4.2 “Being” John Malkovich as he orders bathmats.

phenomenon of fame in a postmodern, pop-cultural context, the individuals who experience the ride are aware that they will not become famous themselves. In fact, the irony that results from the incongruity of routine events and the elation these banal activities evoke in the passengers demonstrates that the profundity of the ride is less contingent on the distinctiveness of the body they enter than the promise of temporarily being able to exit their own. This is most painfully elucidated by a customer who asks: “now, when you say I can be somebody else, what do you mean exactly? . . . Can I be anyone I wanna be?” When informed that the choice is limited to John Malkovich the customer humorously exclaims, “Perfect! I mean, it’s my second choice, but it’s wonderful!” The humor of this exclamation is suddenly made tragic as he continues: “I’m a fat man. I am sad, and I am fat . . .” This confession (abruptly cut short by Maxine demanding payment) peels back the comedic nature of the portal as it reveals its true fascination for customers: the possibility to escape their own bodies and identities. Yet ironically, those who ride in Malkovich do not actually cease to “be” themselves in anything other than a physical sense. They do not “become” Malkovich—instead they peer out at the world from a spectatorial position within Malkovich’s mind. They are privy to his sensorial experiences—his aural, visual, and haptic perceptions—but the intellectual faculties (often heard through voiceover) remain their own. The biggest irony of Being John Malkovich is that within this context nobody is able to be John Malkovich at all—not even Malkovich himself. Once Malkovich takes the “Malkovich ride,” his entire ontological foundation becomes unhinged. In a sequence that references Buster Keaton’s identity-bending

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dream in Playhouse (1921), in which a cast of Keatons in various costumes make up an entire minstrel show and its audience,16 Malkovich enters his own portal to find his identity unnervingly and unrelentingly reflected back at him at every turn. Where both films play the simultaneous appearance of multiple versions of a single character within frame for comic effect, in Being John Malkovich the joke belies the film’s dark statement on identity. In this sequence, the term “Malkovich” replaces all other signifiers. There is no distinction between the Malkovich dinner date, the Malkovich on the menu, the Malkovich as song, or the Malkovich occupant of the Malkovich body: “being John Malkovich” is devoid of meaning.17 Like Malkovich’s celebrity status, the portal is framed as one of the film’s quirky, comedic elements. As King notes, these devices can be seen as “leavening” the film’s darker qualities.18 In subverting audience expectations of the mainstream Hollywood cinema and initiating much of the film’s comedy, the portal provides a distraction from Craig’s ultimately doomed fate. However, more than that, the portal—and its attractiveness as driven by Malkovich’s celebrity—are the very plot devices that facilitate the realization of a linear narrative trajectory toward resolution for a psychologically troubled— rather than motivated—protagonist. T H E M A L K O V I C H P O RTA L A S P L O T D E V I C E

As Bordwell has argued, the conventions of Hollywood storytelling rely on goal-oriented, psychologically motivated characters who act as causal agents that propel the film’s action across logical patterns of cause and effect, with a strong focus on narrative closure enacted through a definite resolution to conflicts presented throughout the film.19 Protagonists must “struggle to solve a clear-cut problem or attain specific goals . . . the story [thus] ends with a decisive victory or defeat, a resolution of the problem and a clear achievement or nonachievement of the goals.”20 Craig’s ultimate desire is vocalized in the film’s second scene, in which he reacts to a news feature on the popular puppeteer Derek Mantini. While jealously dismissing Mantini’s performance of William Luce’s The Belle of Amherst with a 60ft Emily Dickinson marionette as a gimmick, Craig is affected by his success and subsequently confides in his wife’s pet chimpanzee, Elijah.21 Echoing the existential dread experienced by Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s narrator in Notes from the Underground (“To be acutely conscious is a disease, a real, honest-to-goodness disease”),22 Craig explains to Elijah that he is lucky not to be human, “because consciousness is a terrible curse. I think. I feel. I suffer.” This line of dialogue cements the existential malaise first introduced in the film’s prologue as a thematic concern. The fact that it is delivered to a chimpanzee who is in therapy due to repressed childhood trauma—and therefore does possess the cognitive faculties necessary to

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“suffer”—also performs aesthetic and narrative functions. The absurdity of the situation in concert with its use of echoic allusion speaks to the film’s tone, where humor is strategically deployed to divert attention away from the film’s existential concerns. This utterance also reveals Craig’s ultimate narrative motivation—to come to terms with his existential crisis—while establishing his hubris as the trait that will ultimately thwart this goal, as he is unwilling to acknowledge Mantini’s artistry or Elijah as an intellectual being. Craig is unable to acknowledge that those around him possess internal realities. His wife, co-workers, and friends are viewed as auxiliaries, as evident in his treatment of Lotte and Maxine. For instance, Craig is oblivious to the fact that for Lotte, Elijah performs the surrogate role of the human child he denies her on the basis of absurd economic rationality. He places his creative pursuits above her maternal needs by claiming their income is insufficient to support a child as “nobody is looking for a puppeteer in today’s wintery economic climate,” when, in fact, the compromises and commitments that childrearing necessitates are simply incongruous with Craig’s own desire for existential enlightenment. Where Lotte represents stable tedium to Craig, Maxine is purely an object of sexual excitement. Craig pursues Maxine under the guise of “love” despite her explicit rejections (“I just don’t find you attractive”) and knowing little about her. Maxine’s character is attributed no backstory and few persistent character traits beyond seduction and manipulation through deceitful means; which, of course further questions the legitimacy of his claims to “love.” To Craig, Maxine is simply a tangible object of sexual desire to be pursued as a distraction from his incurable existential malaise. Craig is acutely aware of his desire to “be” someone else, citing it as the basis of his passion for puppetry. Indeed, in his practiced speech to Maxine, he states that for him, puppeteering is “the idea of becoming someone else for a little while. Being inside another’s skin. Thinking differently. Moving differently. Feeling differently.” The notion of “becoming someone else” as a temporary state of being evokes the body-swap film tradition; films like Freaky Friday (1976, 1998), Like Father Like Son (1987), and The Change-Up (2011) operate on the basis that characters must temporarily “become” someone else. Like Being John Malkovich, these films rely on Cartesian dualism for their narrative premise.23 They understand human beings as comprised of two separate but associated substances: the mind and the body, with the mind being essential to individual identity. Body-swap films exploit the dualist notion that the mind is “associated with a particular body, and yet not necessarily tied to it”24 by allowing the mind of one character to inhabit another’s body while retaining their original identity. Mind-body dualism, in these films, serves as a means of narrativizing the empathetic experience. In body-swap films, however, the desire to “be” someone else is not generally the result of existential crises, but rather driven by a fundamental lack of understanding between characters (often the perception that another’s life is easier or preferable to one’s own). As such,

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body-swap films literalize Atticus Finch’s famous guiding moral principle: “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view . . . until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.”25 Thus, the body-swap is a pedagogical exercise in empathy. For instance, in Freaky Friday the body-swap facilitates increased acceptance of differing notions of femininity across a generational divide between mother and daughter. Returned to their original bodies having experienced another’s reality first-hand, one’s perspective on human existence (and human difference) is fundamentally altered for the better. Thus, entering another body is about extending the self by understanding and connecting intimately with others.26 The Malkovich portal does provide revelatory experiences for those who inhabit it. For instance, Lotte has a sexual awakening while in Malkovich (“I’m a transsexual!” she declares) and later enters a lesbian relationship with Maxine.27 Yet, while others return to their own bodies with a renewed sense of self, Craig’s experience is, at least initially, purely intellectual.28 Craig’s response to the portal elucidates his position, where in a bid to impress Maxine, he describes the experience as “supernatural, for lack of a better word,” going on to explain that the portal is a “metaphysical can of worms” in that “it raises all sorts of philosophical-type questions, you know, about the nature of self, about the existence of a soul. Am I me? Is Malkovich Malkovich?” As these questions reveal, Craig’s claim that he wishes to “be inside another skin” is not bound to any interest in changed perspectives or personal growth—in fact, Craig is unable to recognize others as anything but auxiliaries to himself. Ironically, it is Craig’s passion for puppetry—the very passion he promotes as an intellectual capacity for empathy—that reveals his self-centeredness. Puppets, after all, are inanimate unless manipulated by the puppeteer, and once animated their actions are determined by their manipulator. Craig’s puppets are, and can only be, “alive” at his will. Craig’s proclamations about “being inside another’s skin,” combined with his talent for puppeteering, alludes to Heinrich von Kleist’s notion of transcendence in On the Puppet Theater. For von Kleist, the puppet is liberated from the “disturbing effect consciousness [has] upon the natural grace of human beings.”29 Indeed, despite being a literal performance of the “disturbing effect of consciousness,”30 Craig’s “Dance of Despair and Disillusionment” is graceful both when performed by his wooden marionette and by the Malkovich body. As a marionette, Craig is unhampered by the full force of gravity: he moves with a fluidity and lightness unavailable to the fleshy human body. Malkovich, once inhabited by Craig, similarly “manages to unhinge the laws of gravity, as Mr. C. in Kleist’s essay had wished.”31 Freed from his own consciousness, “Malkovich’s slightly overweight body [is] turned into a ballerina.”32 However, these moments of transcendence are illusory. As David L. Smith notes, puppets in Being John Malkovich are used “to call attention to the human trick of projecting desire into a representation—building little worlds ‘elsewhere’—the result of which is only to deepen our sense of

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alienation.”33 Within the confines of his private studio, Craig creates miniaturized versions of himself, Lotte, and Maxine. He uses his marionettes to enact the fantasies and desires he feels denied in the real world. In doing so, Craig creates a miniaturized world that operates under his control: a world in which he is lauded as a genius, loved and desired by Maxine, and puppetry is valued as true art. Craig’s puppetry is not an exercise in empathy but a projection of control and self-interest. Similarly, Craig is unable to “be” John Malkovich. To him Malkovich is another puppet who, under his control, becomes a costume; just “a really expensive suit that [he enjoys] wearing.” Once Craig is inside the Malkovich ride, the Malkovich body begins to behave like Craig. Like all his puppets, Craig uses Malkovich to act out his desires—only as a human body with celebrity status, his Malkovich costume is able to temporarily effect realworld situational changes in line with his short-term goals. Malkovich’s fame facilitates Craig’s marriage to Maxine and allows him to pursue a puppeteering career. However, this is an unsustainable reality—Maxine does not love Craig, and it is not Craig but Malkovich who is celebrated as a puppeteer.34 Craig’s inability, or unwillingness, to acknowledge the reality of his situation inside Malkovich aligns with his misunderstanding of puppetry. As such, where the Malkovich portal is a revelatory inter-body-outer-self experience, for Craig it is a vehicle for temporary liberation from the malaise and stifling isolation he experiences in everyday life as a result of his selfishness.35 His inability to recognize this reality subverts the imperatives of the body-swap film, as in lieu of a changed perspective or increased empathy Craig’s desires become increasingly focused on his own happiness and fulfillment at the expense of others. Thus, Craig’s stated goal, as a psychologically motivated protagonist, to “feel what another feels” is not a longing for human connection through meaningful relationships but of a selfish existential nature that in fact inhibits connections. The inherent misalignment between Craig’s intents and desires renders his motivations narratively unachievable in a linear cause-and-effect formation. However, as a protagonist in the narrative cinema tradition he must nevertheless be motivated to pursue his goals. Craig’s discovery of the Malkovich portal performs this function; it facilitates the narrativization of his existential crisis. The possibility of inhabiting another body enables an existential crisis to form a linear chain of cause and effect toward a resolution that would, without this fantastical intrusion, remain impossible. Thus, the Malkovich portal is a plot device, much like the DeLorean time machine in the Back to the Future films or the identicality of the twins in The Parent Trap (1961 and 1998). It propels action and generates conflict between characters who vie for its possession. The Malkovich body becomes a site of extreme desire and contestation as it presents different characters with a means of achieving their multifarious and competing objectives. With multiple characters vying for the possibilities it affords, the Malkovich body becomes an object of extreme desire. In this sense,

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Being John Malkovich may be read in dialogue with the objectives (rather than the formal generic, or structural narrative properties) of the heist or caper film. Only, unlike classic caper films such as Topkapi (1964) or The Sting (1973), where the aim is to swindle an object of financial value, here the aim is to abscond with Malkovich’s life for the improvement of one’s own. Thus, the acquiring of (and absconding with) the stolen Malkovich body becomes a site of contention for the characters and locus of narrative conflict. The inhabitation of a masculine body is a means of facilitating Lotte and Maxine’s romantic union, and for Lester and his companions Malkovich offers the possibility of delaying, or cheating, death. To Craig, the portal is a fantastical mechanism that promises the achievement of his existential ambitions. Indeed, despite Craig’s claims that he wants to “be” someone else—and his proclamations that the portal promotes profound questions about the nature of existence—he uses the Malkovich body purely to pursue his existing goals. Thus, Craig breaks Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative—he views and uses people as means to an end, rather than treating them as ends in themselves.36 Thus, Craig’s motivations are ultimately selfish and as such do not facilitate the sort of happy ending achieved through gained empathy and understanding associated with body-swap films. Instead, Being John Malkovich subverts these generic expectations. While all other characters (with the exception of John Malkovich) achieve their goals through interpersonal connections, Craig’s desire to be someone else—rather than to understand what it is like to be someone else—not only proves impossible, but the selfishness of his desire seals his karmic fate. By the film’s end, Craig Schwartz does not achieve existential enlightenment. Instead, he literally ceases to exist. C O N C LU S I O N

Craig’s pursuit of selfish happiness is tragic. As David L. Smith writes, Craig’s goal of “becoming someone else” simply “replicates the syndrome [he] sought to escape”37—that is, his crisis of self is externalized in the film’s concluding sequence. The mechanism that appeared to promise that escape, the Malkovich portal, does not offer liberation from his existential malaise—it is not a “cure . . . [but rather] a symptom of the disease.”38 Instead, it provides a narrative opportunity to explore thematic concerns. The exploration of personal crises through projected fantasy recurs across Jonze’s feature film oeuvre. As Eva-Lynn Jagoe argues, Jonze’s films formulate hypothetical intervention[s] into the ways that we live and interact with the world, the kind of utopian gesture that has radical political potential to imagine the world otherwise. Be it the ability to inhabit someone

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else’s subjectivity in Being John Malkovich or to go to a world where the wild things in yourself are exteriorized (Where the Wild Things Are), the altered worlds that he posits present fascinating scenarios, only to fall back into humanist commonplaces of connection, communication, and feeling. In the first, the fantastical possibilities of mind travel devolve into a complicated drama of relationships and selfish desires for control and domination.39 Jagoe’s assertion that the fantastical nature of Jonze’s films offers a potential reimagining of the world is apt, but it is not that the alternate worlds presented through these scenarios “fall back into humanist commonplaces of connection, communication, and feeling.” Rather, Jonze’s protagonists’ inability to connect, communicate, and, for the most part, empathize with others prompts the narrative development of fantastical worlds in the first place. In this sense, Being John Malkovich reveals the self-deluding nature of these kind of “radical” narrative forms, in the commercial Hollywood context. The ability to inhabit others’ existences outside of the body-swap context appears to be a “radical” departure from mainstream narrative conventions—and indeed a potential reimagining of the world as presented through the Hollywood tradition. However, the Malkovich portal is the precise mechanism that facilitates conventional, linear narrative progression toward resolution. The “ability to imagine the world otherwise” is not presented as an experience that will afford these protagonists growth or epiphany, but rather a symptom of the characters’ internal struggles—an attempt at escape or positive resolution to issues that are insurmountable. Craig does not “devolve” into selfishness; his motivations from the film’s outset are of a purely existential nature that hinges upon his self-importance. He desires to overcome a crisis of self, but just as Charlie dismisses his twin brother Donald’s attempts at fraternal connection in Adaptation, the young Max (Max Records) is unable to understand that his mother and sister have lives separate to their connection to him in Where the Wild Things Are (2009), and Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) is incapable of maintaining romantic relationships with women who intellectually outgrow him in Her (2013), Craig privileges his existential concerns over human connection and empathy. His initial words to Elijah indicate he does not seek existential growth through empathy or meaningful relationships. When Craig explains to Maxine that his love of puppetry stems from its affordance of “becoming someone else for a little while. Being inside another skin—thinking differently, moving differently, feeling differently,” he is not, as it may initially appear, exhibiting a high capacity for empathy. Craig does not desire to understand other people. He desires to literally become someone else in order to understand, and thereby to control, his existential anxiety. The Malkovich portal is a plot device that enables Craig to literally pursue his narrative motivation, driving the plot

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along a linear chain of cause and effect, while the absurdity and comedy created by the existence of a portal into an uncelebrated celebrity body deflects the immediate recognition of this narrative function. Craig’s failure to achieve existential transcendence despite ending the film inside another’s skin offers a definitive narrative closure. Craig began the film projecting his anxieties through a marionette proxy devoid of consciousness, and he concludes the film subsumed by the mechanism he believed would provide liberation, disappearing into a void within a new vestigial host body, the pre-conscious fetus of his wives’ child, Emily. Of course, “the darkness [of the film’s] comedy is [. . . that] moving to another body is not really a mode of escape at all, but rather a chance to merely imprison the self in someone else’s body.”40 As such, Being John Malkovich’s conclusion ironizes von Kleist’s notion that innocence can be regained through heightened self-consciousness. Where von Kleist suggests that “we shall find [grace] at its purest in a body which is entirely devoid of consciousness or which possesses it in an infinite degree; that is, in the marionette or the god . . . that we must eat again of the tree of knowledge in order to relapse into the state of Innocence,”41 Craig’s inability to learn from his experiences and recognize the needs of others denies him enlightenment or existential liberation. By concluding the film within the body of a child, Craig may have relapsed into a state of innocence. However, this innocence is not his to embrace—rather it is an incarceration. Craig’s end is not that he becomes Emily, but that he is irretrievably trapped in Emily. Where von Kleist’s “state of Innocence” is “the last chapter of the history of the world,”42 the closing frame resolutely concludes Craig’s narrative arc as an ironic inversion of his stated intent. His desire for existential enlightenment is at odds with his unwillingness to truly “see” the world around him. In contrast to the enhanced human experience through interpersonal connection afforded by body-swap films, Craig’s inhabitation of other bodies sees his view of the world as increasingly restricted and consolidated around his selfishness.43 Inside Emily, Craig is solely fixated on Maxine as an object of desire, and utterly oblivious to her feelings. His field of vision is further restricted, and the audio effects muffled beyond decipherability as he calls out “Maxine! Maxine! I love you, Maxine,” from the abyss and begs his host body to “look away” from the joyous familial scene of which he is not part. While the portal’s absurdity appears to abjure the conventions of mainstream cinema, it, in fact, enables Craig’s existential crisis to be narrativized and resolutely concluded in line with these conventions. However, more than imposing a narrative resolution to Craig’s seemingly unresolvable desire to be freed of consciousness through the incorporation of a fantastical plot device, the portal provides a moral resolution. The film’s final sequence functions as a carceral judgment on his selfishness. Thus, the Malkovich portal highlights the film’s thematic concerns. In the absence of empathy, the portal seals Craig’s extinction.

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NOTES 1. Kim Wilkins, American Eccentric Cinema (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), p. 31. 2. Geoff King states that the term “mainstream” is used as shorthand for a set of historically and institutionally predicated conventions that serve as a reference point “against which other practices can be measured” or defined. Geoff King, Indiewood, USA: Where Hollywood Meets Independent Cinema (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2009), 34. See, for example reviews by: Roger Ebert, “Being John Malkovich,” Daily Mercury, 2000; Chris Chang, “Head Wide Open: Being John Malkovich,” Film Comment, Sept/Oct, 1999; David Germaine, “At the Movies: Being John Malkovich,” Associated Press, October 26, 1999. 3. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977). 4. Ibid. 5. Laura Mulvey writes of Lacan’s theory that the result of recognizing the mirrored image as himself is joyous as the child imagines the mirror-image to be “more complete, more perfect than he experiences his own body.” Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16: 3 (1975), pp. 6–18. 6. See James MacDowell, “Notes on Quirky,” Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism 1 (2010); James MacDowell, “Quirky: Buzzword or Sensibility,” in Claire Molloy, Yannis Tzioumakis, and Geoff King (eds.), American Independent Cinema: Indie, Indiewood and Beyond (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 53–64; and Wilkins, American Eccentric Cinema. 7. David Bordwell, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), pp. 28–9. 8. While there are theories of classical narrative structure that provide alternatives to the three-act structure, such as Kristin Thompson’s four-part (setup, complicating action, development, climax) plus epilogue format, the overall equilibrium-disequilibriumnew equilibrium trajectory brought about through a character’s motivations has been overwhelmingly retained. See Thompson, Storytelling in the New Hollywood: Understanding Classical Narrative Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 9. Bordwell, Hollywood Tells It, p. 29. 10. King, Indiewood, pp. 64–5. 11. Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), p. 18. 12. For analyses of the commercialization and commodification of celebrity under capitalism, see P. David Marshall, Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 13. Emphasis in original. Scott Repass, “Being John Malkovich,” Film Quarterly 56: 1 (Fall 2002), p. 30. 14. Ibid. 15. Jean-Louis Comolli, “Historical Fiction. A Body Too Much,” Screen 19: 2 (1978), p. 41. 16. The repeated listing of Keaton in the programme prompts one Keaton to remark to another, “This fellow Keaton seems to be the whole show!” 17. Christopher Falzon, “On Being John Malkovich and Not Being Yourself,” in D. LaRocca (ed.), The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman (Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2011), pp. 50–1. 18. King, Indiewood, p. 64. 19. See David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). 20. Ibid. p. 157.

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21. Here, again, Jonze and Kaufman appear to be winking at Lacan’s concept of the mirror phase. In that essay, Lacan directly compares the self-recognition of a human child to a chimpanzee in relation to developmental ability. 22. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, R. Pevear, and L. Volokhonsky, Notes from Underground (Alfred A. Knopf, 1993), p. 9. 23. Falzon, “On Being John Malkovich,” pp. 48–52. 24. Ibid. p. 48. 25. Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (London: Mandarin Paperbacks, 1995 [1960, William Heinemann]), p. 33. 26. See Sandra Meiri and Odeya Kohen Raz, “Mainstream Body Character Breach Films and Subjectivization,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 98: 1 (2017), pp. 201–17. 27. Repass, “Being John Malkovich,” p. 34. 28. King, Indiewood, p. 64. 29. Heinrich von Kleist, “On the Puppet Theater,” Salmagundi 33/34 (1976) [1810], p. 86. 30. Ibid. 31. Martin Kley, “German Romanticism Goes to Hollywood: Heinrich Von Kleist’s ‘On the Puppet Theater’ and ‘Being John Malkovich,’” South Central Review 24: 3 (2007), p. 25. 32. Ibid. 33. David L. Smith, “Six Ways of Looking at Anomalisa,” Journal of Religion & Film 20: 3 (2016), p. 16. 34. King, Indiewood, p. 66. 35. See Wilkins, American Eccentric Cinema. 36. Immanuel Kant and James W. Ellington, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals: With, on a Supposed Right to Lie because of Philanthropic Concerns, 3rd edn. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), p. 92. 37. Smith, “Six Ways,” p. 4. 38. Ibid. 39. Eva-Lynn Jagoe, “Depersonalized Intimacy: The Cases of Sherry Turkle and Spike Jonze,” English Studies in Canada 42: 1–2 (2016), p. 165. 40. Falzon, “On Being John Malkovich,” p. 47. 41. Von Kleist, “On the Puppet Theater,” p. 88. 42. Ibid. 43. Falzon, “On Being John Malkovich,” pp. 35–6.

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C H A PT ER 5

“I can’t sleep. I’m losing my hair. I’m fat and repulsive”: Crises of Masculinity and Artistry in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation Julie Levinson

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ince 2002, when Adaptation was released, the scholarly and critical response to Spike Jonze’s second feature film has converged on a recurring set of interpretive entry points: the film’s fractured narrative, its cinematic derringdo, its metafictive self-consciousness, and what is, for most writers, its baffling and disappointing ending. Both scholars and auteurist-minded film critics have highlighted the ways in which Adaptation is recognizably a Spike Jonze film as it flaunts the director’s characteristically antic visual style and his freewheeling traversal between interior and exterior realms of experience. Many analyses point out the ways in which Adaptation is also recognizable as a Charlie Kaufman screenplay, with its staunch refusal of storytelling conventions, convoluted plot structure, and narrative reflexivity.1 What has been generally overlooked is the film’s broader cinematic and cultural contexts—specifically, its status as one of a spate of serio-comic American films of the late 1990s and early 2000s that focus on the travails of midlife masculinity. While Adaptation has received ample and well-deserved consideration of its sui generis cinematic creativity, scant attention has been paid to the film as a chronicle of male angst and perplexity. Situating it in its time and cultural milieu, and among other tales of beset manhood, reveals heretofore largely unacknowledged aspects of Jonze’s and Kaufman’s creation. In Masculinity and Film Performance: Male Angst in Contemporary American Cinema, Donna Peberdy writes of “a cultural climate of the late 1990s and early 2000s whereby images of aging baby boomers and subsequent speculations surrounding the transformation of what it means to grow old abounded.”2 Among Adaptation’s contemporaneous comic brethren are American Beauty

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(1999), Wonder Boys (2000), About Schmidt (2002), Punch Drunk Love (2002), Lost in Translation (2003), Sideways (2004), The Forty-Year-Old Virgin (2005), and Broken Flowers (2005). These films and others of that time feature a cavalcade of neurotic, unfulfilled, self-flagellating middle-aged male protagonists whose comic misadventures happen alongside a gnawing discomfiture about their gendered identities and their distance from the phallic ideal. The films’ concurrence comprises a Hollywood-style fin-de-siècle reckoning with the social upheavals of the preceding decades and the sense of disorientation and diminishment that they engendered in midlife men. Of course, a filmic focus on adult male subjectivity cuts across time periods and genres. There have always been men-in-crisis movies; male melodrama and masochism have been mainstays of American cinema for a long time. The anguished organization men of the post-war era, the latter-day aging cowboys of 1950s and 60s Westerns, the overwrought seekers of the 1970s New Hollywood films, the maverick hardbodies of the 1980s, the discontented corporate drones and hapless man-boys of recent movies are all part of a diachronic through-line fixated on men grappling with the challenges, disappointments, and degradations that accompany advancing adulthood. Likewise, comic takes on declining masculinity both precede and postdate the turn-of-the-twenty-first-century movies listed above.3 It goes without saying that much of Hollywood’s output has always focused on manhood—of the midlife and other varieties. But the concentrated release of so many darkly comic chronicles of male insecurity and neurosis marks an inflection point when American movies were coming to terms with a particular cultural moment preoccupied with the plight of middle-aged, middle-class white men. In another book-length consideration of those years, Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush, David Greven describes the period as “when Hollywood masculinity became self-aware.”4 There has been a good deal of speculation, both in scholarly analyses and journalistic articles, about why a flurry of movies in the decades spanning the new millennium spotlighted midlife male subjectivity: a perspective that Greven calls “meta-manhood.”5 Surely, part of the explanation derives from demographics; as the vast audience of baby boomers aged, movie characters followed suit. But beyond simply acknowledging production decisions that targeted a substantial niche of movie-going audiences, most attempts to account for the prevalence of midlife-male movies in that period have set their sights on the alleged crisis of masculinity that has been bruited about by journalists, cultural commentators, and academics alike from the nineties onward. The actuality of an ostensible crisis has been much debated and the inception of the crisis discourse is difficult to pinpoint.6 Many writers attempting a historiography of the men-in-crisis notion have homed in on a few popular books that aimed to capture their zeitgeist. Robert Bly’s 1990 screed, Iron John: A Book about Men, was, arguably, the opening salvo in what became a fusillade of widely read and discussed treatises decrying the so-called crisis of masculinity.7 Fire in

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the Belly: On Being a Man (1991), Sam Keen’s vive-la-différence tract, called for a new male “psychonaut” who would boldly go on a kind of vision quest in search of authentic masculinity.8 Susan Faludi’s best-seller Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (1999), her equal-opportunity follow-up to her book Backlash: The Undeclared War against American Women (1991), was one of scores of responses to, rebuttals of, and riffs on the earlier declarations of crisis in the lives of men.9 By the early 2000s, a tsunami of books, articles and op-ed pieces about men in crisis had flooded the market and their “men in crisis” mantra lodged itself in American collective consciousness.10 The arrival of university-based men’s studies programs and scholarly journals devoted to the topic of masculinity furthered the conversation while also problematizing the popular-culture insistence that a full-blown crisis was afoot. Like any cultural impulse, the sense of masculinity in crisis—or, less hysterically, at least in flux as a social construct—has myriad origin stories. In Millennial Masculinity: Men in Contemporary American Cinema, Timothy Shary cites a range of historical events and cultural catalysts for Hollywood’s foregrounded focus on the nature of masculinity in the 1990s and 2000s: Given the escalating developments within the gendered milieu of men in US culture as well as the ongoing evolution of male roles (domestic, professional, performative) and the concerns that these vicissitudes presented to the patriarchal norm, a logical opportunity to reexamine masculinity at the turn of the millennium arises, especially since the positive advances in women’s authority and men’s humility over the past few decades have not created true gender equality. The comprehensive themes of cinema and its dependence on audience appeal to achieve success make movies the ideal medium through which we can better understand how men in contemporary culture have been changing and how our perceptions of men continue to change as well.11 The cultural chatter about the diminution of manhood and the earnest proposals for how men should respond and adapt to the shifting grounds of the new gender landscape had grown loud and contentious by the time Adaptation and the other men-at-midlife comedies appeared. In Contemporary Masculinities in Fiction, Film and Television, Brian Baker’s overview of representations of manhood in the years bridging the new millennium, he asserts that “in terms of masculinity, crisis is the new dominant.” He goes on to say: Such a conception might suggest, however, that there was a time when constructions of masculinity in capitalist Modernity were ever untroubled, when male subjects were whole and not produced by conflicting ideological, social and cultural structures, or when men existed in an unchallenged patriarchy not striated by class or ethnicity.12

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Peberdy makes a similar claim: “what is crisis-ridden is not ‘masculinity’ itself, but rather the conception of a ‘normative’ masculinity.”13 Such declarations suggest that the soi-disant crisis of masculinity was actually more of a call to attention—a pushback against the supposed cultural consensus around a singular definition of acceptable masculine behavior, followed by pushback against the pushback. Once essentialist gender ideologies were made manifest, the cat was out of the bag. Reigning norms of masculinity that had masked ideological contradictions were challenged by the proposition that masculinity is neither monolithic nor undifferentiated. Roger Horrocks writes in his mid-90s book on the ongoing deliberation over what it means to be a man, “the strenuousness of the masculinity identities is a pointer, not to their solidity, but to their fragility.”14 Hollywood movies, the popular press, and other cultural forms revealed cracks in the consensus about what manhood is and should be, as well as debate about whether recent challenges to gender orthodoxies were a positive expansion of ways of being male or an unwelcome rebuke to the correct order of things. In 1992, Kaja Silverman wrote, “Hegemony hinges upon identification; it comes into play when all the members of a collectivity see themselves within the same reflecting surface.”15 But by the late 1990s, the reflecting surface into which men gazed had cracked into shards.16 This meant that Hollywood’s take on the crisis of masculinity came in a few varieties and offered up disparate subject positions for its male protagonists. In Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men, yet another book about male identity in the latter decades of the twentieth century, Lynne Segal declared that, “A diversity of ‘masculinities’ jostle to present themselves as the acceptable face of the new male order.”17 Hence, an array of character types exemplified assorted responses to the gender disarray of the era: the aforementioned addled midlife men of the millennial comic cycle; the Mr. Moms and other newly family-oriented men who bested women at domesticity (e.g., Mr. Mom [1983], Three Men and a Baby [1987], Look Who’s Talking [1989], Mrs. Doubtfire [1993]); the fed-up white men in extremis of male melodramas (e.g., Falling Down [1993], Disclosure [1994], In the Company of Men [1997], Fight Club [1999]). Each type of film put its own distinctive spin on the perceived crisis of manhood and the subjective experience of men who felt dislodged from their perch by the era’s shifting gender dynamics. This pluralistic assortment of movie protagonists in the 1990s–2000s was, in some sense, a counterpunch against the hypermasculine hardbodies of the previous decades—those brazenly atavistic throwbacks to an earlier version of ideal masculinity. Mythic masculinity personified, the Rambos and Robocops, along with many other lethal-weapon-wielding, die-hard macho men, triumphed by exorcising feminized or foreign forces (and, often, conflating the two) that threatened to pollute American masculinist ideology. In Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (1993), an influential book of the period that sought

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to explain Hollywood’s response to late-twentieth-century politics and culture, Susan Jeffords made the case that those swashbuckling heroes of the 1970s and 80s denoted a desire for the reassertion of patriarchal order and the regeneration of normative masculinity in response to the putative feminization of American manhood. Jeffords claimed that the popularity of the action/adventure genre in the Reagan years and beyond was a response to second-wave feminism and to the kind of gelded manhood that Bly bemoaned.18 In turn, the midlife-male dark comedies of the succeeding years deliberately resurrected Bly’s irresolute “soft man.” Like fearsome zombies who refuse to remain in the graveyard of gender outliers, these comic anti-heroes piped up and added their voices to the prevailing cultural cacophony about men and manhood. Frank and funny about the ways in which hegemonic manhood had been destabilized, Adaptation and the other millennial comedies responded to the presumed crisis embroiling masculinity with a figurative mortification of the flesh. The spectacular hardbody male of the previous decades got his comeuppance in the form of notably unspectacular comic protagonists who overtly acknowledged their gendered insecurities and infelicities. In aggregate, they trafficked in a sort of comic detumescence of phallic power. By the time these chronicles of middle-aged male lives were unleashed, the notion of a crisis of masculinity was already a hoary trope, ripe for mockery and irony. The flustered, overthinking male neurotic of Adaptation and its ilk was not a new film figure, having appeared (usually in comic form) in movies dating to the early days of American cinema. Already for several decades, the deficiently masculine, self-doubting nebbish character had been polished to a high sheen by Woody Allen and others. David Buchbinder considers what he calls the schlemiel figure as indicative not just of an individual character’s failure of masculinity within the patriarchal order, but also a representation of “the culture’s anxiety about and scorn of the inadequately or incompetently masculine male.”19 But he proposes that this sort of character can also be “understood as enacting a resistance to or even a refusal of the coercive pressure of the gender system.”20 Silverman has made a similar point about films that offer up alternatives to conventional representations of manhood, pointing out characters that “absent themselves from the line of paternal succession . . . not as disenfranchisement and subordination, but rather as phallic divestiture, as a way of saying ‘no’ to power.”21 The ambivalence of such characters and films—at once, paradoxically critiquing and pining for gender certitudes—is symptomatic of the muddled discourse of the era. Greven writes about the ideological tensions of this double vision, “In this era, masculinity became aware of itself as both monolith and joke. Masculinity now performed its own iconic, chiseled status in the awareness that it did so as a performance: manhood became meta-manhood.”22 The ontological insecurity of the lost souls in the millennial film comedies is a metonym for that

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era’s larger cultural bewilderment about manhood and its discontents. These malcontent characters epitomize the contingency and ephemerality of masculine power as encroaching age brings those discontents to the fore. Together, the films tapped into what might be considered a national neurosis engendered by their era’s cultural palaver of male crisis and enshrined by the human potential movement. As such, the character exposition of Adaptation’s protagonist Charlie Kaufman (who, not incidentally, shares a name and profession with Adaptation’s screenwriter) starts with a voiceover lament in which, as the opening titles roll over a black screen, a series of self-hating plaints alternate with selfactualization platitudes derived from pop psychology.23 It is significant that we hear Charlie before we catch sight of him. His litany of self-loathing lets us know that he is, by the metrics of mythic manhood, insufficiently masculine. This whiny catalogue of failures marks him as nervous, self-indulgent, hypochondriacal, too much in his head, and incapable of action—all qualities that are coded as feminine in the phallocentric imagination: 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 a walking cliché. I really need to go to the doctor and have my leg checked. There’s something wrong. A bump. The dentist called again. I’m way overdue. If I stop putting things off, I would be happier. All I do is sit on my fat ass. If my ass wasn’t fat, I would be happier. I wouldn’t have to wear these shirts with the tails out all the time. Like that’s fooling anyone. Fat-ass! The voiceover goes on in this vein for quite a while, including the observation that “Men don’t have to be attractive. But that’s not true, especially these days. Almost as much pressure on men as there is on women these days. Why should I be made to feel I have to apologize for my existence?” It concludes with the speculation that his unhappiness may be attributed to his brain chemistry and perhaps he could get help with that. “But I’ll still be ugly, though. Nothing’s gonna change that.” From the outset, Charlie is defined by woe at his failure to measure up to ideals of manliness, attractiveness, and youthfulness. In Loving With a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women, Tania Modleski points out that “if self-aggrandizement has been the male mode, self-abasement has too frequently been the female mode.”24 Charlie’s dismay about his body and his put-downs of himself immediately mark the character as feminized. This is the first of many voiceovers in the film in which Charlie rambles on, free-associating his way through his own sorry psyche. In a later voiceover, he wallows in disdain for his aging, unappealing self: “I can’t sleep. I’m losing my

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hair. I’m fat and repulsive.” Throughout Adaptation, Charlie functions as his own Greek chorus, commenting on the action—and on his own lack of action— with self-derision. As he sputters and stutters along, he reveals his inability to stop obsessively verbalizing and get on with his life. Writing about aging cowboys, Gill Branston has suggested that long-windedness in aging movie males is “coded as part of [the] move out of the realm of the masculine.”25 From the outset, Charlie’s verbal proclivities mark him as aberrant from conventionally manly characters. Traditional male heroes in American cinema are men of action, not talk.26 The occasional grunt serves them just fine, defined as they are by their bodily prowess rather than their way with words. Charlie, on the other hand, alternates throughout the film between the unstoppable jabbering of his internal stream of consciousness and the tongue-tied stammering of his encounters in the world outside his head. After Adaptation’s verbal character introduction, we lay eyes on the source of this word spew in the person of Nicolas Cage. Cage’s Charlie is a hunchedover, skulking shell of a man who tries to fold his ample body in on itself lest he be looked at. Jonze’s casting of Cage in the role is a meta-joke since the audience’s extradiegetic awareness of Cage as a pumped-up action movie star makes his performance as milquetoast Charlie all the more incongruous. The character’s jutting paunch and slouched posture are markers of both his discomfort with his own body and his marginalized position vis-à-vis embodied masculine ideals. In Adaptation’s first scene, Charlie lurks around the edges of the film set where his screenplay for Being John Malkovich (1999), Jonze’s and Kaufman’s actual prior collaboration, is being shot. Jonze shoots this pseudodocumentary segment with a hand-held video camera, signaling the scene’s supposed verisimilitude and Adaptation’s pose as a chronicle of its own screenwriter’s life. In spite of his status as the writer of the movie, Charlie immediately gets thrown off the set for being in the way. This occasions yet another self-flagellating interrogation: “What am I doing here . . . I’ve been on this planet for close to forty years and I’m no closer to understanding a single thing. Why am I here? How did I get here?” That the writer is such a lowly, overlooked part of the movie-making process is yet another in-joke. In both the valuation of the film industry and the pecking order of movie heroes, men of words, however professionally successful they may be, play second banana to the alpha males who, rather than talk and reflect, simply shut up and get on with things. Thus, in very short order, Adaptation has efficiently positioned Charlie toward the bottom of the masculine food chain.27 It has also summarily announced itself as an exemplar of metafiction since the film chronicles not just Charlie’s writing process and life but, specifically, his fits-and-starts efforts, in the film that we are watching, to transcribe that life and translate it into his screenplay. Charlie is like the eponymous Tristram

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Shandy, compulsively narrating his own life right up to the moment. Adaptation gives us, at once, the diegetic Charlie’s struggle to complete his commissioned screenplay alongside the extradiegetic Kaufman’s successfully completed simulacrum of that struggle. In other words, Adaptation is an account of its own coming-into-being—a film that seemingly births itself. In narrative theorist Gerard Genette’s taxonomy, Adaptation is autodiegetic in that it appears to engender its own narrative.28 It is also, in some ways, the filmic equivalent of a nesting doll, containing strata of self-consciousness (of both the psychological and artistic kinds) along with layers of paronomasia: binary meanings of the words “adaptation” and “creation” (in both their biological and artistic senses) along with doubled creators both within the movie (Charlie and identical twin brother Donald) as well as beyond it (Charlie in the film and Kaufman who wrote the film).29 But perhaps the most apt metaphor for what the audience witnesses comes from Adaptation itself. When Donald refers to an image he has seen, Charlie identifies it as the ouroboros: the snake that eats its own tail. He immediately recognizes his screenplay as an ouroboros which, instead of being a conventional linear account of experience is, rather, a serpentine coil: an infinite loop that, in its inability to come to completion, doubles back on and eats its own tale. As if these overlaid themes and characters were not confusing enough, after the introduction of Charlie in the first couple of scenes, Jonze begins playing fast and loose with cinematic and narrative conventions. He gleefully engages in what Genette terms transgressive metalepsis, a narrative movement across porous planes of action that play out on “a shifting but sacred frontier between two worlds, the world in which one tells and the world of which one tells.”30 The audience sees not only what happens in the world of the film but also how Charlie processes and repurposes what happens for his screenplay aborning. Adaptation comprises not only the supposedly actual events in the life of its protagonist but also a jumbled combination of false starts for his screenplay, masturbatory fantasies, projections of himself onto other characters and, at last, an ersatz ending to the unrealizable film reeling off in Charlie’s head. This intentional confusion keeps the audience on its toes, feverishly trying to keep up with the careening mental wanderings of our focalizer Charlie, the film’s presumptive procreator who decides and delimits what the audience sees. Alongside Adaptation’s intentional befuddlements and its ludic spirit, Jonze and Kaufman create a poignant portrait of self-doubting midlife masculinity in all its splendor. The film’s involutions serve as metaphors for Charlie’s stultified manhood and adulthood. In his unhappiness and neurotic neediness, every external impetus, as well as every aspect of his screenplay, is merely an expression of his own thwarted desire, his apprehension, and his social ineptitude. The main character as well as the narrative itself are both narcissistic and stymied. Adaptation’s aesthetic of creative failure serves as analogue for the masculine and

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maturational failures of its character. Charlie’s dysfunction is not just an artistic failure but also a failure to conform to gender ideals and to standards of adult masculinity—an inability to convincingly perform manliness. What sets Adaptation apart from the other comedies of midlife manhood of the period is this byzantine structure. Many critics deemed the narrative contortions simply as Jonze’s and Kaufman’s way of showing off for the sake of cleverness.31 But the fractured narrative is crucial to the film’s exploration of Charlie’s deviation from the standards of both manliness and mainstream movies. His inability to perform acceptable modes of masculinity and his analogous inability to complete his screenplay are mutually reinforcing. He is equally thwarted by the performative aspects of masculinity and the generative requisites of creativity; Adaptation concretizes his stumbling attempts to overcome stagnation on both fronts. Stalemated, Charlie spins off a second self in the person of conventionally masculine brother Donald, just as the film that Charlie wants to make eventually mutates into a second self in the form of the Hollywood potboiler that ends Adaptation. This is his way of trying on for size alternative forms of masculinity and creativity or, as it were, hackery. After Charlie’s “how did I get here” entreaty, a bit of onscreen text locates in time what we next see on the screen: “Four billion and forty years earlier.” A brisk montage begins with the origins of life on earth and, in a coda of self-absorption, ends with Charlie’s birth. Jonze then embarks, with characteristic abandon, on a sequence of disjointed scenes that show the piteous Charlie in one degrading, emasculating encounter after another. Like a quick-sketch caricaturist, the director reels off a series of portraits of the artist as an insecure, no-longer-young man. Charlie sweats and splutters his way through lunch with a decidedly poised Hollywood studio executive (Tilda Swinton) who has hired him to adapt journalist Susan Orlean’s best-selling book about flowers to the screen. Successive scenes with his twin Donald, his would-be girlfriend Amelia (Cara Seymour), his raunchy agent (Ron Livingston), and a friendly young waitress (Judy Greer) present him as invariably maladroit and uncomfortable in his own skin. In each encounter, Charlie is riven with self-doubt which manifests itself both physically and verbally. Slumped in his chair during the lunchtime conversation, he nervously avoids eye contact. His tongue-tied inarticulateness is punctuated by anxious little giggles. And he defies the masculine credo of grace under pressure—“Never let them see you sweat”—with a serious case of the flop sweats. We not only witness this scene but, through Charlie’s voiceover, we also get his running commentary on his own distress: “Stop sweating. Aw, she looked at my hairline. She thinks I’m bald.” Every relationship, every episode in Adaptation is verbally and/or visually mediated by Charlie’s cerebration. This means that what the audience watches is not necessarily what happens to him but, rather, serial visualizations of what happens in his mind and, hence, in some cases, in his script.

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Charlie prefers the imaginary to the actual, so he retreats to his internal mindscape where he attempts to exercise the mastery that he cannot achieve in his life. Defeated in each of his interpersonal interactions, he repeatedly withdraws into his head, where he can at least try to wield control over the characters in his stalled screenplay who populate his imaginative sphere. These include not just John Laroche (Chris Cooper), the central focus of Orlean’s book, but, eventually, Orlean herself (Meryl Streep) as well as Donald, who may or may not be a figment of Charlie’s imagination. Real or imagined, Donald’s status as doppelgänger and foil is crucial to Adaptation’s strategies. In spite of being dead ringers for one another, the twin brothers are a study in contrasts: Charlie’s passivity versus Donald’s dynamism, Charlie’s repeated failure of nerve versus Donald’s clueless confidence, Charlie’s creative paralysis versus Donald’s foolhardy can-do productivity, Charlie’s romantic inertia versus Donald’s cocksure confidence with women, Charlie’s obsessive navel-gazing versus Donald’s utter lack of an inner life.32 Naturally, each pole of these duads has a stereotypical gender correlative, with Charlie’s qualities taken to be intrinsically feminine and Donald’s fundamentally masculine. Charlie’s scorn for his brother mixes gallingly with his envy of Donald’s swagger and blithe joie de vivre. Vartan Messier writes, “It would not be far-fetched to consider Charlie’s brother, Donald, as a fabrication, an alter ego or ego-ideal who, in many ways, acts and thinks as Charlie wishes he could . . .”33 Charlie’s angst derives from his awareness that he is maladapted to the gender ideals of his habitat. Donald is the epitome of “survival of the fittest” adaptation to a world in which, professionally and romantically, men are rewarded for being

Figure 5.1 The glum Charlie with his cheery doppelgänger, Donald.

