The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Spike Jonze · a film · 1999 · 112 minutes · from an original screenplay by Charlie Kaufman
Mode
American comedy of a metaphysical conceit, played straight; workplace comedy, marital farce, celebrity satire and body-snatching horror in one
Mythos
Possession: the puppet master who takes the strings of a living man; the immortals who feed on the young; Narcissus at his pool; a descent through a narrow passage and a birth into nowhere
Phase
From a street puppeteer’s despair to a filing job on floor seven and a half, a ride sold by the quarter hour, a love affair conducted through another man’s body, a puppeteer made famous, and the night the vessel ripens
Presentation
Feature film in colour, 112 minutes, in English; a living star in the title role as himself; the inside of his head shown as an iris of blurred sight; Lance Acord’s drab, lightly handheld photography, Carter Burwell’s score
Register
Deadpan throughout: every marvel treated as a matter of logistics, with brief rises into the uncanny and into dread
Scale
Four persons, a building, two apartments and one famous head
Governing Proposition
An unemployed puppeteer takes a filing job on a floor half the height of the others and finds behind a cabinet a small door into the head of John Malkovich, where anyone may live for fifteen minutes before being dropped beside the New Jersey Turnpike. The wager of the film is that the wish to be another person is the common wish of the dissatisfied, that it can be sold like any other product, and that a self is a space which can be entered, let, worked like a marionette and finally occupied by people who want it more than its owner does.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins with a puppet. In a shabby proscenium a marionette dances its despair to Carter Burwell’s music. Its maker is Craig Schwartz, an unemployed street puppeteer played by John Cusack, and before a word is spoken the film has given its argument in one image: a figure moved by strings, and a man who can make a body express what he cannot. Everything that follows is this dance enlarged, until the strings run to a living man.
Craig lives with his wife Lotte, played by Cameron Diaz, a mainstream star made dowdy, in an apartment kept as a menagerie of her animals, among them a chimpanzee called Elijah. The marriage is a quiet failure, and the film does not hurry to say so. Craig’s art is despised in the street, and he takes a job as a filing clerk.
From the start the film keeps its world drab. Lance Acord photographs offices and apartments in flat, worn colour, the camera lightly handheld, without a trace of the fantastic. Nothing is lit for wonder, and nothing will be. When the marvel comes it arrives in the same light as the filing cabinets, and that is the film’s method: every impossibility is treated as a practical problem, a matter of access, price and timetable.
Movement II
The job is in the Mertin-Flemmer Building, on floor seven and a half. The ceiling is half the usual height, and the clerks go about their work stooping. The joke is played without comment, and it is the first sign of the film’s law: people housed in spaces not built for them, bending to fit. The storey will turn out to have a reason, and the reason will be given late by the elderly Dr. Lester, played by Orson Bean; Mary Kay Place plays Floris.
On the floor Craig meets Maxine Lund, played by Catherine Keener, cold, quick and exact, and he wants her. She does not want him. The desire that cannot reach its object is the motive of what follows, and it will be met not by a change of heart but by a mechanism, which is the film’s way with every feeling it holds.
Behind a filing cabinet Craig finds a small door. He crawls in, and the passage takes him: a wet, sliding fall into darkness, and then a round, blurred view through another man’s eyes. The man is reading the paper and eating toast. The man is John Malkovich, and Craig is inside him, hearing his breathing and his voice from within. Fifteen minutes later he is dropped beside the New Jersey Turnpike.
Movement III
Craig and Maxine sell the ride: two hundred dollars for fifteen minutes in a celebrity’s head. The customers want it without knowing what Malkovich does. That is the disclosure in its plainest form: the wish to be someone else is the common wish of the dissatisfied, and it can be bought and timed like any other product. Every ride ends the same way, on the verge of the Turnpike, which gives the fantasy a cost and the film a running joke.