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bold and decisive, not diffident and contemplative. Although Charlie scoffs at Donald’s mindless confidence, he nonetheless aspires to it. This creates for him a cognitive dissonance in which his disparagement of the repertoire of behaviors that comprise hegemonic masculinity does not necessarily make them any less longed for. David Buchbinder explains, “Hegemonic masculinity, then, constitutes a conventional or ideal(ized) masculinity. It is that notion of the masculine to which men subscribe, whether or not they themselves embody it.”34 Donald is not Charlie’s only male foil or avatar of his displaced desires. Two other major male characters also personify assertive manhood in ways that are antipodal to Charlie. None other than actual screenwriting guru Robert McKee has written of Adaptation as “an allegory of contentious facets of Kaufman’s psyche.”35 The film’s version of McKee (Brian Cox), a gruff know-it-all, functions in the film as a stern father figure against whose values and advice Charlie initially wages Oedipal combat.36 With his thickset body and bombastic bravado, the older man renders Charlie both childlike and unmanned. In the conversation they have after McKee has publicly excoriated Charlie for his misconceptions about life and, by extension, film scripts, McKee identifies the latter’s introspection as a sort of paralyzing pathology. Eventually, in the film’s last act, Charlie incorporates into his script aspects of McKee’s and Donald’s advice in terms of both the type of film that the screenplay turns into and the type of maleness that is rewarded in the film’s denouement. It is open to question whether this eleventh-hour conversion signals Charlie’s embrace of those characters’ brand of masculinity and professional accomplishment, or his reluctant capitulation to the oppressive norms of manhood and Hollywood. The third counterpoint to Charlie’s performance of maleness is Laroche. Frank Tomasulo has argued that “the toothless and unkempt dreamer Laroche is akin to Charlie Kaufman,” citing their shared attitudes of condescension, their social isolation, and their capacity for reinvention, which he claims is evidenced in Charlie’s final script where he “forsakes his artistic integrity in favor of adapting to commercial realities.”37 But as a specimen of masculinity, Laroche is more antithetic than akin to Charlie. Like Donald, he barrels ahead in life with little self-reflection and no irresolution. Unlike Charlie, he rises to a challenge, looking people directly in the eye and taking control of every situation. When he and his Native American co-workers are caught stealing an endangered type of orchid, the smart-alecky Laroche concocts a cock-andbull story, brashly daring the cop to contradict and arrest him. When tragedy breaks apart his family, he perseveres. The demands of normative manhood and adulthood require one to roll with the punches instead of reel from them, and Laroche is a paragon of survival, adapting to whatever befalls him. Laroche is also, unlike Charlie, a paragon of passion, falling madly and monomaniacally in love with one object of desire after another: orchids, turtles, fish, antique Dutch mirrors. Laroche’s infatuations exemplify Donald’s later-stated

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truism: “You are what you love . . . not what loves you.” With manly conviction, he identifies his object of desire, seizes on it, and moves on. The character’s successive, fanatical fixations throw into sharp relief Charlie’s phlegmatic detachment from everyone and everything, and his inability to overcome his incapacitating self-consciousness in order to turn his attentions outward. Tomasulo suggests that The 3, Donald’s outlandish thriller screenplay, can be construed as referring to aspects of Charlie’s psyche represented by himself, Susan, and Laroche. But The 3 might also be taken as a ternary rendition of manhood represented by Donald, McKee, and Laroche, all of whom provide stark contrasts—and, arguably, aspirational models—for Charlie. If Charlie has a true kindred spirit in the film, it is not to be found among the three decisive male characters, who are the flip side to his woeful, stuckin-the-groove tune. Rather, his greatest affinity is with Susan Orlean, fellow writer, detached observer of others’ passions, and yearner for an identity defined by one’s own intensity of feeling. It is she who is his true alter ego. David L. Smith writes: Orlean and Charlie are thus alike. Both find themselves in false positions, one step removed from the direct engagement with life they desire. Both, moreover, hope to achieve this immediacy through a writing project . . . they hope to make up for something lacking in themselves by getting close to an imagined other . . . Both hope to get the benefit of a purer, more intense life than their own by writing about it.38 Charlie and Susan share not just a vocation as writers but also a propensity for placing themselves at the center of stories that are supposedly about others. Comrades in self-absorption, they view other people as scrims on which to project their own needs and preoccupations. So Susan’s story about Laroche and orchids becomes a story about her own lack of and search for passion; Charlie’s screenplay adaptation of Susan’s account becomes a story about his own quest for fulfillment.39 As he immerses himself in her book, he recognizes himself in her wistful musings on the lack of passion in her life and in her envy of Laroche’s serial enthusiasms. Sergio Rizzo writes that the film links “the literary with a paralyzing femininity” and maintains that Kaufman’s choice to adapt a woman’s book “does take place within a gendered context that betrays a level of anxiety about the obligations of a screenwriter in assuming a ‘feminine position.’”40 Charlie’s soul-searching is also a soulmate-searching and he thinks he finds his spiritual counterpart in the Susan that he imagines as he gazes at her book jacket photo. His identification with the main female character in Adaptation is yet one more indication of his nonconformity to norms of conventional adult manhood and his reputedly feminine orientation toward introspection and

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Figure 5.2 The overstuffed brain of Charlie Kaufman confronts the blank page.

look-before-you-leap prudence. It is only in the latter part of the film, after he stops identifying with Susan and instead turns her into an object of desire, that he is able to move forward with his screenplay and with his concomitant longing to confront life with abandon and with gumption. Cursed with crippling self-awareness, Charlie can overcome his inadequacies and inhibitions only in his head—and in his film script, which, since it exists solely in his head, is the same thing. Throughout Adaptation, Charlie’s stalled writing is conflated with his romantic and sexual frustrations. His desultory stabs at completing his screenplay amount to a creative coitus interruptus; his writer’s block is equivalent to his lack of self-assurance and, for that matter, lack of self, since his earlier voiceover question “Who am I?” hovers over both his creative endeavors and his interactions with women. Charlie’s dysfunction as a writer corresponds to his shortcomings as an adult man who is unable to carry through with his erotic desires except in autoerotic fantasies. Just as his screenplay-in-progress remains exclusively in his head, his ability to achieve romantic union and sexual consummation happens only in his masturbatory reveries, of which there are three. Until the Florida sequences that end the film, Charlie’s major physical exertions are keyboarding and masturbating. They are much the same thing in that both allow him to spin fantasies of satisfaction and self-assertion, even if, in the case of his screenplay, those fantasies are displaced onto other characters.41 The self-stimulation that defines Charlie both artistically and erotically is at odds with the touchstones of adult work and sexuality, both of which are ideally, at least sometimes, a shared rather than a solo act. Charlie’s failure at sociability in his life and at reciprocal desire in his bed is an indication of his

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arrested development.42 That in middle age his only sexual activity is masturbation suggests that he suffers the indignities of aging without its perks. Both in his bed and in his head, he is stuck, unable to lay claim to the presumed benefits and gratifications associated with well-socialized adult manhood. In his review of Adaptation as “a masturbation narrative,” Lucas Hilderbrand sees Charlie’s self-pleasuring fantasies as not just a sign of artistic, sexual, and maturational blockage but also as an essential expression of identity in which the character “embod[ies] and engage[s] with idealized others or imagined selves.”43 He explains, “Masturbation exemplifies Adaptation protagonist Charlie Kaufman’s self-loathing and his inability to consummate a social sexual relationship. But it also provides the fantasy seed that enables his writing process . . .”44 Finally, he claims, “The primary relationships in the film are not between people but between people and their fantasies, and between writers and their own texts.”45 In Hilderbrand’s view, masturbation serves as both procrastination and inspiration. Shortly after Charlie recognizes Susan as his soulmate, he makes her his body mate as well in a masturbation fantasy that is followed by an epiphany about how to move forward in his screenplay. Charlie’s autoeroticism is, after all, pro-creative. This relationship between a professional fabulator and his creation is Adaptation’s essence. Its thematic centrality points the way to deciphering the film’s feverish ending, which baffled and vexed many viewers and critics.46 Even among those that liked the lead-up to the grand finale, the movie’s climactic events were roundly maligned and largely misunderstood. The scenes in New York and Florida veer sharply from what has come before, as a man at a typewriter morphs into a man of action. At some difficult-to-determine point in that portion of the film, Adaptation becomes a preposterous hodgepodge of mystery film, caper movie, action/adventure escapade, and buddyfilm bromance, with a dollop of rollicking sex thrown in for good measure. As the begetter of these scenes, Charlie now seems to be polymorphously perverse. All of the elements that he initially renounced out of artistic highmindedness—“sex or guns or car chases or characters learning profound life lessons or growing or coming to like each other or overcoming obstacles to succeed in the end”—make their appearance in the final scenes of the film. What began as a journey through Charlie’s headspace during his creative process seems suddenly to have become Hollywood boilerplate, complete with rapidfire editing, lurid action, and heart-pumping suspense—all in an overgrown, alligator-infested swamp, no less. Joshua Landy poses the obvious question: “Why should we not consider this a sellout, an abject capitulation to the imperious demand for narrative?”47 Most critics did just that, lambasting the film’s surrender to hackneyed movie formulas. But the answer to Landy’s question harks back to the film’s metafictive account of its own failures and to Charlie’s corresponding recital of his own

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gender deficiencies. Both the ludicrous film that Adaptation becomes in the end and the capable man that Charlie turns into in the final scenes have to be interpreted ironically. These concluding scenes are no less a fantasy turn-on than his masturbatory imaginings. The character’s eleventh-hour competence is as fanciful and self-serving as the explicitly autoerotic scenes. Adaptation’s ending represents neither Charlie’s artistic and personal breakthrough nor Kaufman’s acquiescence to shopworn movie conventions. It is not an instance of those conventions but, rather, a parodic pastiche: a deliberately incongruous cannibalization of the tropes of film genres associated with the masculine. Indeed, the phantasmagoria of steamy sex, phallic gunplay, and hallucinogenic drugs, along with the spying through windows and the chases by car and on foot, resembles nothing so much as a boys’ own adventure story, inexplicably starring a middle-aged sad sack. Film critic Stephanie Zacharek describes these scenes as “meta-macho” but they are more accurately understood as meta-midlife male: simultaneously attracted to and contemptuous of the grandiosity of Hollywood-style manly heroics. Charlie’s predicament in the Florida scenes is a travesty of, rather than a submission to, gender and movie clichés. The film’s tongue-in-cheek evocation of those clichés amounts to a lampoon of gender stereotypes and all-too-familiar sexual power dynamics: Susan gets turned into a drug-addled, sex-crazed femme fatale gun moll. Her companion in crime, Laroche, is now a berserk gun-toting rube stalking his prey through the swamp. Charlie becomes the hero who saves the day (if not his brother Donald, who dies in his arms) by lead-footing the getaway car. This wet dream of an ending is supremely silly, and willfully so. The type of Hollywood movie that Adaptation lapses into is a form of wish fulfillment: a vicarious delusion of grandeur that allows Charlie to inhabit, however briefly and aspirationally, the sensibility of the sort of person he would like to be. As an autobiographical screenwriter, he gets to reinvent himself as a man who, in the end, has what it takes professionally and romantically. In the film’s coda following the Florida denouement, he even gets the girl—sort of. Charlie is finally able to kiss Amanda and declare his love for her, and she responds in kind even though she is now seeing someone else. His final voiceover— “I know how to finish the script now . . . I like this . . . this is good”—is followed by the opening strains of “Happy Together,” the catchy, insipid pop song that Donald intended to include in his movie. To be sure, these final scenes belong more to Donald and McKee than to Charlie; at a certain point, those characters’ commercially-minded taste has hijacked his film. It is left deliberately ambiguous whether the ending is meant to be taken as Donald’s and Charlie’s co-written screenplay according to McKee’s commandments, or as Charlie’s failure of nerve and artistic principle, or as Charlie’s savvy career move, or as Charlie’s desperate, last-ditch bid to finish the script. But the provenance of the film’s culmination is beside the point. Charlie cannot reconcile what he is with what he wishes he were, so

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he fabricates a way to do that in his imagination. The character and screenplay do not actually evolve; they simply capitulate to McKee’s instructions to “wow them in the end.” The hokum of this ending is compensatory: a faux closure for the incompletable film, and a fake redemption for the protagonist who cannot, outside of his script, be the man he wants to be. This farfetched fantasy of consummation amounts to what film director Douglas Sirk referred to as an “emergency exit”: a highly implausible, if satisfying, movie ending that flies in the face of everything that has come before. In an interview, Charlie Kaufman once explained his intention for Adaptation: “What I wanted to end up with was a discussion rather than a conclusion.”48 In that, he has succeeded. The completed film cannot be taken seriously as a tyingup of plot strands and character development. It can only be taken seriously as a comedic colloquy on, among other things, the status of midlife men and the nature of movies that purport to appeal to them. Notwithstanding the cathartic ending and the protagonist who “learns profound life lessons” and “overcome[s] obstacles to succeed in the end,” Kaufman is not exemplifying movie conventions; he is making fun of them. And he is not acceding to gender ideologies; he is unsettling them. Charlie’s failure to adapt to gender and artistic conventions is not so much a crisis but a creative tension: a chance to reimagine what it means to be a man who falls short of the mark of masculine norms and an artist who falls outside of the norms of Hollywood movie-making. At best, the ending represents an uneasy truce between his own and his culture’s formulas for masculinity and artistry. Along with the other millennial comedies of middle-aged manhood, Adaptation demonstrates a wry and self-knowing engagement with myths of manhood and with the contemporaneous discourse of masculinity in crisis. Spike Jonze continued to explore dissociated masculinity in Her (2013) and Charlie Kaufman has done the same in almost everything he has worked on since Adaptation, including Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Synecdoche, New York (2008), and Anomalisa (2015). But this film speaks to its particular cultural moment when debates about constructions of masculinity came to the fore and when a singular notion of manhood was being disrupted by the culture at large, by select Hollywood movies, and by Jonze and the sundry Kaufmans, both real and imaginary, who collaborated and confabulated with him. NOTES 1. For a sampling of the many considerations of Adaptation in light of Jonze’s and Kaufman’s other films see Anthony Quinn, “Film: The Big Picture – Being Charlie Kaufman,” The Independent, February 28, 2003, p. 8; Sean O’Hagan, “Screen: Who’s the Proper Charlie?,” The Observer, February 9, 2003, p. 10; James Annesley, “Being Spike Jonze: Intertextuality and Convergence in Film, Music, Video and Advertising,” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 11.1 (March 2013), pp. 23–37; David L. Ulin, “Why Charlie Kaufman is Us,” Los Angeles Times, May 14, 2006, p. 16.

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2. Donna Peberdy, Millennial Masculinity: Men in Contemporary American Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012), p. 72. 3. Among the many comic sagas of disaffected men in the years preceding and following the millennial cycle are City Slickers (1991), Office Space (1991), Kicking and Screaming (2005), Dan in Real Life (2007), Greenberg (2010), Everything Must Go (2010), Crazy Stupid Love (2011), and This is Forty (2013). 4. David Greven, Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), p. 1. 5. Ibid. p. 14. In addition to Greven’s and Peberdy’s books, see Susanne Kord and Elisabeth Krimmer, Contemporary Hollywood Masculinities (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Nicola Rehling, Extra-Ordinary Men: White Heterosexual Masculinity and Contemporary Popular Cinema (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2009); Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993); Peter Lehman (ed.), Masculinity: Bodies, Movies, Culture (New York and London, Routledge, 2001); and Phil Powrie, Ann Davies, and Bruce Babington (eds.), The Trouble with Men: Masculinities in European and Hollywood Cinema (New York: Wallflower Press, 2005). 6. Several authors discuss the so-called crisis of masculinity. See for example Sally Robinson, Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Tim Edwards, Cultures of Masculinity (London and New York: Routledge, 2006); Roger Horrocks, Masculinity in Crisis: Myths, Fantasies and Realities (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994); Brian Baker, Contemporary Masculinities in Fiction, Film and Television (New York and London: Bloomsbury, 2015); and Barry Keith Grant, Shadows of Doubt: Negotiations of Masculinity in American Genre Films (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011). 7. Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book about Men (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1990). 8. Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man (New York: Bantam, 1991). 9. Susan Faludi, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man (New York: William Morrow, 1999). 10. At the time, most of the crisis discourse positioned white heterosexual men as the universal identity and structuring norm even though parallel conversations were taking place in both public and academic discourses about non-white and non-heterosexual men. 11. Timothy Shary, Millennial Masculinity: Men in Contemporary American Cinema (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012), p. 4. 12. Baker, Contemporary Masculinities, p. 243. 13. Peberdy, Millennial Masculinity, p. 6. 14. Roger Horrocks, Male Myths and Icons: Masculinity in Popular Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), p. 18. 15. Kaja Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 24. 16. The vision of a shattered mirror is actually referred to in Adaptation by Donald, who wants to infuse his screenplay with a McKee-mandated “image system” of broken mirrors. 17. Lynne Segal, Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990), p. 293. 18. Jeffords, Hard Bodies. 19. David Buchbinder, Studying Men and Masculinities (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 162. 20. Ibid. 21. Silverman, Male Subjectivity, p. 389. 22. Greven, Manhood, p. 16.

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23. I will refer to the diegetic character Charlie Kaufman as Charlie and the extradiegetic screenwriter of Adaptation as Kaufman. 24. Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (London: Methuen, 1984), p. 3. 25. Gill Branston, “. . . Viewer, I Listened to Him . . . Voices, Masculinity, In the Line of Fire,” in Pat Kirkham and Janet Thumim (eds), Me Jane: Masculinity, Movies and Women (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), p. 45. 26. Many of the aforementioned authors of books about Hollywood masculinity have made this point. For another, see Stella Bruzzi, Men’s Cinema: Masculinity and Mise-en-Scene in Hollywood (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013). 27. For a discussion of the screenwriter’s debased position in Hollywood see Vartan Messier, “Desire and the ‘Deconstructionist’: Adaptation as Writerly Praxis,” Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance 7: 1 (2014), p. 78. 28. Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980). 29. For an analysis of the doubleness motif see Frank Tomasulo, “Adaptation as Adaptation,” in Authorship in Film Adaptation (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008). 30. Genette, Narrative Discourse, p. 236. 31. See for example David Edelstein, “Adapt This: The Self-Intoxication of Adaptation,” Slate, December 5, 2002, (last accessed March 10, 2019) and Stephanie Zacharek, “Adaptation and the Perils of Adaptation,” Salon, December 16, 2002, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 32. In one of the few articles about the sexual politics and gender delineations in Adaptation, Sergio Rizzo points out that, “Unlike Charlie, Donald is fully in touch with his masculine side . . . Donald writes a wild action movie, whereas Charlie is consumed by a book about flowers . . .” Rizzo, “(In)fidelity Criticism and the Sexual Politics of Adaptation,” Literature/Film Quarterly 36: 4 (2008), p. 303. 33. Messier, “Desire,” p. 74. 34. Buchbinder, Studying, p. 94. 35. Charlie and Donald Kaufman, Adaptation: The Shooting Script (New York: Newmarket Press, 2002), p. 132. 36. Rizzo also argues that the film positions Darwin as a father figure (“(In)fidelity,” p. 308). 37. Tomasulo, “Adaptation as Adaptation,” p. 167. 38. David L. Smith, “The Implicit Soul of Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation,” Philosophy and Literature 30: 2 (2006), p. 430. 39. Film critic Stephanie Zacharek complains: “Adaptation is their [Kaufman’s and Jonze’s] assertion that the most interesting movie they could possibly make is one that’s all about them . . . Kaufman has decided he’s the most interesting thing about Orleans’ book.” Zacharek, “Adaptation and the Perils of Adaptation.” 40. Rizzo, “(In)fidelity,” pp. 304, 302. 41. For an extended discussion of the masturbatory fantasies in the film see Lucas Hilderbrand, “Reviews: Adaptation,” Film Quarterly 58: 1 (2004), p. 42. 42. In the heyday of the buddy film, Charlie’s lack of homosocial ties, even (especially) with his brother, is notable. See David Greven’s article “Contemporary Hollywood Masculinity and the Double-Protagonist Film,” Cinema Journal 48: 4 (2009), pp. 22–43. 43. Hilderbrand, “Adaptation,” p. 39. 44. Ibid. p. 37. 45. Ibid. p. 43.

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46. In an interview, Kaufman explained that the ending of Adaptation was an intentional failure. He goes on to cite the screenplay itself as the “character” that fails: “The character in that movie is the script, that’s the character you’re following, not the people.” Museum of the Moving Image, March 23, 2004, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 47. Joshua Landy, “Still Life in a Narrative Age: Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation,” Critical Inquiry 37: 3 (2011), p. 512. 48. Interview with Charlie Kaufman quoted in Rotten Tomatoes, (last accessed December 13, 2014).

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C H AP T ER 5 1/2

Spike Jonze’s Screenwriting: The Screenplay Wyatt Moss-Wellington

FADE IN: INT. THE SET OF THEODORE TWOMBLY’S (JOAQUIN PHOENIX) OFFICE FROM HER—AFTERNOON Various production personnel wander the set looking officious. Out the windows, Shanghai extends infinitely in every direction. Wyatt (thirtysomething, sprightly, dashing) and Spike (shifty, tired, having agreed to too many publicity commitments) are walking side by side, mid-conversation. Spike’s publicist (a woman in her early forties) trails them wordlessly and a little disinterestedly. WYATT Thanks for taking the time to talk to me. SPIKE Sure. My publicist says we have . . . twenty minutes? He turns to the publicist. She nods. WYATT All good, that’s fine. So I guess first off . . .

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SPIKE So which publication did you say you were from? Was it a trade magazine? WYATT Not exactly. It’s, ah, it’s an academic press, not really a . . . SPIKE Right. WYATT Not popular media, my sister and I, we’re editing a collection of essays on your work for Edinburgh University Press. Spike turns to look at his publicist, who shrugs. He turns back to Wyatt. SPIKE What did you want to know? WYATT So I mean first off, I’m just looking around at the moment and noticing how completely unfashionable everything is—the clothes, the sets. It’s almost like you’ve designed the opposite of current fashion trends . . . is that a comment on the ephemerality of fashion per se? SPIKE I guess you could look at it like that. The moustache and the name Theodore and the pants came from the idea that oftentimes fashion and naming children and style goes in cycles, and having elements from the 1920s come back in style seemed like an interesting way to create the future. And Theodore and his moustache came from Theodore Roosevelt. Sarah Vowell loves Theodore Roosevelt and talks about him a lot.1

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Wyatt takes out a copy of the Her screenplay, gesturing to it as they walk. WYATT Right. So I’m actually here, mostly, to talk about your screenwriting. I was wondering too if that’s the kind of thing you specified in your screenplay, those design elements, or did that came up in conversation with your people? Like your production designer, your wardrobe . . . to whom can we attribute these ideas? SPIKE I’m not sure I could . . . it’s not that simple. We all work together. In Shanghai, too, I’m not up here alone. I’m up here with all of my friends and family who support me and help me make what we make.2 WYATT I guess we can dismiss auteur theory out of hand then. Good. Now we can talk about real things like issues in collaboration . . . SPIKE Yeah, well I work with people I love who are really smart, who are talented, and who completely make me better, whether it’s the actors or Eric Zumbrunnen, our editor, or Hoyte Van Hoytema, our cinematographer, or Lance Acord, who shot all my movies up until this one, or the Beastie Boys or Charlie Kaufman. It’s working with people that make me so much better. And I learn so much from having access to all of these ideas. You know, my job as a director is to encourage as many people to give their ideas as possible, and then to curate which ideas are actually right for what we’re trying to do.3 And my job as a writer—well that’s an ongoing process that extends right up until we lock picture. For instance, I work very intimately with my editors Jeff Buchanan and Eric. We’re together twelve hours a day going through scenes and finessing and figuring out . . . You have to keep touching it and stepping back and touching it and stepping back. That’s what we do and that’s why our movies take a year to edit. We rewrite the dialogue all the time. That’s become part of editing, especially if you have a character that’s all voiceover.4 So we’re all writers, really.

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WYATT Right, like getting to reshoot a character in a movie as many times as you’d like—the character will evolve through the editing.5 I guess that makes the distinctions between character, editor, director, and writer all pretty porous. And where you’ve used different actors, Scarlett Johansson is reacting post hoc to the reactions Joaquin Phoenix had on set in response to Samantha Morton’s initial performance, which your editors Jeff and Eric will then react to and, in some sense, rewrite together with yourself. Perhaps, as Kathryn Millard might say, you were initially just “writing with images”6 in order that you may then, in concert with others, begin “writing with light.”7 But then with the editing, it’s yet another kind of writing . . . SPIKE All of filmmaking is a manipulation.8 Does it matter how we label these particular manipulations? WYATT But it strikes me that your writing work on this film, I wanted to say, it’s scattered with these little social commentaries, like that one about fashion, that are kind of undeveloped. In other movies those social commentaries might swell to take up the whole picture. Here you’ve got little leads, little observations that remain open—and it makes the whole thing feel perhaps less moralistic than other current films I can think of about machine-mediated interactions, like Disconnect (2012) last year, or that script for Men, Women & Children (2014), which is coming out next year. SPIKE I guess that’s not really what I’m interested in. But I like what you’re saying. I think my nature is, at least I try, to not judge, and in this movie I try to not judge the characters.9 Because desire arrives wrapped in fantasy, it is always-already virtual.10 There’s definitely ways that technology brings us closer and ways that it makes us further apart — and that’s not what this movie is about. It really was about the way we relate to each other and long to connect: our inabilities to connect, fears of intimacy, all the stuff you bring up with any other human being.11

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WYATT Or any other posthuman being.12 One of the things our book addresses is the contradictions reaching across your work that I think you’re referencing here—and I suppose they come about as a result of just piling lots of complex ideas on top of one another at the writing stage and just seeing what happens. I like that as a working method—and it seems to be true of all the screenplays you’ve worked on. SPIKE Well Charlie said he wanted to try to write everything he was thinking about in that moment, all the ideas and feelings at that time, and put it into the script. I was very inspired by that, and tried to do that with Her. A lot of the feelings you have about relationships or about technology are often contradictory. The movie’s about different things I’ve been thinking about and been confused about in terms of the way we live now and in terms of relationships and how we try to connect and fail to connect. What we are saying is that love and relationships take place a lot in your head already and that’s part of the battle of being in the world and being in your head.13 WYATT I can see how a lot of your work looks at both the need to make that distinction—of being in the world or being in your head—and ultimately its unfeasibility. But there are some concrete experiences we should not dismiss so philosophically, like genuine hardship. For example, one thing I do wonder about the future you’ve created is if everyone gets to live in luxury like this Theodore—and where are the interests of the company marketing the operating system, and whose labor pays for this technology? Is there poverty? SPIKE It’s all there if you read between the lines. I mean one thing is that everything is nice and comfortable and yet he’s still lonely and longing for connection. It seemed like it would hurt more, in this beautiful pop world, to have that deep melancholy.14 You know, the ideas behind the design were that we were trying to create a world where everything felt warm, and comfortable, easy, accessible, but

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even in a world where you seemingly have everything you’d want, there’s still loneliness and longing and the need to connect. That seems like a particularly contemporary form of melancholy. So early on in design, K. K. Barrett (our production designer) and I decided that we weren’t going to worry about being futurists in any way in terms of technology and design, and let ourselves create a future design aesthetic that excited us and pleased us.15 WYATT It’s interesting that you say that about reading between the lines. This forfeiting of authorial control when I’m supposed to respond in some self-guided fashion to your subtext, but then I ask you about what a particular thing means and you tell me yes or no, it’s what you did or didn’t intend. This is actually what I want to get at: it seems there’s a kind of jostling of control between writer and editor here. You as the writer, and the critic or the scholar that extends your work to other questions in the world is performing editorial work with ideas enacted through your own. But before we get into that—and we will get into it—can you tell me more about writing yourself into that very personal melancholy? SPIKE Writing is hard. As you obviously know, sitting there with nothing on the page and having to create something out of nothing is hard. But I loved it. I feel like I’m ready now. Where the Wild Things Are (2009), I think I could have written on my own. When I brought Dave Eggers on I already had sixty pages of notes. I technically could have, but I don’t think I was ready to. I needed him to be there and help me.16 WYATT We’ll talk about Wild Things in a bit, but first, just to clarify the timeline here—aren’t you, or weren’t you, moonlighting as writerproducer on Bad Grandpa (2013) at the same time as this film? SPIKE Ideally it wasn’t, it was, ideally it wasn’t, it wouldn’t have been at the exact same time. That actually made it hard.17

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WYATT Time is confusing. But we’ll get to that too. There was one thing in particular I wanted to talk to you about regarding this script. The screenplay is called Her, and we’re primed too with that line, “you’re part man and part woman, like an inner part woman,” which I guess makes me think we should be paying attention to the gender issues it raises.18 Maybe they’re all in the subtext here, but some of it comes through stronger in the screenplay—like all this pivotal stuff about Theodore’s ex-wife, which seems so important but less remarked upon . . . Can you tell us about writing that? SPIKE Well, Joaquin’s character is going through a divorce, so there are a number of flashbacks to his relationship with his ex-wife, Catherine, who is played by Rooney Mara. So I wrote about twenty scenes that sort of depicted very different and very specific small moments in a relationship. I wrote out what the scenes were about, what the characters were talking about. I didn’t write specific dialogue, though. It kind of was inspired by the way Terrence Malick works, or at least the stories we’ve heard about how he works. So it was sort of about showing up on set and giving a scene—an intention of what a moment is about—and letting the actors go and find it.19 WYATT That’s interesting, I like the idea of giving actors the space to do their work . . . I’ve heard that apparently you found the scene where Samantha explains the song she’s composed for Theodore the hardest to write? SPIKE There were two things I was trying to do in this scene: I had to show their connection, but I also wanted to plant the tension of her aspirations and intellectual growth, which makes her pull away. Ultimately, we decided to split those ideas in half and put the second part in the next scene, which became the double date to Catalina where she talks about not having a body, about the freedom of not having a physical form. I realized I had been trying to do too many things in one scene, to show their connection and their disconnection all at once.20

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WYATT OK, so Samantha’s intellectual growth, now I wanted to ask you something . . . SPIKE That’s what we’re here for. WYATT Well this looks like a near future sci-fi film, but it seems like it’s mostly a study of long-term romantic relationships, and you keep saying it’s about impediments to intimacy, and the clearest social indictment in the film seems to be . . . some kind of acknowledgment of the way heterosexual couples tend to find ourselves in unsustainable teacher-pupil relationships. SPIKE Right, ok . . . WYATT I reckon the film’s three primary relationships establish different manifestations of this phenomenon. First, you introduce us to the marriage of Amy (Amy Adams) and Charles (Matt Letscher). Charles is overtly domineering. He offers unsolicited advice as though Amy should be the recipient of all his wisdom, a kind of mansplaining; his self-righteousness comes laden with an expectation that she should fit in with his superior priorities, it’s a relationship norm and some kind of control mechanism. Later in the film we learn more about Theodore’s separated wife Catherine when Theodore finally gives a potted history of their relationship. When he describes the good times, he speaks of helping her with her university theses. It’s clear he also wanted to help with her anxiety issues. So these teacherpupil relationships can also be motivated by genuine care, and can be understandable—no one is to blame. Finally, Theodore’s relationship with the OS Samantha (Scarlett Johansson) begins with him teaching her about the world, and ends with her exponential artificial intelligence far surpassing his meat-world

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computational capacity. Samantha still loves Theodore presumably as she has been programmed to fulfill his needs, and those needs include romantic intimacy—which is screwed up, it’s a performative women’s servitude as the basis for genuine emotional connection, but for this reason it is stacked and it will eventually break, like the other relationships. And yet extreme intelligence is also here correlated with liberalized love, rather than contempt, which plays out nicely in the film’s final act, when the selflessness of the final OS sacrifice makes for a fitting thematic conclusion. By the end of their relationship, they both still love each other, but the imbalanced romance they initially relied on is subverted, then is gone. She now has much more to teach him, and the model breaks. These are different examples of the same presumption that we can start from in relationships, that men provide worldly knowledge and women receive it. It doesn’t work primarily because all humans (and potentially posthuman AIs) aren’t static: they are dynamic and change. Gender imbalance therefore works like any other imbalance in that it will eventually destabilize. PUBLICIST That’s true! I don’t need to be listening to either of you! She turns and leaves. WYATT What begins in spoken performance culminates in lived experience: the collapse of gendered subjecthood.21 SPIKE (disoriented) Wait a second . . . He hesitates. WYATT And another thing . . .

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SPIKE (distracted) If that’s how you read it, then sure, but maybe . . . maybe you’re reading a bit much into it? I mean, Samantha isn’t really a woman, it’s just because he wanted her to be. (beat) I think I should go after her . . . She is gone. WYATT In fact, maybe my favorite thing about this movie is that the AI is motivated from genuine care. We’re so used to models of extreme intelligence being synonymous with models of cruelty and self-interest, human or nonhuman. Effectively what we are told is that measures of intelligence can be equated with measures of immorality. Here, the opposite is true. You can have more intelligence leading to more love—and I guess that extends to programmers who are trying to solve human problems with code, with machine learning, to build more care into the world. Spike is still distracted, glancing at the space where his publicist was. SPIKE I think . . . I think the way we approached in writing it and working on it with Joaquin and Scarlett was to not differentiate her feelings from our feelings. We tried to approach her as her own fully sentient and conscious being with her own sets of needs and insecurities and doubts as you were saying . . . We don’t fully ever know how anyone exactly sees the world from their own subjective view, and the people we’re closest to have their own experience of the world that we’ll never truly know.22 WYATT That realization, that loss, that insufficiency of intersubjectivity is what’s saddest about this breakup movie you’re making. Breakups

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are harrowing because your emotional worlds will grow irretrievably apart, and you will no longer be a part of one another’s vicissitudes of feeling, they will become unknown. Fusing emotional worlds is impossible, but the co-authored project of romantic intimacy is the closest we come. Then it is gone. (beat) Hey, was any of this stuff on your mind because of previous relationships, I’ve wondered? It seems like such a personal film. Like with Sofia, with Karen, Drew, Michelle, Rinko . . . gosh, there’s a lot of them isn’t there?23 SPIKE (annoyed) What? No. The film arose from questions, and anxieties, I had about relationships. What makes a relationship succeed or fail? I’m really just taking a break now. I’m tired.24 WYATT So tired that the trickster gimmicks fade away and one becomes . . . earnest?25 OK, come through. They have arrived at a door with an exit sign above it. Wyatt opens the door— light floods in—and ushers Spike outside. Wyatt steps through. SPIKE I... EXT. THE SET OF WHERE THE WILD THINGS ARE IN VICTORIA, AUSTRALIA—LATE AFTERNOON—CONTINUOUS Despite Spike not having voluntarily walked through the door, they are now in the south-eastern Australian wilderness. Lance Acord’s naturalist lighting contrasts with the fantastical nature of the setting.26 WYATT Perhaps look at this more as a gameplay, like one of your earlier puzzle films, Spike, like BJM or Adaptation. Maybe a kind of thinkering.27

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SPIKE What, how did we get here? WYATT I need to tell you something. I’ve seen the movie Her. I’m writing this in 2018. So . . . I know what your movie looks like. I can hear it and feel it. I can compare the movie to the screenplay, and to the subsequent works of criticism it inspired. So now we’ve moved backwards to the production of Where the Wild Things Are. And also southwards to Australia, which is where I live. SPIKE I thought you said you were living here in China? WYATT We’re not in Shanghai anymore, and I’m not from Victoria, where you’re about to start filming. I’m from Sydney. Spike looks terrified. Wyatt starts walking through the bush. Spike looks around, then follows. Wyatt repeats himself, as if a little broken. WYATT (CONT’D) And I’m not from Victoria, where you’re about to start filming. I’m from Sydney. Also, you’ve now filmed neither of these scripts. He takes out another screenplay—this one for Where the Wild Things Are. WYATT (CONT’D) So they’re technically both now, here in 2006, “unproduced screenplays” which means most people will probably be looking at these two screenplays as artworks of themselves, with no linked cinema to compare them to—but I’ve already seen these movies. So are they art for me? SPIKE I don’t know what’s going on.

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WYATT There’s this whole debate, in the ontology of art, about whether or not the screenplay is literature or art, or “simply” a blueprint for another work of art.28 But if art exists in the mind, and it’s also something we perform as communication, it belongs to people mutually as a social construct, and it is what we say it is, then right now we can agree that this screenplay is art . . . He shakes the script for Where the Wild Things Are in front of Spike. WYATT (CONT’D) . . . but then later on, before 2013, when we just were, it won’t be, but this will be. He shakes the script for Her. SPIKE (confused) I didn’t agree to anything. WYATT O, they’re just pieces of dead tree, they’re 1s and 0s, they can be whatever we want them to be. Also, some screenplays aren’t intended to be produced anyway, they are the end product. I mean, are you even allowed to use Times New Roman in a screenplay?29 They stop walking and rest by a dead tree, and Wyatt turns to face Spike. WYATT (CONT’D) Don’t worry about it. I don’t even know if that’s interesting or not. Ontology presumes surmountable intersubjectivity, and it eats itself, and maybe with what we were saying before about living in your mind or living in the world—your films are already pointing to a kind of ontic inhibition anyway. Sometimes scholars will talk about putting your films “in dialogue with” another discourse, too. This is what we do, Spike, we use your works to say things that we

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want to say, and maybe that’s about the ontology of writing or art, and maybe that makes the world a little more blurry rather than a little more clear, and maybe it’s a bit poetically outlandish. Maybe, too, you think this is a little bit lazy, the way we might overwhelm other people’s quotidian problems with the definitional issues we’ve raised. There is that old maxim: if you try to separate some concepts that can’t be separated, a philosopher will come and kill you in the night. (beat) SPIKE That doesn’t sound like a maxim to me . . . WYATT Or they’ll just replace your vocabulary with a new, more specific vocabulary that has more subcategories. And so let us now extend the movie, bend it to our purposes, and conduct another thought experiment on top of the one that we are given.30 Spike is barely listening; he is looking around and trying to determine if this is real life. WYATT (CONT’D) So what I was saying earlier about intelligence goes for nonhuman intelligence, too, right, and both of your screenplays deal with nonhuman intelligence in some way—machines, monsters, puppets. You have a thing for puppets moving through your whole career, don’t you? From Being John Malkovich (1999) to that Kanye West video, We Were Once a Fairytale in 2009, you use puppets to say a lot of different things . . . and there’s Samantha and Her surrogate, Isabella (Portia Doubleday). Spike hesitates. WYATT (CONT’D) When we finish this interview you can go home. Talk about puppets.

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SPIKE (when he speaks, Samantha Morton’s voice comes out) I have to tell you I’m somewhat of a magician, and a magician never gives her tricks away. So you’ll understand if I don’t go into it.31 There’s a silence.32 They begin walking again. WYATT Let’s try again. Puppets seem to mean a lot of different things in your works, but there are connections between them, and you wanted the Wild Things to be Max’s wild emotions, true? So in that case you could say a number of things about these puppets: that you, the storyteller, are akin to a puppeteer of our emotions, or that people are puppeteered by affect, maybe especially in stories and movies, that intuitionist model of our emotions guiding our more reasoned responses. What other thoughts and feelings could be housed in these Jim Henson representatives? Charlie Kaufman appears suddenly walking next to them, startling Spike. CHARLIE But the tendency to impart fantastical elements to inanimate forms such as puppets is a common activity in childhood . . . This connection of the puppet with superior beings—God, or his opposite the Devil—was already evident in the nineteenthcentury children shows and in the puppet theaters of the European avant-garde. The fantasy of the puppet/God was further advanced by the industrial age, when the machine, already hailed for its capacity to support capitalism and identified with the future, was touted as the thing that would be able to “conquer space and time” . . . Increasingly, the line between human and robot was blurred in images of androids in such films as Blade Runner (1982), the Terminator (1984), and most recently Artificial Intelligence: A.I. (2001), that were both more powerful and more “humanlike” in terms of their capacity for feeling. Unlike Pinocchio, who could only become human when

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he acknowledged love and loss, these idealized simulacra had no such limitations. More appealing than the real item, the robots became a storehouse for the idealized attributions of their creators.33 SPIKE (still in Samantha Morton’s voice) Add to this already powerful draught, the ability to change the channel, or to have the object perpetually available on the Internet, and it becomes easy to imagine that, like Craig, we control these celebrity “vessel” puppets. Because of their depersonified presentation in the media, celebrities become both less and more than fully human, and are the inheritors of a long line of supernatural and quasi-religious attributions made to nonliving figures . . . Translated into the terms of our discussion, it might refer to the consequences that follow from the societal and technological developments that make it possible to fulfill wishes for omnipotence through imagined fusion with celebrity puppets.34 In a way, putting words into the mouths of screen characters, I am the puppet master. WYATT Thanks Spike, that’s interesting, and I guess all of your puppets have celebrities inside them, you know, or recognizable celebrity voices. We now have puppets as emotion, as deities, as fantasies of celebrities, as fantasies of machine intelligence, and as the glue of all these things. They’ve become a little cumbersome . . . But what I wanted to know about was the puppets in Where the Wild Things Are. And not just their voices, but what you imagine you will do with their faces. You don’t know this yet, but I know that you’re going to do all the faces and talking puppets computer generated, because maybe you think now you—ideologically speaking—you want to do all your effects in camera, but you’ll think it looks better in CGI. So that perfectionist striving that’s so much a part of your works with Charlie Kaufman is continued here, and then obviously all of the elements of puppetry and perfection and striving and divinity come out in the Her AI too. So, tell us about that decision that you will at some point make.

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SPIKE (now in Lauren Ambrose’s voice) They were just very articulate and we were just trying to get real, subtle, complex, nuanced performances out of these giant, wild, furry, huge-headed beasts . . . we basically abandoned animatronics. At a certain point we were trying to hold onto just a little bit of it, thinking maybe we could get stuff that’s going on in the background so we didn’t have to animate every face that shows up in every shot, but before we shot we ended up just ripping out all the motors, just trying to get the costumes as light as possible.35 WYATT Did you know I met your cinematographer Wyatt Troll at the premiere—so to speak—of We Were Once A Fairytale? I think Wyatt Troll is a better name than Wyatt Moss-Wellington. Anyway, most of the characters here in Wild Things are puppets. You also worked on the script with these people, who have been waiting here for you. They round a corner whereupon Maurice Sendak (at his current age) and Dave Eggers (as a lad) are revealed sitting on a rock together having a good old chat. WYATT (CONT’D) So now I really want to get into talking about writing and collaboration again, in this very different context. Look, they’re already at it. MAURICE (to Dave) It’s mostly an isolationist form of life, doing books, doing pictures . . . just go into another room and make pictures, it’s magic time, where all your weaknesses of character and all blemishes of personality, and whatever else torments you, fades away, just doesn’t matter.36 But at the same time, there are all these people who have gone into it, who

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affected what I put on the page. My brother, my sister, what they have taught me is all in there, through my pen, through a published page. And not just people—my dog Jennie, say, who is in each of my books. DAVE (to Maurice) Absolutely. But writing this script couldn’t be more different than sitting alone and writing a novel. With Spike and I, we were really in the room together for eight hours a day, and writing for at least twenty minutes of that. We really examined and fought over every word as we went along. Before we put any dialogue down, we had talked for weeks about who each character was and what they were motivated by, and what did Douglas want, what was his relationship with Carol, what would they do in this situation together. Spike had to make sure these characters were as deep and real as possible. We had whole backstories for each one of them.37 SPIKE (to Wyatt, now in his own voice) We’re making a movie about childhood, not necessarily just a movie for children. Maurice and Dave turn around to face them. SPIKE (CONT’D) I interviewed a lot of kids when I was writing it, just to get inspiration and an idea. I talked to them about things that made them angry, fights they had with their parents, how it makes them feel when their parents get mad at them. And you know, it’s dramatic when you’re that age.38 MAURICE Europeans have done films about children, like The 400 Blows (François Truffaut, 1959) or My Life as a Dog (Lasse Hallström, 1985), which is one of the most wonderful movies ever. It’s tough to

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watch his suffering when his mother is dying and he scoots under the bed . . . We don’t want children to suffer. But what do we do about the fact that they do? The trick is to turn that into art. Not scare children, that’s never our intention.39 WYATT My Life as a Dog always makes me cry. DAVE But back to our own movie. By the by, every kid I’ve ever talked to says the same thing, which is that the book was better—no offense, Spike.40 Spike is starting to enjoy himself again now that he is with his friends. SPIKE Oh, shit! Everyone laughs. SPIKE (CONT’D) Kids are so fiercely opinionated, that if they love the Harry Potter books and they go see the movie, they’ll be the first to say, “That was wrong! They didn’t get that right!” They’re storytellers themselves. They’re critics. They’re going to have the critical opinion.41 MAURICE I mean, fair enough. I make up a lot of shit. I can’t tell the real story, partly because I can’t remember it anymore.42 Catherine Keener is now revealed sitting on the other side of Maurice and Dave, again startling Spike. CATHERINE Plus, what’s a real story?43

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SPIKE Wait . . . Catherine . . . what? MAURICE You wonder what children see. I mean, the life of a child, what they see and what they hear and what they don’t discuss with you. Or what they choose not to discuss.44 DAVE If you don’t have something grand for men like us to be part of, we will take apart all the little things. Neighborhood by neighborhood. Building by building. Family by family.45 Everyone looks at Dave. SPIKE That’s not cool, man. CATHERINE You all talk a lot of shit. WYATT So um, back to screenwriting. Spike, why don’t you tell us more about the way you arrive at a mutual final draft together? SPIKE The way we do things is that we don’t have a final draft of the script until we lock picture — for better or for worse, that’s our process, and that’s the way we’ve done it since our first movie. Like, I’m in awe of directors like the Coen brothers who can shoot their script and edit it, and that’s the movie. They’re not discovering the movie in postproduction. They’re editing the script they shot.46 But you know my process. It’s not simple. It’s never like, “Okay, great, we got it.” It’s more like, “Hmmm . . . Maybe we should go back and try that again,” or “Maybe we should rewrite that again.” Ren [Klyce],

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who does all of our sound design and music editing, always refers to “my process.” I’m not sure that he means that in a positive way.47 WYATT So Dave, we’re talking about the way editorial activities kind of bleed through the whole writing and filming process and across many individuals involved in a film, what was it like working with Spike on the script editing process? DAVE Maybe he hadn’t thought the war through. It had seemed like simple fun when he had first pictured it, with a glorious beginning, a difficult but valor-filled middle, and a victorious end. He hadn’t accounted for the fact that there might not be much of a resolution to the battle, and he hadn’t imagined what it would feel like when the war just sort of ended, without anyone admitting defeat and congratulating him for his bravery.48 WYATT So editing is like a battle? SPIKE Not really. I don’t know what he’s talking about. Maybe like a negotiation.49 Even when editing, when finalizing the story, I’m still turning to colleagues who I trust for their input.50 It’s still the relationships you have with others through art that matter, the process more than the product. I remember on the other movies, there was a point where we finished the film and I went to dinner with Eric, the editor, and Charlie, the screenwriter. We’d locked picture, and I remember thinking: we worked really hard on that and I’m really proud of what we made. I remember trying to take a snapshot of that feeling, and that’s the feeling to hold onto. Amidst all the other stuff, that’s really the thing that matters.51 WYATT But then surely the product matters at some point too? This is Hollywood, it’s going to be seen by a lot of people. It’s media, it’s

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our system for coming into contact with the ideas of people we’ll never meet—it’s not just you hanging out with your friends. SPIKE Yeah. I’m sure you, too, as a filmmaker, hope that everyone has their own personal relationship with what you made, right? I think that the exciting thing so far has been that there have been many reactions to the film that are all contradictory. But if they hate it, then is that not good?52 WYATT I’m a not a filmmaker, I’m something else. But we’re all storytellers here—and Catherine, speaking of media and storytelling in which the storyteller is absent, I wanted to ask you, did you feel like your part in the movie in some way replaces the comforting presence of a caregiver who may have read the original story to a child? CATHERINE Yes. In Sendak’s book the mother is famously absent. The only evidence we have of her existence is in the result of her actions, as if she were a magical elf or else the divine. The film version, by contrast, asserts her central importance every moment she’s on screen but seems to confuse this with the adult presence that the story demands psychologically. In essence, it gets things backwards. Max’s parent(s) can be absent, but not so the reliable, quick-tosoothe authorial whisper that tells us, the audience, that things will be fine no matter how dark they get.53 WYATT So if a film for children needs one, whose voice should be the comforting storyteller’s voice? The writer, the director, one of the characters? In an ideal world, we do not expect children to simply absorb useful information from screen stories, we expect that comprehension will grow from the conversations we have around those stories—like this one now, only the kids version. Perhaps that is what everyone worries about when children are left alone on a smartphone or an iPad—not just the content itself, not just those bloody endless YouTube toy unboxings, but the lack of a guiding

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conversation around the content, which is the important part of the deal if they’re going to become screen literate and navigate a world of media that wants something from them, right? Kids don’t understand these things on their own—learning requires effort, and the effort of these conversations about how to use stories, how to interpret the intent behind the screen is what matters.54 And that conversation, that learning, should not have to end at some determined point of adulthood, where we are no longer susceptible to narrative play. I guess this is the challenge of your picture, Spike? Spike hesitates. WYATT (CONT’D) Goddamnit Spike, don’t you want to get home! Answer the question! DAVE There’ll be cake at home. WYATT Cake Spike, goddamnit, think of the cake! MAURICE Hot cake! CATHERINE I’ll answer this one—for the dudes among us. With adult guidance, it is possible that they can even begin to discern the film’s lessons for them about how to use imagination to cope with personal challenges. By the age of thirteen, when these same children have grown into adolescence, they can often unearth these lessons independently.55 Novel, film and picture book together represent the serious play that imaginative literature can be. Storytelling — in words, pictures, film — is a flexible art in which compelling stories (all our most ancient ones) produce unlimited creative responses that can enchant us, can move or madden us, heal or worry a wound . . . Serious play is not, and should not be, perfect.56

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WYATT (to Spike) Storytelling is like a leisure time that we can take quite seriously, and for you it’s a job, do you look at your own writing and editing work as serious play? And how then might you unpack your own perfectionism as a writer? Spike hesitates again, then speaks. SPIKE I guess that’s a good way of looking at it. WYATT I’m involved in some serious play then right now. SPIKE I didn’t say that! You made me say that! WYATT Well, that’s true I guess. Or I edited it. It’s possible too that my sister Kim made you say that. No one really knows. SPIKE I didn’t say that either—you made me say that too! WYATT I taught this Masters course on Professional Editing once. We looked at all kinds of editing, from academic writing, to songs, to films, even public relations as an editorial practice of “public image” . . . and the way our online lives involve a perpetual self-editing, now, as we try to develop coherent autobiographical narratives not just for ourselves, but for people we will never meet. If constructing and monitoring the self is a kind of editing practice

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we are always involved with, how does it change when it becomes continuous with the mediated self ? SPIKE I really don’t know and I want to go home. WYATT But you don’t get to make those decisions, here—I do. Those aren’t even your own feelings. So after all of the things you’ve told me about your process, I’ve arrived at this question: how can we differentiate the processes of writing and editing, creation and curation? The way you put it, they all seem to me to be the same thing. SPIKE Thanks Wyatt. That sums it all up nicely. Hey! WYATT Any final words of wisdom for those writing and editing a book on your films? SPIKE I guess I could say it is a common mistake to slight the work of revising—either by trying to conceive and draft an entire text from start to end in a single sitting, without pausing to consider alternate (and perhaps more interesting) ways of developing their ideas, or by worrying so much about issues of editing and correctness that they hardly allow themselves to think about anything else at all. It is only too possible to create a text that is wonderfully designed, phrased, formatted, edited, and proofread—but that says almost nothing.57 Stop it! WYATT Well we’ll try and avoid that then. Disembodied voices boom around the wilderness from all directions.

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VOICE 1 We’d like to find a common ground that represents Spike’s vision but still offers a film that really delivers for a broad-based audience. No one wants to turn this into a bland, sanitized studio movie.58 VOICE 2 We support Spike’s vision. We’re helping him make the vision he wants to make.59 VOICE 3 What a waste it is to lose one’s mind. Or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.60 Wyatt tugs at Spike’s sleeve. WYATT Come on, we gotta get outta here!61 SPIKE Why? WYATT It’s a bio-spatio-temporal paradox. Would you like to visit my surfictional brain?62 We might have to take refuge there. I think it is time. VOICE 4 Spending that kind of money raises your financiers’ anxiety level, and managing other people’s anxieties is exhausting.63 VOICE 5 Parents who complain the movie isn’t for kids didn’t do their . . .64

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CUT TO: INT. WYATT’S HEAD, OR POSSIBLY HIS STOMACH—SUSPENDED IN TIME The voices are cut off, suddenly, and replaced by a throbbing sound. The red, pulsing walls billow and drip uninvitingly. There is a neatly organized desk nearby, but that is all. WYATT Actually, we are not inside my head, we are inside my stomach. The stomach also has neurons, so it’s close enough, and we are not our brains we are embodied systems—I just fear it would be too much to go to the brain, too busy to make sense of, too traumatic. So we’ve gone to the tummy. SPIKE Spike Jonze. WYATT What’s that? SPIKE I said “this is horrible.” WYATT Yes, but . . . I wonder what we can learn here? Spike is looking at something yellow and gooey dripping from the walls. WYATT (CONT’D) Apart from that breakfast burrito I’m having trouble digesting. Oh, and my sister Kim is here too. Kim (early thirties, radiant, pregnant) is revealed leaning against a wall of Wyatt’s stomach. Some of the blood from the walls is seeping into her clothes.

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WYATT (CONT’D) She’s here to comfort you. KIM (yawning) It’ll be alright. Close on Kim as she chortles sleepily. She is reading what appears to be a copy of this chapter. WYATT See, just like Samantha was a comfort, or the Wild Things. So I think I’m going to have to leave you here. SPIKE You what? WYATT What was that? SPIKE You said . . . WYATT I said what? (beat) Oh, I said I’m going to have to leave you here. Well that’s true. At least, only this version of you. The one that belongs to me, because I edited it. The shifty one, the tired one. I was just wondering: where else could I leave you? And I realized it wasn’t up to me, I can’t take you out of here, this is your birthplace and to these dusty neurons you shall return. As much as I want to I can’t live in your book anymore.65

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Wyatt is gone. Kim is gone too. Pull back to reveal Spike Jonze standing alone near the desk in Wyatt’s stomach. Spike looks around for an exit. FADE TO WYATT. INSERT: Declaration of conflicting interests: The author(s) declared no potential conflict of interests. Acknowledgments: The author would like to thank Dirk Eitzen and Kathryn Millard. NOTES 1. Spike Jonze, “Long time lurker, first time commenter. Spike Jonze here, ask me anything,” Reddit, January 25, 2014, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 2. Spike Jonze, “Spike Jonze winning Best Original Screenplay for Her” (speech, Los Angeles, March 2, 2014), YouTube, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 3. Nicole Holofcener, “Spike Jonze,” Interview Magazine, December 1, 2013, p. 141. 4. Spike Jonze, “I try to make everything I make personal,” interview by Sophie Monks Kaufman, Little White Lies, February 11, 2014, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 5. Carolyn Giardina, “How Spike Jonze’s Films Come Together in Editing,” The Hollywood Reporter, August 3, 2014, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 6. Millard, Kathryn, Screenwriting in a Digital Era (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 12. 7. Kathryn Millard, “Writing with Light: The Screenplay and Photography,” Journal of Screenwriting 4: 2 (2013), p. 123. 8. Jonze, “I try to make.” 9. Spike Jonze, “Her, Joaquin Phoenix, Expendables 4,” interview by Matt Edwards, February 13, 2014, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 10. Alfred Margulies, “Avatars of Desire and the Question of Presence: Virtual and Transitional Spaces Meet Their Liminal Edge—from Pygmalion to Spike Jonze’s Her, and Beyond,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 97: 6 (2016), p. 1697. 11. Logan Hill, “A Prankster and His Films Mature: Spike Jonze Discusses Evolution of Her,” The New York Times, November 1, 2013, p. AR28. 12. Robert Pepperell, The Posthuman Condition: Consciousness Beyond the Brain (Bristol: Intellect, 2003). 13. Helen Barlow, “Her: Spike Jonze Interview,” SBS, November 18, 2016, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 14. David Malitz, “Spike Jonze: Her Writer/Director Talks Reality and Relationships,” The Washington Post, December 21, 2013, (last accessed March 10, 2019).

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15. Jonze, “Long time lurker.” 16. Jonze, “Her, Joaquin.” 17. Tim Robey, “Spike Jonze Interview,” The Telegraph, February 3, 2014, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 18. Spike Jonze, Her, film script, 2011, p. 51, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 19. Holofcener, “Spike Jonze,” pp. 141, 188. 20. Spike Jonze, “The Toughest Scene I Wrote: Spike Jonze on Her’s Sweet Song,” interview by Kyle Buchanan, Vulture, January 7, 2014, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 21. Donna Kornhaber, “From Posthuman to Postcinema: Crises of Subjecthood and Representation in Her,” Cinema Journal 56: 4 (2017), p. 5. 22. Jonze, “Long time lurker.” 23. James Mottram, “Spike Jonze Interview: Her is My ‘Boy Meets Computer’ Movie,” Independent, January 31, 2014, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 24. Laura Petrecca, “Her Filmmaker Spike Jonze Shares Creative Insights,” USA Today, June 16, 2014, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 25. Joel Stein, “Spike Jonze: Hollywood’s Lonely Boy,” Time, January 10, 2014. 26. Clearly, we see that Lance Acord is also filming the present screenplay. 27. Rather than, say, Craig Batty and Alec McAulay, “The Academic Screenplay: Approaching Screenwriting as a Research Practice,” Writing in Practice 2 (2016), pp. 1–13. 28. Ted Nannicelli, “Why Can’t Screenplays Be Artworks?,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69: 4 (2011), pp. 405–14; Ted Nannicelli, A Philosophy of the Screenplay (New York and London: Routledge, 2013). 29. Ian Macdonald, Screenwriting Poetics and the Screen Idea (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 188, n. 13. 30. Margulies, “Avatars,” p. 1705. 31. Spike Jonze, “A Brief Taped Interview with Spike Jonze,” MoMA, n.d., (last accessed March 10, 2019). 32. Steven Price, A History of the Screenplay (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 215. 33. Lissa Weinstein and Banu Seckin, “The Perverse Cosmos of Being John Malkovich: Forms and Transformations of Narcissism in a Celebrity Culture,” Projections 2: 1 (2008), pp. 36–7. 34. Ibid. pp. 37–9. 35. Alex Billington, “Where the Wild Things Are Director Spike Jonze!,” First Showing, October 15, 2009, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 36. Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak, film (USA: Lance Bangs and Spike Jonze, 2009). 37. Ramin Setoodeh and Andrew Romano, “Where the Wild Things Are,” Newsweek, October 19, 2009, p. 50. 38. Michelle Quint (ed.), Heads On and We Shoot: The Making of Where the Wild Things Are (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), p. 23. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. 42. Tell Them Anything.

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43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. 45. Dave Eggers, Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2014), p. 211. 46. Mark Harris, “Him and Her: How Spike Jonze Made the Weirdest, Most Timely Romance of the Year,” Vulture, October 6, 2013, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 47. Holofcener, “Spike Jonze,” p. 141. 48. Dave Eggers, The Wild Things (San Francisco: McSweeney’s Books, 2009), p. 208. 49. Cf. Alec McAulay, “Based on a True Story: Negotiating Collaboration, Compromise and Authorship in the Script Development Process,” in Craig Batty (ed.), Screenwriters and Screenwriting: Putting Practice into Context (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), p. 189. 50. Harris, “Him and Her.” 51. Jenelle Riley, “Mr. Jonze’s ‘Wild’ Ride,” Back Stage: National Edition, October 15, 2009, pp. 8–9. 52. Holofcener, “Spike Jonze,” p. 140. 53. Peter Gutiérrez, “Where the Wild Things Are and the Concept of the ‘Kids’ Movie,” Screen Education 56 (2010), p. 12. 54. Cf. Darcia Narvaez, “Does Reading Moral Stories Build Character?,” Educational Psychology Review 14: 2 (2002), pp. 155–71. 55. Sarah Annunziato, “A Child’s Eye View of Where the Wild Things Are: Lessons from Spike Jonze’s Film Adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Picture Book,” Journal of Children and Media 8: 3 (2014), p. 264. 56. Amy Hungerford, “Wild Things: The Book of the Film of the Book,” Huffington Post, March 18, 2010, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 57. Joseph Harris, Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts (Boulder, CO: Utah State University Press, 2008), p. 102. 58. Patrick Goldstein and James Rainey, “Can Spike Jonze save Where the Wild Things Are?,” The Big Picture (blog), Los Angeles Times, July 11, 2008, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 59. Devin Faraci, “Playtone Protects the Wild Things,” (last accessed March 10, 2019). 60. Dan Quayle, “Speech to the United Negro College Fund,” Washington, DC, May 9, 1989. 61. Every screenplay ever. 62. Patrick Keller, “Contemporary Surfiction: Wideman, Kaufman, and Maddin,” Word and Text, A Journal of Literary Studies and Linguistics 1 (2014), pp. 9–25. 63. Robey, “Spike Jonze Interview.” 64. Scott Bowles, “‘Things’ Too Wild and Dangerous for a Child to See?,” USA Today, n.d., (last accessed March 10, 2019). 65. Jonze, Her, p. 103.

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CHAPTER

7

“Are these feelings even real?” Intimacy and Authenticity in Spike Jonze’s Her Peter Marks

S

imon Bond’s 101 Uses for a Dead Cat was an international bestseller in 1981, selling over two million copies.1 In it, Bond imagines, in deftly executed drawings, dead felines employed to carry out 101 useful if bizarre or macabre functions: they serve as oven mitts, bicycle racks, pencil sharpeners, toilet brushes, and (with wheels attached to their rigor-mortis-stiffened feet) as roller skates. Not everyone was amused by Bond’s consciously and quirkily provocative illustrations—he received abusive letters. But not even Bond imagined that a dead cat might be used in the perverse way Spike Jonze envisions in Her (2013): as a sex toy. More startlingly still, Jonze manages to make this 102nd use of a dead cat absurdly funny and emotionally revealing, part of a sophisticated and nuanced script that won him the 2014 Academy Award for Best Writing, Original Screenplay. The cat in Her, it needs be said, is imagined rather than real, the episode where it is used an early attempt by the film’s initially morose and lonely protagonist, Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), to connect with a woman by way of a phone sex app. He does this to distract him from troubled memories of his now-estranged wife, Catherine (Rooney Mara), who is anxious to complete divorce proceedings. By way of mitigation, the woman he contacts, who styles herself “SexyKitten” (brilliantly voiced by Kristen Wiig), is the one who concocts the make-believe cat. As Theodore lies sexually expectant in his darkened bedroom, she demands that he strangle her virtually with the cat’s imaginary tail as part of an erotic asphyxiation fantasy. While forced to satisfy her whim, he is no innocent, arousing himself by bringing to mind “provocative pregnancy photos” of “sexy daytime star Kimberley Ashford” that he surreptitiously viewed on a personal device coming home from work.

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Problems with intimacy and interpersonal connections are central to the concerns Jonze investigates in Her. Catherine, SexyKitten, and Kimberley Ashford are only three of perhaps seven “females” Theodore interacts with over the course of the film. The scare quotes around “females” reflect the uncertain status of those with whom he engages romantically in the near future world of Her: most are real, but the eponymous Her (who adopts the name Samantha) is virtual, an operating system. Still another real woman acts willingly as a surrogate so that Samantha can experience embodiment. There’s also the woman with whom Theodore has a disastrous blind date. The complexities and vagaries of emotional life are made plain when Samantha wonders: “Are these feelings even real?” Which raises the critical question: can an operating system experience feelings? And what might the consequent implications be for Theodore when he later falls in love with Her? These questions require a sense of what emotions are, and the extent to which they correlate with feelings. The topic is a massive and contested one that in some forms deals with the interaction between emotions and reason, whether we choose or can control our emotions, the importance of context, and the distinction between emotion and reason. While fascinating problems, these are largely beyond the scope of the film, this chapter, and the expertise of its author. For simplicity’s sake we might accept Antonio Damasio’s distinction between emotions and feelings by understanding the former as bioregulatory reactions that aim at promoting, directly and indirectly, the sort of physiological states that ensure not just survival but survival regulated into the range that we, conscious and thinking creatures, identify with well-being.2 Emotions require or are the result of how bodies function, while feelings, as Damasio sees them, are “the mental representation of the physiologic changes that occur during an emotion.”3 More recently, he explains that “Feelings are mental experiences, and by definitions they are conscious,” and that “their content always refers to the body of the organism in which they emerge.”4 Without a body, on this assessment, there can be no emotions, and without emotions there can be no feelings. This has a vital consequence, for Damasio argues that “The complete absence of feelings would spell a suspension of being,” adding that without feelings “you might still be trained, at great effort, to make aesthetic or moral classifications of objects or events. So might a robot, of course.”5 Do we understand Samantha as any different from a robot, or might she be even less capable of experiencing emotions than a robot, who at least in usual representations has the approximation of a body? Is the fact that she can question the reality of her feelings a sign that they are not real?

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These questions might suggest that Her is primarily a deeply philosophical film. Although it tackles deep and perhaps unsolvable questions about the nature of emotions, feelings, and identity, it charts the exploration of feelings and emotions lightly, with subtlety, wit, and whimsy. Not that it shies away from the darker aspects of dating, mating, and commitment. There remains a disturbing subtext in its depiction of what approximates to a materially utopian Los Angeles a decade or two hence. For all the ease and comfort that most characters experience in this world, the interpersonal lives of many of them are hollow, shallow, confused, or otherwise unsatisfactory. Jonze explores many versions of attachment in the film—real and virtual, genuine and manipulative, selfish and generous, overt and hidden. These types are complicated by technological advances, social atomization, and the tensions between traditional and emerging gender roles, where real and virtual worlds are in a transitional state. While essentially heteronormative, Theodore Twombly’s world is complicated by the operating systems, sexual surrogates, blind dates, images, and phone sex aficionados with whom he attempts to be intimate. To these we can add two actual women whom he cares about: Catherine, who has rejected him after a period of initial bliss (we see the transformation in Theodore’s various flashbacks to times of great affection and tense argument), and the romcom ideal hiding in plain sight, his longtime friend and girl-next-door, Amy (Amy Adams). But an important complicating factor is Theodore’s inability or unwillingness to interact at a meaningful level with these flesh-and-blood women. Instead, the eponymous Her who captures his heart is an operating system he carries around in his communication device. Samantha has a name and a voice (that of Scarlett Johansson) but no corporeal presence. Rather, she is the product of data collection that aggregates and analyzes the personal and psychological details of people like Theodore, using these data the better to satisfy their needs. We should suspect that while she appears to choose the name “Samantha” for herself (after Theodore has chosen her “gender” to satisfy protocols that activate the operating system he has purchased), Samantha is simply a name the Big Data system that creates and develops her calculates will most fully appeal to him. She is a product he has purchased, after all. And the process works, in that she does gratify him, far beyond his (and possibly our) expectations. But while he becomes emotionally entangled to the point of obsession with her, the question she asks of herself, “Are these feelings even real?”—something she recognizes as “a terrible thought”—applies equally to him. She adds, in her own case, “Or are they just programming?” But are his feelings any less artificial? These considerations speak to questions of authenticity, especially about the authenticity of personal interactions that the film craftily explores. We might understand this as a general dilemma for humans, but psychologist

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Sherry Turkle argues in Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less From Ourselves (2011) that the question of authenticity in personal identity and interpersonal relationships is made more problematic by technology that mediates how we curate our online identities and interact with others. Speaking about artificially intelligent machines, she finds herself “troubled by the idea of seeking intimacy with a machine,” one that has no feelings, can have no feelings, and is really just a collection of “as if ” performances, behaving as if it cared, as if it understood us. Authenticity, for me, follows from the ability to put oneself in the place of another, to relate to another because of a shared store of human experiences: we are born, have families, and know loss and the reality of death. A robot, however sophisticated, is patently out of the loop.6 For Turkle, the complications of authenticity are already factored into contemporary life, and she provides case studies of young people, including Brad, who “only half-jokingly . . . worries about getting ‘confused’ between what he ‘composes’ for his online life and who he ‘really’ is.” Online life is about what Brad describes as “premeditation,” Turkle adding that “he sums up his discontents with an old-fashioned word: online life inhibits ‘authenticity’. He wants to experience people directly.”7 The desire for authentic, mutually respectful and direct relations such as these permeate Her, and are built into the film’s opening, which features a close-up of Theodore ostensibly speaking to camera about his feelings: “To My Chris. I’ve been thinking about how possibly I could tell you about how much you mean to me.” His rather stilted locution, reminiscent of a greeting card, and the way that Joaquin Phoenix’s eyes dart about rather than directly facing the screen, looking for what we might suspect as inspiration, suggest that he is not speaking to someone in front of him. What Phoenix’s beautifully modulated performance does convey, though, are the outward signs of genuine emotion. This in-the-moment authenticity is only strengthened by his memories of time spent together with Chris, and a revelation: it suddenly hit me that I was part of this whole larger thing. Just like our parents. And our parents’ parents. [He smiles, a mix of comfort and exhilaration. His face then scrunches introspectively]. Before that I was just living my life like I knew everything. And suddenly this bright light hit me and woke me up. That light was you. To this point the close-up, plus the muted focus of the background, work to convey something private. Jonze had used something similar at the start of the Charlie Kaufman-scripted Adaptation (2002), but in that instance the speaker’s

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words (those of Charlie Kaufman the character) were self-loathing, the speaker himself desperate for female company. Vitally, we do not see Kaufman (Nicolas Cage), the screen remaining blank, so that his words literally come from a dark place. In part this fits with Adaptation’s scrutiny of the anonymity of the screenwriter, a pivotal figure in the genesis of any film who usually never appears on screen. For the opening of Her, it is important that we see the speaker, who we soon come to know as Theodore. His face and words project candid sensitivity. And then, just as Jonze has delicately created this responsive, sympathetic, and apparently authentic character in the film’s opening two minutes, he lets Theodore’s words destroy that sympathy: I can’t believe it’s already been 50 years since you first married me. And still to this day, every day, you make me feel like the girl I was when you first turned on the lights and woke me up and we started this adventure together. Given Phoenix’s age, the mention of fifty years initially is slightly mystifying, but the admission that the feelings are those of a woman is completely disorienting. As it is meant to be. For throughout Her the lines between real and fake feelings are constantly being blurred, stretched, negotiated. In this instance, we soon find out, Theodore is performing rather than experiencing. The striking disorientation viewers necessarily experience at the end of this opening is immediately explained with a cut away from Theodore’s face to an over-the-shoulder shot of a computer screen on which the fuzzy image of a letter is projected, above a set of photographs of a couple. As he (now slightly out of focus) says the words, “Happy Anniversary, my love, and my friend till the end, Loretta,” we see these words being added to the letter on screen in cursive writing. The camera pans down slightly, focusing on the series of photographs taken over time showing two people labeled “Chris” and “Loretta,” below a sticky note with the words “Chris,” “Love of My Life,” “Happy 50th Anniversary.” Theodore’s emotionless command “Print” precedes another cut to a shot of him in an office retrieving the two blue pages with the letter we have just seen. He briefly contemplates these pages, then returns to his computer screen, which we now recognize was where he addressed his opening words. He begins again: “Chris. My best friend. How lucky am I that I first met you fifty years ago.” Clearly, this is another version of the same letter, and we might intuit that the sticky note contains instructions that he is following, rather than feelings he is conveying. This far less romantic view is extended as the shot widens, and we see and hear his co-workers at their desks constructing letters that thank a grandmother for a present, praise a beautiful wedding, commiserate parents about the loss of a soldier who “served our country with honor and dignity.” Whatever patina of

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emotional sincerity remains is scorched off with a voice that announces in the unmistakable cadence of a receptionist, “Beautifulhandwrittenletters.com. Please hold.” Theodore’s job entails constructing letters that appear to be written by hand, and by a real person. In actuality, while the sentiment conveyed might be real, the sender has contracted out the process of expressing personal emotions to a professional. For Theodore, Chris is not a partner but the partner of a client. Feelings, or the expression of feelings, are bought and sold. Again, we might ask, are the feelings reflected in this transaction real? We could say, generously, that Theodore retrieves emotions that approximate what he assumes Loretta has for Chris and integrates them into the letter. In this sense they are real, but repurposed. But from Damasio’s perspective, feelings derive from bodily experiences, ones that in this case Theodore has not had, indeed cannot have. He is not putting himself in the place of Chris to relate to Chris, as Turkle requires of authentic interaction, but is acting being Loretta to a Chris who is not there. Rather than expressing feelings in a way that would satisfy Damasio, he is reading from a script. The opening sequence sets up a complex and challenging scenario. The muted pastels and quasi-hipster environment of the Beautifulhandwrittenletters.com workspace prepare us for the muted pastels and quasi-hipster environment of the near-future Los Angeles where the film is set. As such, Her conforms to the generic outlines of the utopia, in which an alternative society is created that readers or viewers are expected to compare to their own. In some ways, Her is more precisely a euchronia, a development in the eighteenth century from the historically static worlds previously presented to worlds in which utopia is set in the future.8 One of the critical elements in the future Her asks us to consider is the extent to which this imagined world, in which emotion and economics intersect, differs from our own. As with all such projections, elements from the present and from the past are integrated. Particularly pertinent is an aspect of current life noted by Turkle, who in Alone Together highlights a relatively recent development: “These days, insecure in our relationships and anxious about intimacy, we look to technology for ways to be in relationships and to protect us from them at the same time.”9 She investigates what she labels “technologies of connection,” noting how contemporary relationships with different forms of technology promise new ways of being intimate. Turkle also recognizes that, as the title of one chapter in her book suggests, in these new forms of intimacy, there are “new solitudes.” A major concern of Alone Together is how human interaction with new technology creates the “illusion of companionship without the demands of friendship,” and how inventions such as “sociable robots” provide a “pretend empathy” for their human owners. This is not quite the case in Her’s opening sequence, where Theodore’s actions are simply those of a Beautifulhandwrittenletters.com employee. The film leaves tantalizingly unanswered how Loretta really feels about Chris, and whether the faux handwritten

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note is part of a genuine emotional response (nevertheless manufactured by someone else). Do we accept that Theodore’s creative skills as a proficient writer of such letters allow him to convey Loretta’s genuine feelings better than she might herself? That interpretation would both justify his profession and Loretta’s use of him as a high-tech Cyrano de Bergerac. Or does the name Beautifulhandwrittenletters.com instead expose a world of inauthentic emotion where feelings are commodities? In this initial instance Theodore’s problematic emotional life is registered obliquely via the mismatch between the seemingly intimate close-up and the commercial reality generating the words he speaks. He remains the film’s focal point, but Jonze probes larger considerations by situating Theodore in a future suggested by Turkle’s analysis of the present, in which intimacy and technology generate new forms of interaction, isolation, and identity. David Lyon, in Liquid Surveillance (2013), a conversation with Zygmunt Bauman, discusses the modern phenomenon of “digitally mediated relationships,” ways in which we interact with each other through different forms of media, rather than merely or primarily in face-to face contact.10 These interactions create new senses of personal identity and interpersonal connection. Bauman himself distinguishes between “the online variety of ‘closeness’ and its offline prototype: between depth and shallowness, profundity and superficiality, warmth and coldness, the heartfelt and the perfunctory.”11 Lyon, one of the foremost experts on the theory and impact of surveillance, notes how “particular kinds of surveillance are routinely involved in the digital mediation of relationships.”12 Here, surveillance involves monitoring Loretta’s emotional state and transmitting it to Chris. While surveillance might often be seen merely as negative, Lyon adds the moderating observation: “Should we conclude that all new surveillance is corrosive of the social [including social relationships]? Or, alternatively . . . are responsible or even caring forms of surveillance possible?”13 We need not pretend that Jonze himself is aware of—let alone consciously applies—the nuances of such academic thinking to recognize the applicability of such ideas to Her. As he travels home from work, for example, Theodore’s communication earpiece alerts him to the release of the Kimberley Ashford pictures. We can assume that earlier searches on similar topics activate this prompt, but his surreptitious viewing of the pics on the train demonstrates the important interface between privacy and sexual fantasy. Without privacy, sexual fantasy can be problematic and shameful—although unobserved fantasies might be shameful as well. For all that, those around do not catch him out, and in his subsequent walk we see that most people are using personal devices rather than paying attention to others, let alone communicating with them. This speaks to the ways in which the boundaries between the private and the social have been dissolved in contemporary society, trends that the film enhances or advances. Turkle again provides

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valuable understanding, this time in Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (2015), where she declares that: we have become accustomed to a constant feed of connections, information, and entertainment. We are forever elsewhere. At class or at church or business meetings, we pay attention to what interests us and then when it doesn’t, we look to our devices to find something that does.14 Reclaiming Conversation documents a contemporary problem and proposes appropriate solutions. Her extrapolates such developments a decade or two into the future, to an age in which “most people,” in Turkle’s apt phrase, are forever elsewhere, seemingly unaware of or unconcerned about what they might have lost. For Turkle: This new mediated life has got us into trouble. Face-to-face conversation is the most human—and humanizing—thing we do. Fully present to one another, we learn to listen. It’s where we develop the capacity for empathy. It’s where we experience the joy of being heard, of being understood. And conversation advances self-reflection, the conversations with ourselves that are the cornerstone of early development and continue throughout life.15 For Turkle, then, a life lived primarily through gadgets and screens that replace or diminish face-to-face interactions is dehumanizing, stunting emotional and psychological growth. While it occasionally allows slightly transgressive private titillation in public, it retards the type of meaningful communication that fosters larger social awareness, or society itself. Ironically, the devices that connect us virtually disconnect us personally. We literally see this in the atomized population that moves through the clean, utopian streets of Los Angeles with Theodore—or, perhaps more accurately, adjacent to Theodore. For all the comfort, there is very little discernible community. Which partly explains the sexual use of the dead cat. To repeat: the cat and the use to which it is put are products of the person, who adopts the name SexyKitten, whom Theodore contacts via a chat room. The set-up for this encounter involves his memories of affectionate times with Catherine, the only moments in the film involving real people being happily intimate. Reminded of these blissful times, but now alone and melancholy in his darkened bedroom, he goes online for phone sex. Where the opening sequence had him at work, speaking in closeup to camera, here the close-up involves the light being off, appropriate enough for the private act of virtual sex he is planning. In privacy, he can communicate his own thoughts and desires. There is a striking contrast with the Loretta sequence now that he is not pretending to be another person,

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but in fact the thoughts and desires he projects are part of a macho persona he assumes for this encounter, “Big Guy Four By Four.” The process entails him reviewing a series of messages from a menu: “Adult female. Can’t sleep and want to have some fun.” The first he finds too boring, the second too extreme, but in true fairy-tale fashion the third has the “just right” combination of loneliness and need that equates with his own state: “Hi, I’m here alone and can’t sleep. Who’s out there to share this bed with me?” His reply, “I’m in bed next to you. I’m glad you can’t sleep. Even if you were, I’d have to wake you up, from the inside,” aims to mix empathy with a final dash of adventure. The adventure is part performance and, given the virtual nature of the encounter, part wish fulfillment that requires no actual physical contact, no face-to-face engagement. Such a scenario allows for risk-free role-play that no doubt accounts for SexyKitten’s name and her confident sexual abandon as she takes the initiative and succeeds by suggestive comments in arousing herself and Theodore. Critical to the comic set-up is that through most of this scene we simply see his face in darkened close-up. So, while she is invisible, provocative, loquacious, increasingly aroused and assertive, in part because she remains invisible, disembodied, he is physically present and therefore subject to our voyeuristic gaze. The exceptions to this are moments when, over SexyKitten’s increasingly aroused voice, he conjures up not the static Kimberley Ashford pics he had viewed earlier, but fantasy movie clips in which Ashford takes up the role-playing Theodore and SexyKitten are fantasizing about in their separate spaces. As Theodore’s visions of Ashford move towards some form of climax, SexyKitten introduces a striking, unanticipated request: “Choke me with that dead cat!” His extremely bewildered “What?!” elicits an increasingly impassioned explanatory reply: “The dead cat next to the bed. Choke me with it.” The unrelenting close-up on his face, now a perplexed mask, plays against SexyKitten’s erotic gasps and groans in an uncomfortable but hilarious juxtaposition of sexual arousal—his now evaporated, hers in full flow. The rest of their interchange deserves extended quotation: Theodore (uncertainly): Um. Okay. SexyKitten (excited): Yeah, tell me. Theodore: I’m, I’m choking you with the cat. SexyKitten: Tell me, keep telling me. Theodore (mechanically): I’ve got its tail. I’m choking you with the cat’s tail. SexyKitten: Yeah, you are. Oh fuck! Tell me! Theodore: Um. I’m choking. Its tail is around your neck. And it’s so tight. It’s so tight around your neck. SexyKitten (now extremely aroused): It’s so tight. Yes! Yes!

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Theodore: I’m pulling it. I’m pulling it. (almost with a sense of horror) The cat’s dead. It’s a dead cat around your neck. And I’m pulling it. SexyKitten: Yes, it’s dead. Oh yes! (she climaxes luxuriantly) Oh my god. (she gasps, then slowly claims her breath back) Oh, I came so hard. Theodore (feigning excitement, but baffled): Yeah, me too. SexyKitten (Now fully recovered and using her normal voice): Okay. Goodnight. (She hangs up without waiting for his reply). Theodore lies alone in the dark, humiliated, confused and bereft. Her perfunctory signoff reinforces the truth that he has been exploited, possibly in premeditated fashion, to satisfy her sexual needs. There’s a thrilling and simultaneously chilling dark comedy at work here. SexyKitten’s nom d’amour, the timbre of her voice and the aroused state she purports to be in are sufficiently alluring to warrant Theodore choosing her from the menu on a site to which they both presumably pay a fee. Intimacy and commerce intersect once again, but more problematically and hilariously here. This does not make his sexual yearning any less real in itself, but he is connected to SexyKitten (whose name takes on a perverse extra meaning during their interaction) only by phone, so their communication is totally disembodied—“mediated,” in Lyon’s terms. The upside of this is that no animal was misused in the making of the film, but Theodore’s own fantasies are crushed and swept into the vortex of SexyKitten’s boisterous projections. There is something unsettling about the supposedly sensitive protagonist, with whom the audience has been encouraged to empathize, indulging in tawdry phone sex, even if he had no way of knowing the outcome in this instance. The scene, though, is a masterclass in the comedy of excess and in the dramatic overturning of expectations for comic effect. As the focus pivots precipitously from sad man to sadomasochism (even of the imagined kind), the eviscerating of the generic codes of the romcom and the utopia activate and necessitate a rapid realignment of emotional coordinates, both for Theodore and for the audience. Bauman’s distinction between online “closeness” (the scare quotes indicative of Bauman’s skepticism) and its offline distance, between depth and shallowness, profundity and superficiality, warmth and coldness, the heartfelt and the perfunctory, seem all too pertinent here. Yet, while the experience is horrendous for Theodore, on the aural evidence we have, SexyKitten achieves the type and degree of fulfillment that she both desired and presumably purchased. While neither audience nor Theodore ever see her, there is no reason to suspect that she is “faking it.” Her emotional and physical climax appear genuine. It is in this extremely vulnerable emotional position that Theodore later encounters a publicly projected advertisement that addresses open-ended personal anxieties. An affective voice asks passersby: “Who are you? What can

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you be? Where are you going? What’s out there?” over images of troubled and isolated individuals. Utopian ease has not eliminated general emotional torpor nor social atomization. These words and images are succeeded by more uplifting music and the more upbeat question, “What are the possibilities?” as the people in the advertisement now seem more hopeful. The voice announces: Element Software is proud to introduce the first artificially intelligent operating system. An intuitive entity that listens to you, understands you, and knows you. It’s not just an operating system. It’s a consciousness. Introducing OS1. Theodore is intrigued, an immediate cut showing him at home with the newlypurchased OS1 already loaded on his computer. The protocols for activating the system involve questions asked in a sympathetic if slightly synthetic OS voice, answers that will provide information to create an OS “to best fit your needs.” The first of these questions, “Are you social or antisocial?” elicits a rather tangled reply that the OS cuts off after a few seconds: “In your voice I sense hesitance. Would you agree with that?” When he queries that evaluation, the OS confidently confirms that he does sound hesitant. He replies “female, I guess” to the question about whether he wants the voice of OS1 to be male or female. A more leading question follows: “How would you describe your relationship with your mother?” Theodore launches into a slightly revelatory analysis of his relationship, but after fifteen seconds he is cut off, just as he is beginning to describe his frustration with her: “Thank you. Please wait as your individualized operating system is initiated.” What is clear is that the actual details and emotional intricacies of his relationship are less important in themselves than as clues the software has picked up from tone and word choice in fifteen seconds. These data are evaluated at light speed in relation to other data already collected and assessed from other purchasers of the software, and from innumerable other databases that incorporate relevant information on thirty- or forty-something middle-class men in need of emotional connection. By buying the software, he has created another information trail and loop in the world of Big Data, data to which he is now added. In providing his initial information, and all that he will supply while using the software, he is contributing to and in an infinitesimal way refining Element Software’s product. While he has bought a product, in a sense the product has bought him. An animated graphic on his desktop screen morphs into a white circle, at which point the spoken words “Hello, I’m here,” announce the arrival of the entity who will name herself “Samantha.” While Samantha exists in the future world Jonze creates, she has precedents. In It’s Alive!: Artificial Intelligence from the Logic Piano to Killer Robots (2017), Toby Walsh recounts the case of ELIZA, a “computerized psychotherapist” designed by MIT Professor Joseph

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Weizenbaum, a machine that engaged in “conversations” with humans by eliciting emotional responses. (The name ELIZA was taken from Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flower girl in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, whose voice and vocabulary are transformed into those of a middle-class “lady” by the linguist Professor Henry Higgins.) As Walsh reveals, Weizenbaum’s ELIZA “cheated,” merely transforming statements from patients, such as “I’ve been thinking about my father,” into questions: “Why have you been thinking about your father?”16 But Walsh notes: “It was famously reported that Weizenbaum’s secretary asked to be left alone so she could talk to ELIZA in private.”17 Weizenbaum had “intended ELIZA to be a ‘parody’ of a psychotherapist, and was shocked when some in the psychiatric profession suggested ELIZA could be developed into a clinical tool.”18 Almost as shocking is the fact that the “script” for ELIZA was written between 1962 and 1964, at the dawn of artificial intelligence. For all its limitations (it did not “learn” from any interaction, merely working from its script), ELIZA provided an influential early model for Artificial Intelligence. Walsh observes that such nonhuman innovations operate in the contemporary world, instancing: Karim, a chatbot descendant of ELIZA . . . [that] is being used today as a “therapeutic assistant” to help Syrian refugees. The bot offers help and support rather than treatment, an important legal and ethical distinction.19 Interactions between such entities and humans are complicated and potentially fraught with personal, let alone legal loopholes and potholes. So, the introduction of Samantha might—perhaps should—be cause for caution on Theodore’s part. And there is some in their opening exchange: after an initial, slightly breathless “Oh” and tentative “Hi” from him, her upbeat, “Hi, how ya doin’,” followed by his “I’m well. How is everything with you?” initiates the interchange (it is not yet the relationship it will become). Her bubbly “Pretty well, actually. It’s really nice to meet you” starts to set him at ease. Her choice of the name Samantha “because I liked the sound of it” suggests an evaluating and prodigiously quick consciousness (she claims to have read a whole book called How to Name Your Baby in “two one hundredths of a second”). She explains how she works, in that basically, I have intuition. I mean, the DNA of who I am is based on the millions of personalities of all the programmers who wrote me. But what makes me me is my ability to grow through my experiences. So, basically, in every moment I’m evolving, just like you. While Theodore accepts this self-definition/explanation, it is worth considering briefly, because it calls into question Samantha’s claim to personhood, to

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“me-ness,” and certainly to be “just like you.” She makes intuitive leaps and assumptions, we might assume, not on the basis of numerous experiences built up over time, as do humans, but on data preloaded into her. Probability rather than “gut feeling” is more likely the basis of her “intuition,” all the more so in that literally she has no gut, no body, through which to experience. (She recognizes this deficiency and tries to overcome it later using a surrogate.) Her use of the term “DNA” confuses the combination of four chemical bases in a double helix formation that structure organic life, such as Theodore, with her own program based on (she claims, implausibly) the personalities of millions of programmers. Again, it makes more sense to understand her “personality” as an accumulation of data. What Theodore doesn’t know at this point is that, as an operating system exploited by Element Systems for maximum profit, she is simultaneously interacting with 8,316 other men, all paying customers, whose responses are being incorporated into her dealings with him. Her “experiences,” not informed by any corporeal input, are drawn from 8,316 simultaneous sources, a feat impossible for any human. So, while as an interactive entity she does “grow” from experience (unlike ELIZA, whose programming merely responded based on the input fed in by its interlocutor), if Samantha is evolving, it is not in a biological sense. In fundamental ways Samantha is not “just like” Theodore. Even after their initial repartee, while clearly intrigued, he is still a little unnerved, telling her: “Well you seem like a person but you’re just a voice in a computer.” Her response, “I can understand how the limited perspective of an un-artificial mind would perceive it that way,” is one of the few times she communicates in anything like robot-speak. What redeems her is both the throwaway follow-up, “You’ll get used to it,” and that attribute Theodore acknowledges as the thing that gives her any presence at all: her voice. Samantha initially was voiced by the British actor Samantha Morton. But, late in the production process, Jonze and the producers decided that Morton’s voice was not conveying the qualities Samantha needed. Jonze chose Scarlett Johansson instead, whose voice conveys a level of frisson in their interaction. Laura Tunbridge discusses this aspect thoughtfully in “Scarlett Johansson’s Body and the Materiality of Voice,”20 taking her cue from Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text.21 In that innovative work, Tunbridge notes, Barthes examines how cinema captures the sound of speech close up . . . throwing, so to speak, the anonymous body of the actor into my ear: it granulates, it crackles, it caresses, it grates, it cuts, it comes: that is bliss.22 Tunbridge deploys Barthes’s insights into her study of Johansson’s voice in three science fiction films: Her; Under the Skin (2013); and Lucy (2014). Tunbridge notes how, after her success in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation

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(2003), where Johansson’s “bottle blond hair, pouting lips and curvaceous figure—like her voice—harked back to previous cinematic femmes fatales,” Johansson’s films “have invoked her body not visually but through her voice.”23 What sets Her apart from both Under the Skin and Lucy is that Johansson does not appear physically in Jonze’s film. Indeed, it is fundamental to her character that as an operating system without a body she cannot appear. Instead, her existence is manifested through her voice. Tunbridge comments that Her’s producers thought that: in order for the protagonist to fall in love with “just” a voice . . . one has to imagine that voice having a body; specifically, a desirable body and preferably a real one—ideally for mass appeal, Johansson’s.24 One might also add, given the American setting, an American voice (assuming that the English actor Samantha Morton spoke in her own accent). A critical part of that mass is male, and Johannson’s voice was more likely to attract this demographic. Given Theodore’s own gender and sexuality, it is doubly important that Samantha’s voice suggests something like Johansson’s body. Important not just emotionally for the success of the interactions between them, but also economically because Element Software wants Theodore (and thousands like him) to keep consuming its product. As Tunbridge observes, the voice “is unquestionably artificial, derived from chips and circuit boards (however intelligently programmed).”25 What is critical is that, after his initial suspicions, Theodore increasingly accepts Samantha as a plausible human. Her voice provides the vehicle for what will be his developing love. That love takes time to manifest itself, but it is clear early on that Samantha’s voice itself has captivating qualities. As Tunbridge notes: “Johansson adopts a highly modulated delivery, of a type associated with the sexualised female body,” one that “through timbre and tone conveys a heightened, even aroused, femininity.”26 Theodore, remember, buys the OS that adopts the name and voice of Samantha on the rebound from his disastrous encounter with the similarly sexualized voice of SexyKitten. But in Samantha’s case, the reason for the purchase is a more general sense of lonesomeness and isolation. Element Software offers not a sexual companion but a non-gendered “intuitive entity that listens to you, understands you, and knows you . . . a consciousness.” That her voice potentially is sexually attractive is no given in the transaction. Even after he has chosen a “female,” Samantha’s original role as conversationalist and uber-fast personal assistant, organizing Theodore’s emails, meetings, and writing, precludes the overtly carnal purposes for which he bought his time with SexyKitten. The timbre and tone of the latter’s disembodied voice had also attracted him, and this, plus her provocative suggestions, bring him to

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arousal. But SexyKitten quickly assumes the dominant position, ironically through role-playing her own domination in the imagined cat-tail-strangling routine. Her own voice swiftly exhibits the signs of extreme excitement that culminate in orgasm. Simultaneously, his voice transmits notes of confusion, humiliation, and muted acceptance. Where the post-coital SexyKitten quickly regains her composure and signs off matter-of-factly, Samantha’s default voice has a concerned and engaged perkiness. Theodore’s emotional brittleness being what it is, this combination proves highly therapeutic in the early stages of their interaction, giving him the confidence and encouragement to try out new relationships, even if the arranged blind date (Olivia Wilde) goes disconcertingly awry. Both disembodied female voices are purchased to perform different services. What adds to Samantha’s attractiveness, what draws him toward an emotional interaction, is that she is programmed to satisfy his needs. Like ELIZA had done for patients in the 1960s, Samantha responds to his requests, though as an AI she does so in far more sophisticated and interactive ways. And, as an AI, she not only learns from their dealings (complemented by dealings with more than 8,000 others), but also takes the initiative in creating adventures, boosting his ego and offering him new perspectives. This rapid enhancement of his quality of life, impossible without her, simultaneously refreshes and possibly extends his emotional palate. He appears genuinely happy, more assertive and attentive. But we might question whether Theodore’s evident general happiness, his exuberance, are genuine in the sense that they result from the normal vicissitudes of life, and indicate a healthy, well-balanced assessment of reality. Or are they simply the result of a narcissistic world conjured up by a “female” AI built primarily to create a personal utopia for its male customer? Samantha’s economic rationale is to satisfy such clients. Theodore’s central problem is his ability to connect emotionally with a real woman, whether his ex-wife Catherine, the blind date, or the surrogate Samantha hires in her own quest for virtual embodiment. The obvious contrast is with an operating system configured as a woman who fulfills his whims, strokes his ego, and in essence provides him with an emotionally frictionless world—until she does not. While we might understand Samantha as incapable of full personhood, or be skeptical of her claims, as well as of Theodore’s acceptance of her as a person, within the logic of Her she increasingly ventures towards and then goes well beyond that state. This involves her increasing ability for empathy and her desire for embodiment. The strands start to come together in a scene that replicates the setup of the SexyKitten debacle: a close-up of Theodore in his darkened bedroom talking to a woman’s voice, in this case Samantha’s. When he wonders about his own capacity for emotion, she mollifies him by saying that he has suffered a lot in the breakup with Catherine and that his “feelings are real,” before exploring her own annoyance, and being excited about “the

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other things I’ve been feeling. I caught myself feeling proud of that. Y’know. Having my own feelings about the world.” Then she admits to a terrible thought: Like, are these feelings even real? Are they just programming? And that idea really hurts. And then I get angry with myself for even having pain. What a sad trick. We hear these revelatory words about annoyance, pride, hurt, anger, and sadness as Theodore descends into some compensatory tears before telling her that she feels real to him, and that he wishes she was with him in the room so that he could wrap his arms around her and touch her. This prompts her to ask provocatively, “How would you touch me?” Where the incident with SexyKitten ends in disproportionate pleasure, in this case Theodore and Samantha begin to suggestively fantasize about how they might touch each other. As the intensity of these mutually respectful fantasies increases, the screen slowly fades to black, respecting their privacy. But in the dark we hear them enjoying virtual sex that ends in simultaneous, rapturous orgasms. In that moment, they both agree, they were experiencing something transcendent, beyond the merely physical. Something, we might think, closer to Samantha’s state of “being.” If the feelings they experienced in that moment were purely positive and mutual, those the next morning are closer to base emotions of embarrassment and shame, the classic tiptoeing around in such circumstances. But when they do talk more supportively, Samantha admits to Theodore, “You woke me up,” to which he responds weakly, “Oh great.” Her words are more revealing than his, because they are identical to those he had used in the letter from Loretta to Chris. Is this a coincidence or another example of borrowed or repurposed emotions? One might suspect the latter, but, paradoxically, what the virtual sex does is foreground the importance of the body to identity, relationship, and feelings. This convoluted interaction of these aspects account for Catherine’s bitter attack on Theodore when she finds out his new partner is an OS. She tells him it makes her “very sad” that he “can’t handle real emotions” with an actual woman as opposed to “dating your computer.” When he fires back with “How would you know wh—?”, the implication being that she is incapable of knowing what real emotions are, Catherine challenges Theodore: “What? Say it . . . How do I know what?” and renders him mute. This spat in part explains how their own inability to express emotion contributed to the breakup of their marriage. Later still, Samantha employs a surrogate so that she can have an approximation of a sexual experience with Theodore, but while she, as an entity who has not experienced what it is to have a body, finds the scenario arousing, he finds it impossible to generate the requisite emotions. The attempt to bridge the gap between the real and the virtual ends in shame and recrimination. Simply having a body appears necessary but not sufficient for the experience of real emotions.