Lotte goes in, and the film turns. Inside Malkovich’s body she finds herself a man, and finds that she is someone the marriage never allowed her to be. She falls for Maxine, and Maxine desires her, but only while Lotte is inside Malkovich, behind another man’s face. A love story between two women is conducted through a third body, and the vessel is only where they meet. Maxine’s desire follows the occupant, never the man.
Craig, shut out of what he found, locks Lotte in the chimpanzee’s cage. In the cage the film gives Elijah a memory of his own capture, shown as a flashback, and the cage becomes what it is: a body kept where it does not belong, as every person in the film is kept. The menagerie of the first scenes has returned as a prison, and the farce of a marriage has become a fight over who may live in whom.
Movement IV
Malkovich goes through the door into his own head, and the film reaches its summit. He finds a restaurant in which every face is his, and every word spoken is “Malkovich”. It is the purest of the film’s jokes and its nearest approach to horror: a self with only itself to look at, Narcissus at his pool made literal, and a celebrity whose inside is nothing but his name repeated.
Craig takes Malkovich over by puppetry. He works the living man as he worked his marionettes, and Malkovich’s walk becomes stiff and jointed, a puppet’s grace in a famous body. Malkovich’s performance carries three persons at once: himself, himself possessed by a clumsy man, and the marionette that has found a life. The occupation of another person is no longer a ride sold by the quarter hour; it is a career.
Craig turns Malkovich into a celebrated puppeteer. The street performer whose art was despised is applauded for the same art once it is shown through a famous face, and a montage of the new career runs on, with Charlie Sheen appearing as himself. The artist has got what he wanted, which was never art but another man’s life, and the film watches him have it with the same flat patience it gave the filing.
Movement V
The last movement belongs to Lester and his elderly companions, who have passed from body to body for generations. The lore arrives as exposition: a vessel ripens at forty-four, and after that night the portal leads to a larval host. Malkovich is their next vessel, and they mean to claim him on the night he ripens. The rules come late and come to close the plot, but the figure they complete is the oldest in the film, the old living on as parasites in the young.
The climax is crowded: a chase with Lotte runs through Malkovich’s memories, his childhood humiliations rising out of the subconscious; Maxine is pregnant; the timetable of the vessel presses on every party. Lester and his circle take Malkovich. Craig loses Maxine and Lotte both, and when he goes back through the door it is too late: the portal no longer leads where it did, and he is carried into the next vessel.
The last shot shows the two women by a pool, watched through the round, blurred sight of a child, the daughter of Maxine and Lotte, and from behind her eyes comes Craig’s voice, trapped. The man who wanted to be another person has become a voice inside a child, with no strings to work. The film ends where it began, with a figure that cannot leave the space it is housed in, and it does not say whether that is a punishment or simply a continuation.
Act III · The Twelve
The film’s elements are required by one idea, that a self can be occupied, and nearly all of them pay. The half-height floor, first a sight gag of stooping clerks, is the first sign that the building has a hidden storey for hidden men. Craig’s puppetry is the whole plot in small: the man who works marionettes ends by working a man. Lotte’s menagerie returns as the cage, and the chimpanzee Elijah’s memory of his capture is the cage’s meaning. The Turnpike drop gives the fantasy a cost and a running joke at once. The give is late: the lore of vessels arrives as exposition when the plot needs it, and the celebrity montage runs past its point.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it is several. To be another person is the common wish of the dissatisfied, and the film shows it as consumption: a ride sold at two hundred dollars, fifteen minutes in a celebrity’s head, bought by people who do not know what Malkovich does. Desire attaches not to a person but to a person inside another: Maxine loves Lotte only through Malkovich’s eyes, and Lotte finds through his body that she is someone her marriage never allowed. Celebrity is a vacant vessel; the artist wants possession, not art; the old buy immortality as parasites in the young. These are meanings, and they hold. They are turned by conceit and comedy, and Craig is a thinner case than the conceit could bear.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Elevation comes as the uncanny more than as beauty or grandeur. The opening, a marionette dancing its despair in a shabby proscenium, is a small, real transport and the argument in one image. The first passage through the portal, a wet slide into darkness and then the round, blurred sight of another man reading the paper and eating toast, lasts. The summit is Malkovich in his own head, a restaurant where every face is his: comedy reaching horror. The chase through his childhood humiliations is dread, and the last shot is quiet dread. What holds the axis here is frequency and kind: the film is made almost wholly at the level of deadpan, and its heights are brief and comic.