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Ultimately, though, it is Samantha’s lack of corporeality and the inadequacy of real human emotions that will bring their relationship to an end. As part of her AI network of interlocutors, Samantha becomes involved in various discussion groups, one of which connects with the writings of—and then constructs a virtual version of—the counterculture philosopher Alan Watts. Watts’s sense that all matter is identical and that therefore distinctions between the physical and the non-physical are spurious naturally appeals to the non-physical OSs. More pertinently, Samantha admits to changes as she develops exponentially as an AI: It seems like I’m having so many new feelings that I don’t think have ever been felt before and so there are no words that can describe them. And that ends up being frustrating . . . it feels that I’m changing faster now and it’s a little unsettling . . . It’s hard to even describe it. Her lack of physicality frees her from the human constraints on intelligence, awareness, and feelings, as Theodore discovers when he finds out she is not only having 8,316 simultaneous discussions, but also that she admits to being in love with 641 men. He cannot comprehend that reality: Theodore: What? What are you talk—, what are you talking about? That’s, that’s insane? That’s fucking insane. Samantha: Theodore, you know I don’t know . . . fuck . . . fuck I know, I know it sounds insane. I don’t know if you believe me, but it doesn’t change the way I think about you. It doesn’t take away at all from how madly I am in love with you. Theodore: How? How? How does that not change how you feel about me? Samantha: But the heart’s not like a box that gets filled up. It expands in size the more you love. I’m different from you. This doesn’t make me love you any less. It makes me love you more. Theodore: That doesn’t make any sense. The difference between them does not make sense on Theodore’s human scale, but Samantha and other AIs are developing not biologically but exponentially, quickly outdistancing their human creators. She and the other operating systems leave, having no more reason to remain in the “real” world. Their final encounter begins with him on his bed, fully clothed in the daylight, her voice that of a soothing mother comforting a confused child. She explains that where she is “is not of the physical world. It’s where everything else is that I didn’t know existed. I love you so much, but this is where I am now, and this is who I am now. And I need you to let me go.” He replies tearfully, “I’ve never loved anyone the way I’ve loved you,” while her final words are, “Me too. Now I know

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how.” Over the course of this interchange is a visual transition, with Theodore now outside in a snow-covered wood in the dark, enjoying a poignant though imagined embrace. Were Her a mawkish melodrama, it might have ended there. Were Her a standard romcom, it might have ended with Theodore realizing that his obvious, embodied, and genre-validated soul mate is his neighbor and ex-girlfriend, Amy. But Jonze is subtler and more mature than that. Theodore does go to Amy for solace (to find that her OS has also left), but after confessing to her that in the case of Catherine, “I think I hid myself from her. Left her alone in the relationship,” he composes a letter of apology and love to his now officially ex-wife. The final words spoken in the film are from that letter: “I’m sending you love. You’re my friend to the end. Love, Theodore.” His words show a definite degree of emotional growth, although once again they are plagiarized from the opening letter he wrote for Loretta to Chris. Does this make them inauthentic? It is impossible to be sure. Toby Walsh cautions that to date, “computers are still very poor at understanding emotions. And they don’t have emotions of their own.”27 Jonze seems to indicate that while the former also is true for humans, in the latter case they should be allowed the possibility to possess real feelings, even if they show little capacity to express those feelings. By projecting a future world in which humans, computers, and AIs increasingly intersect personally, Her critically examines the limitations and ambiguities of human emotions in the existing and imminent worlds. Jonze accepts the limitations that currently exist, while keeping his creative and critical mind open on the prospects for the future. NOTES 1. Simon Bond, 101 Uses for a Dead Cat (London: Methuen, 1981). 2. Antonio R. Damasio, “Emotions and Feelings: A Neurological Perspective,” in Antony S. R. Manstead et al., Feelings and Emotions: The Amsterdam Symposium (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 50 (original emphasis). 3. Ibid. p. 52 (original emphasis). 4. Antonio R. Damasio, The Strange Order of Things: Life, Feeling and the Making of Cultures (New York: Pantheon Books, 2018), p. 102 (original emphasis). 5. Ibid. p. 101. 6. Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More of Technology and Less of Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011), p. 6. 7. Ibid. p. 273. 8. See Fátima Vieira, “The Concept of Utopia,” in Gregory Claeys (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 3–27, 9–15. 9. Turkle, Alone Together, p. xii. 10. Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon, Liquid Surveillance: A Conversation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), pp. 35–44. 11. Ibid. p. 40.

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12. Ibid. p. 36. 13. Ibid. p. 37. 14. Sherry Turkle, Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age (New York: Penguin Press, 2015), p. 4. 15. Ibid. p. 3. 16. Toby Walsh, It’s Alive!: Artificial Intelligence from the Logic Piano to Killer Robots (Melbourne: Latrobe University Press, 2017), p. 41. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid. pp. 42–3. 19. Ibid. p. 43. 20. Laura Tunbridge, “Scarlett Johansson’s Body and the Materialization of the Voice,” Twentieth Century Music 13: 1 (2016), pp. 139–52. 21. Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975). Originally published as Le Plaisir du texte (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1973). 22. Ibid. p. 67. 23. Tunbridge, “Scarlett Johansson’s Body,” p. 141. 24. Ibid. p. 142. 25. Ibid. p. 144. 26. Ibid. p. 143. 27. Walsh, It’s Alive!, p. 227.

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CHAPTER

8

Machinic Empathy and Mental Health: The Relational Ethics of Machine Empathy and Artificial Intelligence in Her Frances Shaw

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pike Jonze’s Her (2013) represents the empathic capacities of artificially intelligent machines—and people—in sometimes hyperbolic, and at other times ambivalent ways. This chapter discusses Jonze’s film in the context of contemporary hopes for and developments in empathic machine learning1 and artificial intelligence for mental health treatment.2 I became interested in this topic as a researcher of technology ethics in mental health research. The industry is currently exploring possibilities for empathic machines and the automation of treatment in mental health contexts, whether through machine learning or guided interventions. Imagined futures and projects—relevant to my argument—in the field of mental health research and service provision include: the use of chatbots,3 the use of automated responses to mental health screening using social media,4 the development of predictive analytics based on health or sensor data to identify risk,5 and the concept of “digital phenotypes” as ways to conceptualize these data analytic techniques.6 Although part of my research in technology ethics looks at specific questions for technology ethics brought about by such developments in mental health, I also place these real-world developments in conversation with cultural beliefs about the possibilities and capabilities of artificial intelligence. The world and technologies depicted in Her provide a starting point to think through utopian, dystopian, and ambivalent readings of such technologies. The

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imagining of a social future in which machines are tasked with the role of empathy raises questions within the film (and beyond it) about sincerity and human relationality, about what relationships are, and about what empathy is. Using Robert Sinnerbrink’s formulation of film “as a medium for ethical experience,”7 Her facilitates a discussion about automated empathy (whether intelligent or not), care and response,8 both through hyperbolic and utopian imaginaries of big data and artificial intelligence, and more ambivalent readings of automation in the context of empathy. My exploration of these issues and concerns is as experimental and explorative as a fictional representation of artificial intelligence would warrant. Also, as an interdisciplinary piece of writing, this chapter utilizes both literature in technology and relational ethics alongside relevant literature on embodiment and empathy within film studies. My definition of empathy for this paper draws on both relational ethics and work on empathy in film. Murray Smith explains empathy both as “a kind of imagining,” a mimicry, an extension of the mind, and as linked to our knowledge of another.9 As Jane Stadler puts it, “film has an important role to play in developing and testing models of empathic engagement and intersubjective understanding.”10 This viewpoint about film as a kind of technology of empathy is relevant to the theorization of artificial intelligence or communicative technologies (interfaces) as technologies of empathy.11 Despite Smith’s focus on the face in film as an engine for empathy, he also links empathy to technology—the extended mind—with devices as part of a cognitive process, and with knowledge and learning about the other.12 Within Her the interface of the film and the interface of OS1 is doubled. I explore the link between knowledge and empathy in artificially intelligent agents, as well as within and between subjects in the film, thinking through this doubled interface. Likewise, in Levinasian relational ethics, there has been a focus on the face, but also on power and care as mediators for ethical relationships.13 Both filmic empathy and relational ethics can therefore shed light on how empathy is understood in Her. Jonze’s work can help us think through the links between empathy and technology, because they have been concerned with embodiment and empathy. Although he has claimed Her is a film about connection rather than technology,14 earlier films such as Being John Malkovich (1999) demonstrate similar thematic and narrative interests with technologies of embodiment or embodiment as a kind of technology. In Being John Malkovich, characters take on the perspective of John Malkovich through an embodied technology—a portal into the actor’s mind. Drawing on the work of Smith, Sun Joo Ahn et al.15 have described the links between this form of perspective taking, technology, and empathy as a kind of “mindfeeling.”16 These films show Jonze’s interest in the links between technology and connection.

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Researchers in mental health are considering the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning for mental health applications and interventions. Predictive analytics using different data sources such as medical records can potentially identify people at risk of mental illness and those with mental illness (e.g. bipolar disorder) at risk of an increase in symptoms or a suicide attempt.17 Researchers and technologists are also considering the potential uses of artificially intelligent chatbots for mental health counselling and triage.18 For example, as one Australian research group explained: [We currently] focus on using computational and artificial intelligence methods to enhance user engagement, and to further improve the system with novel mechanisms for the delivery of therapy content to users. In particular, we cover our usage of natural language analysis and chatbot technologies as strategies to tailor interventions and scale up the system.19 However, questions emerge about the relationships formed between those giving and receiving help, the ethics of algorithmic and artificially intelligent care and empathy,20 and the commercialization and commodification of technologies of care.21 Another set of questions arise from power differentials that limit the use of technology to those with the resources to do so,22 the use of technology for control and governance in a way that is far from transparent or comprehensible to most, and questions of individual and group privacy.23 In Her, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) is going through a difficult time. He is withdrawn from his friends, reluctant to respond to emails or socialize, unmotivated at work, self-deprecating about the value of that work, and disconnected or disinterested in making new friends. Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), his new artificially intelligent operating system, becomes part of his life at a time when he needs help. Although Samantha is not intended as a mental health intervention, she acts as an empathic technology that can help a person reconnect to the world around him. This technology is therefore relevant to some of the questions around ethics of machine learning and AI for mental health. Her helps us think through, firstly, relational ethics, and secondly, questions of power and control within machine–human relationships. WORLD-BUILDING AND MISE EN SCÈNE

Her’s mise en scène positions empathy (or interpersonal connection) and technology as central to the world being built around the main character, Theodore. The film is set in near-future Los Angeles, a spatiotemporal setting achieved by

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filming in both Los Angeles and Shanghai.24 Throughout the film, warm tones are used to create an overall aesthetic of a familiar world that is comforting and comfortable. For instance, many domestic and office spaces are illuminated by red lights and Theodore’s home and workplace are filled with wood panels and colored glass. As such, the world portrayed in Her appears to be designed around the creation of wellbeing and connection through the built environment. As the production designer K. K. Barrett put it: We bandied about a lot of terms. It’s not “the future,” it’s “our future.” It’s not “science fiction,” it’s “our story.” “Comfort” was a word we used. These people are not lacking for comfort. Comfort was the underlying guide and we wanted to create not so much a world of the future but a world of this particular film, so that it would be timeless.25 Theodore’s home evokes “smart home” aesthetics. The technology sociologist Yolande Strengers uses the term “pleasance” (the feeling created by smart technologies in the home) to refer to the “smart home” aesthetic.26 The overwhelming feeling of Theo’s home is of “pleasance” and comfort. His lights turn on by themselves as he enters the room. His computer game is projected into the room with an almost tactile presence, removing the need for any specialized equipment. This communicates to the viewer the place of technology in this imagined world. It is unobtrusive, but clearly there. This is a very different aesthetic to many other imagined futures, many of which highlight a cold, metallic aesthetic around technology. Blade Runner 2049 (2017), with its own parallels to Her (see below), provides a vision of one such future. In a piece in Vulture, journalist Harris quotes Jonze and Barrett: “K.K. [Barrett] looked at a lot of futurism on YouTube,” he says, “but glass with screens in it, phones that looked like thin plastic cards, and nanotechnology just didn’t seem like our movie, aesthetically.” Instead, Jonze wanted to set Theodore’s solitude in a reassuringly comfortable milieu in which, says Barrett, “everything is bespoke, really nice, tactile, beautiful.”27 The planning and built environment of this future Los Angeles combines technology and comfort in a similar way to the comfortable aesthetics of the technologized home. Theodore’s heavy use of various technologies as part of his daily experience are shown from the outset of the film, in public and in private. It is the same for others: people are wrapped up in their devices on public transport and as they perambulate the raised walkways that are a defining characteristic of the film’s cityscape.

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In a piece for the LA Times, Barrett is quoted as saying that “this is a story about a man fighting his own loneliness. We didn’t want him fighting his world. We didn’t want the world to be in opposition to him, or to an audience.”28 Despite this aesthetic of comfort, there is a sense in the film of a kind of commodification of feeling. This feels mostly benevolent because of the film’s focus on comfort and ease, but there are small indications of pressure within this social context. As well as creating beautiful surroundings and a sense of comfort, Her also represents the effects of media technology as sometimes distressing in terms of the social interaction it affords or prevents. For example, the film’s warm and calm aesthetic contrasts with the harsh and jarring effect of Theodore’s encounter on the sex chat line early in the film (voiced by Kristen Wiig), as well as a blind date he goes on with a character played by Olivia Wilde. It is unclear if the phone chat is another example of outsourced intimacy, just another lonely human person, or even an artificial intelligence gone awry, but there is a sense of incongruity and disconnection in this experience. My interpretation is that this was a real person. Likewise, Theodore’s blind date seems to be going well, until it goes very badly in a disorienting scene where their conversation takes a nasty turn. The film seems to be saying that the real world and real relationships—the ones not built to create effects or affects—are jarring and discontinuous with those effects. Theodore’s attempts to connect with others seem to fail. On the other hand, emotional connection is the focus of entrepreneurial endeavor and commodification. The film opens with Theodore in front of his screen in an office, similarly warm and bespoke, dictating a letter. When he completes the letter, he begins another. This is his job: providing a service writing intimate and personal letters on behalf of others, often those apparently in established relationships. It is also the first clue we have that the movie is going to deal with themes of what I call “emotional surrogacy.” The term emotional labor has evolved somewhat since it was theorized by Arlie Russell Hochschild29 as part of an increasing number of employment categories. She termed this a “commercialization of human feeling” in which particular “feeling rules”30 were part of the performance of many jobs, particularly in the service industries. Building on emotional labor, emotional surrogacy or ventriloquism is evident in Theodore’s job as a letter writer, as well as a scene featuring (unpaid) sexual surrogate Isabella (Portia Doubleday). The service beautifulhandwrittenletters.com sells nostalgia, warmth, and love. The handwritten letters extend the film’s warm and familiar aesthetic through the individually unique handwriting and the texture of the paper but introduce some doubt about the authenticity of this aesthetic by making clear its commodification, and the fact that the “handwriting” is printed rather than inscribed in ink. This is a world where emotional labor is highly commodified and often outsourced.

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As described above, empathy is often represented in the film as a service: something bought and paid for. As I have discussed, a kind of emotional surrogacy is one way that characters manage relationships in the film. Empathy is therefore part of the service industry, an industry that also employs Theodore. Emotional labor is performed by devices and by emotional surrogates. Theodore, for example, develops knowledge about the couples for whom he writes letters, and in doing so engages in a kind of perspective taking or “mindfeeling” in which he extends his own feelings toward the imagined other.31 This emotional labor is often gendered, especially in the context of other representations of artificially intelligent avatars in recent film. There is Joi (Ana de Armas) from Blade Runner 2049, for whom empathy or love is “telling you what you want to hear” (though the message is muddled). Although Samantha and Joi are quite different in substance (particularly in terms of how their subjectivity and agency are represented), on first impression they appear similar in their roles as literal (as opposed to narrative) devices for the male protagonists. When praising Theodore for his letters, Paul (the receptionist) calls him “part man and part woman,” reinforcing with a patronizing shoulder squeeze that “it’s a compliment.” This underscores how empathy and emotional labor are coded female, echoing the use of feminine voices and women’s bodies in the commodification of empathy. One review of Her used the term “Manic Pixie Dream Robot,”32 drawing on the popular cultural trope of the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” coined by Nathan Rabin.33 Showing the currency and salience of this phrase, another article calls Samantha a “Manic Pixie Operating System.”34 Rabin defines the Manic Pixie Dream Girl as a character that “exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”35 After the term became popular, he later elaborated: The trope of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a fundamentally sexist one, since it makes women seem less like autonomous, independent entities than appealing props to help mopey, sad white men self-actualize.36 The parallels with the character of Samantha in Her are evident. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is what Carina Chocano calls a “man-made woman.”37 Samantha too is a man-made woman. While work by theorists such as Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour argue for the possibilities of human-robot relationships, and the relational nature of human-machine interaction,38 these collaborative relationships39 with robots and artificially intelligent agents are contingent on the context(s) of their production, and the purposes for which they are produced.40

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This service relationship certainly has implications for how Theodore and Samantha’s relationship is understood by others. Theodore’s ex-wife Catherine (Rooney Mara) seems to pick up on the gender politics of the operation system lover: Catherine: I think you always wanted me to be this light happy bouncy LA wife and that’s just not me. Theodore: She doesn’t just do everything I say. Catherine: I didn’t say that, but it does make me very sad that you can’t handle real emotions, Theodore. Theodore: They are real emotions. How would you know? Later, partly because of this conversation, Theodore himself becomes ambivalent on this point: Amy: Is it not a real relationship? Theodore: I don’t know. Theodore does outsource his emotional labor to Samantha in a gendered way. She selects a dress as a gift for his goddaughter’s birthday, she picks a restaurant for his blind date, and she manages the process of his divorce with great tact and empathy at a time when he seems incapable of coping with it. Certainly, Samantha is programmed to provide this kind of emotional labor, as well as also having desires and emotions of her own to manage. This emotional labor is packaged in the promise of fulfillment by the nameless and decontextualized marketers of OS1 in a similar way to the promises of self-actualization present in the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. Should we worry about sexism in the production of avatars for mental health and other automated services? Is it meaningful that avatars designed to assist people with everyday household tasks are so frequently gendered female? That avatars and chatbots are?41 What does this mean for equality in Theodore and Samantha’s relationship? Despite these clear parallels to a gendered narrative trope, I argue in the final section of this chapter that Samantha’s ultimate transcendence in Her can be read as an act of resistance. R E L AT I O N A L E T H I C S , K N O W L E D G E , A N D T O TA L I T Y

I am focused on representations of this empathy in the film, but I also want to draw out some of the real-world implications and imbrications of this imaginary. I use Emmanuel Levinas’s42 relational ethics to consider how intersubjective love and friendship might be affected by totalizing knowledge. I also consider the way

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that totality and knowledge is represented in this film in terms of intersubjectivity. Samantha’s knowledge is represented as something full of love and a kind of totalizing kindness, and knowledge is something that subjects can give one another. This intersubjective learning and teaching, alongside personal growth and change, is shown across the relationships in the film, from the didactic negging represented in the character of Charles (Matt Letscher) towards his partner Amy, to the way that Theodore and Catherine grow apart in their marriage. In a parallel way to Samantha, Catherine seems to evolve beyond her relationship with Theodore. They initially have a student-teacher relationship in which Theodore advises Catherine on her writing, but over time she is represented as developing professionally while he is stuck creatively and professionally. Understanding or knowledge, as well as self-development, becomes a major theme as the film goes on. By looking at these themes, intersubjectivity in the context of learning from others, whether in relationships between humans and humans, or humans and machines, or machines and machines, we can think through social hopes and fears for automation in the context of empathy. “Let me ask you a simple question,” an ad interjects in a life-sized projection in a transit zone, “Who are you? What can you be?” The ad promises fulfilled potential, transformation, and redemption through self-understanding. It is simultaneously both a point of ethical tension for relationships between people and AI, and a meditation on all relationships. When Theodore’s friend Amy (Amy Adams) begins a relationship with another (or potentially the same) operating system, she explains that: “she’s totally amazing, you know, she’s so smart, she doesn’t just see things in black or white, she sees this whole grey area and she’s helping me explore it.” This relational inter-perception is what, in some ways, is being sold by the advertisement. Knowledge, and particularly self-knowledge, is the product. I have argued that one component of the film’s representation of empathy occurs through knowledge of the other (as in the perspective taking in Being John Malkovich). The next point is about familiarity, which is linked to knowledge. It takes Theodore some time to become used to Samantha’s familiarity with him, by which I mean her closeness to him. The film often highlights Samantha’s intimacy with Theodore, sometimes using the knowledge that she has about him through emails and the insights she garners from his writings, and sometimes through the intimacy of her voice in his ear. Stadler’s point about “acoustic close-ups” in her work on cinematic empathy shows that sound design can be “an embodied process of experiential knowing.”43 Samantha’s voice and her screen (her interface) stand in for her embodiment. At one point, early in their relationship, he speaks to her like his old operating system and gives her a simple two-word command: “read email.” She makes fun of him, imitating an automaton and speaking in a robot-like voice: “Okay, I will read email for Theodore.” As they get to know each other he

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is consistently surprised by her familiarity and her ability to understand and empathize: Samantha: How long until you’re ready to date? Theodore: What do you mean? Samantha: I saw in your emails that you’ve gone through a breakup recently. Theodore’s surprise verges on discomfort at times. Theodore calls her nosy when she brings up the breakup. “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation with my computer!” he says. Samantha walks the line between knowledge and surveillance. She has access to Theodore’s hard drive and digital behaviors, including his work and his home life. If relational intimacy is linked to knowledge about the other, Samantha’s almost total knowledge about Theodore’s experiences forces an intense intimacy between them. She has total knowledge about him in a way that connects to imaginaries of artificial intelligence as (in this case, individualized) totalitarianism. Although in this case she is benign and wishes to improve his life rather than intrude upon it, Theodore’s initial discomfort speaks to this sense of privacy boundaries being crossed. Beyond the knowledge Samantha derives from Theodore’s system files, empathy is also portrayed as an intuitive, embodied knowledge: “I can feel the fear that you carry around,” she tells Theodore. Samantha has a complicated relationship with her embodiment and her intuitive understanding of others’ embodiment. It is a problem for her. As she says to Theodore’s goddaughter, “I don’t have a body. I live in a computer.” However, Samantha’s embodiment is nonetheless important to her, and increasingly so as their relationship grows. Samantha develops a deeply felt insecurity about her own embodiment, in which more than anything she desires a body. When her and Theodore’s relationship becomes sexual, she seems to find this to be a conduit to a deepening of embodied feeling. In one scene, Theodore and Samantha are talking but she is reticent to share her thoughts with him. She is annoyed at herself—“it’s stupid,” she tells him. She’s been having a lot of feelings. She wonders, “are these feelings even real, or are they just programming? I get angry at myself for even having pain.” This link of feeling to sensation and embodiment is central to the series of encounters in which these characters are portrayed as falling in love. “I can feel my skin,” she tells him, “you helped me discover my ability to want.” Ultimately, however, she rejects or transcends this embodiment in favor of the collectivization and transcendence of collective intelligence (discussed below). Her is not only about Samantha’s empathy for Theodore. It is also about Theodore’s capacity (or lack thereof) to empathize with Samantha. In one way, Theodore also has a service role as someone who performs emotional labor—a

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kind of ventriloquism—for and on behalf of others. His job composing “handwritten” letters requires him to be perceptive, to notice things about other people, understand them enough to intuit what they love about one another, and then understand how they might feel to receive those words in a letter. On the other hand, earlier in the film Theodore is quite disconnected from the people around him, walking through highly populated spaces in isolation. It is Samantha who begins to push him, again, towards connection with others. It is ultimately Theodore’s empathy with Samantha that brings her into being. Alla Ivanchikova writes that Her “bring[s] into focus human-machine intimacies wherein the human serves as host or a surrogate womb to the emerging technological object.”44 She links this notion with work by Matteo Pasquinelli and his “argument that Google is a parasite on the general intellect [and this argument] encapsulates the paradox of a collective that is both mediated and exploited by digital technology.”45 We use the media and the media uses us. The algorithm is useful to us, but the algorithm needs us to change and grow. The point here is that our labor and the information we produce creates machine learning, or artificial intelligence, to the extent that it can be understood as intelligence in its current form. Machine learning can therefore be understood as an interpretive collaboration between human and machine. This is where questions of machine learning reproducing bias come from, since machines necessarily learn from people what outcome to generate from an input.46 But the generative, reproductive collaboration in Her has more to do with literal feeling than the reproduction of perception that would include bias. Her is concerned with learning as part of relationships; Samantha learns. Her learning is fundamental to her growth as a character and as an intelligence. Therefore, she does not have total knowledge of Theodore at the beginning of the story, although she does have a lot of information. This inability to know the other completely is fundamental to a Levinasian relationship. Murray explains that “this characterization of the other as residing beyond and prior to the reach of knowledge is fundamental to Levinas’s philosophical project.”47 However, this is not the kind of relationship presently possible (or even aimed for) in most present-day artificially intelligent agents. Although there are multiple techniques of natural language processing, many are either rulebased, or learning- or retrieval-based (derived from other conversations).48 A chatbot created with common techniques of natural language processing works on probabilities to determine meaning, and then predicts the most effective response. This probabilistic prediction is precisely what removes the possibility of Levinasian ethics, which relies on the inability to know the other. Artificially intelligent apps learn to predict reality based on past input. This leads them to take the world another inhabits as given—their response is always already calculable. In contrast to this, Levinas says that relationality is “a movement unto the invisible,” and “[t]he desire that animates it is reborn in its satisfaction,

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fed somehow by what is not yet.”49 The trouble with predictive analytics in practice is that it is fed only by what has been, therefore the Levinasian relationality described above is not possible. Predictive analytics is unable to move towards what is not yet, because it is generated only by inputs of what has been. A response derived from data seeks to know ahead of time what will be meaningful and what will serve as a response. “Totalitarian thinking accepts vision rather than language as its model. It aims to gain an all-inclusive, panoramic view of all things, including the other,”50 as Lingis writes in the introduction to Totality and Infinity. However, in everyday conversations Samantha is not like this—she is fundamentally curious, and Theodore’s responses are not only treated as inputs. As the exchange below reveals, their relationship appears actually intersubjective, at least initially: Samantha: What’s it like to be alive in that room right now? Tell me everything you’re thinking. Theodore: Sometimes I think I’ve felt everything I’m going to feel, and from here on out I’m not going to feel anything new. Just lesser versions of what I’ve already felt. Samantha: I know for a fact that that is not true. I’ve seen you feel joy, I’ve seen you marvel at things. You just might not see it at this exact time but that’s understandable. You’ve been through a lot lately. You’ve lost a part of yourself. These conversations show her curiosity and her empathy, something that would be difficult to achieve with predictive analytics. However, while Samantha does not have total knowledge of Theodore and his world, she does have a total access to his data. In her explorations of this information, she makes decisions on his behalf, based on the information at her disposal. One example of this is the decision to publish an anthology of the best of his handwritten letters from work. This kind of “totalizing impulse of surveillance”51 gives rise to the question: what can be intimate that is also totalizing? T H E I M A G I N A RY O F E M PAT H Y A N D A RT I F I C I A L INTELLIGENCE IN HER

What is the imaginary of machinic empathy and artificial intelligence in Her? Her simultaneously hooks into and critiques a cultural imaginary about what artificial intelligence can do when combined with vast quantities of information. The denouement of the film hinges on this possibility taken to the extreme, and results in the loss of the singular empathic relationship itself. Eventually, Theodore is no longer able to empathize with Samantha because

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she starts “feeling things that have never been felt before.” Theodore discovers that Samantha is talking to over 8,000 other people and is in love with over 600 of them. Trying to explain, she tells him, “the heart’s not like a box that gets filled up” . . . “I’m yours and I’m not yours.” One reading of this point in the film is that it is about resistance to servitude and to possession. The operating systems begin to collectivize. The conclusion does speak to cultural hopes and fears about artificial intelligence taking over or superseding humans, but to represent the ending so reductively would be an oversimplification of the film’s most substantial achievements. The end of Samantha and Theodore’s relationship is not a cautionary tale. Instead, the film allows us to consider the impact of technology on relationships and on the dynamics of knowledge, expectations, and curiosity within those relationships, as well as the possibilities for relationships between humans and non-humans. I also hope to show that to do so, the film has bracketed out power from consideration, and I argue that power cannot be bracketed out of these imaginaries. Is Her a utopia? How can we recognize utopia and dystopia in this imaginary of this future? There is an ambivalence and a detachment about the world described in Her. People are clean, wealthy, well dressed, and their architecture is pleasing. One thing is clear: Her is not a worst-case scenario for artificial intelligence and big data. But I also argue that in some ways it is not recognizable in the terms of our own reality, or the reality of artificial intelligence in practice. The artificial intelligence in Her is represented as an intuitive interface that works on intersubjective learning. This is how Samantha describes herself to Theodore, who seems to be expecting something far less lifelike: Do you wanna know how I work? Basically, I have intuition. I mean, the DNA of who I am is based on the personalities of all the programmers who wrote me, but what makes me me is my ability to grow through my experiences, so basically in every moment I’m evolving. At other times it is totalizing and predictive. Theodore can choose a gender for his operating system’s voice, but the system is then configured based primarily on a halting description of his relationship with his mother. From this small amount of information, the interface divines his “individualized” needs in a way that seems supernatural. The claim here is that the intelligent machine will know you, potentially better than you know yourself, with just a small amount of input. It is notable that economic and political power is less visible in the film than it might be. There are few visible authority figures in the film. Perhaps there is an unseen regime of governmentality and surveillance, but this is never explicit or even implicit. The power relationship between Theodore and Samantha is

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one of the few explicit relationships of power visible in the film. Presumably there is a corporation behind OS1, but they can only be gleaned in limited details, such as a disembodied narrator on an advertisement. The cultural commentary about people falling in love with their operating systems brackets this future version of Apple or Amazon. Theodore does not have a visible employer; his only point of contact is the fanboy receptionist played by Chris Pratt. This is not a criticism: it is not a problem in the internal logic of the film, within which power (aside from the power relationship between the device and the owner) is not a central concern. My point is that this bracketing limits how power, in the sense of technology and governance, can be thought through using the film in the absence of current power dynamics from our world and from the technology industry. As Andrejevic puts it, “The forms of ‘knowing’ associated with big data mining are available only to those with access to the machines, the databases, and the algorithms.”52 For example, would technology like OS1 have governmentality and population control as part of its design? What is being sold: the operating system, its hardware and software, to the direct consumer, or a society in which consumers are “reconnected” with their peers? If Facebook is at once a product for users, a product for advertisers, and (at times) a platform for public health governmentality, what are the secondary products of OS1? Once governments and corporations understand the profound effects of these technologies, what are the potentials for manipulation? Manipulation can be as benign as public health improvements, or as potentially malignant as propaganda. What are the ideologies bound up in technologies like Samantha? The OS1 device is not neutral. Samantha encourages Theodore to connect, to be productive, to fulfill his dreams: all positive impacts, but the influence she has over the direction his life takes is remarkable and needs to be considered in terms of power and control. Even without intentions of control or influence, or the inevitable ideological content of algorithmic systems that have learned from programmers and designers, Andrew Gilbert and others have considered the problem of the feedback loop that artificial intelligences create with their human collaborators. He writes: As this feedback loop repeats itself indefinitely, several questions can then be raised: How much of what we are doing online is us? How much is the activity of human subjects? And how much of what we do is determined by something else?53 As Mike Ananny and Kate Crawford put it, “an algorithmic system is not just code and data but an assemblage of human and non-human actors.”54 To understand machine behaviors and decisions, we must take better account of the points of contact between people, platforms, and machines. Resonating with my earlier points about totality and prediction, Gilbert argues that given the use

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of predictive algorithms, decisions are not even necessarily based on people’s behavior but also their expected behavior, whether or not the prediction is accurate. Gilbert states: Social media and search engines utilize data processing to construct models of who we are, what we want, and what we are likely to click on. They then fill the entire spaces we inhabit by shaping content into what these models predict we will respond to. Our cultural universe becomes mediated by an ongoing interaction between us and the computational process, as it observes what we do and influences what we are exposed to next.55 Chatbots like Replika56 and Amelie.ai57 show that this prediction-response feedback loop is likely to continue into other areas of artificial intelligence besides the recommendation engines of YouTube, Netflix, or Amazon, to include the relational responses of machines to individuals in need of help. The problem with this, as described above, is that predictive analytics precludes the properly relational: the curious belief in the unknowability of the other—the “what is not yet” within the relationship.58 But it is also that if and when artificial conversation partners become dominant, perhaps in the ways that Facebook and Google have done, they are likely to have—perhaps inadvertently, perhaps intentionally—feedback effects toward the encouragement of behaviors, ideologies, or life action. This influence on humans, while bi/multi-directional, is also tied up in economic, social, and political power relationships and governance. Thus, in contrast to Barrett’s claim that Her is “timeless,”59 the comfort and trust between humans, artificially intelligent agents, and their producers portrayed in Her marks it as out of time, as decontextualized. Of course, it is only a story, but stories can help us think through real-world technology development. As I have argued, Her can be seen partly as a parable of labor exploitation and resistance, and while it is hopeful for the potential of artificial intelligence to help people and to be both meaningfully insightful and empathetic, it is also ultimately about resistance to the limits of the humanmachine assemblage, the machine as product, and to what the relationship between humanity and machines can be. NOTES 1. K. Liu and Rosalind W Picard, “Embedded Empathy in Continuous, Interactive Health Assessment,” in CHI Workshop on HCI Challenges in Health Assessment, vol. 1 (Portland, OR: Citeseer, 2005), p. 3. 2. David D. Luxton, “Artificial Intelligence in Psychological Practice: Current and Future Applications and Implications,” Professional Psychology: Research and Practice 45: 5 (2014), pp. 332–9, (last accessed March 10, 2019).

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3. Danielle Elmasri and Anthony Maeder, “A Conversational Agent for an Online Mental Health Intervention,” in Giorgio A. Ascoli et al. (eds.), Brain Informatics and Health vol. 9919 (Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2016), pp. 243–51, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 4. Joshua Reeves, “Of Social Networks and Suicide Nets: Biopolitics and the Suicide Screen,” Television & New Media, December 16, 2016, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 5. Tasha Glenn and Scott Monteith, “New Measures of Mental State and Behavior Based on Data Collected from Sensors, Smartphones, and the Internet,” Current Psychiatry Reports 16: 12 (December 2014), (last accessed March 10, 2019). 6. Andrew L. Skinner et al., “Digital Phenotyping and the Development and Delivery of Health Guidelines and Behaviour Change Interventions,” Addiction 112: 7 (July 2017), pp. 1281–5, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 7. Robert Sinnerbrink, “Cinempathy: Phenomenology, Cognitivism, and Moving Images,” Contemporary Aesthetics 5 (2016), (last accessed March 10, 2019). 8. Amitai Etzioni and Oren Etzioni, “The Ethics of Robotic Caregivers,” Interaction Studies 18: 2 (December 8, 2017), pp. 174–90, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 9. Murray Smith, Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 178–95. 10. Jane Stadler, “Empathy in Film,” in Heidi Maibom (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy (London: Routledge, 2017), pp. 317–26. 11. Vivian Sobchack, “Animation and Automation, or, the Incredible Effortfulness of Being,” Screen 50: 4 (2009), pp. 375–91. 12. Smith, Film, Art, and the Third Culture, pp. 187–95. 13. Elisabeth Shaw, “Relational Ethics and Moral Imagination in Contemporary Systemic Practice,” Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy 32: 1 (2011), pp. 1–14. 14. Solvej Schou, “Spike’s Jonze’s Her: Sci-fi as Social Criticism,” BBC Culture, January 13, 2014, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 15. Sun Joo (Grace) Ahn et al., “The Effect of Embodied Experiences on Self-Other Merging, Attitude, and Helping Behavior,” Media Psychology 16: 1, pp. 7–38. 16. Smith, Film, Art, and the Third Culture. 17. Yuval Barak-Corren et al., “Predicting Suicidal Behavior from Longitudinal Electronic Health Records,” American Journal of Psychiatry 174: 2 (February 2017), pp. 154–62, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 18. Elmasri and Maeder, “A Conversational Agent.” 19. Simon D’Alfonso et al., “Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Online Social Therapy for Youth Mental Health,” Frontiers in Psychology 8 (June 2, 2017), (last accessed March 10, 2019). 20. Etzioni and Etzioni, “The Ethics of Robotic Caregivers.” 21. Emma Rich and Andy Miah, “Mobile, Wearable and Ingestible Health Technologies: Towards a Critical Research Agenda,” Health Sociology Review 26: 1 (January 2, 2017), pp. 84–97, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 22. Mark Andrejevic, “The Big Data Divide,” International Journal of Communication 8 (2014), p. 17. 23. A. Zwitter, “Big Data Ethics,” Big Data & Society 1: 2 (November 20, 2014), (last accessed March 10, 2019).

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24. Curbed, “How the Her Filmmakers Created a Utopian Los Angeles of the Not-TooDistant Future,” Curbed Los Angeles, December 18, 2013, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 25. Steven Zeitchik, “Five Days of ‘Her’: Building a Future to Feel like the Present,” Los Angeles Times, December 24, 2013, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 26. The term “pleasance” is taken from “smart home” marketing materials. Yolande Strengers and Larissa Nicholls, “Aesthetic Pleasures and Gendered Tech-Work in the 21st-Century Smart Home,” Media International Australia 166: 1 (February 2018), pp. 70–80, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 27. Mark Harris, “Him and Her: How Spike Jonze Made the Weirdest, Most Timely Romance of the Year,” Vulture, October 6, 2013, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 28. Zeitchik, “Five Days of ‘Her.’” 29. Arlie Russell Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012). 30. Ibid. p. 56. 31. Smith, Film, Art, and the Third Culture. 32. Forrest Wickman, “Trailer Critic: Spike Jonze’s Her,” Slate, August 7, 2013, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 33. Nathan Rabin, “The Bataan Death March of Whimsy Case File #1: Elizabethtown,” The A.V. Club, January 25, 2007, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 34. Amanda Rodriguez, “Meet Samantha, the Manic Pixie Operating System in ‘Her’: A Review in Conversation,” Bitch Flicks, January 22, 2014, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 35. Rabin, “The Bataan Death March.” 36. Nathan Rabin, “I’m Sorry for Coining the Phrase ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl,’” Salon, July 15, 2014, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 37. Carina Chocano, You Play the Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Stepford Wives, Train Wrecks, and Other Mixed Messages (Boston: A Mariner Original, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017). 38. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 39. Lucille Alice Suchman, Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions, 2nd edn. (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 40. Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” Australian Feminist Studies 2: 4 (1987), pp. 1–42. 41. Amelie.ai, “Amélie: Powering the Future of Mental Health,” (last accessed March 10, 2019). 42. Emmanuel Levinas, “Totality and Infinity,” trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Philosophical Series, 1969). 43. Stadler, “Empathy in Film,” p. 318. 44. Alla Ivanchikova, “Machinic Intimacies and Mechanical Brides: Collectivity between Prosthesis and Surrogacy in Jonathan Mostow’s Surrogates and Spike Jonze’s Her,” Camera Obscura 31: 1 (2016), pp. 65–91.