Score: 7.2 / 10
The myth is built into the mechanism. The puppet master who takes the strings of a living man inverts Pinocchio and draws on the oldest figure of possession, the wish to live in another’s body, and that possession is the plot, not an allusion to it. Lester and his circle are the immortals who feed on the young, a body-snatching myth played as a geriatric social club, and their passage from vessel to vessel is the film’s late structure. Malkovich in his own head is Narcissus at his pool made literal. The portal is a narrow, wet descent and the Turnpike a birth into nowhere. Most of these are struck once as comic premise, deepened in the mechanism more than in the persons, and the vampire lore is supplied rather than grown.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance is the American comedy of the 1990s, its independent wing included, and the line of surreal comedy from Buñuel onward. The turn is large: a metaphysical conceit about the occupation of a self, told without explanation or irony about its premise, in drab offices and apartments; a living star playing himself as an empty vessel, his name the title and his head the location; a mainstream star made dowdy; a love between two women conducted through a man’s body. The structure passes from workplace comedy to farce, satire and horror, and holds. The stake was real: a first feature for both director and writer, resting on one actor’s consent to be mocked by name. The comic register is inherited and the absurd premise has antecedents.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. Being another person is given as a point of view: an iris-shaped, slightly blurred frame, Malkovich’s breathing and voice heard from inside, the hands at the edge of the frame not one’s own. That is cinematic knowledge: the viewer is placed where the customers are placed. Casting Malkovich as himself is form, not gimmick, since the claim about celebrity needs an actual famous face to be occupied, and his stiff marionette walk as Craig takes him over puts the possession in a body we can watch. The flat photography keeps the marvel ordinary, a product like any other. The cost is the conventional dramatic shape and the well-made scenes a stage could carry.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Twenty-seven years of return have kept the questions open. Is the film about authorship, Craig as the artist who must live through others, or about celebrity, or about gender and desire, with Lotte’s discovery read now as the story of a trans or queer self as much as a sexual awakening? Does the ending punish Craig or simply continue him? What does Elijah’s memory ask of the people who cage? The conceit reopens with each new form of mediated presence, and the film reads differently beside each one. What it does not yield on return is in its surface: much of the pleasure lies in jokes and performances known after the first sight, and the lore of vessels is a device that does not reward scrutiny.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The field is American cinema of the late 1990s and the 2000s, so force and reach are scored together. Intrinsic force: the film showed that an absurd metaphysical premise, played straight in a dingy world, could carry a serious and very funny account of identity and desire, and that a star could lend his own persona as the film’s material. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it launched Kaufman as a screenwriter and Jonze as a feature director; it stands at the head of a line of American films built on conceits about mind and identity, Kaufman’s own Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind among them; and it opened the way for films and series in which celebrities play distorted versions of themselves. It redirected a kind of screenwriting and comedy more than what the medium can do.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Weighed on form, presence and fabric. The film as released survives whole: nothing is lost, and no altered version has displaced it. Its presence across twenty-seven years has been continuous, on each home format, on television, in repertory screenings and in steady teaching and writing, and it is widely known and quoted, though presence of the widest kind belongs to more popular films. The surface is somewhat fixed to its years: the late-1990s office, the celebrity culture of its moment, a cameo by Charlie Sheen as himself. But the conceit has outlived those conditions and gained point with every new medium of borrowed presence. The surface is charged lightly, the presence is good, and the bar is met exactly.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The making serves the conceit with discipline. Kaufman’s screenplay is the strongest department: each movement turns the premise to a new use, the dialogue is exact in its deadpan, and the reversals, Lotte in the cage, Maxine’s pregnancy, the vessel’s timetable, are planted early. Acord keeps the world drab and lightly handheld, and the portal is made with few effects and much physical invention. Malkovich’s performance is the technical summit: himself, himself possessed by a clumsy man, and the marionette become a famous puppeteer, each distinct. Keener’s Maxine is cold, quick and exact; Burwell’s score gives a mournful, slightly sacred colour. The costs: a loosely staged last act and celebrity montage, Cusack’s Craig played in one key, and a busy chase through Malkovich’s memories.