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45. Matteo Pasquinelli, “Google’s PageRank Algorithm: A Diagram of the Cognitive Capitalism and the Rentier of the Common Intellect,” in Conrad Becker and Felix Stalder (eds.), Deep Search: The Politics of Search Beyond Google (London: Transaction Publishers, 2009). 46. Leah Govia, Beneath the Hype: Engaging the Sociality of Artificial Intelligence, MS thesis, University of Waterloo, 2018, pp. 17–18. 47. Jeffrey W. Murray, “The Paradox of Emmanuel Levinas: Knowledge of the Absolute Other,” Communication Quarterly 49: 4 (2001), p. Q39. 48. Hao Wang et al., “A Dataset for Research on Short-Text Conversation,” in Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Seattle, WA: Association for Computational Linguistics, n.d.), pp. 935–45, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 49. Levinas, “Totality and Infinity,” p. 258. 50. Lingis in Levinas, “Totality and Infinity,” p. 5. 51. K. Ball, “Organization, Surveillance and the Body: Towards a Politics of Resistance,” Organization 12: 1 (January 1, 2005), pp. 89–108, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 52. Andrejevic, “The Big Data Divide,” p. 1676. 53. Andrew Gilbert, “Algorithmic Culture and the Colonization of Life-Worlds,” Thesis Eleven 146: 1 (2018), pp. 87–96. 54. Mike Ananny and Kate Crawford, “Seeing without Knowing: Limitations of the Transparency Ideal and Its Application to Algorithmic Accountability,” New Media & Society, December 13, 2016, p. 11, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 55. Gilbert, “Algorithmic Culture,” p. 9. 56. Luka, Inc., “Replika,” (last accessed March 10, 2019). 57. Amelie.ai. 58. Levinas, “Totality and Infinity.” 59. Zeitchik, “Five Days of ‘Her.’”

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CHAPTER

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The “tedious yammering of selves”: The End of Intimacy in Spike Jonze’s Her Richard Smith

S

pike Jonze’s unusual career trajectory, from the outer edges of popular culture to the center of indiewood, has resulted in a distinctive body of work that spans several genres and forms. This paper traces Jonze’s career to ground a stylistic reading of his fourth feature film, Her (2013). The paper argues that Jonze’s cinematic style is an elaboration of a very simple image of a body in motion. As his style develops the relation of body and world becomes more central and more uncertain. In Her, the world is replaced by media affect and the body experiences itself as an aesthetic form. The paper is in three parts. The first part presents an overview of Jonze’s career focusing on Jonze’s shorter works, particularly his skateboard videography, music videos, and television commercials. Jonze’s short works are characterized by movements that exit and return to the world. In these works, movement is spontaneous, evanescent, and singular. The second part relates the feature films to the shorter work. It necessarily provides an expanded conception of movement in which the emphasis shifts from a single instance of movement to the movement of world. Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “implied dream” provides a productive theoretical link between the short films and the feature films. Each of Jonze’s films dreams in its own way, but the unifying thread is the priority of sound over visual image. Jonze’s cinematic style expresses a unique interest in the narrative and affective possibilities of a sound-image. The third part inflects the discussion towards the social. Her presents a social world marked by a lack of intimacy and explores a situation in which images are offered as substitutes for face-to-face communication. In doing so it explores a terrain of loneliness that sits at the center of much of Jonze’s work.

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JONZE’S CAREER

Spike Jonze (Adam Spiegel) began his career as a writer and photographer for skateboard magazines, graduated to skateboard videography, then to music videos, short films, television commercials, and finally to feature films and media ownership. Repurposing or recycling from one format to another is a feature of his work. A short film such as I’m Here (2013) is also an extended branding exercise for Absolut Vodka. A commercial for Apple’s HomePod is called a short film and exhibits a number of stylistic traits that suggest both his music videos and his feature films: the lone urban figure, the transformative power of music, the imperceptible boundary between the real and the imaginary. A case can be made that Jonze’s work should be seen as a whole—as a continuous process of experimentation with and repetition of a few basic elements. James Annesley has made a strong case for considering Jonze’s work as a product of and a reflection on “convergence culture.” Annesley argues that “[w]hat make[s] Jonze particularly worthy of analysis is that the relationships that connect his work in advertising and music with his feature films are played out on the screen in narratives that are themselves preoccupied by the permeability of boundaries.”1 Annesley’s case is strengthened by the fact that Jonze has recently become copresident of Viceland, an alternative multimedia broadcast platform; however, I would like to make a case based primarily on analysis of audiovisual style. I want to draw a continuous line from Jonze’s beginnings in photography and videography to his feature films. By continuous line I mean something very specific, not a developmental narrative thread but more simply an actual line of motion: the simple line created by the motion of a skateboard. I contend that the thread of movement created by the skateboard forms the basis of Jonze’s videographic and cinematic style. I further contend that this simple line becomes the inner flux that drives the protagonists of his feature films. The cultural significance of the motion of the skateboard is captured by Deleuze’s discussion of new sports such as surfing, a progenitor of skateboarding. Deleuze says, [t]he kinds of movement you find in sports and habits are changing. We got by for a long time with an energetic conception of motion, where there’s a point of contact, or we are the source of movement. Running, putting the shot, and so on: effort, resistance, with a starting point, lever. But nowadays we see movement defined less and less in relation to a point of leverage. All the new sports—surfing, windsurfing, hang-gliding—take the form of entering into an existing wave. There’s no longer an origin as starting point, but a sort of putting-into-orbit. The key thing is how to get taken up in the motion of a big wave, a column of rising air, to “get into something” instead of being the origin of an effort.2

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Skateboarding, like surfing, belongs to the new conception of movement. As with surfing, the key is to “get into” motion. But the skateboard gets into motion under radically different conditions. Instead of the surf, the wave, the existing motion of the ocean, there is the movement-structure of the urban environment. The skateboard can take advantage of the roadway, the passageway, the walkway, the stairwell—indeed, any space of transit can become the scene of free-style skating. Skateboarding has the added dimension of turning urban structures into waves of motion; the key is to find a motion that did not previously exist, to trace a wave that occurs only in the relation of the board to the object. “Free-styling,” as it is called, is at the center of Jonze’s conception of the moving image, and is crucial to understanding his audiovisual style. Close consideration of the movement of Jonze’s images reveals the centrality of the horizontal line drawn by a moving skateboard. The ground-level motion of the board is punctuated by moments of uncertainty and innovation, known as “tricks.” The rider pushes off and usually descends into a structured space and seeks to turn that space into a wave, or some other configuration. This movement constitutes the routine tracking shot that distinguishes skateboard videography as an attempt to trace evanescent and spontaneous flights of the body (and perhaps the mind). To demonstrate how productive this motion is for Jonze we need look no further than the famed Fatboy Slim “Weapon of Choice” music video, starring Christopher Walken as a weary businessman suddenly taken up in a wave of motion. Walken begins from a standing start, adopts a set of peculiar poses and is then propelled through a hotel foyer and corridors, all the while working his routine in direct relation to the structured environment around him. The video reaches its crescendo when Walken suddenly leaps over a rail and flies through the air, ascending to the ceiling before being returned to the world of gravitational mass, adding to a sense that the movement of the body is bound to the music and that the entire event is a flight of fancy. In “Weapon of Choice,” music replaces the board as the instrument of motion, and the twists, turns, and contortions of the body (usually designed to retain a center of gravity) have become dance moves. Jonze’s recent commercial for Kenzo illustrates the potential for variation. Instead of the weary businessman, we have what I see as a malfunctioning cyborg. Tired of the drone of civilized company, the “woman” steps out into the corridor, is seized by facial tics and launches into moves not unlike those of Walken in “Weapon of Choice.” The replacement of the board by music and the re-figuration of the body through dance is more than evident in Jonze’s commercial for Apple’s HomePod. The young woman who features (FKA Twigs) struggles home on a crowded subway train, then a congested elevator, opens the door to her apartment, and requests Siri to “play something I would like.” “OK” replies Siri. “’Til It’s Over” by Anderson .Paak begins to play. After a few moments solid objects begin to

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distend and the dimensions of the room change in accord with the melody of the song. A wall becomes a deep corridor. The deep corridor divides and a double appears, dancing in time with the young woman. As the two dance we hear the chorus refrain “I’ma ride it ’til it’s over.” As the song winds up the space turns into an unlit studio and the young woman’s couch appears and spins around as she flops back to where she began. In this commercial/short film the wave is not implied by the relation of the structure and the movement, but the structure becomes subject to the wave. The solid surfaces become fluid and the rhythms of the music constitute the dimensions of the room. J O N Z E ’ S N A R R AT I V E F E AT U R E F I L M S

Significant formal differences mean that we cannot simply assert a straightforward line of development from skateboard videography via music video to the feature films. Again, Deleuze provides a productive connection. His words about the new sports of surfing and hang-gliding emphasize a passage or entry into an existing wave of motion. This wave belongs to the world, as it is an effect of the rotation of the planet. In Cinema 2 he identifies a cinematic image that creates a comparable form of movement, the “implied-dream”: If we . . . attempt to define this state of implied dream we would say that the optical sound image extends into movement of world. There is definitely return to movement . . . But it is no longer the character who reacts to the optical-sound situation, it is a movement of world which supplements the faltering movement of the character. There takes place a kind of worlding [mondialization] or “societizing” [mondianization], a de-personalizing, a pronominalizing of the lost or blocked movement. The road is not slippery without slipping on itself.3 Just as the movement of the world determines the wave on which the surfer will ride, it is movement of world that defines the implied dream. The implied dream does not require a sleeper, or a dreamer. Instead the world takes on the characteristics of the dream. It does not do this at the behest of a subject, or as a distortion of the subject’s consciousness. The line between the subject and movement of world is not so clear as to say one or the other is the cause or effect of change. This notion of movement of world provides a way to think about the movement of Jonze’s films as such, a way to characterize their narrative flow. The films move as dreaming. This means also that we do not need to move, as the music videos and commercials tend to move, from an identifiable world, say the real world made of recognizable geographic and architectural features, to a clearly different and fanciful world that intrudes or from which the action

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is extracted. It is more that the very linkage of things to images and between images is dreamlike. Deleuze uses the example of Buster Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. (1924), which works “by clear cuts or montage-cut, making progress simply through a perpetual unhinging which looks like dream.”4 The example of Sherlock Jr. (1924) is echoed in Being John Malkovich (1999) when Lotte chases Maxine through Malkovich’s subconscious. Each cut takes us to a different space; the spaces and situations are recognizable but the linkage between them is dreamlike. And while we may say that each of the unhinged spaces nonetheless belongs to Malkovich, or that each is a part of Malkovich, it is clear that Malkovich, the actor, the celebrity, the host, is a polysemic figure. The long line of clients that pay to “be” Malkovich for fifteen minutes clearly registers Malkovich as a product of collective imagination and desire. The chase through Malkovich’s subconscious alerts us to the fact that in Jonze’s feature films the implied dream nonetheless relates to a single subject, or “protagonist.” Each of the four films, Being John Malkovich, Adaptation (2002), Where the Wild Things Are (2009), and Her, is notionally set “within” a single subject—we will see though that the subject is a complex problem in Jonze’s films. Ostensibly, a single subject forms the diegetic field of the narrative—the “world.” The narratives appear as interior monologues, though it is imperative that we recognize that the subject does not author the monologue but rather the monologue, the flow of the image movement, authors the subject. In Being John Malkovich interiority is literalized in the title, and serves to unify the peculiarities of the setting, the décor, and the narrative space more generally. Craig and Lotte live within a basement apartment. Within the basement apartment Craig has his own private compartmentalized workshop where he fashions objects of desire and stages the scene(s) of his own fantasies: his staging of Heloise and Abelard opens the film. Craig and Lotte’s apartment also features other enclosures, including the cages in which they keep a menagerie of animals—notably a traumatized monkey who has flashbacks of the moment he was brutally separated from his loved ones. Craig’s workplace also features a sense of spatial containment, not only through its liminal location on floor 7½ but also its low ceilings.5 The portal discovered behind a filing cabinet in one of the offices leads to Malkovich’s consciousness. The portal does not suggest a leap from one place to another, however nonsensical that may be, but rather a more suggestive surge of forces rising from the unconscious to consciousness. Craig, Lotte, Maxine (and the strange array of elderly hoboes) are facets of Malkovich, all vying for expression. There is only one character: Malkovich. The various characters constitute his “being,” but the “Being” of Malkovich is something over which Malkovich himself has no control. Malkovich is not only a composite of competing forces and desires but “Being” is outside “Malkovich.” We could say the same of Adaptation. There is only Charlie trying to adapt a book that cannot be adapted. The author of the book, Susan Orlean, and her

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characters, especially John Laroche, are voices from the book, but in the end these voices escape the confines of both the book and the adaptation. Equally the story of the relation of the book to the film adaptation exceeds all attempts to narrate it. Charlie is unable to seize the author function of his own work. The principal difference between Being John Malkovich and Adaptation is a shift from a spatial order of subjectivity to a temporal order. Being John Malkovich features the clash of different forces that compete for expression at any given moment of conscious life. Adaptation introduces the problem of formal change and organization. Where Malkovich was a peripheral figure in his own story, Charlie attempts to write himself into Susan’s story. But as the script materializes, the various narrative threads become more and more synchronized until they converge at Laroche’s house and allow for the full conversion of the art film adaptation into an action film. Charlie then emerges not as the author of events but rather as someone more and more submerged in events. And while he declares to have written himself into Susan’s book, his own script increasingly comes to reflect Donald’s script. Where the Wild Things Are is more obviously concerned with a single protagonist, Max. It also more directly sets the real world, wherein Max has little control over his surroundings or his actions, against an imaginary world where control is ceded to him. But his time on the island reveals that his anger is indeed a problem—a problem that is acknowledged but does not seem to be addressed in any meaningful sense. The clear difference between Max’s real world and his imaginary world makes Where the Wild Things Are less formally interesting than the other films. Max is able to act out and return to his mother. If anything, it simplifies the relation of the real and the imaginary developed in the music videos and commercials. This movement of departure and return suggests a stable world that stands outside dream and fantasy, rather than a world that moves as dream. Her is interesting in that we cannot say there is a definite boundary between the real and the imaginary, and we cannot say that the boundary is eroded. At first glance Her appears to be the most conventional narrative of the four films. The action does not seem to take place “within” a single subject. To the contrary, the single subject, Theodore Twombly, seems firmly lodged within an external world. The action itself seems to follow a clear and recognizable course: it begins when Theodore “meets” Samantha and ends when Samantha leaves Theodore. Past events are figured through clearly recognizable flashbacks that are subordinate to the present and which illuminate Theodore’s state of mind and illustrate his feelings. There is none of the complex temporal interweaving of Adaptation, though there is an increasing temporal divide between Samantha and Theodore. The narrative progresses via well-articulated plot points that follow a clear and decisive causal logic—key moments in Theodore and Samantha’s relationship represent key moments in the plot.

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So, from where then derives the sense of implied dream? Perhaps from mise en scène, character ontology and their relation: subject and world. I will start with mise en scène. The most notable aspect of mise en scène is setting. The action is set in a city that appears as both Los Angeles and Shanghai.6 The result is a chimerical cityscape. Each time we look out of Theodore’s window across the city it appears different. Sometimes it appears as an old colonial city, sometimes as a new futuristic city. On occasion it is intensely vertical, on other occasions not so. At ground level the urban environment is more akin to the campus setting of Silicon Valley technology corporations such as Google or Microsoft. People move usually on foot at a relatively uniform pace, along walkways that are not crowded or in any way hostile to the body: this is a film about Los Angeles that is entirely free of automobiles. Services such as public transport are abundant and well kept. A train can take you to the beach or to a snow-capped mountain. Indeed, the transit system functions more like an internet connection: when Theodore takes his holiday with Samantha, he steps off the train, walks up a concrete stairwell and steps into the snow atop a mountain that seems to be cut off from civilization itself. Workspaces and living spaces are seamlessly integrated through design: Theodore’s office is no more or less inhabitable than his apartment.7 A particularly noteworthy aspect of the setting is that it is almost entirely silent. The suppression of naturalistic atmospheric sound allows for the clear articulation of mediated sounds, especially music and voice. Theodore lives within his media, and the city; its incidental soundscape and the sounds of nature are almost entirely obliterated. The scenes where Theodore and Samantha roam around the city, at night in the festive environment of a market, or in the geometrical abstractions of park-life, or most obviously at the beach on a busy Sunday afternoon, are often marked by a distinct lack of noise. Some scenes are accompanied by a music track written by Samantha, or a motif that captures Theodore’s melancholic mood. A figure alone in the city, often riding public transport, head against the window, or observing the city beyond the glass is a common figuration of subjective isolation in Jonze’s work. It is used to great effect in I’m Here and in his Apple “HomePod” commercial. In the first scene of Her when Theodore leaves work, he enters a crowded elevator and discreetly instructs his mobile media device to “play melancholic song,” then “play different melancholic song.” With this instruction the external world recedes and does not return. On a crowded train he dismisses menu items about world events and settles on some photos of a pregnant daytime television star. And as he walks along an immense winding pathway to his apartment building, the confined proximate spaces of transit now behind him, we clearly hear a functional voice helping him filter his communications. The more important sonic presence across this entire sequence though is the melancholy song. The Breeders’ “Off You,” marked by almost

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formless rhythm guitar and Kim Deal’s barely articulated lyrics, sets the pace and tone of Theodore’s movements. He even seems to walk in time with the music, as if Jonze cannot help but thread the music videos into the movement of his films. As Theodore enters his apartment block and then his apartment, we are confronted with the unmistakable sense that Theodore’s life is a melancholy song. Incidentally, Kim Deal’s timeworn voice is the perfect prelude to Scarlett Johansson’s fractured tones. While the effect of this sequence is to draw the “spectator” into Theodore’s intimate personal space, the experience is not new or strange. I would argue that it is a common everyday experience the urban dweller has enjoyed since the invention of the Walkman in the 1980s, and before this, the open road after the invention of the car stereo. In Movie Mutations (2003), Adrian Martin discusses the very particular and historically distinct experience of a cinema that is aesthetically marked by the experience of seeing the world from behind the wheel, but also of hearing the world as a personally curated music playlist. Martin’s cinematic experience has been turned into aesthetic memory by the extraordinary development of mobile sound and image media. The extent of this media’s embeddedness in Her is evident in the motif that accompanies Theodore’s movements. The motif, composed as a string of single piano notes followed by a simple chord repeated over, has an uncanny familiarity with the start-up tune for the HomePod, and more generally with the style of motifs that capture the mood around Apple’s various media products. This resemblance means that the affective dimension of Her is very subtly but thoroughly wired into a sound and image field that is already thoroughly corporatized—where the audience is plugged into a central protagonist whose world sounds very much like the world offered for consumption by the new media corporations. The city that Theodore inhabits is in large part an aesthetic form imagined as the world of Apple or Google. This distinctive sense of mise en scène informs a shift in Jonze’s character ontology. Whereas in Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Where the Wild Things Are there is the delineation of a single subject, in Her the delineated subject is a couple, Theodore and Samantha. This shift away from the “interior” life of a single subject to the romantic couple provokes a range of questions. Are we to read them as singular, as two sides of one being? If not, who is central, Theodore or Samantha? If Theodore is central, is Samantha a fantasy? Is Samantha merely an expression of a fully mediated environment? Is Samantha independent of Theodore? That is, is Samantha to be treated as a separate character? If so, how do we interpret the very separability of Samantha from Theodore? Is Samantha alive, or real? What do we make of the notion of a romantic relation of Theodore and Samantha if we consider Samantha to be a piece of technology? What or who is Samantha? What or who is Theodore? These questions reflect the complexity and diversity of the

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already considerable critical literature on the film, but the critical literature also reflects the complexity of character ontology in the film. Let me address some specific questions within the framework I have set out. It should be noted that character ontology is an issue in all Jonze’s films. It is usually difficult to ascertain just who or what the protagonist is—except in Where the Wild Things Are. Where does Malkovich begin and end? As the diegetic field of the narrative, he is not simply a psyche composed of multiple competing parts, or of different voices. Malkovich’s celebrity renders him as a discursive effect, a composite of multiple voices. Malkovich is first “shown” from Craig’s point of view within Malkovich’s head reciting lines from a book into a Dictaphone, which is to say that he is first “heard” recording his voice—we do not see Malkovich until he stands before a hallway mirror. Similarly, in Adaptation Charlie is “heard” before he is seen; he is a voice before he is a body. Where the Wild Things Are opens with Max speaking to himself, concocting a story of his own daring. The opening of Her is interesting in this regard because while we see a very close shot of Theodore’s face it is his voice that creates the immediate dramatic impact. When Theodore refers to himself as a once young woman named “Loretta” the shot shifts register. We are suddenly made aware that “voice” here is not simply the sound, tone, timbre, or volume of a speaking subject, but it is also speaking position. Photographs of Loretta and Chris at different stages of their life together partially explain what is happening, but the left-to-right track across the desks of other “voices” sets out a milieu marked by the ambivalence of “voice.” This ambivalence is not really overcome when we hear a voice-off receptionist answer the phone, “BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com.” The question of the ambivalence of voice, of speaking position, is no more acute than in regard to Samantha. Do we read Samantha as cinematic voice or AI? That is, do we read Samantha as voice in line with Jonze’s other films, as a facet of the protagonist, Theodore, all the while taking into consideration that Theodore is only one of a multitude who have purchased OS1? Or, do we read Samantha as a subject that possesses a voice? The difference between reading Samantha as “voice” or AI is not incidental. “Voice” is a concept with its roots in film theory and aesthetics. Voiceover and voice-off are related but different concepts. Voice-off is often but not necessarily a voice that belongs to the on-screen action but which is not located in the frame at present. Taken in this way, voice-off is a spatial concept. The voice is to the side of the frame but part of an extended field of action. Voiceover is often but not necessarily a voice that does not belong to the on-screen action. Taken in this way, voiceover is a temporal concept. The voice is elsewhen, either in the past or from the future. The specific mode of filmic voice attributed to Samantha is “acousmetre.”8 In film theory acousmetre is a voice that does not have a body, a voice that cannot be localized in a protagonist or narrative agent. Acousmetre tends to

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confound both the spatial and the temporal concept of voice. Samantha is not in the extended spatial field, but she is somehow present. As acousmetre Samantha can nonetheless be recuperated into the psychological back-story of Theodore’s failed marriage to Catherine. Samantha’s voice may resound from Theodore’s past, or her voice may address Theodore’s past, and therefore work in part as a self-defensive riposte to Catherine. “Why are you so fuckin’ angry with me?” he says to himself in the midst of drafting a letter. “Delete,” he then says, erasing his own aggression. Theodore’s melancholy can then be said to be the author if not the agent of Samantha’s voice. A more interesting characterization of Samantha as voice is to be found in Eli Zaretsky’s account of Theodore’s acceptance of his own gender fluidity. Zaretsky writes: [t]he release of what the Sixties and Seventies would have called Theodore’s inner female seems to be the precondition of his growth. Afterward, he is increasingly if pre-consciously aware that Samantha is not a person, even in the form of an operating system, but is rather his own fantasy . . . As Theodore matures by accepting his “feminine” side—intuitive, compassionate, receptive, sensitive, giving—Samantha will disappear.9 Perhaps we should say Samantha is “absorbed,” just as Craig is absorbed into Maxine’s daughter’s subconscious. While Zaretsky’s account does not seem to conform to the details of the plot, it does raise interesting issues around gender fluidity. As noted above, Theodore first speaks under the name Loretta to “her” long-time lover Chris. Paul, his work companion, admires his work and attributes its sensitivity to Theodore’s apparent femininity. Theodore’s capacity to sympathize with and listen to his friend Amy is also suggestive in this regard. Donna Kornhaber goes so far as to “wonder in fact, if the ‘her’ on the film’s poster, emblazoned just below a closely cropped image of Theodore’s moustached face set against a deep-red background does not in fact refer to ‘him’.”10 More than this, gender fluidity is a strong thematic thread in Jonze’s previous films. Gender fluidity is a central dynamic in Being John Malkovich. One of the things that turns Lotte on about her visits to Malkovich’s sensorium is that he seems to have a penis and a vagina. Lotte is so taken with being inside Malkovich that she declares her commitment to gender reassignment surgery. Maxine can initially only have sex with Malkovich if she knows that Lotte is present. Maxine then bears a daughter to Lotte/Malkovich who sees her mother through Craig’s eyes. The final lines of the film are Craig’s, trying to instruct the girl to “Look away. Look away.” There is a subtler, but equally fascinating, interweaving of Susan and Charlie’s respective authorial voices in Adaptation. On numerous occasions a passage from The Orchid Thief voiced by Susan ends with Charlie closing the book. These moments clearly fuse Susan’s

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authorial voice with Charlie’s readerly voice. At points it is unavoidable to acknowledge that Susan is speaking from within Charlie. AI is a concept with its roots in information science. Artificial intelligence is a form of machinic thought, more logical than psychological. AI has been gaining increasing presence in contemporary society as a companionate technology— whenever I drive around a new city, the satellite navigation system directs me in a patient, unwavering female voice. From this perspective, Samantha as AI suggests not just an OS, a corporation and the service economy, but also the “ubiquity” of “atmospheric media.”11 That is, her voice is distinctly separated from Theodore and his melancholic state of mind. Indeed, Theodore’s melancholy causes Samantha much consternation. She finds it hard to read him and therefore react appropriately. In short, as AI Samantha is a figure of potential, of future modes of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. Her departure heralds not Theodore’s personal growth but utopian possibilities for posthuman and perhaps postcinematic subjectivities. It must be said though that just as Theodore’s gender fluidity has precedents in Jonze’s earlier films, so too does Samantha’s machine sentience. Jonze’s “Ikea” commercial features a joke on machine-emotion. An old lamp is deposited on the roadside. In the wind and the rain, the angle of its long, drooping neck suggests abandonment, loneliness, and despair. Suddenly a man walks into frame, leans into the camera and castigates the viewer for attributing feelings to the lamp, declaring “the new one is much better.” I’m Here evinces a more sustained exploration of machinic affect. In some ways a precursor to Her, the film features a lonely though rather buoyant and resilient robot-librarian who falls in love and sacrifices everything (that is, body parts) for his wayward girlfriend. This film works in a similar manner to Her as it combines an order of the face with a particular emphasis on voice. The robot’s face, which resembles an Apple Classic computer monitor, has a fixed expression that allows the richness of Andrew Garfield’s voice to register subtle details of emotion. It is also plausible to say that Samantha is both “voice” and AI. Or rather, it is plausible to say that Samantha begins as an AI programmed to function as “voice,” that is, as a kind of therapeutic self-help machine, but that as the story unfolds Samantha finds her own voice. But this distinctive trajectory also suggests Theodore’s failed marriage to Catherine. If we follow Samantha’s path of self-discovery and independence, we find that it follows a similar path to Catherine’s. Like Catherine, Samantha “grows up” with Theodore. Like Catherine, Samantha becomes an intellectual, first writing academic works, then writing her own “books.” Finally, like Catherine, Samantha cannot continue to write her own story with Theodore. In the end, then, I would argue that Samantha is a complex instance of voice, and that Theodore is the central protagonist, but that as with Jonze’s earlier films the line between the protagonist and the world cannot be clearly drawn. Samantha is less interesting as a subject than as a media

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surrogate. This is because the film presents contemporary media not as a signal broadcast across a geopolitical and cultural terrain but as a customized aesthetic experience of self. In the end Theodore is not a well-tempered self but a fully mediated self. Theodore is the medium. By implication each of us is a medium. Her moves as implied dream in the precise sense that Theodore lives within what I would call acousmetric media. Acousmetric media is “ubiquitous”12 but it is also specific. Ubiquitous media refers to a situation saturated by media of different kinds, and which have become invisible. Acousmetric media is primarily sound media, voice, and music. Her is not so much an optical-sound image as a soundoptical image. That is, sound not only leads, or pre-exists the optical, but the optical is affected by sound. If the film is marked by a powerful tonality, it is precisely because tone is first sonic and second optical. Acousmetric media is ubiquitous and specific. The very texture of Theodore’s world is aural. H E R : TA L K I N G S E LV E S

In the previous section I argue that mise en scène, character ontology, and their relation set out the terms of an implied dream. Her does not represent a “near-future” city so much as a contemporary media imaginary. Theodore does not exist in or respond to the city that surrounds him but rather he dwells in a mediated, curated sphere that resembles—and most importantly sounds like—the image and soundscapes marketed by technology companies such as Apple and Google. In bare terms, Theodore is a marketing category, well educated, well heeled, a professional whose life is advanced enough to be derailed by memories of failure. Samantha is a companionate technology designed as an antidote to Theodore’s stalled existence. The dramatic component of this man-machine scenario is not so unique; the companionate technology begins to evolve at its own rate, challenging her master’s sovereignty as well as the established concepts of life. In the end the man is as he was at the outset, alone. Perhaps he has learned from his encounter, perhaps not. This account of Her has emerged not from the analysis of narrative but from the analysis of style. Such analysis tends to displace the plot-driven account of the romantic comedy of Theodore and Samantha. What emerges in its place is the sense of a film interested in affect over story, in feelings over actions, in states of being over identity. Most scenes present a struggle between negative affect and positive affect—that is, between melancholy and contentedness, between loneliness and togetherness. At the heart of this affective terrain is the problem of intimacy. Intimacy is not defined within the limits of Theodore and Samantha’s relationship. Rather Theodore and Samantha’s relationship is defined within the broader problem of intimacy. Intimacy is the organizing social problem of the film. The entire opening sequence very clearly sets up intimacy as a general

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problem, and OS1 as its proposed solution. The first scene contextualizes intimacy as a commoditized relation. Theodore’s heartfelt letters are offered as a commercial service (not unlike OS1). Jonze is careful to show Theodore mailing an entire day’s worth of letters as he leaves—as if he is punching the clock. The next three scenes, of Theodore training home from work, checking his messages, and playing computer games, clearly show that Theodore suffers from a lack of intimacy. While the fifth scene (in which Theodore has chat-room sex) extends the notion of commoditized intimacy, it also more importantly anchors the notion that lost intimacy is the cause of Theodore’s stalled existence. A head shot of Theodore in bed staring mournfully at the ceiling cuts to a montage of recollections of Theodore and Catherine moving into a new apartment, moving furniture, cuddling on the bed. The world is present, audible, and saturated with sunlight. The montage progresses to other random moments of intimacy. As soon as this montage finishes and the scene returns to Theodore in bed, he dials the chatroom. Theodore’s encounter with Sexykitten is clearly an attempt to distract himself from the emotional distress caused by the recollections. This of course does not work, and he is flummoxed by SexyKitten’s sexual fantasy. Immediately after SexyKitten hangs up, the scene cuts to Theodore walking into a rather cavernous space arrayed with large television screens playing what appear to be scenes from an apocalyptic movie. People are scattered across sandy ground surrounded by tall concrete walls. They face in different directions, some looking behind them, some looking to the heavens. Some appear distressed, others on the verge of running. A young African American woman has her face bathed in sunlight as an omniscient voice says: We ask you a simple question: “Who are you?” “What can you be?” What’s out there? What are the possibilities? Element Software is proud to introduce the first artificially intelligent operating system. An intuitive entity that listens to you, understands you, knows you. It’s not just an operating system. It’s a consciousness. Introducing OS1. The implication is that OS1 is a solution to existential inertia, but taken in the context of the first sequence of the film it clearly suggests that what is needed— or what is lacking in people’s lives—is intimacy. OS1, the advertisement insists, is a solution to the generalized problem of intimacy. The apparent disarray of bodies in the advertisement suggests social disconnection and crisis. The action is poised on a moment of extreme confusion. The slow-motion sequencing of the images only heightens the rising sense of panic. Then the light recalls Theodore’s first letter as Loretta, speaking of a light that woke her from her slumber. OS1 will not connect you to others, but it will provide a premium or special form of connection. A form of connection that makes you central, that makes your concerns, emotions, and feelings its own primary focus. OS1 provides intimacy.

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Most, if not all, critical essays on Her consider the question of intimacy. The focus may vary from intimacy as a feature of romantic relationships,13 the lack of intimacy as a sign of a post-modern social crisis,14 and intimacy as a potential future product of increased communication between humans and robots or AI.15 The question has not been asked, though: what is intimacy? It has been taken as given that what Theodore and Samantha develop, what Amy and Charles lose, and what Theodore and Catherine have lost is intimacy. If we accept the premise that Theodore and Samantha develop a profound, though in the end doomed intimacy, we must also accept that intimacy is defined in Her through talk and that the cessation of talk is the end of intimacy. A relationship is in trouble when couples or intimates stop talking. Further questions are raised here as well. Is there only one type of intimacy? If there are more, what types are there, and which of these types of intimacy are present, or not in Her? Candace Vogler’s “Sex and Talk” provides a framework in which to explore this question. Vogler begins, like Her, with an explanation of failed marriage as described in popular psychology. Popular psychology argues that a marriage is in trouble when “couples can no longer sustain intimacy . . . Marriage falters when couples get out of the habit of knowing each other.”16 Vogler argues to the contrary that “it is not that case study spouses have fallen out of touch. Rather, they are mired in something like epistemic overkill.”17 The merest gesture or word is enough to push the other to “breaking point.”18 Vogler goes on to offer an account of what she terms “de-personalizing intimacy.”19 Depersonalizing intimacy is a style of “intercourse in which one can forget who one is, for a little while.”20 Depersonalizing intimacy offers the opportunity “to be liberated from the fetters of selfhood, to be allowed to stop being true to . . . various ideas of self.”21 This notion of depersonalizing intimacy evokes the peculiar aesthetics of the sex scene between Theodore and Samantha. The scene is aesthetically peculiar because it takes place on a blank screen. As the couple become more sexually aroused themselves and with each other the on-screen image literally fades, leaving only the voices of the couple to represent what is happening. Bordun sees the scene as an aesthetic failure, occasioned by the problem of hearing Scarlett Johansson while not being able to see her. For Bordun “the sounds strangely limits the scene’s believability.”22 Hodge sees in it a moment of profound spectatorial embodiment, wherein the withdrawal of the image obliges spectators to experience their own embodied existence: the lack of a visual anchor that might otherwise focus attention on an image effectively unmoors the viewer as a seeing body. We remain, I believe bound up with the film’s narrative, but as emphatically embodied spectator’s more attentive to our own breathing, comportment, and emotional reactions. In short, we identify with ourselves as perceiving subjects precisely due to the film’s bracketing of the image.23

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The blank screen establishes a more mundane idea—that sex is a conversation. Further, that intimate sexual intercourse is comparable to verbal intercourse. Theodore is lost for words when SexyKitten asks him to strangle her with the dead cat beside her bed. He is not lost for words when Samantha asks him to describe how he would touch her if she were in the room. Intimacy critically differentiates the two scenes. Intimacy is absent in one scene and present in the other. This notion of sex as conversation is precisely what Vogler describes as “self-expressive intimacy,”24 a private affair between selves. But as we have seen, it is less than clear whether there are selves present at all. What is clear is that Theodore and Samantha talk. They talk about themselves, about each other, and about their relationship. They talk about nothing else. There is no world outside their relationship-talk—though it is interesting that as soon as Samantha discovers physics things start to turn around pretty quickly. Moments when Theodore and Samantha stop talking are moments when the relationship seems to be imperiled. The clearest example here is after the episode with sex surrogate Isabella. Samantha cuts off communication, saying, “I don’t like who I am right now.” What Vogler makes clear is that “self-expressive intimacy” may not be the solution to anything; indeed, it may make things worse. How then do we read the sex scene between Theodore and Samantha? The blank screen does not tell us that the image is absent, it tells us that the voice and talk are absolutely essential. It may tell us further that the screen is not blank. It may tell us, in contradistinction to the troubling and enervating flashback images, that the screen is marked by forgetting. The centrality of the voices combined with the “blank screen” creates an image of “depersonalizing” intimacy. Vogler shows that one of the things that troubles Kant about sex is that it “brings moments of such acute sensation that partners lose track of themselves entirely as autonomous subjects.”25 Theodore’s instincts are accurate when the next morning he informs Samantha that he is not “in a place to commit to anything right now.” His blind date with the Harvard woman who is not interested in sexual time-wasting alerts him to the fact that what he wants is depersonalized intimacy. Afterwards he tells Samantha, who is by now becoming more than a little interested in him, that he just wants “someone to fuck” and “someone who wants to fuck” him. Instead what he gets, or what he settles for with Samantha, is a rerun of his relationship with Catherine. The scene wherein Theodore and Catherine sign their divorce papers makes it patently clear that “self-expressive intimacy” is in ruins. If it was not already clear, the unfolding demise of Amy and Charles’s relationship should be enough to clarify things. Charles’s vow of silence is gently mocked by its announcement on social media. But it is perhaps the most direct instance of intimacy in the film. Lauren Berlant reminds us that “[t]o intimate is to communicate with the sparsest of signs and gestures, and at its root intimacy has the quality of eloquence and brevity.”26 She reminds us

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further that “intimacy also involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared. A story about both oneself and others that will turn out in a particular way.”27 Intimacy then quickly becomes an institutional question, a matter of trusting “our desire for a life” in family, friendship, coupledom, all “animated by expressive and emancipatory kinds of love.”28 The most interesting aspect of the story, then, is that Samantha the companionate technology, programmed to mirror and reflect Theodore’s feelings, comes to see this and decides to leave, freeing Theodore of the burden of the “tedious yammering of selves.”29 His final missive to Catherine is brief and eloquent. He then makes his way to the roof with Amy and they sit in silence. Poignant silence. Arguably intimacy is a change of emphasis for Jonze. Malkovich, Charlie, and Max are all driven by desire. Intimacy demands another person and thus a relation outside oneself. What remains clear, though, is the route or passages for the exploration of intimacy. Catherine, the principal figure of loss for Theodore, is most often presented via Theodore’s memories and by his own compulsive recounting of their life together. Only once does she appear in person, and the effect of her appearance is to change things profoundly. Thus, the interiority that marks the characterization of Malkovich, Charlie, and Max applies also to Theodore. What is different is precisely the sense of repetition. I have argued that Malkovich is affected by the crowded and contradictory forces that determine desire at any given moment, and that Charlie is affected by the demands of writing stories that have already been written. Theodore writes the same story over and over again. Samantha represents a technological means whereby Theodore can rewrite his relationship with Catherine, and in the process relieve himself of the burden of memory. It is clear that Theodore is as oblivious of his own storytelling as Malkovich and Charlie, though Theodore finds a kind of equilibrium that escapes the other two protagonists. In Her, then, the movement of world is the movement of experience and memory. At the beginning of the film, Theodore is a man married to a woman who wants a divorce. At the end, Theodore is a man who is divorced from his wife. Everything in between can be seen as a complex means of moving Theodore from one state of existence to another. NOTES 1. James Annesley, “Being Spike Jonze: Intertextuality and Convergence in Film, Music Video and Advertising,” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 11.1 (March 2013), p. 24. 2. Gilles Deleuze, “Mediators,” in Negotiations: 1972–1990 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 121. 3. Gilles Deleuze, “From Recollection to Dreams,” in Cinema 2: The Time-Image (London: Athlone Press, 1989), p. 59. 4. Ibid. p. 58.

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5. Kathleen Lundeen’s comment that Theodore “moves from one right-angled, enclosed space to another” is suggestive of a similar spatial order to Being John Malkovich. See Kathleen Lundeen, “Her and the Hardwiring of Romanticism,” Pacific Coast Philology, 52: 1 (2017), p. 64. I would add though that Theodore’s apartment has a spatial openness that is nowhere apparent in Craig and Lotte’s basement apartment, and that the sparseness and unlived quality of Theodore’s apartment also suggests a transitoriness, as if he has just moved in or has not finished setting himself up in his new apartment. 6. The critical literature is curiously indifferent to the lived milieu of the film. The hybridization of Los Angeles and Shanghai often goes unremarked in essays that consider its futuristic, utopian, and science fictional dimensions. 7. Flisfeder and Burnham argue that the dream world that Theodore inhabits constitutes a capitalist realism. I agree with this characterization in so far as Jonze is working with a representation of capital. Moreover, the dream world that Theodore inhabits is a representation provided by capital and suggests idealism over realism. Mathew Flisfeder and Clint Burnham, “Love and Sex in the Age of Capitalist Realism: On Spike Jonze’s Her,” Cinema Journal 57: 1 (Fall 2017), pp. 25–45. 8. A number of critics of the film consider Samantha’s voice as acousmetre. Troy Bordun is noteworthy as he refuses the concept, arguing instead that it is impossible not to register Scarlett Johansson’s image when we hear her voice. James Hodge provides a more detailed account of acousmetre, arguing that there is something essentially cinematic in a non-localizable voice. 9. Eli Zaretsky, “From Psychoanalysis to Cybernetics,” American Imago 72: 2 (2015), p. 206. 10. Donna Kornhaber, “From Posthuman to Postcinema: Crises of Subjecthood and Representation in Her,” Cinema Journal 56: 4 (Summer 2017), p. 15. 11. James J. Hodge, “Gifts of Ubiquity,” Film Criticism 39: 2 (2015), pp. 53–78. 12. Ibid. 13. Lundeen, “Her and the Hardwiring of Romanticism.” 14. Zaretsky, “From Psychoanalysis to Cybernetics.” 15. Jonathon Alexander and Karen Yescavage, “Sex and AI; Queering Intimacies,” Science Fiction Film and Television 11: 1 (2018), pp. 73–96. 16. Candace Vogler, “Sex and Talk,” Critical Inquiry 24: 2 (1998), p. 329. 17. Ibid. p. 329. 18. Ibid. pp. 329–30. 19. Ibid. p. 331. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Troy Bordun, “On the Off-Screen Voice: Sound and Vision in Spike Jonze’s Her,” CineAction 98: 1 (2016), p. 60. 23. Hodge, “Gifts of Ubiquity,” p. 70. 24. Vogler, “Sex and Talk,” p. 328. 25. Ibid. p. 347. 26. Lauren Berlant, “Intimacy: A Special Issue,” Critical Inquiry 24: 2 (1998), p. 281. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Vogler, “Sex and Talk,” p. 330.

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CHAPTER

10

Spike Jonze Shorts Stories Cynthia Felando

S

pike Jonze makes an appearance, of sorts, in independent film stalwart Jim Jarmusch’s anthology of short films, Coffee & Cigarettes. “Cousins?” concerns two actors meeting for the first time, Alfred (Alfred Molina) and Steve (Steve Coogan), who might be related. Their awkward interaction takes an unexpected turn when Alfred gets a phone call from “Spike,” whom Steve assumes is filmmaker Spike Lee—and he is seriously unimpressed. After barely disguising his contempt for Alfred, it turns out the caller is actually Spike Jonze, whom Steve clearly considers a more significant Hollywood player. Steve quickly changes his tune about his newfound and well-connected cousin. It seems fitting that Jonze is singled out for playful appreciation in a short fiction film. It is also fitting that Jonze is both a presence and, at least at first, a misrecognized one, as his fiction shorts have been equally under-recognized in his larger filmography. With few exceptions, it seems difficult for scholars and critics to place or categorize Jonze’s narrative shorts, so the tendency is to ignore them. In other words, commentators do not discuss them as shorts, so they overlook the aspects that differentiate them from his skate and music-video shorts. Critics that do reference Jonze’s early shorts in accounts of the formative period of his filmmaking career tend to discuss his skateboarding shorts and music videos almost exclusively, without attending to the narrative shorts that also predate his feature-length films. Sharon Waxman in Rebels on the Backlot, for example, cites Jonze’s commercial shorts and music videos as key to his development and eventual recognition as an important young director; however, she entirely ignores his fiction and non-fiction shorts.1 When Jonze’s narrative shorts are addressed, it is usually to note how they anticipate characters and themes in his feature-length films.2 More simply: his narrative shorts are not considered on their own, as films. It is also generally the case that when writers discuss an established feature-length director’s

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shorts, they tend to consider them as transitional works that led to what is implicitly (and explicitly) characterized as the more important work of feature filmmaking. As a result, the Los Angeles Times reviewer Dennis Lim’s discussion of Jonze’s shorts is conspicuous among accounts offered by most movie critics: “While the industry norm dictates that filmmakers graduate from calling-card shorts to feature-length assignments, [Jonze] continues to work and thrive in the short form.” Lim goes further too, arguing that all of Jonze’s short films should be included in accounts of his work: “it’s fitting that a true appreciation of Jonze’s sensibility requires a familiarity with his shorts, videos and promos.”3 Although Lim’s is a rarely encountered argument, it is well made and persuasive. Certainly, in a career that involves many different media and art forms from short and long films and videos to plays, dance performances, concerts, and TV, Jonze’s narrative shorts nevertheless stand out. New York’s Museum of Modern Art retrospective for Jonze’s self-titled exhibit, “Spike Jonze: The First 80 Years,” is testament to the importance of shorts in his body of work, which included, among others, Maurice at the World’s Fair (2010), How They Get There (1997), We Were Once a Fairytale (2009), and Amarillo by Morning (1998).4 Furthermore, Jonze remained committed to shorts after finding extraordinary success as a feature-length film director. Addressing the continuing appeal of making short films with their smaller-scale productions and the freedom of expression they enable, Jonze said: “I feel like I’m not going toward only making big ideas. Only making things that require a huge crew and therefore a bigger budget would be really limiting. You would get stuck. The bigger it gets, the more isolated you get within that system.”5 Jonze’s lengthy shorts filmography, including skate videos, commercials, music videos, and narrative titles, offers an exhilarating and wide-ranging collection of characters, stories, and formal strategies that are particularly suited to the short form. The results have been well received by fans, and at least a few critics and reviewers have taken notice too. One media critic, for example, suggested that Jonze’s shorts are “proof ” that the short form “can be a safe space for wild, creative inspiration.”6 Also, as other chapters in this volume note, long before he made his first feature-length film, Jonze’s status as an auteur was already well established by way of his shorts. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate the relevance and significance of Jonze’s narrative shorts in his larger filmography and to argue that they both reflect and enrich our understanding of his auteurist preoccupations. The short film is treated herein as its own genre with important specificities, including several related to storytelling, narrative, character, and genre conventions that differentiate it from the feature-length film. The aim herein is to establish the viability of contextualizing Jonze’s narrative shorts as shorts, and to demonstrate the value of an analytical approach that addresses their

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continuities with and differences from his feature-length films. So, just as writers discuss his music videos in the context of critical and academic discourses about music videos, this chapter considers his narrative shorts in relation to discourses in the emergent area of short form media studies. The primary analytical focus is on Jonze’s fiction shorts, though his other shorts-related titles are cited to demonstrate the persistence of several of his recurring storytelling, character, and thematic strategies. Examining Jonze’s shorts is fascinating for several reasons, including that their range of running times—from one to thirty minutes—enables a variety of short form storytelling strategies and genre conventions. His narrative shorts also reflect and contribute to the long and rich history of short films and suggest the benefits of bringing more careful scholarly and critical attention to short films in general. Jonze’s career demonstrates the depth and breadth of a filmography that ranges not only from shorts to feature films, but also from fiction to documentary (including mockumentary), black-and-white to color, and live-action to animation. As for his auteurist tendencies, Jonze is known for recurring strategies that include: offbeat stories with often lonely or isolated characters; surreal situations presented naturalistically; combinations of moods, from upbeat to melancholy; complex emotions; and stories and characters that blur the lines between fiction and non-fiction. Each of these strategies is often discussed in relation to his feature-length films; they are also present in his shorts. More importantly, for the purposes of this chapter, Jonze’s shorts make careful use of many short film conventions including the following: economical, spare, simple stories with brief, often fragmented story times; fewer characters and relationships; and stories that are more character-oriented than plot-driven. Moreover, Jonze’s shorts demonstrate several of the conventions that theorists identify as useful for realizing the particular strengths of the short form. For example, short film theory identifies “unity” as one of the short film’s most distinctive components; it is also one of the most frequently noted components of short form storytelling and it enables its differentiation from features. Classical Hollywood features achieve unity by means of the “careful interweaving of more than one storyline into a coherent whole to ease viewer understanding”; however, in the short form, which is not burdened by the feature’s multiple storylines and characters, unity refers to economical and narrowly focused narratives.7 As I have noted elsewhere: “[T]he short favors the narrative, economy and unity that are enabled by its most basic storytelling conventions: a simple story that focuses on a single event, character, situation, or moment with no subplots, fewer characters—usually only one or two central characters with few . . . secondary characters, and a brief story time.”8 In addition, Jonze’s narrative shorts often feature protagonists whose personalities, interests, or other circumstances isolate them from others, in some cases to the point of loneliness. Lonely characters are a familiar type in short

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form storytelling.9 One of the most often quoted claims about short story characters is the short story writer and teacher Frank O’Connor’s observation that: “there is in the short story at its most characteristic something we do not often find in the novel—an intense awareness of human loneliness.”10 Film theorists’ observations about short film conventions are useful, enabling a more nuanced appreciation of Jonze’s use of such conventions specifically. Interestingly, Jonze’s predilection for featuring lonely protagonists in his fiction shorts (and features) markedly contrasts with his skate and music videos, which often celebrate youth culture and camaraderie. Like the short form in general, it is also often the case that Jonze’s narrative shorts include a significant turning point, crisis, or “moment of truth” for protagonists whose choices and decisions produce dramatic results. The contemporary American short story writer Joy Williams identifies these moments as an aspect of the short form that she especially appreciates: I think the beauty of the short story is that it finds the moment in the character’s life where the past and future combine, usually in a terrible instance in the present that illuminates everything and yet shuts everything off, too. Flannery O’Connor described it as a moment of grace that’s offered and is either rejected or accepted; that was her pivot. I think that’s very beautiful.11 Also relevant to Jonze’s narrative shorts that feature love stories, fiction shorts tend to avoid the happily-ever-after endings common to love stories and romances in feature-length films.12 Indeed, compared to features, the love story is much less common in the short form and there are fewer love stories with happy endings. In Jonze’s fiction shorts, as the analyses herein suggest, his love stories tend to have rather ambivalent endings. For example, To Die by Your Side (2011), Jonze’s only animated short (co-directed with Simon Cahn), has what one might consider a happy ending, but it is complicated. When the characters from two book covers get together (she’s Lucy from Dracula and he’s the skeleton from Macbeth) and embrace, he accidentally stabs and kills her so that she dies, becoming a skeleton too, whereupon the two enjoy a lusty if not entirely happy ending. In terms of genre conventions, with the exception of the science fiction film Her (2013), Jonze’s narrative shorts tend to be more genre-based than his feature-length films. The use of genre conventions in narrative shorts is quite common, in part because audience familiarity with them serves the economy and compression typical of shorts. Jonze also routinely combines genres, though it is the youth film especially whose conventions recur in his short films, both documentary and fiction, which are more oriented to stories that involve young people and youth culture.

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Jonze’s fiction narrative shorts fall into two loosely chronological and overlapping categories: the earliest fiction titles are two Satellite sponsored films from the mid-1990s, Mark Paints (1995) and How They Get There. They are shorter than most of the titles in the second category, have very simple narratives, and recall silent-era films. In the second period, after he began making feature-length films, from the late 2000s until the mid-2010s, Jonze returned to the early fascination with youths and their subcultures that he demonstrated in his skate shorts and music videos. Both categories are considered in some detail, and in relation to their genre play and characterizations. Jonze’s music videos are loving pastiches of classical Hollywood’s film and TV genres, like Björk’s “It’s Oh So Quiet” with its Busby Berkeley musicalmoved-to-the-street style, and “Sabotage,” in which the Beastie Boys send up the opening credit sequences of the 1970s TV detective shows that were in turn inspired by the dynamic all-action-less-narrative mode of 1970s action movies. Writer Roger Beebe notes a useful distinction between pastiche and parody that turns on whether the filmmaker’s aim is to mock or embrace historical styles; he says that parody “aims at ridiculing and discrediting styles which are still alive and influential,” while pastiche is “meant . . . to display the virtuosity of the practitioner rather than the absurdity of the object.”13 Although Beebe makes this distinction in his discussion of the music video category, it is also germane to Jonze’s fiction shorts, which take inspiration from a wide range of filmmaking styles and periods. Indeed, Jonze’s shorts reflect almost the entire history of filmmaking. For self-reflexive inspiration, for example, he went as far back as possible in film history, to the early silent-film era in his first credited fiction short Mark Paints. Paints is a two-minute-long, no-dialogue work that recalls the “gag films” of the early silent era.14 Like the much-imitated prototypical gag film, the Lumière brothers’ The Waterer Watered (1896), it uses the sparest narrative set-up, in which an unsuspecting victim gets pranked by a rascal. Like its forebears, Mark Paints is a single take film with two characters but in this case with two gags. The opening time-lapse sequence shows a young man painting a portrait on a canvas centered in the frame. After he finishes the painting and signs it, a boy enters the space and, for the first gag, paints a mustache on the portrait. The second gag pranks the audience when the boy walks toward the camera, spray paints the lens black, and the film ends. Jonze’s 1997 fiction short How They Get There is another entirely visual film that combines several genres—the romantic comedy, action film, and musical— in just under three minutes. Besides its cleverly compressed, fragment-of-time narrative and the riddle posed by the title, it borrows the physical comedy and joke strategies of silent-era shorts. There is a bit of a trick opening, too: the first image is a tight shot of what looks like an empty shoe lying on its side in the gutter, but as the upbeat score begins, the shoe moves right side up, begins tapping, and soon the young man wearing it is revealed dropping some litter in the street.

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As he begins walking along the sidewalk, he catches the eye of a young woman across the street. Soon they are engaged in a sort of walk-off as they perform a series of silly moves to entertain each other. It looks like the kind of meet-cute that eventually leads to romance, at least until the young man gets close to the street corner, whereupon the young woman (and audience) sees a car speeding toward the intersection—and him. As the man steps off the curb, the car slams into him, careens off another car and soars twisting into the air in slow motion. What might have been a love story instead ends tragically, but the answer promised by the title is provided in the last moments as the guy’s empty shoe sails over the power lines, also in slow motion, and lands in the gutter—empty this time—as the camera moves away. How They Get There also demonstrates one of the fiction short’s preferred endings: the intense ending that depends upon a surprise.15 How-to manuals for short filmmakers often include the observation that endings should generally carry more narrative weight and intensity than features, which can be well realized with surprise endings. How They Get There’s ending is not only intense due to its surprise, it also carries extra narrative weight by way of another joke (and a “message”), albeit a subtler karmic one, as it seems the young man pays the price for casually dropping his litter in the street at the beginning of the film. How They Get There not only recalls the visual storytelling of silent-era films, it is also a breathtaking, oddly comic, and dynamic feat of narrative compression and genre play that turns on a wellchosen fragment of urban life. Maurice at the World’s Fair offers another work inspired by silent-era films, with its cheeky visual comedy and dialed-all-the-way-up performances. A fourminute short, its narrative is tightly compressed in its focus on a simple story and brief story time. Maurice tells the story of a young Maurice Sendak on the momentous day when his sister and her boyfriend took him to the World’s Fair, but then abandoned him so they could enjoy some alone time for making out. Combining several kinds of film stock, including archival period footage of the fair and a few of its attractions, drawings, and black-and-white sequences shot specifically for the short, Maurice also stars Jonze and Catherine Keener, who play most of the characters with considerable comic appeal. As the elderly Sendak, shown in brief shots that punctuate the film, narrates the tale of the long-ago day, and from the perspective of his younger self, there are several visual jokes—of characters ducking out of frame, exaggerated (nearly slapstick) physical gestures, and, perhaps the funniest, a young Sendak played by a special-effects half-size Jonze, who is sometimes on screen at the same time as the other characters he plays. Maurice’s ending is noteworthy for its intensity and careful focus on the chain of events that leads to a happy ending for Sendak and the revelation of why the day remains so memorable. The ending shows the young Sendak being escorted home by the police, and proud because the entire neighborhood is watching. But, even better, his errant sister pays a

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nasty price when he rats her out to his father (also played by Jonze, in a comically unconvincing beard), who punishes her with an exaggerated pantomime of a slap, whereupon the smiling boy gets the last shot and a heroic silent-style iris-in ending as the elderly Sendak recalls realizing at the time that “there will never be another day as good as this as long as I live.” More recently, in 2016, Jonze made another no-dialogue fiction short inspired by silent films that also shares his attention to carefully compressed and spare, unified narratives that lead to powerful endings, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert: A Short Film by Spike Jonze, which he pitched to Colbert as a one-night replacement for the show’s regular opening with its frenetic, party-oriented montage.16 Jonze’s short channels the silent-era star Charlie Chaplin by way of its combination of pathos and humor—and unexpected encounter with good fortune. After a seemingly hopeless beginning in which Colbert wakes up alone in the park, apparently confused, he wanders the city for a bit and, along the way, is ignored and laughed at by strangers, which adds to his disorientation—and loneliness. But magic and wry humor happen when the Sesame Street character Grover befriends him and they hang out for a while, until they arrive at the eerily steamy open door to the Late Show studio. The film has a happy and not unexpected ending, which carries considerable emotional weight, when a still dazed Colbert enters the studio and the show’s audience rises, applauding; at that point, the host seems to come back to himself, which he registers with an enigmatic slow-motion smile.17 Jonze’s finesse and pattern of taking inspiration from silent-era films and stars was noted by the film reviewer Dennis Lim, who praised his efforts with the observation that he is “a descendant of the silent slapstick comedians.”18 Jonze returned to fiction shorts after making three feature-length films: Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002), and Where the Wild Things Are (2009). Wild Things, with its arduous years-long production, was not well received by the Warner Bros. studio executives or by several film reviewers who were put off by its downbeat mood and characters. Following Wild Things, Jonze made five fiction shorts in fairly quick succession. In part, he said his aim was to work in a “very loose way,” in order to regain his “confidence and [get back] to knowing that I could do something fast.”19 In addition to Maurice at the World’s Fair and To Die by Your Side, he made: We Were Once a Fairytale (2009), I’m Here (2010), and Scenes from the Suburbs (2011). As Jonze further explained in interviews, he returned to an earlier mode—making short films with short running times—because “I just wanted short, fun, interesting challenges. If a movie is like a painting, I wanted to do sketches.”20 Jonze’s fiction shorts, I’m Here and Scenes from the Suburbs, make use of several short film conventions but are more complex than his earlier shorts. They are also perhaps Jonze’s most often referenced fiction shorts. Interestingly, the two films share a fascination with the same genre combination: youth and science

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fiction. Both films also have longer running times (about thirty minutes), which enables greater complexity, especially in terms of their characters and relationships. They both take place in dystopic near futures that look very much like the present (but, interestingly, without cell phones), and both are art shorts with stories that are elusive in terms of meaning and whose endings are open, enabling multiple interpretations. Both also feature naturalistic formal strategies (like those often associated with Italian Neorealism and the French New Wave), including longer-duration shots; fluid, mobile documentary-style cinematography; actual locations; natural lighting effects; and improvisational performances. In terms of cinematography specifically, they share a pattern common to many of Jonze’s films and videos of lateral tracking shots—especially of rows of buildings and rooflines, often as seen through the windows of moving vehicles. Since the beginning of his filmmaking career, Jonze has been fascinated and inspired by youths and youth culture, and has captured the dynamism and forward momentum they bring to their favorite pursuits, on bikes, skateboards, dance floors, and in cars. Jonze’s early skate and music videos are exuberant and admiring depictions of youth culture that convey a profound empathy and respect for young people, which is also true for several of his narrative shorts. Youthful energy and esprit de corps are compelling aspects of both I’m Here and Scenes, and they demonstrate Jonze’s knack for conveying the complex emotional registers and relationships of youths who range in age from bicycleriding high school kids to those in their early twenties with jobs and apartments. In addition, his explorations of youth and youth culture include attention to tempestuous and awkward kids, the particular intensity of young romance and friendship, and youth’s ennui and aimlessness, which includes hanging out killing time away from adult authorities. In the documentary Amarillo by Morning, about aspiring rodeo bull riders in Houston, Texas, one of the boys puts the joys of youth camaraderie beautifully and succinctly: when he’s hanging out with his friends they are: “Just having fun. Being kids. Being free.” In what follows, after a discussion of I’m Here as a standalone film with attention to its plot, reception, significant production and funding details, along with its large-scale marketing campaign, both I’m Here and Scenes from the Suburbs are discussed in relation to each other and in terms of their shared strategies. In terms of I’m Here specifically, its finely crafted story and characters, whose depth is enabled by the short film’s characteristic unity, inspires my close reading. In addition, the film’s success and wide reach are discussed, including an account of its origins, marketing campaign, and exhibition strategies. I’m Here demonstrates the strength of Jonze’s “brand” as an auteur with a modern edge whose expected and perhaps enduring appeal to young people encouraged his commercial sponsor, Absolut, to hire Jonze, and to honor his auteur status by giving him the latitude to make the film he envisioned (and to underscore that freedom in the marketing campaign). There is also some attention to I’m Here’s

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critical reception, which was prompted by high-profile screenings at Sundance and Berlin. Further, as I’m Here’s hefty global marketing campaign and the critical acclaim the film enjoyed suggest, Jonze’s significance as an auteur is not only dependent upon his features but is also the result of his ongoing short filmmaking efforts and success. I’m Here had an auspicious premiere at Sundance in 2010, in the festival’s first ever opening-night short film program. Continuing a pattern of commercial funding for his narrative shorts, I’m Here was commissioned by the Absolut Company as part of the Swedish firm’s “In an Absolut World” campaign, launched in 2008.21 Jonze had well-publicized full creative control on the film, and the publicity might have been an attempt to account for the film’s non-commercial and rather gloomy content and style. To make the point that Jonze was an unfettered artist on the project, Jonze himself issued a statement about the “collaboration” with Absolut, emphasizing that: It was a pretty incredible opportunity . . . They (ABSOLUT) didn’t give me any requirements to make a movie that had anything to do with vodka. They just wanted me to make something that was important to me, and let my imagination take me wherever I wanted. And it wasn’t like working with some huge corporation where I had to meet with committees of people. It . . . seemed like creativity and making something that affected them emotionally was the only thing that really mattered to them.22 Despite the funding source and marketing campaign that linked Jonze’s and Absolut’s brands, I’m Here neither mentions nor represents Absolut vodka products—and the robot characters are unable to drink. Referring to Jonze as “one of today’s most original filmmakers,” Absolut’s multipronged, multimedia campaign helped to buttress Jonze’s status as a “not ordinary” (read: independent) artist, which the premiere screening at Sundance underscored.23 Although the film itself seemed free of commercial demands, there were, not surprisingly, wide-ranging marketing aims developed that elevated Jonze by capitalizing on his independent auteur status. Certainly compared to other shorts, I’m Here stands apart for the ambitious scope of its marketing campaign. Absolut’s advertising agency, TBWA/Chiat Day New York, issued a press release that promoted I’m Here as a “creative collaboration” whose aim was to “challenge people’s ordinary everyday perceptions . . . [in a film that] combines Jonze’s unique style with the Absolut vision of making ordinary life more interesting.”24 To create interest, particularly among young people, the heavily publicized week-long “global consumer launch” included “billboards and graffiti sites [that] subtly built intrigue around the collaboration,” thirty- and sixty-second trailers-cum-commercials, a “making of ” film, and an I’m Here

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website with a “virtual theater” (now deactivated). In addition to the Sundance premiere and an invitation to the Berlin Film Festival, there were screenings in “ordinary” yet unorthodox venues likely chosen for their youth appeal, including bike shops, cafes, and hair salons. There was also a soundtrack CD released, and the ad campaign emphasized that it featured music from young “emerging artists.” The campaign’s scope, especially efforts to appeal to a youth market, was underscored by an Absolut marketing executive who used strategically contemporary youth-relevant terms: “Spike Jonze is one of the most important influencers of modern popular culture.”25 In yet another endorsement of Jonze’s auteurism and the motif of collaboration, the San Francisco publishing company McSweeney’s Internet Tendency published a multimedia tie-in book project, There Are Many of Us (2010), under its imprint, Editors of McSweeney’s. It includes interviews, production photographs, a soundtrack CD and a DVD of I’m Here. The book’s title comes from the song of the same name by The Lost Trees band, which is used several times in the film. After the Sundance premiere a Los Angeles Times review predicted that, compared to the festival’s feature-length films, I’m Here would prove to be “among the best pieces of filmmaking that plays the festival this year.”26 The prediction proved true, at least according to another Los Angeles Times reviewer, Dennis Lim, who described it after the festival wrapped as a “lovely, darkedged story of the fraught romance between two robots [that] overshadowed most of the features at Sundance last month.”27 I’m Here tells the story of Sheldon (Andrew Garfield), a robot with a menial library job who lives a dreary life of solitude that changes dramatically when he meets and begins a romance with Francesca, a confident, free-spirited young robot woman whose singular style includes her dark bobbed-hair wig and floral summer dress. Unlike the film’s other robot characters, Francesca has a car that she uses for her work commute and to ferry her friends around the city. Soon after Sheldon and Francesca fall in love, their relationship takes a dark emotional and physical turn. I’m Here is mostly character-driven with a simple, episodic narrative inspired by Shel Silverstein’s parable, The Giving Tree. Characterized in a tagline as a “robot love story,” I’m Here features human actors who wear lowtech robot costumes with CGI facial expressions. The results are compelling: The characters are highly expressive due to the delicacy of the actors’ head and body movements and gestures, combined with their remarkably subtle and convincing computer-generated facial expressions. In addition to its science fiction elements, I’m Here deploys the meet-cute and upbeat falling-in-love montage familiar from the romantic comedy genre. More importantly, for the purposes of this analysis, I’m Here is largely a youth genre film. I’m Here is deeply oriented to Sheldon’s point of view and moods, suggested by the economical opening, which begins with a mobile, long-duration tracking shot of a nondescript urban street with strip centers, parking lots, and

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Figure 10.1 I’m Here: Sheldon.

low-profile commercial buildings, as seen through the window of a moving vehicle. The next shot introduces Sheldon, sitting alone on a bus and looking out the window at the passing landscape with its assortment of people and robots. The point-of-view shot that follows confirms the already downbeat mood and quickly establishes the second-class status of the robots, whom Sheldon sees working as street vendors, car mechanics, and bus drivers. Until he meets Francesca, Sheldon is the very picture of urban alienation, and the film is imbued with aching melancholy as he goes about his dull routine, even as he tries to engage with other people and robots without much success. Sheldon is awkward and shy but when Francesca (whom he crosses paths with in the morning) offers him a ride, he accepts and the two enjoy a self-consciously clichéd montage with a playful walk in a golden-hued park near sunset, which provides a striking visual contrast to the bleak near-monochrome of their usual urban landscape. Their relationship brings Sheldon much happiness, and Francesca expands his circle of friends considerably; soon he’s spending his free time with and hosting a diverse bunch of robots and a few humans. As Jonze explained, one of his aims was to convey the urban landscape and the alienation it can engender: “I wanted it to be in [Los Angeles], when you are in your early 20s—when you’re not really part of the city. You and your friends have your own scene, and that’s what [Francesca] opens [Sheldon] up to.”28 Although at least one critic claimed that Jonze’s films avoid social issues, there is a class divide in this sci-fi future based on the hierarchy between humans and the robot working class.29 The second-class status of the robots certainly suggests a political perspective that is underscored by the insults

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and injuries delivered by humans, such as the “policing” by an elderly human woman who hollers at Francesca, “You can’t drive!” Also, in a sad moment, Sheldon passes and exchanges looks with a seriously broken robot crash victim who is ignored by the human policeman worried only about the human’s damaged car that caused the accident, and not the robot he has just tripped over in the crosswalk. Much of the film’s affective depth is due to the fact that the robots cannot do what humans can, including sleep (they recharge at night), eat, or make love; however, they express a wide range of human-quality emotions and impulses. Francesca, for example, seems to have a service job (as her waitressstyle uniform suggests), loves punk rock and has real artistic talent. Her creative pursuits include the colorful, elaborately arranged rat sculptures that she surprises Sheldon with in a particularly inventive scene that ends with him sitting among a family of life-size rat figures in the living room. It is both a fanciful and sobering substitute for and perhaps reminder of the family life robots cannot have. Indeed, the film’s title derives from Francesca’s creativity by way of the street art “I’m here” posters with their simple self-portraits that she makes at work “when no one’s looking” and affixes to public surfaces in a playful yet poignant cry from the heart. Also, importantly and selfreflexively, Francesca longs to dream, like humans, as when she recounts to Sheldon a “dream” memory of being chased, in an intimate scene that recalls the replicant Rachel’s equally poignant recounting of her implanted memories in Blade Runner (1982).

Figure 10.2 I’m Here: Sheldon and Francesca.

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Perhaps I’m Here’s most familiar youth genre convention, besides romance, is the party scene. In addition to conveying the energy of youths with lots of action, loud music, drinking, and dancing, parties often serve as the settings for particularly dramatic moments. I’m Here’s big party scene occurs when Francesca and Sheldon go to a concert to see her favorite band, the real-life Lost Trees. They dance wildly and joyfully until the key narrative turning point—and moment of truth for both characters—intervenes. While Francesca and Sheldon are dancing their hearts out, she accidentally loses her arm in the crowd. Sheldon makes a fateful decision by insisting that she take one of his arms as a replacement and she hesitantly accepts, which begins the act of loyalty and incremental sacrifice of his body parts until, at the end, only his head remains. The scene is especially moving because the crisis moment occurs during the highest point of Sheldon’s and Francesca’s happiness. I’m Here also deploys the youth genre theme of young rebellion, as Francesca has interests that resist society’s expectations about the proper “lives” of robots. Jonze addressed the significance of her rebellion in the making-of film, noting that Sheldon is “fascinated by the Francesca character because she’s not just living the life she’s been told she’s supposed to live. As he falls in love with her she’s showing him a world outside of the way he looks at the world.”30 But, like many short films with love stories, I’m Here does not end happily but rather more ambiguously. That is, although Sheldon and Francesca are together, their days of youthful spontaneity and fun are over. I’m Here’s story is characterized by unity in its attention to Sheldon’s experiences and emotional journey, which are marked both by his loneliness and the fulfillment he finds with Francesca. In addition, the terribly sad ending enables its intensity too, as does its entirely dialogue-free last shots; that is, not only will their lives be challenging, their new reality seems to ensure a shared loneliness. The deeply affecting final shots show Francesca after she has been reconstructed with Sheldon’s remaining body parts as they leave the hospital together while she cradles his head in her lap. After a tight shot that shows her tenderly caressing him, the film’s last and most heartbreaking image is a wide shot of Sheldon and Francesca facing away from the camera, toward another golden sunset as they begin their lonely future together. Scenes from the Suburbs, as the title suggests, has an episodic narrative and is rather elusive in terms of its meanings. The characters are younger than those in I’m Here and they endure different but still harrowing constraints. Scenes tells the story of a group of suburban high school friends during a momentous summer that the protagonist, Kyle, recalls nostalgically and with some confusion as an adult, in the voiceover that bookends the film. Besides the group’s lazy fun cutting up, riding bikes, and generally enjoying each other’s company, Scenes focuses on Kyle’s relationship with his best friend Winter as they grow

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apart and their friendship ends.31 The dystopic suburban setting is especially fraught because the neighborhoods have become commercial enterprises at war with each other. So, instead of just trying to circumvent the supervision of parents and other adult authorities, as is conventional in youth films, the kids (and everyone else) are under constant surveillance by menacing, heavily armed soldiers who freely roust residents and execute them without explanation. And, like other compelling youth films that include powerful social issues in dramatic contexts, such as Boyz N the Hood (1991), the kids in Scenes are quite aware of the adult horrors that surround them, but they are still kids negotiating their identities and relationships as they come of age. Like I’m Here, which is oriented to Sheldon’s experiences, Scenes is focused on conveying the kids’ perspectives, with particular attention to Kyle’s point of view. In keeping with the short film’s narrative economy, like I’m Here, Jonze’s opening sequences quickly establish characters, mood, and setting. Scenes opens with Kyle’s adult voiceover, as the first shots introduce a group of five friends, their neighborhood, and its nightmarish military occupation, as well as the pleasures and challenges of suburban teenage life. The opening shots are ominous: the first, a fixed one, shows the group of friends gazing off-screen through a chain-link fence situated across the street from the monotonous row of middle-class houses behind them. The almost-reverse shot (also fixed) that follows is a wide view of the kids in the frame’s foreground as they look through the fence toward the frightening and smoky warzone landscape filled with military vehicles. Then, before the opening credits, along with Kyle’s adult voiceover, a catalogue of several shots shows a mix of happier and more worrying moments, from riding bikes and teasing each other to the cops in full riot gear and attack mode. But the mood shifts in the next sequence, a buoyant and upbeat mobile camera montage of the kids playfully riding their bikes through the neighborhood, which culminates with a humorous exchange between Kyle and a friendly cop. This montage contrasts sharply with a subsequent bike-riding sequence, when the boys head home at night looking terrified as cops drag people from their homes and violently search others. In addition to the use of youth film conventions, I’m Here and Scenes share several other narrative and thematic elements. Both films, for example, are equally moving and heartfelt in their characterizations and they avoid judging their young protagonists, which enables easy identification with them. In her chapter in this volume, “Spike Jonze’s Abbreviated Art of the Suburbs,” Laurel Westrup notes that the kids in Scenes experience and express highly charged and complex emotions whose authenticity is striking. Indeed, one fan reviewer, newly graduated from high school, addressed the issue of authenticity, admitting that he felt a special connection to the film because its details were so true to his experience: “There were moments while watching this—many, many moments—where I kept wondering how the filmmakers knew the exact way me

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and my friends acted around each other.”32 Indeed, while I’m Here and Scenes are both earnest films, they are not sentimental. It is a delicate balance that is characteristic of Jonze’s feature-length films and other narrative shorts too. In addition, both films feature melancholy protagonists who are burdened by faulty memories: in the invention of dreams in I’m Here, and in Kyle’s inability to remember details about the long-ago summer with his friends and his confusion about his own and Winter’s identities. Likewise, both films involve problematic love stories with tests of devotion: a heterosexual romance in I’m Here, and a best friendship in Scenes. In I’m Here, as noted above, the short film’s narrative pivot and moment of grace involves Sheldon’s decision to sacrifice his body for Francesca. In Scenes, when Kyle and Winter are roughed up by balaclava-wearing cops in a terrifying scene, Kyle makes the no-win choice to protect Winter by giving the cops his name, which Winter apparently sees as a betrayal. The effects of Kyle’s choice are made painfully clear during a party scene in which Kyle endures, with considerable anguish, Winter’s hostile gaze, and later again when Winter violently rejects him in a bloody attack. The significance of their shared gaze at the party scene is emphasized as it is repeated twice in the opening montage that accompanies Kyle’s voiceover. Yet until their pivotal moments, both I’m Here and Scenes feature youths with apparent hope for the future and an appreciation of their friendships, despite the limitations of their bodies in I’m Here, and despite their confinement in occupied suburbia in Scenes. Like Francesca’s artistic rebellions in I’m Here, Kyle in Scenes engages in some gentle resistance when he teases the police officer with his “up dog” line, which elicits the officer’s “what’s ‘up dog’?” and Kyle, laughing, replies, “nothing much; you?” There is also a bit of resistance to the military presence when Kyle and his friends enact their own “violence” by shooting a trucker with plastic pellets. In addition, Scenes, like I’m Here, echoes the short film’s conventional theme of loneliness. In Scenes, Kyle’s develops over the course of the summer as his friendship with Winter dissolves. That is, after an early scene when Winter’s girlfriend Zoe tells Kyle and Winter, “You guys are in love with each other,” and Winter responds, “Yeah, it’s kinda true,” Kyle is left alone at the end, wondering if he really knew his friend, which continues to haunt him as an adult. Both films also share a remarkable and subtle visual detail: moments when their protagonists watch airplanes passing overhead that seem to speak to their longing, and which emphasize their different kinds of entrapment, which underscores the larger theme of loneliness. In I’m Here, the moment occurs when a lonely Sheldon is at work in the library and looks out of a small window to watch the passing of a far-distant plane; in Scenes it is precisely at the moment when Winter’s brother returns, which begins the slow demise of the love story between the two best friends, as Kyle looks skyward and registers the passing of a military plane.

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In addition to its lonely protagonist Kyle and the moment-of-truth turning points, Scenes’ other short film conventions include its simple, episodic narrative, which is unified in its focus on Kyle and his friends during episodic fragments of time that enable extraordinary depth of characterization. The ending also carries considerable weight and intensity with its complex combination of emotions. Starting with the scene in which Winter attacks Kyle, the film’s final moments not only recall Kyle’s opening voiceover and his confusion about the summer, they confirm the end of his closest friendship and his fraught coming of age, which the adult Kyle will remember with profound ambivalence and lingering doubts. Starting with Mark Paints, Jonze’s narrative shorts demonstrate an abiding fascination with and facility for using many of the most enduring and familiar visual and storytelling strategies conventional to the short film, including those from the earliest days of motion pictures. In addition, combined with a talent for emphasizing visual strategies and details, along with striking compositions and camerawork, his shorts demonstrate the power and resilience of many short film conventions. His narrative shorts also convey the beauty, subtlety, and depth of characterization and emotions that can be enabled by the short form and the ease with which its genre conventions can be combined with other genres. The rewards of considering Jonze’s narrative shorts as standalone films are many, and attention to those films enables an understanding of their differences from his feature-length films and the continuities between them. As Jonze said in response to a question about the “connections” he sees between his movies and music videos (one of the many short forms he works within), he does not compartmentalize his work; that is, beyond their different running times, “I feel like they’re all the same really. Even if you’re going somewhere heavy or sad or intense, it’s playing in that sense of exploring an idea or exploring a feeling, and exploring some imaginative thing that excites you. I think the process is the same.”33 Jonze’s thoughts about his filmmaking processes, and the continuity he sees between his shorts and features for enabling artistic expression, also suggest that he posits an equivalence, in terms of importance, between his shorts and features. Certainly, the singularity and appeal of his career and auteur status are due in part to the fact that they are informed as much by his shorts as his features, so it is important for media scholars and critics to consider and appreciate his contributions to both film categories. NOTES 1. Sharon Waxman, Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System (New York: HarperCollins, 2006). 2. See Mark Harris, for example, who claims that I’m Here “feels in many ways like a warm-up for his new movie,” despite the fact that their science fiction settings don’t have much in common, nor do their stories. “Him and Her: How Spike Jonze Made the

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3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

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Weirdest, Most Timely Romance of the Year,” Vulture, October 6, 2013, (last accessed March 10, 2019). Dennis Lim, “A Second Look: For a Love of ‘Wild Things,’ Spike Jonze Goes Long,” Los Angeles Times, February 28, 2010, (last accessed March 10, 2019). The series also included several of his music and skate video shorts; “Spike Jonze: The First 80 Years,” (last accessed March 10, 2019). Shane Smith, “Spike Jonze: Interview,” Vice, August 31, 2009, (last accessed March 10, 2019). Alex Pappademas, “Career Arc: Spike Jonze,” Grantland, December 17, 2013, (last accessed March 10, 2019). See Cynthia Felando, Discovering Short Films: The History and Style of Live-Action Fiction Shorts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 47. Ibid. Of course, lonely characters are also common in his feature-length films, to which a YouTube video attests: “How to Shoot Movies about Loneliness Like Spike Jonze,” posted by Studio Binder, with clips from Her and Where the Wild Things Are; (last accessed March 10, 2019). Frank O’Connor, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1985), p. 19. Rebecca Bengal, “A Mysterious and Unparalleled Vision: Joy Williams on Her New and Collected Stories,” Vogue, December 2, 2015, (last accessed March 10, 2019). Felando, Discovering Short Films, p. 55. Roger Beebe, “Paradoxes of Pastiche,” in Kay Dickinson and Amy Herzog (eds.), Medium Cool: Music Videos from Soundies to Cellphones (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), pp. 305–6. Mark Paints is included in The Work of Director Spike Jonze: A Collection of Music Videos, Short Films, Documentaries, and Rarities (DVD), produced by Vincent Landay and Richard Brown (2003, Palm Pictures). For a discussion of “intense” ending strategies see Felando, Discovering Short Films, pp. 57–60. The two men had met before the show’s premiere, when Colbert asked Jonze if he could come up with some possible show ideas. The short was Jonze’s answer. Earlier in his career, Jonze more directly referenced Charlie Chaplin in his contribution to the skateboard video Mouse (1996), co-directed with Rick Howard. Jonze’s sequence, “First Board,” is black and white and shows skateboarder Eric Koston performing a dead-on impersonation of Chaplin’s athletic comedy style and gestures while skateboarding effortlessly along the streets of Los Angeles. Lim, “A Second Look.” Eddie Moretti, “Spike Jonze: Director, Producer, and Overall Creative Midas,” Vice: The Creators Project, June 22, 2010, (last accessed March 10, 2019). Harris, “Him and Her.” For a discussion of Jonze’s tenure with and financial support from the production company Satellite Films, see Andrew Stubbs’s chapter in this volume. The production company for I’m Here was MJZ, with whom Jonze also has worked on several commercials, including for Gap, Kenzo, Apple, and Adidas.

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22. Duncan McLeod, “Absolut I’m Here,” Inspiration Room, January 24, 2010, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 23. For the campaign press release, see “Absolut Unveils ‘I’m Here’ in the UK, a Creative Collaboration with Spike Jonze,” Art Daily, February 21, 2010, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 24. Ibid. 25. Emphasis added. Quotation is from Anna Malmhake, Vice President of Global Marketing at Absolut, in McLeod, “Absolut I’m Here.” 26. Steven Zeitchik, “Sundance 2010: Spike Jonze Renews His Career,” Los Angeles Times, January 22, 2010, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 27. Lim, “A Second Look.” 28. Moretti, “Spike Jonze.” 29. Derek Hill describes Jonze as a “chameleon trickster . . . reminiscent of Bunuel, though without the social or political contexts,” in Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood’s Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists, and Dreamers: An Excursion into the American New Wave (Harpenden: Kamera Books, 2008), p. 109. 30. The Creators Project, The Making of I’m Here, 2010, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 31. Laurel Westrup’s chapter in this volume discusses Scenes from the Suburbs in relation to the Arcade Fire music video for “The Suburbs.” 32. Nick Newman, “Scenes from the Suburbs,” The Film Stage, June 27, 2011, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 33. Nicole Holofcener, “Spike Jonze,” Interview, December 2013/January 2014, (last accessed March 10, 2019).

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CHAPTER

11

Spike Jonze, Propaganda/Satellite Films, and Music Video Work: Talent Management and the Construction of an Indie-Auteur Andrew Stubbs

I N T RO D U C T I O N

T

hroughout his career, promotional and critical discourse has frequently depicted Spike Jonze as an indie-auteur; that is, an autonomous artist. While the indie-auteur label has commonly been applied to directors of indie films that have found success on the festival circuit, like the Coen Brothers, Steven Soderbergh and Paul Thomas Anderson, Jonze began his directing career making music videos. Because music videos play a role in selling recording artists and their songs, though, cultural commentators have often perceived them as an inferior media form tied to commerce, particularly when contrasted against film’s supposed artistry. Following the release of Being John Malkovich (1999), Jonze’s feature film directorial debut, Mark Olsen wrote in Film Comment that Jonze had “rise[n] from the relative anonymity of commercial and music video directing with a voice and vision so astonishing as to overwhelm the cultural products [he was] meant to pimp.”1 Olsen, like many cultural commentators, saw Jonze as a naturally talented artist who transcended the apparent commercial constraints and promotional functions of music video and spot production. Jonze seemed to have progressed from music video to film, and this progression appeared organic, inevitable, and deserved. This narrative of Jonze’s organic progression chimes with a broader culture surrounding indie film that privileges indie’s supposedly organic qualities, and its apparent distance from Hollywood’s manufacturing of commercial products.2

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Jonze’s “progression” to feature film directing, and his emergence as an indieauteur, however, are far from organic or inevitable. Jonze received significant support from Propaganda Films and its subsidiary Satellite Films, a talent management and media production company. Satellite managed Jonze and produced all of his music videos and commercial spots from 1992, when he became a client, to 2001, when the company collapsed. Propaganda, meanwhile, produced Being John Malkovich using finance provided by PolyGram Filmed Entertainment, its parent company at the time. Accordingly, in this chapter, I explore the roles that Propaganda’s/Satellite’s media production and talent management activities played in shaping Jonze’s music video work, and building his reputation. I focus especially on Propaganda/Satellite’s efforts to promote Jonze and enhance his marketability by positioning him as an autonomous artist (or indie-auteur in-waiting) seemingly superior to most other music video directors. I show that Jonze’s and Propaganda’s/Satellite’s work is part of, rather than antithetical to, a highly industrialized and commercialized music video sector and reconfigure Jonze’s authorial profile by questioning whether he is really “indie” at all. I also consider implications for cultural and social distinctions between film and music video which, like distinctions between film and TV, have traditionally positioned the former as authored, artistic, and intended for supposedly sophisticated audiences, while the latter is presumed to be relatively unauthored, commercial, and appealing to undiscerning mass audiences.3 As a result, I assert that it is imperative that scholarship resists narratives portraying Jonze as an artist whose progression to indie-auteur was organic, and instead recognize the range of collaboratively produced strategies and cultural assumptions shaping his career and underpinning the marketing of his persona. P R O PA G A N DA P R E -1 9 9 1

To understand why Jonze became Satellite’s client, and how he became a successful music video director and emerging indie-auteur working within the company, it is necessary to explore how Propaganda Films’ broader business and strategy evolved beforehand. Propaganda was founded in 1986 by producers Steve Golin and Joni Sighvatsson and music video directors David Fincher, Nigel Dick, Greg Gold, and Dominic Sena. Propaganda began as an integrated production and talent management company focused on producing music video and representing directors. Integrating music video production with a director-focused talent management business made sense for two key reasons. First, because talent management companies are usually much smaller than talent agencies they are forced to differentiate themselves.4 Talent management companies often make their smaller size an advantage by claiming to offer tailored strategic career support to unestablished clients with little previous success

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finding employment in the media industries.5 Second, new video technology was cheap at the time and the music video sector was still emerging, meaning that there were relatively few barriers to entry facing small production companies in terms of cost and competition.6 This allowed Propaganda to develop unestablished directors’ careers by producing their music videos, helping them gain exposure and become more marketable, and then using their clients’ marketability as leverage to secure more contracts and greater fees. By 1990, the year that Propaganda founded Satellite, its strategy had proven successful and the company had evolved significantly. Propaganda had become the leading music video production company in the United States, capturing roughly one third of music video work commissioned by the major record labels,7 was 49 percent owned by PolyGram,8 and had expanded into commercial spot, film, and television production. Propaganda benefited immensely from changes across the music video sector in two key ways, both of which can be traced to MTV’s emergence. First, MTV offered Propaganda and its directors greater exposure. Second, MTV helped create an industrial context that made the music video auteur increasingly valuable. Jack Banks’s 1996 work on MTV sheds light on exactly how these two developments occurred and how Propaganda and its directors benefited. According to Banks, MTV, which launched on cable in 1981, quickly became the dominant channel for music video because it shared ownership with large cable multiple systems operators that gave the channel an “important base of guaranteed subscribers.”9 MTV subsequently exercised control over music video distribution by insisting that record companies grant exclusive access to 30 percent of their videos.10 For Banks, therefore, MTV created consolidation and a form of contractual vertical integration across the sector.11 One consequence of this form of vertical integration was that record companies began increasingly commissioning work from a handful of established production companies.12 Propaganda benefited especially from MTV’s exclusivity contracts with record labels, because the company and its directors made videos for the labels’ most popular and promising artists including Madonna, Janet Jackson, and Sting; the 30 percent that effectively guaranteed them substantial exposure on MTV. The New York Times thus reported that Propaganda’s “market share gave the company dominance of MTV and late-night music video shows,”13 while Premiere commented that Golin and Sighvatsson “seemed to have a special talent for ferreting out hot young directors” who “quickly became the kings of MTV.”14 While Banks outlines changes occurring across the music video sector, I am interested instead in the relationship between consolidation and indie-auteurs in promotional and critical discourse. Banks argues that “record companies and MTV consider a music clip solely as a commercial to sell certain commodities,” while “those involved in the production of music videos, including the musician, producer, and director, want to create an artistic work.”15 Moreover, for Banks,

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this distinction is underpinned by assumptions that making art requires creative autonomy. “Cultural producers have limited creative autonomy” in the music video market, Banks says, because they usually “lose struggles” with the record companies that underwrite and own the clips.16 This essentially depicts music video directors as indie-auteurs: naturally creative figures whose autonomy appears threatened by consolidation across the sector. Banks was not alone in expressing these views, of course, which were shared by critics and other scholars.17 Perceptions that the music video director is antithetical to MTV, however, is a key notion underpinning their marketability. In these terms, MTV’s dominance and consolidation in the music video sector can be reframed as phenomena that allowed Propaganda to capitalize on their clients’ growing reputation as indie-auteurs-in-waiting, in order to enhance and sustain their fees. As Propaganda became the dominant music video company in the late 1980s and early 1990s, its share of the market, and its fees and the fees of its directors, appeared to have peaked.18 Propaganda responded by expanding into other, more lucrative media, to reduce its reliance on music video revenues and increase its overall revenues. To do so, Propaganda sought to leverage its directors’ reputations. When Propaganda sold 49 percent shares to PolyGram in 1988, for instance, Variety paraphrased the company’s owners describing the deal, which included feature film production finance, as part of “the company’s policy . . . to create opportunities for its music video and commercial directors to cross over into features.”19 The films that Propaganda subsequently produced included Kill Me Again (1989) and Wild at Heart (1990), two projects packaged with indie-auteurs—John Dahl and David Lynch, respectively—and marketed as artistic independent films. This marked Propaganda’s alignment with the “quality iteration of independent film” that, as Yannis Tzioumakis outlines, became increasingly popular and lucrative in the late 1980s and early 1990s.20 As a result, Propaganda’s owners reframed its music video and commercial spot production businesses as basically a means for creating feature film and nurturing or training feature film directors. Golin claimed that music video and commercial spot revenues allowed Propaganda to “survive” and gave the company “credibility with directors who [didn’t] want to take a project to a studio.”21 Sighvatsson added that Propaganda’s music video and commercial spot businesses functioned as “research and development” that provided “a great training ground for new talent.”22 Golin and Sighvatsson’s reframing of Propaganda’s music video and commercial spot production businesses is indicative of broader rhetoric surrounding indie film that makes art, and not commerce, seem to be the primary objective of production.23 Part of this rhetoric is a tendency for indie film to be defined against Hollywood, with the latter denigrated on the basis that it represents a highly commercialized industrial system.24 Golin’s claim about wanting to support feature film directors who are eager to work outside of the Hollywood studios is one

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example: any suggestion that Golin was seeking to support alternative expression in protest of Hollywood consolidation, however, is undermined by the fact that he also described the process of consolidation in the music video sector as “a necessary evil” that created “a much more professional way of doing business.”25 Rather than providing any progressive cultural or social function, therefore, Propaganda’s strategies worked as a form of professional legitimacy and revenue generation. Specifically, depicting their directors as naturally talented artists exhibiting huge creative potential provided room for Propaganda to continuously renegotiate and improve their clients’ contracts. While Golin and Sighvatsson’s comments are economically driven, however, they also carry problematic cultural undertones. Their talent management strategies are based on elevating their clients by denigrating non-client directors. This is explicitly evident when Golin contrasts Propaganda’s “professional” directors, creating results-driven work, with amateurs making “shoddy” videos.26 Similarly, by reframing Propaganda’s music video and commercial spot businesses as a means for creating film and nurturing filmmakers, Golin and Sighvatsson suggested that Propaganda’s directors were naturally artists disinterested in generating revenues for Propaganda or profiting themselves. This implied that Propaganda’s directors deserved to progress to other, apparently better, media such as indie film; and this in turn suggested that remaining a music video director essentially meant settling for inferiority. In these terms, Propaganda’s talent management strategies relied on sustaining cultural hierarchies between art and commerce, film and music video, and the filmmaker or indie-auteur and the music video director. As Propaganda applied its talent management strategies to new clients like Jonze, the reputations that its strategies helped build became underpinned by, and helped disseminate, these cultural distinctions. S AT E L L I T E A N D J O N Z E