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the stooping clerks on floor seven and a half, and Craig’s consciousness trapped behind a child’s eyes in the last shot. One law governs both: people are housed in spaces not built for them, and they bend, enter, crowd and occupy; the self is a space that can be let. The workplace comedy, the marriage, the love conducted through a man and the immortals’ plan all obey it, and the deadpan, which treats every marvel as logistics, is the film’s physics. The range is wide and the tone never breaks. The breach is in the rules: the vessel ripens at an age and the portal then leads to a larval host, a rule brought in to close the plot, and the chase through the subconscious runs on a dream logic the rest of the film does not use.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Judged on what a film of 112 minutes holds. Consciousness, given as a place one can enter; marriage and its quiet failure; sexuality and gender, through Lotte and Maxine; labour, the filing job on the half floor; art and its market, the street puppeteer despised and the celebrity puppeteer applauded; celebrity and the selling of experience; age, mortality and the wish to escape them; the animal, in Elijah’s memory; the next generation, the child as vessel. These are integrated, since the portal is the one mechanism by which each is reached. What holds the axis at 7.0, the lowest of the twelve: the state and history do not enter, the sacred appears only as parody, the persons beyond the four principals are sketches, and the world beyond the building and two apartments is barely seen.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve at 8.7, then The Imperishable at 8.5 and The Unconcealment at 8.4. A metaphysical conceit told straight in drab offices, with a living star as its empty vessel, carried from workplace comedy through farce and satire into horror; a film that survives whole after twenty-seven years, its conceit gaining point with every new medium of borrowed presence; and meanings that can be stated and hold, that the wish to be another is a consumer’s wish, that desire can be routed through a borrowed body, that celebrity is a vacancy.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.0: consciousness, marriage, desire, labour, art and its market, celebrity, age and the animal are joined by one mechanism, but the state and history do not enter, the sacred is parody, and the world beyond a building and two apartments is barely seen. Above it, The Sublime at 7.2: the heights, the restaurant of Malkovich faces, the first passage, the last shot, are real and brief, and the film is made almost wholly in deadpan. Then The Made at 7.9: a screenplay and a central performance of great exactness, a narrow Craig and a loosely staged last act.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.1 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.3, The Inner Law at 8.2, The Made at 7.9, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Swerve at 8.7 clears the bar of 8.5 and The Imperishable meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls a tenth short, Pressure on Tradition at 8.3 two tenths short and The Archetypal Deep at 8.0 five tenths short. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 7.2, below 7.5; every other axis but The Encompassed stands at 7.9 or above, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.0. Three of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.1 from a sum of 96.6, in Tier IV, below the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Being John Malkovich as released in 1999, the theatrical cut of about 112 minutes, in its one version, from the marionette’s dance to the girl in the pool: directed by Spike Jonze, his first feature, from an original screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, his first produced feature; photographed by Lance Acord, edited by Eric Zumbrunnen, with music by Carter Burwell; with John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener, John Malkovich as himself, Orson Bean and Mary Kay Place; first shown at Venice in September 1999 and distributed in the United States by USA Films. The film was nominated for Academy Awards for its direction, its original screenplay and Keener’s performance, and Kaufman’s screenplay won the BAFTA for original screenplay; these are recorded as presence, not as proof. No print or script was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, and the one word quoted is the name spoken in the restaurant scene. Details that could not be verified, among them the production companies, the exact date of the American release, the aspect ratio, particular home editions, shot counts and the share of particular departments, are not given.