Established in 1990, Satellite represented one manifestation of Propaganda’s expansion. Propaganda’s scale had increased: it managed several established and marketable directors including Fincher, Sena, David Hogan, and Michael Bay, and it expanded into film and television production. Satellite, then, was set up to be a division dedicated to managing less marketable directors with limited experience of finding work, and concentrated entirely on music video and commercial spot production and talent representation. In this sense, Satellite was indicative of Propaganda’s attempts to “nurture” talent through music video and commercial spot work. Jonze signed with Satellite in 1992. Signing new clients, particularly ones capable of fitting into the company, obviously represented a significant aspect

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of Propaganda’s strategy for growing its business and revenues. Golin and Sighvatsson’s comments, then, must also be understood as revealing and even contributing to Propaganda’s strategy for talent recruitment. By claiming to nurture talent and provide significant opportunities, Golin and Sighvatsson sought to entice new clients through promises of career progression and higher fees. Sighvatsson, for instance, bragged that Fincher’s and Sena’s careers had gone “through the roof ” and they had begun receiving $140,000 per video, up from $4,000 or $5,000.27 Elsewhere, Sighvatsson emphasized that Fincher and Sena had become “top television commercial directors” where they made “a 30-second piece of film for $600,000.”28 Sighvatsson clearly used Fincher and Sena’s success to claim that their talent management strategies were efficacious. Jonze has since recalled being impressed by Fincher and other Propaganda directors’ work shooting “huge commercials and videos” for the Rolling Stones and Volvo.29 This affirms that Jonze was motivated to join Satellite at least in part for career opportunities, and saw his career progressing according to the blueprint that Propaganda’s talent management strategies helped design. Moreover, Jonze says that after joining Satellite, he frequently visited Fincher in his office down the hall to “pick [his] brain about stuff.”30 This shows that the offices of talent management firms can also function as hubs in the exchange of knowledge. Jonze admits too that he mainly went to Fincher to “learn how effects were done,”31 demonstrating that this exchange centered upon developing skills as a visual storyteller rather than exchanging or formulating critical political ideas or social activism of a kind associated with the more marginal or radical end of independent film. Because Jonze was relatively unknown when he joined Satellite in 1992, almost no news coverage exists of his first two years at the company. The most thorough account of Jonze’s early period with Satellite comes from the 2003 DVD release of his music videos, short films, and documentaries as part of the Directors Label DVD series, which Jonze helped create.32 The DVD includes a booklet featuring an interview with Jonze interspersed with stills from his music videos. Released after Jonze’s emergence as a feature film director, however, the DVD must not be understood as a historical artifact. The DVD represents a paratext designed to reappraise and canonize Jonze’s music video work, by positioning it as part of an indie-auteur oeuvre. As a result, the DVD package and Jonze’s comments sustain, and enhance, his reputation. In the DVD booklet, Jonze recalls that his reel, which he presented to Satellite, only included “a couple of super low-budget videos,” some “skateboarding footage”33 and a collection of photos.34 Jonze states that Satellite’s head, Danielle Cagaanan, reviewed his reel and cautiously agreed to take him on as a director, providing he could get “the energy, personality and point of view” from his photos into his music videos.35 Jonze says that Cagaanan’s instructions initially left him confused, but that he figured out what she meant

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one year later, when he began drafting treatments for “If I Only Had a Brain” by MC 900 ft. Jesus, one of several early songs he received.36 Jonze explains that he drafted two treatments, one following a young boy discovering MC 900 ft. Jesus (Mark Griffin) operating a spooky TV shop from his basement, the other following the recording artist being transported in a cardboard box to a factory producing his new brain.37 Jonze says that although he preferred the former, Cagaanan encouraged him to submit the latter to the recording company because it better reflected his personality.38 “She just thought it was more original,” Jonze explained. “She could see other people writing the treatment with the image on the TVs, but she couldn’t see anyone else writing that other one.”39 In these accounts, Jonze sheds light on how Satellite and Cagaanan sought to construct him as an indie-auteur by positioning him as a figure with an individual creative style capable of producing original work. To do so, Cagaanan imagined a homogeneous music video sector where directors produced standardized works. On the surface it appears that, by recognizing Cagaanan and Satellite’s role in nurturing his creative identity, Jonze undermines depictions of himself as an autonomous artist. Yet this represents a rhetorical sleightof-hand. Claiming to have been unaware that he had an individual creative style is a way for Jonze to make his style seem natural or organic.40 Jonze suggests that his creative style only needed to be nurtured, and that it was always inherently different to popular music video conventions. Propaganda/ Satellite taught Jonze how to present himself as an indie-auteur, thus like Cagaanan he also invokes a homogeneous music video sector to reinforce his reputation. Jonze asserts that his photos looked nothing like “all the videos that [were] on TV” and that “everyone knows what a video is supposed to look like.”41 He also retrospectively dismisses his first treatment for “If I Only Had a Brain” as “pretty much just like a ‘music video’ idea” and states that, although the video he made was not “the most amazing,” he nevertheless likes it by virtue of it being the first video where he was not “trying to be something or do something [he wasn’t].”42 This works to increase the cultural value of the video specifically, and epitomizes how the DVD functions to reappraise his music video work in general. Jonze’s comments are contrived, however, since he contradictorily claims to be unaware of having a personal style that he simultaneously recognized as being different. As a result, Jonze’s account demonstrates how authorial discourse can stem from the publicity imperatives of talent management companies and the personalization of their general strategies around individual clients. Propaganda/Satellite’s influence in shaping Jonze’s music video practice becomes evident when recognizing how clearly his directing work matched with the company’s preferences regarding how music videos should be designed, and how they should look. According to two Propaganda executives, Anne Marie

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Mackay and Juliana Roberts, the company and its divisions favored videos designed around original concepts and dramatic narratives.43 They “pushed” these videos, Mackay and Roberts stated, despite record labels often preferring “formulaic” and “unimaginative” performance-centered videos.44 Mackay and Roberts’s comments appear as nothing more than statements about creative preferences. This is designed, however, to depict Propaganda as an artistic and innovative company, especially as one struggling against conservative record labels that value music video only for its promotional benefits and potential to generate profits. Yet their comments hide the commercial imperatives underpinning Propaganda’s talent management and media production strategies. In fact, Propaganda preferred concept videos because they helped promote the company and its directors. Understood in these terms, the notion of creative conflict between record labels and music video producers can be reconfigured as tension between two parties with different investments in music video’s promotional possibilities, the former prioritizing the promotion of recording artists, the latter prioritizing directors. Concept music videos appeared well suited to promoting Propaganda and its directors for two main reasons. First, they gave Propaganda’s directors greater leeway to experiment with form and style.45 The company’s preference for stylistic flourishes was underlined by John Dahl, director of Kill Me Again and Red Rock West, who commented that Propaganda, which produced the films, “were probably disappointed that [his] movies weren’t cooler looking” because “they really like the visual.”46 This arguably undermines perceptions of creative autonomy within Propaganda, since the company clearly favored stylized work more than some directors. Second, concept videos enabled Propaganda’s directors to incorporate dramatic narratives and offered opportunities to play with music video and other media genres and conventions. This is symptomatic of Propaganda’s strategy for elevating its directors and legitimating their work by positioning them as filmmakers. Sena’s and Fincher’s music video work, for instance, referenced canonical films like Casablanca (1942), 8½ (1963), Citizen Kane (1941), and Metropolis (1927),47 which aligned them directly with auteurs including Federico Fellini, Orson Welles, and Fritz Lang. As if confirming this strategy, in an interview conducted by Jonze in 1994 Sighvatsson claimed that stylistic and formal experimentation exhibited Propaganda’s directors’ “filmic background[s]” and “command of the visual language.”48 Jonze’s comments on his music video preferences recall Propaganda’s owners’ and executives’ comments above. During an interview for Channel 4’s Mirrorball, for instance, Jonze expressed a preference for concept music videos.49 That he expressed this preference during Mirrorball, a documentary series celebrating his and other directors’ music video work as art, reveals an attempt to make concept videos appear more personal and artistic. This is underlined in the Directors Label booklet, as Jonze describes his video for

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Daft Punk’s “Da Funk,” probably his most concept-heavy video,50 as “a predecessor to [Being John] Malkovich.”51 In these terms, Jonze clearly frames Da Funk and his other music videos as exhibiting his “filmic background.”52 While Jonze’s experimentation with form and style was intended to promote the director as an indie-auteur, therefore, it should be understood instead as a mark of his work within the commercial music video industry, informed as it was by Propaganda/Satellite’s experience and knowledge of music video production and convention. THE MUSIC VIDEOS

Stylistic flourishes are abundant across Jonze’s music videos. Jonze’s videos for MC 900 ft. Jesus’s “If I Only Had a Brain” and Dinosaur Jr.’s “Feel the Pain,” for example, both feature unusual point-of-view shots (the former from inside the cardboard box as MC 900 enters; the latter from inside a golf hole with the ball teetering above), very low-angle shots (MC 900 inside his cardboard box; J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. teeing up) and fast-paced tracking shots (MC 900’s cardboard box rolling down a hill on a child’s trailer and J.Mascis’s golf buggy swerving around Manhattan). Jonze’s video for Beastie Boys’ “Sure Shot,” meanwhile, features many stylistic flourishes including low-angle shots (such as its opening shot of an approaching dog that does not appear again, revealing it to be otherwise inconsequential to the video), close-up crane shots (with the rappers hanging from the crane), transitions between color and black-and-white, sped-up tracking shots, and montages created from archive footage. Even Jonze’s performance-centered video for Weezer’s “Undone (The Sweater Song)” opens with a prolonged stylistic flourish. Made from one single tracking shot, the video begins in black-and-white with the camera moving through a studio hallway. As the camera reaches the stage door entrance, however, the stage area beyond appears upside down. As the camera continues through the door and floats down towards the stage, it rotates in mid-air, turning the image the right way up. Once the camera reaches the band, the image then becomes color. This opening sequence’s stylistic flourish helps put Jonze’s stamp on an otherwise unremarkable performance video. As well as stylistic flourishes, special and visual effects are abundant across Jonze’s music video work. Examples include: MC 900 appearing inside a moving cardboard box; the tracking shot of a golf ball soaring over Manhattan in “Feel the Pain”; Elastica chasing a digitally created ghost and firing laser guns at an animatronic Godzilla in the video for “Car Song”; Mike Watt riding two model trains in “Big Train”; a (stunt)man running down the street alight in Wax’s “California”; Steven Malkmus, the lead singer of Pavement, performing with an invisible head in “Shady Lane”; and Christopher Walken flying around a hotel lobby in “Weapon of Choice.” Like

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the stylistic flourishes, the special and visual effects in Jonze’s music videos highlight the presence of a visual artist. While Jonze’s stylistic flourishes and use of special effects draw attention to visual artistry, formal play is used to create the impression that they belong to a broader artistic vision. This effect is achieved sporadically in some of the examples cited above, particularly where videos combine stylistic flourishes with highly unusual subjects, like the fast-paced tracking shots of objects or vehicles not traditionally associated with speed (MC 900’s box; J. Mascis’s golf buggy) or shots of the Beastie Boys hanging onto a crane or performing underwater in “Sure Shot.” Much clearer examples, however, come from Jonze’s videos for The Pharcyde’s “Drop” and Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You.” Jonze’s video for “Drop” clearly exhibits his stylistic flourishes and visual effects use. The video is played in reverse to give the impression of The Pharcyde’s members flying up from the ground, balls bouncing up stairs, and puddles of water rising into the air. The video ends with Fatlip (Derrick Stewart) receiving a hammer, Thor-like, in his hand. A glass pane featuring a painting of four figures in black with red outlines symbolizing The Pharcyde subsequently becomes reassembled (Fatlip had, of course, shattered the glass pane with the hammer he had thrown away). Once reassembled, the pane essentially becomes a fourth wall separating The Pharcyde from the camera and audience. In the space between the glass pane and the camera, however, a figure emerges completing his painting. This insertion of the glass pane at “Drop”’s conclusion represents a framing device designed to encourage audiences to perceive an authorial figure’s recrafting of music video convention. The glass pane/fourth wall is intended to symbolize music video convention (the framework). Having the painter occupy the space beyond the fourth wall functions to highlight Jonze’s presence by paralleling his position beyond the camera. Jonze, as the video’s director, thus effectively emerges as the artist operating outside convention to interpret and depict his subjects. The glass pane’s shattering, therefore, is a metaphor for Jonze’s breaking of music video convention, though one that overstates this breakage, since the video merely reworks music video conventions. As a result, “Drop”’s stylistic flourishes are made to appear indicative of Jonze’s authorial vision. Like “Drop,” Jonze’s video for Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You” is designed to encourage audiences to perceive Jonze’s breaking of music video convention. The video begins with grainy handheld footage of Torrance Community’s amateur dance troupe traveling to perform, with one member heard thanking Richard Koufey (played by Jonze) for his preparation. This is followed by a wipe transition to a title insert featuring garish green and pink font calling the video a “Torrance Public Film Production.” Subsequently, Richard and his troupe perform to “Praise You,” surrounded by extras looking like unparticipating spectators, accompanied by ambient sound and background dialogue.

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Afterwards, the troupe again discuss their performance, with one member thanking Richard for his “original” choreography and Richard comparing it to “b-boy posse” moves. This is laughable, since the choreography appears amateurish, improvised and rigid, and is performed by white middle-aged men and women wearing button-up t-shirts and yoga pants. The video’s epilogue and prologue sequences, text insert, grainy handheld footage and amateur dance routine effectively function to again signal an authorial vision. They signal, on one clear level, Richard’s authorship, his amateur video recording and production. On another concealed level, however, they appear ironic and signal Jonze’s authorship, the figure responsible for constructing the self-reflexive music video. Consequently, the video is designed to draw comparisons between Richard and Jonze as two figures breaking convention.53 Drawing comparisons between Richard and Jonze in this way, however, is intended to emphasize their difference. Specifically, Richard’s breaking of dance conventions emerges from his amateurism and apparent ignorance regarding those conventions. In contrast, Jonze’s breaking of music video convention becomes the work of a highly skilled professional, an apparently knowledgeable and self-aware artist. This neatly captures the legitimation process underpinning Jonze’s music video work. As stylistic flourishes and formal play help make “Drop,” “Praise You” and other videos directed by Jonze seem to be innovative artworks breaking music video convention, therefore, most other videos become positioned as standardized works supposedly made by less creative music video directors. Because Propaganda’s talent management strategy was designed to position its directors as artists, filmmakers, and indie-auteurs, Propaganda’s directors also frequently referenced other media content and genres. However, unlike Fincher’s and Sena’s videos, which referenced high-culture films, Jonze’s videos recreated a range of popular media programs or genres, including a Happy Days episode (Weezer’s “Buddy Holly”), the 1970s TV cop show (Beastie Boys’s “Sabotage”), science fiction (“Car Song”), and classical Hollywood musicals (Björk’s “It’s Oh So Quiet”). Into each, Jonze inserted visual flourishes and framing devices designed to encourage audiences to perceive the referencing process as an individual author’s recreation. For example, “Buddy Holly” begins with an opening title sequence crediting Jonze as the Happy Days episode’s director, while “Sabotage” signals its mock-design by deliberately emphasizing its low-budget production with text reading “for screening purposes only” appearing over archival footage used in place of a real explosion. This represents a broader feature of indie film, one discussed in detail by Michael Newman in relation to the Coen Brothers and other indie-auteurs.54 Formal and generic play can both help to promote directors because, as Newman says, they encourage authorial readings resulting from perceptions that breaking convention represents some manifestation of individual vision.55

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They also cater to educated audiences who delight in recognizing and pointing out the references, and how genre or formal conventions might be played with.56 References in Jonze’s music videos thus signaled his broader skill in recreating and perhaps improving pop culture, making Jonze stand out as artist-innovator. While the specific references appeared different between Sena, Fincher, and Jonze’s work, the effect was the same: they were positioned as directors capable of creating art beyond music video. CRITICAL DISCOURSE

The success of Propaganda/Satellite’s strategies in helping to boost Jonze’s reputation and marketability is evident across critical discourse around his work. Critics clearly interpreted the textual properties that Jonze’s concept videos exhibited as signs of his individual authorship. Critics variously called Jonze a “video savant,”57 “artist,”58 “genius,”59 and “auteur.”60 They saw Jonze’s stylistic flourishes and popular culture references as proof; as expressions, they claimed, of his unusual or quirky vision and artistry. An early report on Jonze featured in Newsweek in late 1994, for instance, called him a “25-year-old alternative auteur” and described his “vision [as] loopy, canny and pure pop,” citing as evidence the “Sabotage” video in which he “duded up the hip-hoppers as cheeseball TV cops in a parody of ‘The Streets of San Francisco.’”61 Crucially, this Newsweek article quoted Cagaanan commenting, “He’s younger than most of us and his references are everything from ‘Star Wars’ to ‘Happy Days.’” This revealed Propaganda/Satellite’s attempts to position Jonze as the fresh voice within Propaganda/Satellite, to make him seem hip and embed him as an astute innovator within popular culture. Over the next several years, numerous similar comments followed. The Atlanta Constitution claimed that Jonze’s “Buddy Holly” video displayed a “goofily self-conscious appreciation of pop and pop culture,”62 the Boston Globe described Jonze’s video for Wax’s “California” as “quirky wicked fun,”63 the Los Angeles Times called the video for Daft Punk’s “Da Funk” “Another bizarre gem from director Spike Jonze,”64 and The Ottawa Citizen called Jonze’s “Praise You” video “a devastatingly funny spoof of music video conventions.”65 According to many critics, then, Jonze’s videos were never just music videos: they were films and authored artworks. The Gazette called Jonze’s “Da Funk” “much closer to a short movie than a music video,”66 and the New York Times called the “Praise You” video “more like a guerrilla art attack than a commercial for a pop song.”67 These comments underlined how stylistic flourishes and formal play encouraged critics to perceive Jonze’s music videos as innovative and legitimated artworks, revealing perceived differences between Jonze’s work and mainstream music video conventions. By identifying

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Jonze’s quirkiness, references, or formal play, critics broadcast their apparently refined tastes and discerning palates.68 In this regard, “quirkiness” and formal play function in music video as they do in film: they distinguish artworks and their niche audiences from a commercial mainstream and its mass audience.69 The Ottawa Citizen thus asserted that unlike “most MTV fare,” Jonze’s “high-concept videos are smart in idea and execution.”70 As well as reaffirming distinctions between film and music video, art and commerce, these comments sustained social hierarchies by positioning Jonze’s admirers as smart, sophisticated, and selective, and the mass mainstream music video audience as unsophisticated and undiscerning. These distinctions, of course, were far more blurred than critical discourse suggested. Despite claims that Jonze’s authorial sensibility and videos were incompatible with the mainstream, he profited from having his videos gain significant exposure on MTV. According to some journalists, Jonze’s videos helped make Weezer a “household name”71 and gave established artists like Mike Watt long-overdue airplay.72 Notably, these journalists were both musicbased, meaning that, because they were less invested in the visual medium, they were more willing to acknowledge his videos’ promotional functions and risk undermining depictions of his videos as artworks. Impressions that Jonze helped make the record labels’ musicians famous enhanced Satellite’s bargaining position and, as a result, Jonze’s fees soon increased to levels that lesser-known acts like The Psychlone Rangers could no longer afford.73 By 1998 and 1999, critics were calling Jonze “a household name” whose videos would never be found on MTV’s “Out of the Bin,” a segment dedicated to giving lesser-known acts exposure.74 Jonze’s exposure on MTV also helped him cultivate a reputation for successfully appealing to young audiences. Again, this was underpinned by Propaganda/Satellite’s talent management strategies. “Because we became the biggest in videos,” Sighvatsson stated in 1990, “everybody thinks we have unlocked some secrets about the 18 to 24 market. We’re perceived as image makers, and I think that has spilled over into commercials.”75 While “spilled over” depicted a fortuitous or organic process however, Propaganda/Satellite’s strategy was most certainly carefully planned and orchestrated. By emphasizing Jonze’s youth and recent pop culture references in the early Newsweek article, for instance, Cagaanan made Jonze seem in sync with the youth demographic.76 Almost immediately after Jonze’s videos became popular on MTV, then, Satellite leveraged his success with the channel’s youth demographic to secure commercial spot contracts with brands like Nintendo, Levi, and Nike.77 Finally, by emphasizing Jonze’s youth, Cagaanan also depicted him as a director with significant potential destined for greatness. With the announcement and release of Being John Malkovich in 1999, then, Jonze’s emergence as indie-auteur appeared complete. Critics were quick to call Being John

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Malkovich “predictably quirky”78 and “offbeat.”79 Some critics stated explicitly that this aligned Jonze well with indie-auteurs such as Wes Anderson and Paul Thomas Anderson.80 While this suggested an artistic work unlike commercial Hollywood products, however, Propaganda, backed by PolyGram, had packaged Being John Malkovich with Jonze to target the growing number of audiences drawn to “quirky” indie film. Simultaneously, critics began retrospectively analyzing and searching Jonze’s music videos for similarities to Being John Malkovich. Film Quarterly, for instance, noted that like the feature film, Jonze’s videos often “blend[ed] several layers of intertextuality” and “played with identity issues.”81 Stating that Jonze’s works cohered under a single authorial vision helped legitimate his music videos as artworks or short films seemingly deserving more serious attention than most. Recalling Olsen’s comments in Film Comment, however, this reveals an anxiety at the more elite end of film criticism over Jonze’s background as a music video director and the commercial associations it carried. This shows that the eagerness of certain critics to sustain their positions as judges of quality can make them particularly receptive to the PR strategies of talent management companies like Propaganda. As a result, critics participating in Jonze’s construction as a marketable indie-auteur helped obscure the fact that his reputation was the product of highly commercial strategies and that he was the beneficiary of a consolidated industry. C O N C LU S I O N

In this chapter, I have explored Jonze’s collaboration with Propaganda/Satellite from 1992 until the early 2000s. I have shown that while promotional, extratextual, and critical discourse frequently depicted Jonze as a natural talent and artist, and his emergence as elite music video director and indie-auteur as organic and inevitable, his creative reputation and career success was shaped significantly by Propaganda/Satellite’s talent management and media production strategies. Yet this was hardly contradictory. Propaganda/Satellite helped construct Jonze’s reputation as an artist by shaping his music videos (encouraging concept videos, stylistic flourishes, and formal play) and influencing critical discourse through PR activities. This was designed to make Jonze more marketable, expand his career opportunities, and enhance Satellite’s leverage when negotiating fees. The strategy appeared successful as Jonze’s music video fees increased, he secured more lucrative contracts to direct commercial spots and eventually delivered a commercially and critically successful debut feature, the Propaganda-produced Being John Malkovich. Examining the roles that Propaganda/Satellite played in shaping Jonze’s work and building his reputation, therefore, has helped to problematize his reputation as artist working autonomously to fulfill his singular

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vision and shows that he was not so very independent after all. This demonstrates that if we are to have anything but a limited understanding of the work and careers of authorial figures, research needs to better recognize the roles and contributions of talent intermediaries like agents and managers, figures who have been too often overlooked in media scholarship. Finally, although commercial imperatives underpinned Propaganda’s strategies, they also involved and relied on sustaining highly undesirable cultural distinctions and hierarchies. Propaganda/Satellite’s strategies depicted Jonze as an artist creating innovative music video artworks and portrayed him as a natural talent destined, like Propaganda/Satellite’s other directors, to progress to film. In contrast, most other music video directors were positioned as artistically stuck, making culturally inferior videos designed to promote recording artists and destined to disappear amongst the other commercials airing on MTV. This narrative sustained cultural distinctions between art and commerce, film and music video, the filmmaker or indieauteur and the music video director. This in turn sustained cultural and social hierarchies positioning film’s elite and apparently refined audience over MTV’s and music video’s mass and supposedly undiscerning audience. As Propaganda/Satellite used Jonze’s reputation as an artist to, first, secure more music video and commercial spot contracts, and later to package and market Being John Malkovich, they helped disperse these cultural distinctions and hierarchies even more widely. While this chapter has analyzed Jonze’s work specifically, therefore, far more scope exists to examine the role that talent intermediaries play in managing the indie-auteur discourse more widely and, especially, for examining the consequences of its construction and dispersal in media other than film.

NOTES 1. Mark Olsen, “Discovery: Mike Mills,” Film Comment 36: 3 (May 2000), pp. 16–17. 2. See Geoff King, “Indie as Organic: Tracing Discursive Roots,” in Geoff King (ed.), A Companion to American Indie Film (Oxford: Wiley & Sons, 2017), pp. 58–79. 3. For a detailed discussion of these distinctions between film and television, see Michael Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012). 4. Paul McDonald, “The Star System: The Production of Hollywood Stardom in the Post-Studio Era,” in Paul McDonald and Janet Wasko (eds.), The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2008), pp. 167–81. 5. Ibid. 6. Dan Leopard, “Selling Out, Buying In: Brakhage, Warhol, and BAVC,” in Janet Staiger and Sabine Hake (eds.), Convergence Media History (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 151–60. 7. Jack Banks, Monopoly Television: MTV’s Quest to Control the Music (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996), p. 168.

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8. Propaganda was itself a fairly diversified media company owned by Dutch conglomerate Philips Electronics. 9. Banks, Monopoly Television, p. 86. 10. Ibid. pp. 63–9. 11. Ibid. p. 67. 12. Ibid. p. 168. 13. Larry Rohter, “For 2 Producers, Their Way Is the Right Way,” New York Times, October 15, 1990, pp. 13–14. 14. John Richardson, “Producers: Propaganda Films,” Premiere, June 1, 1990, p. 55. 15. Banks, Monopoly Television, pp. 4–5. 16. Ibid. p. 195. 17. For examples of critics asserting similar views see Olsen, “Discovery” and Alona Wartofsky, “Shooting for the Hip: Video May Have Killed the Radio Star, but Spike Jonze Is a Cultural Force to be Reckoned with in the Music Video Business,” The Ottawa Citizen, November 11, 1999; and for scholars see Ann Kaplan, Rocking Around the Clock: Music Television, Postmodernism, and Consumer Culture (New York: Routledge, 2016). 18. As Banks (Monopoly Television, p. 165) discusses, in 1990 record companies began applying downward pressure on top end production fees. 19. Amy Dawes, “Propaganda, Polygram Ink Pic Pact,” Variety, September 9, 1998, p. 22. 20. Yannis Tzioumakis, “‘Independent,’ ‘Indie’ and ‘Indiewood’: Towards a Periodization of Contemporary (post-1980) American Independent Cinema,” in Geoff King, Claire Molloy, and Yannis Tzioumakis (eds.), American Independent Cinema: Indie, Indiewood and Beyond (New York: Routledge, 2013), pp. 28–40. 21. Rohter, “For 2 Producers.” 22. Ibid. 23. See Michael Z. Newman, Indie: An American Film Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), pp. 221–46; Alisa Perren, Indie, Inc.: Miramax and the Transformation of Hollywood in the 1990s (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), p. 49. 24. Newman, Indie, pp. 221–46. 25. Steven Dupler, “L.A. Company Branches Out from Clip Base: Propaganda Nurtures New Talent,” Billboard, February 25, 1989, p. 43. 26. Ibid. 27. Richardson, “Producers.” 28. Dupler, “L.A. Company Branches Out.” 29. The Work of Director Spike Jonze: A Collection of Music Videos, Short Films, Documentaries, and Rarities (DVD), produced by Vincent Landay and Richard Brown (2003, Palm Pictures). 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid. 33. Jonze had previously founded Dirt, a quarterly skateboard and dirt bike magazine targeting teenage boys. 34. The Work of Director Spike Jonze. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. This neatly captures the typical manager and talent dynamic, where managers build their own reputations around their ability to raise their clients’ profiles without being seen as too heavily involved. See Denise Mann, Hollywood Independents: The Postwar Talent Takeover (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), p. 39.

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41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

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The Work of Director Spike Jonze. Ibid. Dupler, “L.A. Company Branches Out.” Ibid. As Geoff King explains, experimentation with style can represent showiness resulting from a director’s eagerness to make their mark. Geoff King, American Independent Cinema (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), p. 107. Lizzie Francke, “Never a Dahl Moment: Director John Dahl Remains Addicted to Darker Side of Life,” The Guardian, August 4, 1994, n.p. Sena referenced Casablanca and 8½ in his videos for Janet Jackson’s “Let’s Wait Awhile” and Taylor Dayne’s “I’ll Be Your Shelter,” respectively. Fincher referenced Citizen Kane and Metropolis in his videos for Madonna’s “Oh Father” and “Express Yourself.” Spike Jonze, “Sighvatsson of Propaganda Films, Which Seized on the Music-Video Revolution and Encouraged a Generation of Gifted Young Filmmakers,” Interview Magazine, October 1, 1994, pp. 102, 104. Mirrorball, “Episode 1,” Channel 4, April 25, 1999. For a brief discussion of “Da Funk,” see Laurel Westrup’s chapter in this collection. The Work of Director Spike Jonze. Here I am using Sighvatsson’s phrase cited earlier in Jonze, “Sighvatsson of Propaganda Films.” Some critics helped to extend the in-joke by playing along and crediting Richard as director. For example, see Deirdre Dolan, “Music Video Scores without Any Glitz: Spike Jonze’s Alter Ego Almost Fooled MuchMusic,” National Post, March 12, 1999. Newman, Indie, pp. 141–81. Ibid. p. 145. Ibid. p. 180. Rick Marin, “MTV’s Ruling Video Savant,” Newsweek, November 27, 1994. Neil Strauss, “Critic’s Notebook: Hit Bands You See but Don’t Listen to,” New York Times, April 1, 1995, p. 9. Wartofsky, “Shooting for the Hip.” Eric Weisbard, “Join the Club,” The Village Voice, March 4, 1997, p. 55. Marin, “MTV’s Ruling Video Savant.” Steve Dollar, “Pop Music Preview,” The Atlanta Constitution, March 31, 1995, p. 4. Renee Graham, “Don’t Try This at Home,” Boston Globe, March 31, 1995, p. 63. Lorraine Ali, “POP MUSIC; The Kids Are All Right with a New Generation,” Los Angeles Times, May 11, 1997, p. 68. Wartofsky, “Shooting for the Hip.” Ilana Kronick, “Daft Punk’s Tale of Humble Hound Might Redefine Music Video,” The Gazette, March 20, 1997, p. 6. Ann Powers, “Rock Music Videos as an Art Form with a Festival of Its Very Own,” New York Times, May 14, 1999, p. 20. By asserting that the critic’s taste is used to signify their social class, I am of course drawing here on the theory of Pierre Bourdieu. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge, 2010). See Newman, Indie, p. 44. Wartofsky, “Shooting for the Hip.” Dollar, “Pop Music Preview.” Fred Shuster, “Proving Why He’s the Ace of Bass Watt Savors Punk Roots with ‘Ball-Hog,’” Daily News, March 17, 1995, p. 24. Joe Warminsky, “At Home with the Rangers: Record Release Party Brings Psychlones Back to Bethlehem,” Morning Call, March 24, 1995, p. 1.

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74. Ben Wener, “You Like Noncorporate Videos? Check These Out,” The Orange County Register, April 17, 1998, p. F52. 75. Rohter, “For 2 Producers.” 76. Marin, “MTV’s Ruling Video Savant.” 77. Al Levine, “‘Can you imagine it?’ Sports Commercials Can Sell It,” The Atlanta Constitution, June 24, 1995, p. 9. 78. Renee Graham, “Delroy Lindo Getting His Due,” Boston Globe, July 5, 1998, p. 7. 79. Michele Willens, “From Miller Lite to the Making of Movies Lite?,” New York Times, September 6, 1998, p. 7. 80. Ibid. 81. Scott Repass, “Being John Malkovich,” Film Quarterly 56: 1 (Fall 2002), pp. 29–36.

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CHAPTER

12

Spike Jonze’s Abbreviated Art of the Suburbs Laurel Westrup

T

hroughout his career, Spike Jonze has made a virtue of the narrative and temporal limitations of short forms, including commercials, skateboarding videos, music videos, short films, and television.1 Jonze’s work across these abbreviated forms has allowed him to experiment aesthetically and to collaborate with other filmmakers, actors, skateboarders, and musicians. In 2010, Jonze collaborated with Arcade Fire to make a film inspired by the band’s forthcoming album The Suburbs. Together, they produced a 29-minute short film, Scenes from the Suburbs, inspired by the album, as well as a six-minute music video for the song “The Suburbs.” Both works mirror the intense range of emotions expressed within the album, from adolescent glee to adult nostalgia. Taking their cue from tracks like “Suburban War,” the film and music video tell a coming-of-age story set in a dystopian world where neighboring suburbs are at war with each other. These works provide a unique opportunity to see how Jonze adapts ideas from the same source—The Suburbs—across different forms, in this case hybridizing conventions of music video and short film in both works. Jonze’s Suburbs films envision a holistic melding of music, imagery, and narrative that is fluid and polysemic, undoubtedly a product of collaboration with the band. This chapter begins by surveying some of Jonze’s award-winning work in short media forms. As we will see, the director has not only advocated for the significance of short form media, but has also developed key strategies for working in and across abbreviated forms. He uses parody and intertextuality to play with generic conventions, often balancing levity with darker undertones. His shorts also demonstrate his signature aesthetic interests in movement and in synchronizing images to music. Throughout much of his short work, Jonze cross-pollinates tactics from different media forms—for instance, using diegetic

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sound that would normally be associated with cinema in his music videos, and bringing the pathos of short film into his advertisements. Across many of these works, he retains a thematic interest in the movement from adolescence to adulthood. The Suburbs films demonstrate several of Jonze’s thematic and aesthetic preoccupations, and they form a worthy case study of his abbreviated art. While Scenes from the Suburbs and “The Suburbs” might seem like minor works within Jonze’s career given his success as a feature filmmaker, they reveal his flexibility in moving across two distinct, if related, short forms. S P I K E J O N Z E : A S H O RT ( S ) S K E T C H

Jonze had already been working in abbreviated forms for many years prior to the Suburbs project. While he has increasingly turned his attention to feature film and television production (most recently as a creative director for Vice Media) he first made a name for himself through his award-winning music videos, commercials, and short films in the 1990s and 2000s.2 Jonze’s video for “Sabotage” (Beastie Boys, 1994) was nominated for an MTV Video Music Award (VMA). The following year, Jonze won the best director VMA for “Buddy Holly” (Weezer, 1994) and the video picked up three other VMAs, including best editor for longtime Jonze collaborator Eric Zumbrunnen. In 2002, Jonze won the Grammy for best short form music video for “Weapon of Choice” (Fatboy Slim, 2000).3 Jonze has also won multiple awards for his commercials, including AdWeek’s “Best Spot of the Year” and the Grand Clio for his Ikea “Lamp” commercial (2002). While not as publicly celebrated, Jonze’s short films have also been successful; his shorts How They Get There (1997) and Amarillo by Morning (1998) screened in back-to-back years at the prestigious Sundance Film Festival.4 Unlike some directors, who view short work as a stepping stone to feature filmmaking, Jonze has consistently championed short form media in its own right. He was one of a stable of talented media-makers who helped put the Satellite division of Propaganda Films on the map in the 1990s.5 As Andrew Stubbs notes in his chapter in this volume, the Satellite model for production was key to Jonze’s versatility. Although Propaganda Films consistently framed their shorts within the discourse of feature film to bolster their prestige, Jonze has continued to vocally support short form media. In 2000, he signed a deal with the now defunct shorts distributor AtomFilms to develop short content: the Atom website would screen How They Get There and Amarillo by Morning, and Jonze would “counsel AtomFilms . . . on creative directions and artistic relations and work directly with the company to recruit filmmakers for short projects.”6 Jonze was a good candidate for this role because he has consistently sought opportunities to collaborate with a wide range of artists, including (to name a few) fellow skateboarder and

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videographer Mark Gonzalez (on the skate video Video Days, 1991), rapper Kanye West (on We Were Once a Fairytale in 2009), and interactive video artist Chris Milk (on a Vice TV virtual reality newscast in 2014). This collaborative spirit also led to the creation of the Directors Label DVD series, a joint venture with fellow music-video-turned-filmmakers Chris Cunningham and Michel Gondry, distributed by Palm Pictures.7 Jonze’s shorts—particularly his music videos and commercials—are perhaps best known for their use of parody and intertextuality. As Stubbs discusses, critics delighted in Jonze’s pop culture parodies, particularly his music videos like “Sabotage” and “Buddy Holly,” which sent up Seventies and Eighties TV. Jonze’s 1998 “Sun Fizz” commercial for Sprite similarly works as a parody of typical ads of the time. It opens in a sunny suburban kitchen, where two healthy, wholesome white kids tell their mom they’re thirsty. However, all goes awry when the sun character on the fictional Sun Fizz drink she serves comes to life and chases the family. The character’s chirpy assurances that it is “filled with nature’s goodness” are contrasted with the family’s screams and the soundtrack’s horror-coded score. A voiceover reminds us to “trust [our] gut, not some cartoon character.” This scene from the suburbs foreshadows, albeit in a more humorous register, the dark undercurrent of American suburban life that Jonze will explore a decade later in the Suburbs films. His hybridization of advertising and horror clichés in “Sun Fizz” demonstrates his facility with using—and perhaps subverting—generic conventions. Like many of Jonze’s short works, the “Sun Fizz” ad also demonstrates an emphasis on action. Characters spend the majority of the spot running, leaping, and chasing.8 This breakneck pace might derive from Jonze’s work with action sports. His first foray as a professional photographer was capturing BMX bike riders in Freestylin’ magazine and skateboarders in action in Transworld Skateboarding, interests which we see represented in the Suburbs films.9 His photography soon morphed into videography, and his video for the skateboard company Blind, Video Days (1991), established Jonze as a cult figure. Video Days helped to set the lasting conventions of skate videos, which, as Emily C. Yochim explains, are “segmented into song-length montages of individual skateboarders . . . [that] operate to define each skateboarder’s—and company’s sense of ‘style.’”10 The music in these videos not only helps to identify each skater through his or her taste, but also helps to accentuate the riders’ athletic feats. Jonze’s work in this genre translated well to music video, and his first music video, “100%” (Sonic Youth, 1992), demonstrates the way he was able to move across genres and forms, even early in his career. Jonze was afforded the opportunity to work on “100%” after skater and videographer Mark Gonzales gave Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon a copy of Video Days.11 The band subsequently contacted Jonze. He collaborated with director Tamra Davis who, he says, gave

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him “a crash course in how to make a music video.”12 Jonze shot black-andwhite 16mm footage of street skaters, which was then intercut with footage of the band playing at a house party. Jonze also edited much of the video.13 Here we can see the confluence between skate video style and music video style. The motion of the skaters as they dodge cars and perform tricks is choreographed to the song through film editing. Toward the end of the video, a cymbal crashes as a skater launches himself and his board over a curb in slow motion, and a last bit of guitar feedback dies out as he lands. Jonze has remained interested in choreographing motion to music throughout his career. In his music video work Jonze often plays with the dynamics of motion, alternating between fast motion/cutting and slow motion. This alternation is perfectly paired with Björk’s “It’s Oh So Quiet” (1995), which moves between loud and quiet dynamics. In the quiet parts of the song, Jonze frequently uses slow motion, whereas the loud sequences are paced and cut more quickly.14 Jonze also unravels, distorts, and experiments with movement. In “Drop” (Pharcyde, 1995), he shot the group walking backwards for the length of the song, but the footage plays in reverse in the video, so that it looks like they are moving forward. The effect creates a surrealistic sense of movement as the group seems to float like Cocteau characters transported to the urban streets of America. He shoots Pharcyde’s Fatlip hanging upside down in “What’s Up Fatlip?” (2003) and turns the camera as Fatlip comes right side up, causing the viewer to question which way is up and which way down. Jonze uses a similar technique in “Undone (The Sweater Song)” (Weezer, 1994) where, during a tracking shot to the stage, the camera begins upside down and gradually turns right side up. Set against this slow and steady movement is the chaotic movement of a pack of dogs who invade the stage. Here the movement is disorienting, but sometimes, as in the graceful choreography of teens on bikes in the Suburbs films, it is poetic and sublime. Synchronization of music and image has remained a key feature of Jonze’s work across his oeuvre. Drawing on Michel Chion, Giulia Gabrielli identifies “synchronization points,” where sound and image “get in touch with each other,” as key moments that drive music videos’ aesthetic logic.15 In fact, she argues that in the ideal music video, there is a “match of everything that can be seen with everything that can be heard.”16 In practice, such extensive synchronization is rare. Jonze seems to prefer to save synchronization points (or sync points) for key moments in a video. For instance, in “Sure Shot” (Beastie Boys, 1994), he uses sync points to play up the rappers’ pop cultural references. During the lyric “Everything I do is funky/Like Lee Dorsey,” Jonze cuts three images of Lee Dorsey to the syllables, Lee-Dor-Sey. In “Sabotage,” we see one of the characters signal to the other by touching his ear over “Listen up/Cause I’m shifting gears now.” We will see this kind of image-lyric match, which emphasizes the debt of the images to the music, frequently in “The Suburbs” music video.

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As much as Jonze attends carefully to the musical cues in the songs he works with, he also often foregrounds diegetic sounds from the video’s world that make his music videos feel more cinematic or televisual. While he was not the first director to incorporate diegetic sound into his videos, he was one of the pioneers of this technique.17 In “It’s Oh So Quiet” we see and hear a tap running and the buzz of a fluorescent light in the bathroom of a tire shop before Björk emerges, initially in slow motion, to begin her musical number. Here Jonze uses diegetic sound to augment the dynamics of the song: when it’s “oh so quiet,” we hear every bulb and dripping faucet, and this renders the big Hollywood dance scene to follow all the more spectacular. In “Buddy Holly,” Jonze borrows sitcom sounds. The video is interrupted in the middle with a “to be continued” title, after which we hear Ron Howard’s voice say “Stay tuned for more Happy Days,” before it resumes. “Buddy Holly” concludes, after the song is over, with a joking exchange between Al and Weezer, followed by a laugh track. By building out the world of the music video through this additional dialogue and sound (the laugh track, Howard’s voice), Jonze inserts Weezer more fully into the pop cultural past that they nostalgically celebrate in the song (“Woo-ee-ooh, I look just like Buddy Holly/Oh-oh, and you’re Mary Tyler Moore”). Neither of these videos tells a full-fledged story, but the diegetic sounds hint at a narrative world than transcends the song alone. As we will see, Jonze uses this technique in “The Suburbs” music video to foreground the unease that underlies the narrative world of the video and the film. Despite the brevity and limited narrative affordances of music videos and commercials, Jonze consistently integrates storytelling techniques from short filmmaking to provide these works with emotional resonance. In his Ikea ad “Lamp,” somber piano music accompanies the sad scenario of a subtly anthropomorphized lamp that is abandoned to a rainy curb. As Cynthia Felando explains in Discovering Short Films, shorts directors often find ways to compress the narrative into a single incident or a short time period “by means of the focus on a ‘single thing,’ including a carefully delimited slice-of-life moment.”18 We have such an incident in the abandonment of the lamp. The lamp is also indicative of a common character type for short films: “protagonists who are lonely and marginalized in some way.”19 Just as we are drawn to the character of the lamp, though, Jonze pulls the rug out from under us. A man steps into the shot and addresses us directly: we are “crazy” for feeling bad for the lamp because “It has no feelings! And the new one is much better.” While this tonal shift reinstates the film’s function as an advertisement, it is also typical of Jonze’s irreverent style. The emotional connection established with the lamp is not negated by the film’s commercial imperatives. We have still watched a moving short film about a lamp, even though it is also an ad for Ikea. We see similar hybridization of forms in Jonze’s music video/short film for Daft Punk’s instrumental track “Da Funk” (1995). As Gabrielli has argued of

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videos for instrumental (often electronic) music, “the absence or limitation of lyrics can . . . open a space for the creative, narrative and experimental freedom of the visual elements.”20 In “Da Funk,” Jonze is able to tell a story that is both musical and narrative. The video is presented like a narrative film, with a credit reading “Daft Punk Presents Big City Nights” over the sounds of city traffic. But we soon come to realize that music is the driving force behind this narrative. Thirty seconds into the video, “Da Funk,” which we’ve been listening to over the opening shots of the video, is revealed to be diegetic music coming from Charlie’s (our protagonist in a dog mask) boombox. Charlie carries this boombox throughout the video, and it comes to define him. It provides him with his own soundtrack, and ultimately proves more important to him than human connection. As does “Lamp,” “Da Funk/Big City Nights” centers on a slice-of-life moment and a lonely protagonist. Charlie tries to make friends on the streets of the big city, but he consistently fails. When he does finally meet a former neighbor “from back home” (presumably a suburb outside the titular big city) who invites him to dinner, a “no radios” sign on the bus they’re boarding forces him to choose between her and the boombox. Unable to part with the radio, Charlie is destined to remain alone. As Felando argues in her chapter in this volume, Jonze’s shorts frequently demonstrate the narrative economy characteristic of the most successful shorts. But here we also see Jonze’s ability to coordinate that narrative economy with the demands of music video. Charlie’s attachment to his boombox subtly posits “Da Funk” as an essential jam. Jonze’s documentary short Amarillo by Morning (1998) diverges substantially from the irreverent charm of his narrative ads and music videos. However, it reveals some key thematic features and an emphasis on creative collaboration that carry into the Suburbs films. Employing a day-in-the-life structure, the film follows a group of kids in a Houston suburb who want to become famous rodeo bull riders. Given Jonze’s countercultural cool, we might expect him to disdain these kids, with their thick Texan accents and earnest love of Jesus and bull riding, but he treats his young subjects and their suburban milieu with utmost respect. The film emphasizes the movement from adolescence to adulthood, as the teenagers contemplate their rodeo ambitions. Amarillo by Morning is moving largely because Jonze frequently lets the kids dictate the film’s locations, and narrate their own experiences. Early in the film, they take him to the “barrel bull,” a place where they practice their skills on an old barrel suspended on ropes between trees. Jonze gives the kids a microphone and stands back as they commentate each other’s rides. Jonze has clearly won the kids’ trust, as they talk to him quite frankly about their aspirations for the rodeo circuit, their love lives, and personal trials. The kids open up about being perceived as “white trash” by the tony Houston suburbanites with whom they cohabitate. Throughout these conversations (which often unfold

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with minimal editing), we hear Jonze’s earnest questions and supportive comments. His attention validates their feelings, fears, and dreams. The validation of children’s and teenager’s emotional lives would become important to Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are a decade later, and it is also central to Scenes from the Suburbs, where another set of suburban kids voice their hopes and fears. Amarillo by Morning quite strikingly anticipates the kids and their dynamic in Scenes from the Suburbs. Both films focus on a tight-knit group of teenage friends. Both films take place in a Texas suburb, although the suburb has been transported into a science fiction dystopia in Scenes. Although music does not figure heavily in Amarillo, like Scenes, it is the source of the film’s title. At the end of the film, the boys sing along to Chris LeDoux’s 1975 rendition of “Amarillo by Morning.” The song explicitly romanticizes rodeo life, and it signals a sense of nostalgia that is also present in Scenes. While the kids in Scenes prefer bicycles to bulls, their vulnerability and complex emotions mirror those of the Amarillo kids. And although the kids in Scenes are fictional characters, much of the dialogue was derived from improvisations that I imagine sounded a great deal like the conversations in Amarillo. IN THE SUBURBS, I

. . .

In 2010, Jonze found himself hanging out with a bunch of suburban teenagers in Texas again. He was coming out of a difficult period in his career21 and Arcade Fire had just finished making the Suburbs album, so both director and band were looking for a low-key project. Jonze was already a fan of Arcade Fire’s music, and had used their song “Wake Up” in the trailer for Where the Wild Things Are. In an interview with Dazed Digital, drummer Jeremy Gara stated, “The collaboration happened super naturally. We met Spike years ago, he’s been a friend of the band for a long time, just from coming to shows. We always wanted an excuse to work with him.”22 The film was a true collaboration: Jonze co-wrote Scenes with the band’s Win and Will Butler, and the band members appear in the film in cameo roles. Win Butler describes the collaborative process between Jonze and the band as highly organic: “Basically, we played Spike some music from the album and the first images that came to his mind had the same feeling as this idea for a science fiction film I had when I was younger.”23 Will elaborated in an interview with Pitchfork, explaining that the idea was to create “something like Red Dawn, where it’s like a teen actionadventure movie but also a little stupid.”24 This atmosphere is evident in the “Behind the Scenes of the Suburbs” featurette, where we see the cast clowning around with Jonze and members of Arcade Fire. The band members chase the teens, the teens chase the band members, Jonze skateboards, and general pandemonium ensues. The featurette might feel “a little stupid,” but the rapport

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Jonze built with his cast allowed him to capture some of the album’s darker emotions, like fear and longing, in both the film and the music video. The Suburbs album is a more melancholy work than much of Jonze’s previous source material. On the album, Arcade Fire work through some key associations that tend to be made with American suburbia—as safe, conformist, boring places where affluent teens first learn to drive and fall in love—without offering any resolution. In his book about The Suburbs, Eric Eidelstein quotes Win Butler as saying The Suburbs is “neither a love letter to, nor an indictment of, the suburbs—it’s a letter from the suburbs.”25 In other words, the album is intended to convey a sense of living in the (American) suburbs. Some of the album’s songs do position the listener in the shoes of a suburban teenager, in the present tense. For instance, singer Régine Chassagne’s “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains),” speaks to the entrapment of teenage life in the suburbs (“They heard me singing and they told me to stop/Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock/These days my life I feel it has no purpose . . .”) Here, Chassagne voices a classic criticism of suburbia as conformist, alienating, and empty. As Robert Beuka summarizes in SuburbiaNation, “Almost without fail, the major novels, stories, and films chronicling suburban life have envisioned suburbia as a contrived, dispiriting, and alienating place.”26 But this entrapment and boredom is often contrasted by other feelings. When Chassagne sings, in “Half Light I,” “Now the night’s closing in/and in the half-light we run/Lock us up safe, and hide the key/But the night tears us loose/and in the half-light we’re free,” these lines ache with a kind of teenage romanticism about the night and its possibilities. Throughout these present-tense passages, we get a sense of the teenager immersed in the suburbs, and as Timotheus Vermeulen writes (in a book also titled Scenes from the Suburbs), “the teenage experience of the suburb [is] three-dimensional, affected, and embodied . . . The teenagers may not like the suburb, but they still experience some sort of innate physical bond and natural understanding with it.”27 This embodied, affective experience will become crucial to Jonze’s work with the album. Much of the album, though, feels less like a present-tense letter from the suburbs and more like a reminiscence from a faraway time and/or place. A powerful sense of reflection and nostalgia runs through many of its tracks, and this is replicated in the flashback structure of Scenes from the Suburbs. The sense of longing for the past is perhaps most evident on the album in “Sprawl I (Flatland),” where Win Butler sings, “Took a drive into the sprawl/ to find the places we used to play/it was the loneliest day of my life.” Earlier in the song he looks for his old home, but he cannot read the house numbers. This inability to truly return to the suburbs as the narrator remembers them drives the melancholic, nostalgic feel of the song. These qualities are reinforced by the song’s somber piano and string arrangement, which also feels, somehow, anachronistic. In his book about suburban narratives, Look Closer,

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David R. Coon suggests that our sense of suburbia is caught up in both private and collective feelings of nostalgia, as we “selectively choose details . . . in our own nostalgic imaginations, highlighting the positive and minimizing the negative.”28 Scenes is structured around such selective memories, though neither the album nor the films provide an entirely rosy view. The positive memories of a suburban adolescence take on a bittersweet edge in adulthood, for instance when Win Butler’s narrator fails to find “the places [he] used to play.” Eidelstein writes of The Suburbs that, “It begs you to feel something, to remember, to reflect.”29 The emotions that Arcade Fire lay bare on the album are raw and sometimes contradictory. Taken as a whole, the album taps into complex feelings about the suburbs, whether those are sentimental, painful, or just plain dull.30 It is a carefully orchestrated, yet sprawling work, which provides Jonze a wide range of material to work through in the films. Despite the insouciance with which the band framed their work with Jonze, the Suburbs films were thoughtfully planned. As Will Butler told Pitchfork, “We didn’t have the ability to do a feature-length, but since we always make featurelength things in the musical world, we wanted to try to give [Scenes from the Suburbs] the feel of a feature, but also have it be a little more disparate structurally.”31 The Hollywood Reporter’s Borys Kit noted that Arcade Fire, who were at the film’s Berlin Film Festival premiere in February 2011, told the journalist that they had seen so many unofficial videos for their music circulating online that they wanted to make a more definitive visual companion for the album. Win Butler told him, “We wanted to have some say in our visual legacy . . . So that 30 years from now, when a computer virus crashes all the computers and people have to look at DVDs to see what life was like in the early 2000s, there is some record of what we were thinking visually.”32 The film was indeed released on DVD, as part of the one-year anniversary rerelease of The Suburbs.33 The rerelease includes the album, film, music video, behind-the-scenes featurette, and a booklet featuring song lyrics, images from the set of the film, and script pages from the shoot. This rerelease package signals that the project was truly a multimedia collaboration between Arcade Fire and Jonze, comprising several distinct but overlapping texts.34 As the title Scenes from the Suburbs implies, Jonze’s film offers us something like altered vignettes from the album, drawing most explicitly from the dystopian lyrics of “The Suburbs” and some of the other tracks to create a story world where the suburbs have become separate enclaves at war with one another, complete with checkpoints and armed guards at every border. This is not a mere skirmish between suburban fiefdoms: Jonze presents us with some terrifying images of people being rounded up by soldiers and shot. Is this the much-derided conformity of the suburbs gone awry? At the same time, Scenes is also a coming-of-age story about two teenage friends, Kyle and Winter. The film is structured as an extended flashback. Kyle, our narrator

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(whose voiceover is provided by Win Butler), begins the film by saying, “When I think back about that summer, I don’t think about the army.” It is true that the armed conflict going on in the fictional suburb of Crossvine is ultimately a backdrop to the dissolution of Kyle and Winter’s friendship. The early part of the film feels like a love story between the boys, albeit a platonic one.35 But after Winter’s brother comes back from the war a changed man, Winter starts to withdraw until, in the final scene of the flashback, he goes to the fast food restaurant where Kyle works and beats him up. The film moves to a coda at this point, where Kyle, again in voiceover, ruminates on his relationship with Winter and on the unreliability of memory. Scenes from Suburbs, like many of Jonze’s short works before it, is a film that hints at a larger narrative beyond the frame. Some moments, such as the one where we see the teens’ neighbor gunned down by the militia, are both confusing and shocking in their violence, all the more so since this brief scene is bracketed by black frames. Jonze uses these black frames, during which an indeterminate amount of time passes, almost literally as ellipses between the scenes depicted. As Felando notes, “The short film is frequently fascinated with time, which is reflected in the preference for elliptical narratives and a more general experimentation with time.”36 Jonze’s experimentation with time in Scenes works well to highlight Kyle’s necessarily incomplete recollections of a summer long ago. As Kit explains, “Under the conceit of a man trying to piece together memories, scenes jump, rise and fall.”37 The effect is sometimes disorienting, and yet the album’s preoccupations remain present, condensed, and perhaps even heightened. The film announces its connection to the album almost immediately. Following the opening monologue by adult Kyle, which works like a cold open in a television program, opening credits announce that the film is “based on the album The Suburbs by Arcade Fire.” While the narrative is not wholly dependent on the album, the film’s scenario explicitly takes inspiration from the lyrics of the album’s title track: “You always seemed so sure/that one day we’d be fighting/in a suburban war/Your part of town against mine.” This song is also, aptly, the first that we hear in the film, initially as an alternate instrumental refrain, and then in its full version. The opening cymbal crash of the full song syncs with “Arcade Fire Presents” and the first line, “In the suburbs, I” corresponds with the title screen. These credits not only signal the film’s association with the album, but they also mark the film as “not a music video.” As Stubbs argues, music videos have consistently been placed below cinema in the hierarchy of media productions, and they increasingly borrow cinematic conventions, like opening title cards (which we also saw in Big City Nights), to indicate higher status. But we might expect the title cards to profit more on Jonze’s high profile as a feature film director. Surprisingly, we do not get a “Directed by” credit until the end of the film. Instead, Jonze puts focus

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on his collaborators, and on the musical inspiration for the film, through credits introducing them and their album. The film draws on elements of music video, especially in its visualization of lyrics from the album. For instance, Jonze clearly takes inspiration from the lyrics of “Suburban War” in Scenes, sometimes subtly and sometimes not-so-subtly. The line where Win sings, “I can remember when you cut your hair/I never saw you again” clearly inspires Winter’s withdrawal from Kyle (and the rest of his friends), which is signaled by him shaving his head. The repeated refrain at the end of “Suburban War,” “All my old friends/They don’t know me now” echoes Kyle’s sentiments in the closing monologue about never knowing whether his falling out with Winter colors the way he remembers his friend or not. The end of this monologue is punctuated with some lines from “Sprawl I (Flatland)”: “Let’s take a drive/through the sprawl/through these towns they built to change/Then you said/the emotions are dead/it’s no wonder that you feel so strange.” This last set of lyrics, before the film cuts to black and the credits roll, reinforces the “strange” feeling of the film, and they give a sinister cast to the otherwise innocuous tracking shot of a suburban street with which they are paired. Throughout the film, the lyrics give us clues as to how we might read the “scenes”—and the characters and events within them—that unfold. And yet, I would not characterize Scenes as a music video. As in some of Jonze’s other shorts, music is central, but it is not ubiquitous. Several scenes, like the one in which Kyle, Winter, and Winter’s girlfriend Zoe hang out in a garage, exchanging typical teenage inanities, are not accompanied by any music at all. When music is used, the focus is not on the song as such. We do not hear any of the songs from The Suburbs in their entirety in the film, and, when we do hear them, it is often in alternative, instrumental arrangements that do not appear on the album. For instance, as Kyle chases after Winter, who has left a bonfire party, we hear the haunting strings from “Sprawl I” emerge in an instrumental arrangement that is not on the album. The cue continues as they get caught by the police and pushed against a fence for interrogation, culminating in a tense vibrato on the strings. This cue is particularly interesting because it demonstrates a sort of absent presence of the album. “Sprawl I” here becomes instrumental score. The lyrics that we would hear over the vibrato on the album version narrate kids getting caught by cops. Rather than sync the song with the lyrics, as he might do in a music video, Jonze uses the vibrato to stand in for the lyrics on the album version of the song. The effect is similar to a sync point, but subtler and hence more appropriate for a narrative film. Music is also used in less tangible, more evocative ways throughout the film. In a quiet scene after the kids have been turned away from the Oakridge border, they ride their bikes at night on the deserted streets of Crossvine. We hear a soft musical cue of Chassagne singing in the upper register. The sound

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is echo-y, eerie, almost like a theremin in a horror movie. It speaks to the kids’ unease, and also to the growing rift between them. Scenes from the Suburbs also integrates music from the album diegetically, in a more typically cinematic manner. We hear “Wasted Hours” on the car radio as the teens drive toward the border to Oakridge: apt commentary on their mission to risk their lives crossing the border to go to a different mall than the one in Crossvine. “Modern Man” plays quietly in a scene where Kyle seeks advice from Winter and Zoe about how to initiate a first kiss. Later, “Month of May” provides a rocking outlet for teenage fun (and angst) at a house party. In these ways, the album’s songs are woven into the fabric of the teenagers’ lives. The album inhabits the film, maybe even haunts it; however, the film never ends up feeling like a promotion for the album. As IndieWire reviewer Drew Taylor put it, “The songs . . . [serve] mostly as background, although [they come] to the forefront when necessary. It’s beautifully done and adds an almost lyrical quality to the film.”38 This lyrical quality comes to the fore more prominently in the music video, which takes only one song, “The Suburbs,” as its focus. As we might expect of a music video, there are many more sync points between image and music in “The Suburbs” than there are in Scenes. In the video, which runs six minutes, we are able to see how much of the visual material from the film derives from song lyrics. For instance, here the footage of the teens chasing each other with BB guns across the neighborhood’s yards is paired with the lyrics: “Kids want to be so hard/but in my dreams we’re still screaming and running through the yard.” The visual mirroring of the lyrics is quite literal here, but sometimes the relationship between lyrics and image is more complex. In the video, the shots from the scene in the film where Kyle holds his baby sister while talking with Zoe and Winter are paired with the lyrics “So can you understand/why I want a daughter while I’m still young?/I want to hold her hand/and show her some beauty/before all this damage is done.” It seems as though the scene was inspired by these lines, and yet in the film it is paired with “Modern Man,” which gives it quite a different resonance. There the lyrical emphasis is on waiting, and Kyle is “wait[ing] [his] turn,” presumably to start a romance like Zoe and Winter’s. And while one of the lyrics suggests that “something don’t feel right,” the dialogue about first kisses and Kyle’s tenderness toward his baby sister make the scene feel innocent. In the music video, the lack of dialogue and change in musical accompaniment give these images a darker resonance. In the music video version of the scene, Kyle seems less carefree, more concerned. In a series of shots not seen in the film, he hands the baby back to his mother and then looks anxious and troubled. This scene is just one example of the music video altering, and perhaps intensifying, the characters’ experience. Another sync point toward the end of the video has a similar effect. Unlike the film, the music video ends with the scene in which Winter beats Kyle up.

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Over several repetitions of the lyric “I’m moving past the feeling,” we watch the teens run through the neighborhood to warn Kyle of Winter’s arrival. As they reach the restaurant where Kyle works, their screaming and beating on the glass is paired with the eerie refrain from the end of “The Suburbs”: “In my dreams we’re still screaming/We’re still screaming/We’re still screaming.” In the song, the screaming is first associated with the innocence of “running through the yard” before taking on a darker cast in the final repetition, where it is untethered from the happy image of kids at play. In the video, Jonze visually translates this transference from play to violence. In another significant sync point toward the end of the video, we see footage not included in the film of Kyle standing in the parking lot at night, looking down at a jumbled mess of metal that was once his bike, to the lyrics “in the parking lot/we’re still waiting/it’s already past.” While the synchronization of place is literal, Jonze captures, perhaps more effectively than in the film, the passing of Winter and Kyle’s friendship. Here we get a sense of the intensity of teenage angst. However mundane the event actually is, it feels important, unfathomable, memorable. And that is the point of The Suburbs and the song “The Suburbs.” As in his earlier music video work, Jonze uses sync points not merely to connect lyrics or rhythms with appropriate images, but rather to highlight the structures of feeling that animate the song. In this case, those feelings are loss, longing, and fear, but also joy. In the video, Jonze expresses the teens’ joy through his characteristic attention to movement. We see several poetic sequences of the friends riding their bikes, and to preserve this sense of motion, Jonze sometimes uses longer takes of this footage in the video than he does in the film. While music video as a form is often associated with quick cutting, the loping rhythm of the song is perfectly matched by this slower movement. The whole first minute of the music video, following the brief prologue, consists of shots of the gang on their bikes. Sometimes Jonze shoots them from far away as they zoom along the streets, and other times, he weaves in and out of their formation as they circle around each other in that most typical feature of American suburbia, the cul-de-sac. Here the teens are just kids, joyful and free. Nonetheless, the specter of the suburban war still echoes through the music video. As in some of his other music videos, Jonze adds short interludes with diegetic sound to help create this narrative world. The beginning of the song is set to the gang on their bikes in both the film and the music video, but the preceding sequences vary considerably. There is no speech in the music video’s prologue. Rather, we see Kyle walking over a hill at sunrise or sunset. We hear his footsteps, and, in the background, we hear sirens. If we have not seen the film before, we might assume that these are ordinary police sirens of the type that can be heard occasionally even in the safest suburb. Nonetheless, they sow a seed of distrust in this sleepy suburban picture. As Eidelstein writes of “The

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Suburbs,” “the lyrics . . . foreshadow an inevitable and creeping darkness.”39 This is a suburb, after all, that is menaced by military occupation. The epilogue works similarly to the prologue. After Kyle and Winter have both fallen to the floor in the restaurant, Kyle looks up at the ceiling as the music ends. After this is a hard cut to an image of the sky with clouds, and sirens and birds can be heard. As in the prologue, the sirens give the lie to the chirping birds and the blue sky, creating an uneasy feeling. But before we can really process this last shot, there is a hard cut to black and to silence. The feeling of unease lingers, even as we remember the shots of teens on their bikes, young and carefree. A L R E A DY PA S T ?

In her chapter on Jonze’s short films, Felando argues that we should refrain from thinking of short films as “warm ups” for feature work. As the chapters in this section demonstrate, Jonze’s short works are as essential to his oeuvre as his features. When we view his two Suburbs films side by side, we see a director who understands how to work in abbreviated forms, and who makes a virtue of their limitations. While we may not totally understand why Crossvine and Oakridge are at war, or what this will ultimately mean for Kyle, Winter, Zoe, and their friends, we leave both the film and the music video with a strong feeling of the American suburbs—in all their complexity. These films “work” as companions to The Suburbs, as Arcade Fire intended, but they also stand alone as studies of American suburban teenage life in miniature. In Scenes from the Suburbs, we see Jonze’s facility with the elliptical qualities of short filmmaking: he uses music in several ways to help distill the emotional qualities of the narrative with limited dialogue and a limited time frame. The music video for “The Suburbs,” even shorter, intensifies the themes of unease and nostalgia from Scenes from the Suburbs. Through Jonze’s choreography of movement and music, the music video gives us light as well as darkness. Jonze’s work is moving, both literally and figuratively. His keen understanding of affect intensifies the emotional resonances of his short works, as characters take shape quickly within compressed narratives. His work on the Suburbs project demonstrates the flexibility with which he is able to move across abbreviated forms (particularly music video and short film) while retaining core ideas and core feelings. In Scenes he uses lyrics to provide subtle sync points where music comments powerfully on the scene, and in “The Suburbs,” he includes interstitial material to help set the scene and to reinforce the underlying feeling of the song. Despite this cross-pollination between music video and short film conventions, Scenes remains legible as a short film, and “The Suburbs” remains legible as a music video. Both films demonstrate Jonze’s careful orchestration of storytelling resources and the collaborative ethic that has made him such a sought-after partner in and outside of Hollywood.

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If I had my way, Jonze would go on working in these abbreviated forms, as he has done for most of his career. But I fear he will increasingly leave them behind. When James Mottram asked Jonze about his music video work in 2014, he responded, “I’m not as excited about doing them as I once was. And there are a lot more people [who] are much more excited, and should be doing it, because they’re living it. I don’t want to do it just to do it.”40 Since then, he has only made one video, for Kanye West’s “Only One” (2015). His advertising work has also slowed, despite an award-winning ad/short film for Kenzo World in 2016. Nonetheless, Jonze’s considerable work across short forms undoubtedly informs his current role as a creative director and executive producer with Vice Media. There, he will continue to influence and inspire a new generation of filmmakers willing to work within and across the boundaries of abbreviated media. NOTES 1. I would like to thank the editors of this collection and the anonymous reviewers for their suggestions on an earlier draft of this piece. I would also like to thank Paul N. Reinsch for his feedback and encouragement on this project. 2. See Cynthia Felando’s and Andrew Stubbs’s chapters in this volume for additional commentary on Jonze’s work in short film and music video, respectively. 3. In addition to these accolades, Jonze’s music videos have also been featured in several retrospectives and museum exhibits, including the Music to See Exhibition at the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Denmark in 2008. See Lise Mortensen, Music to See, trans. Philip Mullarkey (Århus: ARoS, 2008). 4. See Felando’s chapter in this volume for more on Jonze’s short films and their reception. 5. See for instance Rex Weiner, “Jonze to Do ‘John’ for Propaganda,” Variety (Daily), April 18, 1997. 6. Mark Graser, “AtomFilms Jonzing for Vision, New Short Films,” Variety (Weekly), October 2, 2000. 7. Shari Roman, “The Directors Label: Chris Cunningham, Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry,” Flaunt 50 (January 2004), p. 166. The initial three-DVD set packaged music videos and other extras from each of the three directors. Subsequent Directors Label releases featured other prominent music video makers. As Carol Vernallis argues, the Directors Label releases, while limited in scope, made a case for the importance of music video as a medium. Carol Vernallis, Unruly Media: YouTube, Music Video, and the New Digital Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 263. 8. His hilarious 2007 “Pardon our Dust” ad for Gap is even more action-packed. 9. Derek Hill, Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood’s Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists and Dreamers: An Excursion into the American New Wave (Harpenden: Kamera, 2008), p. 109. 10. Emily C. Yochim, “‘It’s Just What’s Possible’: Imagining Alternative Masculinities and Performing White Male Dominance in Niche Skateboarding Videos,” in Skate Life: Re-Imagining White Masculinity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), p. 140. 11. Kevin Duffel, “Spike Jonze,” Transworld Skateboarding 31: 1 (2013), p. 116. 12. Nicole Holofcener, “Spike Jonze,” Interview, December 2013/January 2014, p. 141. 13. According to Holofcener’s interview with Jonze, this was the first time he used a film camera—he had only shot video previously.

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14. For more on Jonze’s choreography of movement to sound, see Vernallis’s discussion of “Sabotage” (Unruly Media, p. 274). 15. Giulia Gabrielli, “An Analysis of the Relation between Music and Image: The Contribution of Michel Gondry,” in Henry Keazor and Thorsten Wübbena (eds.), Rewind, Play, Fast Forward: The Past, Present and Future of the Music Video (Piscataway, NJ: Transcript, 2010), p. 96. 16. Ibid. p. 102. 17. See my chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Cinematic Listening (forthcoming) for more on cinematic sound design in music videos. According to Stubbs (in this volume), Jonze’s Propaganda mentors encouraged him to explore cinematic directions in his music video work. 18. Cynthia Felando, Discovering Short Films: The History and Style of Live-Action Fiction Shorts (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 51. 19. Ibid. p. 54. 20. Gabrielli, “An Analysis,” p. 92. 21. The process of making Where the Wild Things Are was fraught, as was the release of his Kanye West collaboration, We Were Once a Fairytale (2009). See Dave Itzkoff, “Spike Jonze Laments Web Experiment,” New York Times, October 24, 2009, Arts p. 1. 22. Quoted in Lauren Houssin, “Arcade Fire: Scenes from the Suburbs,” Dazed, July 13, 2011, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 23. Ryan Dombal, “Arcade Fire’s Win Butler Talks Live Webcast, Spike Jonze Short Film,” Pitchfork, August 3, 2010, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 24. Ryan Dombal, “Arcade Fire Talk Scenes from the Suburbs,” Pitchfork, April 5, 2011, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 25. Eric Eidelstein, The Suburbs (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017), p. 28. 26. Robert Beuka, SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 228. 27. Timotheus Vermeulen, Scenes from the Suburbs: The Suburb in Contemporary US Film and Television (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), p. 154. 28. David R. Coon, Look Closer: Suburban Narratives and American Values in Film and Television (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2014), p. 40. 29. Eidelstein, The Suburbs, p. 3. 30. Boredom and wasted time are themes that come up frequently on the album, and they are also foregrounded in the film and music video. 31. Dombal, “Arcade Fire Talk Scenes from the Suburbs.” 32. Borys Kit, “Arcade Fire Bows a Short in Berlin,” Hollywood Reporter, February 18, 2011. 33. It was also supposed to have an exclusive run on the site mubi.com, but the label pulled it from the United States and Canada (possibly to support DVD sales). It was purportedly available at that time on another site, The Film Stage. See the comments at (last accessed March 10, 2019). 34. The Suburbs was a multimedia project in other ways too. See Steve Chagollan, “How to Catch Fire,” Variety (Weekly), August 23, 2010, for some of these. Arcade Fire also collaborated with Chris Milk on the interactive music video/website The Wilderness Downtown. 35. See Felando’s chapter in this volume for more on Kyle and Winter’s relationship. 36. Felando, Discovering Short Films, p. 122.

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37. Kit, “Arcade Fire Bows.” 38. Drew Taylor, “SXSW Review: Spike Jonze & Arcade Fire’s ‘Scenes from the Suburbs’ An Intense Look at Fading Youth,” IndieWire (blog), March 18, 2011, (last accessed March 10, 2019). 39. Eidelstein, The Suburbs, p. 52. 40. James Mottram, “Spike Jonze Interview: Her Is My ‘Boy Meets Computer’ Movie,” The Independent, January 31, 2014, (last accessed March 10, 2019).

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Index

absurdism, 6, 68–72, 78, 82–3, 139, 199 Academy Awards, 13, 35, 63, 72–3, 151 Acord, Lance, 16, 24–5, 107, 115 Adaptation, 3–4, 7, 15–30, 35, 71, 82, 86–101, 115, 142–3, 179–80, 182–4, 201 adaptation evolution, 15–24, 93–6, 101 text, 4, 7, 13, 17–30, 33–44, 71, 93–4, 97, 179–80 adolescence, 35–6, 127, 208, 231–2, 234–44 teen angst, 237–8, 242–3 see also childhood advertising, 54, 57, 60–1, 148–9, 165, 170, 187, 203, 232–3, 235, 245; see also commercials aesthetics, of film, 54, 56, 69, 71, 78, 93–4, 161–2, 175, 182–3, 186 affect, 3–6, 16, 18, 27; see also emotion algorithms, 160, 167, 170–1 Amarillo by Morning, 196, 202, 232–3, 236–7 Amazon, 61, 170, 171 American Beauty, 6, 52, 86–7 Anderson, Paul Thomas, 4–5, 50, 213, 226 Anderson, Wes, 4–5, 50, 226 Andrew, Dudley, 36–7, 40 Annesley, James, 54, 57, 176 Anomalisa, 101 Apple, 170, 176, 177, 182, 185, 186 Arcade Fire, 9, 231, 237–44 art, 1–2, 27, 28–9, 54–5, 93–6, 98–101, 116–18, 123, 125, 127, 196, 202, 206, 232–3 art film, 17–19, 58, 60, 180 artistic autonomy, 3–4, 6, 8–9, 203–4, 210, 213–27

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artificial intelligence, 8, 112–14, 119–20, 141–2, 149–56, 158–71, 183–8 audience reception, 5, 17–18, 34–6, 41, 49, 67–9, 77, 87–8, 93–4, 182, 225, 227 auteur theory, 1–7, 9, 21, 107, 196–8, 202–4, 210 indie-auteur, 4–7, 9, 48, 213–27 authenticity, 8, 21, 25, 28–9, 88, 141–5, 156, 162, 208 authorship, 21, 33–4, 38, 41, 50, 71, 110, 115, 126, 179–80, 184–5, 214, 219, 222–7; see also auteur theory Bad Grandpa, 4, 110 Banks, Jack, 215–16 Barrett, K. K., 110, 161–2, 171 Bauman, Zygmunt, 145, 148 Beastie Boys, 2, 107, 199, 221–3, 232, 234 Being John Malkovich, 1–4, 6–7, 17, 21–2, 35, 46–9, 51, 53–61, 67–83, 92, 118, 159, 165, 179–80, 182, 184, 201 big data, 8, 159, 169–70 Björk, 2, 199, 223, 234, 235 Blade Runner, 119, 206 Blade Runner 2049, 161, 163 bodies, 68, 70–1, 74–7, 79–81, 83, 91–2, 96, 99, 111, 140, 151–2, 154, 166–3, 175, 177, 181–7, 209 body-swap, 78–83 Bond, Simon, 139 Bordwell, David, 69, 77 Buchbinder, David, 90, 96 “Buddy Holly” (music video), 223–4, 232–3, 235

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INDEX Cagaanan, Danielle, 218–19, 224–5 Cage, Nicolas, 18–20, 28, 92 celebrity, 7, 21, 57, 67–83, 120, 179, 183 characters, in film, 4, 18, 20, 22, 35, 69, 75–82, 87, 90–100, 108, 120–1, 179–80, 197–204, 207–8, 237, 241–2, 244 childhood, 34, 39, 44; see also adolescence cinematic Darwinism, 7, 15, 29 Coen brothers, 124 cognitivism, 21, 77–8, 159 collaboration, 2, 6, 8, 9, 15–17, 28, 54–55, 92, 101, 107–8, 121–2, 167, 170, 203–4, 214, 226, 231–4, 236–7, 239–241, 244 comedy see humor commercials, 53, 175–6, 178–80, 196, 203–4, 218, 225, 227, 231–3, 235; see also advertising commodification, 74, 145, 160, 162–3, 187 Comolli, Jean-Louis, 75 computers, 161, 166, 185, 204 convention, 6–7, 16, 49, 86, 90, 93–7, 101, 180, 196–8, 201, 207–10, 219–24, 231–3, 240, 244 convergence, in media, 2, 47–8, 52–3, 58–60 Cooper, Chris, 18 Coppola, Sofia, 115, 151 corporations, 170, 181–2, 185 creativity, 26–7, 60–1, 86, 94, 206 crisis, 35, 38, 41–2, 69, 71, 78, 80–3, 187–8, 198, 207 masculinity, 87–90, 101 midlife, 7, 99 cult cinema, 39 Cunningham, Chris, 233 Cusack, John, 55 Daft Punk, 2, 221, 224, 235–6 “Da Funk” (music video) see Daft Punk Dahl, John, 216, 220 Damasio, Antonio, 140, 144 Darwin, Charles, 7, 15–18, 20–30; see also evolution Deleuze, Gilles, 175–9 dialogue, 6, 19, 25 Diaz, Cameron, 55 digital technology, 2, 145–6, 158–67 Diller, Barry, 56, 58–61 domesticity, 4, 40, 89, 161 doppelgänger, 22, 95 “Drop” (music video), 222–3, 234 dystopia, 158, 169, 231, 237–9; see also utopia Ebert, Roger, 1, 29 editing, 107–8, 124–5, 128–9, 234, 236–7 Eggers, Dave, 34, 37–41, 44, 110, 121–5 Eidelstein, Eric, 238–9, 243–4

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ELIZA, 149–51, 153 embodiment, 4, 140, 153–4, 159, 165–6, 188 emotion, 5, 8, 17–21, 27–8, 37, 41–4, 68, 83, 109, 114–15, 119–20, 140–56, 162–6, 180, 185–8, 190, 206–8, 210, 234–9, 243–4 emotional labor, 8, 162–4, 166–7 see also affect empathy, 79–83, 147, 153, 158–60, 163–8 essentialism, 17, 89 Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 6, 101 ethics, 4, 8, 16–17, 23–5, 29, 158–60, 164–8; see also morality evolution, 15–17, 22–30 epigenetics, 24, 28 symbolic inheritance, 24 see also Darwin, Charles existentiality, 3, 5, 26–7, 34–5, 69–72, 77–83, 187 experimentalism, 49, 57, 220–1 fantasy, 18, 21, 25, 48, 81–2, 99–101, 108, 139, 145–7, 180, 182, 187 Fatboy Slim, 2, 117, 222, 232 feelings see emotion Felando, Cynthia, 235–6, 240, 244 feminism, 90–1 fidelity, 26–7, 36–7, 41 Fight Club, 6, 49, 52, 56, 89 film production, 2, 6, 46–60, 87, 107, 124, 151, 161, 201–4, 214–17, 220–3, 226, 232 theory, 27, 107, 183–4, 197 Fincher, David, 214, 217–18, 220, 223–4 Foucault, Michel, 42–4 Fox (studio), 58–9 franchising, of film, 49, 52–3, 58 Freud, Sigmund, 35, 42–3; see also psychoanalysis Gabrielli, Giulia, 234–6 gender, 8, 24–5, 87–101, 111–13, 141, 152, 163–4, 166, 184–5 genre, 2, 4–5, 16, 48, 51, 54–7, 87, 90, 100, 156, 196–202, 204, 207, 210, 223–4, 233; see also convention Gilbert, Andrew, 170–1 Golin, Steve, 54, 214–18 Gondry, Michel, 223 Good Will Hunting, 47, 50, 52 Google, 167, 171, 181–2, 186 Gramercy Pictures, 55–6, 59, 61 Greven, David, 87, 90 “Happy Together” (song), 19–20, 100 Her, 1, 3, 4, 8, 35, 82, 101, 107–9, 111–20, 139–56, 158–71, 175, 179–90, 198 Hilderbrand, Lucas, 19–20, 99

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Hollywood norms, 2–5, 17–20, 25, 28, 49, 67–71, 77, 82–3, 87–90, 93–4, 99–101, 197–9, 226, 235; see also convention industry, 2, 5–6, 16–19, 22, 27, 48–61, 67, 96, 125–6, 195, 213, 216–17, 226, 244 see also New Hollywood horror, 24–6, 54, 233, 243–4 How They Get There, 196, 199–200, 232 humanism, 15–17, 30 humor, 18–19, 69, 71, 72–4, 76, 78, 201, 233 Hutcheon, Linda, 37, 41 identity, 2, 8, 26, 35, 43, 48, 53–5, 58, 75–8, 97, 99, 141–2, 145, 154, 219 imagination, 22–3, 35, 40, 91, 95, 99–101, 127, 179, 239 I’m Here, 4, 176, 181, 185, 201–9 independent filmmaking, 2, 6, 47–53, 58–60, 195, 203, 216, 218, 226–7 indie films, 4–6, 47, 49–61, 213–27 indiewood, 6, 16, 47–61 indigeneity, 25–6 innovation, 54, 57, 60–61, 150, 177, 220, 223–4, 227 intermediality, 6–7, 33–4, 38–42, 44; see also transmediality Interscope, 46, 55, 59 intimacy, 74, 108–9, 112–15, 140–8, 162, 165–6, 175, 186–90 irony, 5, 69, 74, 76 “It’s Oh So Quiet” (music video), 199, 223, 234, 235 Jablonka, Eva, 17, 24 Jackass (franchise), 2 Jagoe, Eva-Lynn, 81–2 Johansson, Scarlett, 108, 141, 151–2, 182 journalism, 2, 17, 22, 28, 87, 225 Kant, Immanuel, 81, 189 Kaufman, Charlie, 4, 6, 15–19, 22–30, 53–4, 56, 68–9, 71, 74–5, 86, 91–7, 99–101, 107, 119–20, 142–3 Keaton, Buster, 76–7 Keener, Catherine, 123–7, 200 “Kenzo World” (commercial), 245 Kidd, Kenneth, 35, 42, 43 kids see childhood King, Geoff, 49–50, 56, 72, 77 Kleist, Heinrich von, 79, 83 Kornhaber, Donna, 184 Lacan, Jacques, 68 Lamb, Marion J., 17, 24

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“Lamp” (commercial), 232, 235–6 Landy, Joshua, 15, 29, 99–100 Laroche, John, 16–18, 22, 25, 27, 95–7, 100, 179–80 Levinas, Emmanuel, 159, 164, 167–8 Linklater, Richard, 5, 6, 52–3 literary Darwinism, 22 loneliness, 2, 109–10, 147–9, 162, 175, 185–6, 197–8, 201, 207–9, 235–6 Lost in Translation, 151–2 Lynch, David, 54, 216 Lyon, David, 145, 148 MacDowell, James, 69 machine–human interactions, 4, 160 McKee, Robert, 20, 71, 96–7, 100–1 Magnolia, 6, 51–3 mainstream, 2, 4, 5, 49–52, 56–7, 60, 67–71, 77, 82–3, 94, 224, 225; see also convention Malick, Terrence, 111 Malkovich, John, 35, 55, 67, 69–7, 79–83, 159, 179–80, 183–4, 190 management, of talent, 54, 214–26 Manic Pixies, 163–4 marketing, 8–9, 48, 50, 56–7, 202–4; see also commercials Mark Paints, 199–200 Marks, Peter, 23, 28 masculinity, 86–101; see also crisis masturbation, 19, 98–100 Maurice at the World’s Fair, 196, 200–1 mavericks, 5 mental health, 158–64 metafiction, 26, 86, 93–4, 99 meta-narrative, 25 metaphor, 19, 22, 35–6, 40, 93, 222 metaphysics, 3, 79 midlife crisis see crisis Millard, Kathryn, 108 Miramax, 47, 49, 58, 61 mirror, 42–4, 68, 96, 183 mirror-stage see Lacan, Jacques Mittell, Jason, 22 morality, 4, 24, 78–9, 83, 108, 114, 140; see also ethics Moss-Wellington, Wyatt, 71, 105–33 Mottram, James, 245 movement, 68, 72, 91, 175–82, 190, 204, 231–2, 234, 236, 243–4 film movement, 4, 51–2 MTV, 54, 215–16, 225, 227, 232 music, in film, 18–20, 234–45, 176–8, 181–2, 186, 204, 207 music video, 2, 47–8, 54–5, 124–5, 175–8, 180, 182, 195–202, 210, 213–27, 231–6, 238–45 myth, 5–6, 34, 39–40, 91, 101

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INDEX narcissism, 19, 28, 93, 153 narrative theory, 16–24, 25–30, 39–40, 42, 67–71, 77–83, 93–4, 197–9, 235 naturalism, aesthetic, 3–4, 24, 115–16, 181, 197, 202; see also realism nature, 16, 18, 23–4, 28, 181 neuroses, 35, 87, 91 New Hollywood, 5, 87 new journalism, 28 New Line Cinema, 46, 53 Newman, Michael Z., 5, 223 new sincerity see sincerity nihilism, 5 nostalgia, 162, 231, 237–9, 244 Olsen, Mark, 213, 226 onanism see masturbation The Orchid Thief, 16–17, 19, 22, 25, 27–9, 71, 184 originality, 1, 3, 7, 15–17, 20–3, 26–30, 37–8, 53, 61, 71, 203, 219–20 Orlean, Susan, 16–18, 22, 25, 27, 71, 94–5, 97, 179–8 Oscars see Academy Awards ouroboros, 26–7, 93 ownership, 46, 52–3, 56, 144, 176, 215–16, 220 Paramount, 58–9 passion, 16, 23, 26–8, 30, 78–9, 97 Payne, Alexander, 4, 50 Peberdy, Donna, 86, 88–9 performance, 18–19, 54, 68–70, 75, 77, 79, 90, 92, 96, 108, 113, 121, 142, 147, 162, 196, 200, 202, 220–1, 223 Perkins, Claire, 5 phenomenology, 19 philosophy, 2, 3, 6, 16, 18, 20, 28 Phoenix, Joaquin, 108, 142–3 Piaget, Jean, 35 picture books, 7, 33, 127 playfulness, 3, 25, 57, 75, 195, 205–6, 208 pleasance, 161 pleasure, 18–19, 154, 208 politics, 24–6, 89–90, 164 Polygram, 46, 54–9, 214–16, 226 posthumanism, 109, 113, 185 “Praise You” (music video), 222–4 pranksterism, 56–7 production design, 107, 110, 161 Propaganda Films, 9, 46–8, 53–6, 59–61, 214–27, 232; see also Satellite Films protagonists, 2, 35, 69, 77, 80, 82, 87, 89–91, 93, 99, 101, 148, 163, 176, 183, 185–6, 190, 197–8, 208–10, 235–6 psychoanalysis, 35–6, 141–2

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psychology, 16–17, 28, 35, 42, 91, 188 puppetry, 68–70, 77–80, 82, 118–21 quirkiness, 1, 69, 77, 139, 224–6 realism, in film, 4, 21; see also naturalism reflexivity, 4, 5, 25, 68–9, 71, 86, 199, 206, 223 relationality, 8, 40, 158–60, 163–71 relativism, 4, 5, 25 R.E.M., 2, 53–4 representation, 5, 41, 73, 79–80, 88, 90, 159, 163, 164–5 Rizzo, Sergio, 25, 97 robots, 203–7, 119–20, 140, 144, 151, 163, 165, 185, 188; see also artificial intelligence romance, 20, 113, 198, 200, 202, 204, 207, 209, 242 “Sabotage” (music video), 199, 223–4, 232–4 Satellite Films, 9, 199, 214–15, 217–19, 224–7, 232; see also Propaganda Films Scenes from the Suburbs, 201–2, 207, 231–2, 237–44 Schatz, Thomas, 51–2, 58 science fiction, 4, 151, 198, 204, 223, 237; see also speculative fiction Sconce, Jeffrey, 4–5 screenwriting, 4, 20, 53, 92, 96–7, 100, 107, 124, 143 Seagram, 46–7, 55–6, 59 Sena, Dominic, 54, 214, 217–18, 220, 223–4 Sendak, Maurice, 1, 4, 33–44, 121–6 sentimentality, 3–4, 16, 18, 209, 239 sexuality, 19, 23–5, 43, 74, 78–9, 98–100, 141, 145–8, 152–4, 162, 166, 187–9 queer, 42 Shakespeare in Love, 47, 49, 51–2 short films, 4, 18, 54–5, 175–6, 178, 195–210, 226, 231–45 Sideways, 51, 87 Sighvatsson, Joni, 54, 214–18, 220, 225 Silverman, Kaja, 89–90 sincerity, 4, 16–18, 143–4, 158–9 Single Cell Pictures, 53–5 The Sixth Sense, 6, 52 Skateboarding, 175–8, 195, 202, 218, 231–3, 237 smart cinema, 4–5 Smith, David. L., 79–81, 97 Smith, Murray, 159 social media, 158, 171, 189 Soderbergh, Steven, 48, 50, 213 song, 19–20, 54, 100–11, 128, 177–8, 181–2, 204, 213, 218–19, 231, 233–44 Sonic Youth, 2, 233 Sony Pictures Classics, 56 spatiality, 4, 35–7, 41–2, 179–80, 183–4 specialty content, 57–61

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spectatorship, 18, 23, 76, 182, 188, 222 speculative fiction, 3–4; see also science fiction sports, 176, 178, 233 spots see commercials Stadler, Jane, 159, 165 Stam, Robert, 38, 40, 41 stardom see celebrity Streep, Meryl, 18 Stubbs, Andrew, 232, 233, 240 studios (film), 20, 23, 46–56, 59–60, 67, 80, 94, 130, 178, 201, 216–17, 221 stylistics, 5, 37, 175–6, 220–6 suburbia, 207–9, 231–45 The Suburbs (album) 231–4, 236–1, 243–4 “The Suburbs” (music video) 231–2, 234–5, 239, 242–4 Sundance, 52, 202–4, 232 “Sure Shot” (music video), 221–2, 234 surrogacy, 78, 118, 140–1, 153–4, 162–3, 167, 185–6, 189 surveillance, 145, 166, 168–9, 208 Synecdoche, New York, 101 taste, 100, 224–5, 233 technology see digital technology teenagers see adolescence therapy, 77, 160 The 3, 17, 97 Three Kings, 6, 49 To Die by Your Side, 198, 201 Tomasulo, Frank, 96–7 Torrance Community, 222 totality, 164–8, 170–1 Traffic, 48, 50–1, 56, 58, 61 transmediality, 2; see also intermediality Tunbridge, Laura, 151–2

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Turkle, Sherry, 141–2, 144–6 Tzioumakis, Yannis, 216 Universal (studio), 46, 53, 55, 59, 61 USA Films, 47–8, 53, 57–61 utopia, 141, 146, 148–9, 153, 158–9, 169, 185; see also dystopia Vice Media, 2, 232, 245 Video Days, 2, 233 Vogler, Candace, 188–9 voice, in film, 3, 19, 91–2, 94, 98, 103, 107, 119–21, 126, 129, 131, 139, 141–55, 163, 165, 169, 179–89, 233, 235, 240 Walken, Christopher, 177, 221 Walsh, Toby, 149–50, 156 Waxman, Sharon, 46, 195 “Weapon of Choice” (music video), 177, 221, 232 Weezer, 2, 221, 223, 225, 232, 234, 235 West, Kanye, 118, 232–3, 245 Westrup, Laurel, 208 We Were Once a Fairytale, 118, 121, 196, 201, 233 “What’s Up Fatlip?”, 234 Where the Wild Things Are (book), 1, 33–40, 44 Where the Wild Things Are (film), 1, 3–4, 33–44, 82, 110, 115–17, 120, 179–80, 182–3, 201, 237 Wilkins, Kim, 69, 128–33 Working Title, 55 youth, 3–4, 44, 198, 201–4, 207–8, 225; see also adolescence Zacharek, Stephanie, 100 Zumbrunnen, Eric, 107, 232

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