Charlie Kaufman: The Philosophy Behind His Surrealist Screenplays

I like that Charlie Kaufman’s work mocks every coil of my brain for what it thinks is possible. Identity, subjectivity, freedom, love, social acceptance, and philosophy are all themes that penetrate his movies yet twist everything I think I understand about how those subjects can be represented in films. His body of work protrudes in the sea of formulaic, nationalistic, avaricious Hollywood bullshit that the media shoves down our throats. While his challenging nature is at the essence of what draws me, and countless others, to his work, I find it challenging to fully verbalize why I am so engaged; his work makes me deeply uncomfortable. If Charlie Kaufman’s writing is a worm, consider my brain an apple.

Kaufman doesn’t treat his audience like they’re dense; he leaves much room for interpretation and conversation. He doesn’t follow tropes. He mixes reality and imagination with artistry. His movies are actually totally bizarre. Many people hate them, and I’m proud to be one of his fans. I love that he pushes me out of my comfort zone and makes me think about the ideas that make my skin crawl. His screenplays have caused me to examine my life in a new way: examine how I want to exist in this lifetime. Through the philosophy exhibited in his films, notably in the films Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich, and Adaptation, I have learned about the dual simplicity and complicated nature of humans and of life as a whole.

Charlie Kaufman’s unique cinematic voice interrogates viewers with a sense of utter self-consciousness and bleak existential ideas. His films mirror and mimic many of the philosophical concepts of Frederich Nietzsche, Abraham Maslow, David Hume, Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Kaufman’s filmography is vastly philosophic, and that is because these films further our understanding of philosophy, stimulate our philosophical questions, and consciously reactivate philosophical theories.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), directed by Micheal Gondry and written by Charlie Kaufman, is one of Kaufman’s most Nietzschean films to date. Set in Long Island, New York, Clementine (Kate Winslet) undergoes a procedure to erase Joel (Jim Carrey) from her memory after a heart-wrenching breakup. Joel finds out by accident that Clementine had the procedure done and, in a heartbroken state, does it as well. During the film, both characters go on a journey inside of their own psyches to understand what went wrong in their relationship, and in doing so, they realize that human nature is repetitive and that by both of them erasing their memories of each other, they will inevitably meet again, and their cycle will repeat ad Infinitum.

This film heavily references both Frederich Nietzsche and John Locke but in opposing lights. Both philosophers believed that memory and the psychological weight of man’s actions are important, but Nietzsche believed that forgetting is just as important. To quote Nietzsche’s 1873 book, Untimely Meditations,

“In the smallest as in the greatest happiness, it is something that happiness is happiness: the ability to forget, or to put it in terms most learned, the ability to feel things, as long as happiness lasts, without any historical perspective. The man who is unable to sit on the threshold of the moment, forgetting all past events, which can not, without dizziness and fearless[ness], stand a moment while standing as a victory, will never [know] what a happiness, and what is worse, it will never do anything to give happiness to others.”

His theory goes against that of philosopher John Locke, who considers memory the foundation of identity, but this movie supports Nietszche’s ideas that forgetting is essential to human sanity. Locke believes that

“Memory is the power to revive again in our minds those ideas which after imprinting have disappeared, or have been laid aside out of sight.”

Joel and Clementine’s journey throughout the film shows the bold, philosophical world-building that Kaufman is renowned for. Amnesia has become a creative outlook for Joel and Clementine and is the only time their minds are completely free. The hypermnestic (one with an inability to forget) has unalloyed nostalgia, which is how Nietzsche believes a man can feel total freedom from himself. In Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine world, humans have evolved emotionally and have higher expectations of their partners; they are much more idealistic. The characters in this film love without presumption. The conceptualization of the film that people will obsess over and prioritize their own ambition to the point where their partner would become adversarial is a significant problem. The main characters see loved ones as entirely subordinate to their personal desire for owning perfection and happiness. They can snap it away when their wishes for their significant other no longer comply with their idea of perfect love. The characters in the film have forgotten, willfully, that humans are full of deficits.

The main characters, Joel and Clementine, go against the world that Kaufman has crafted. They are drawn to each other because their personalities complement each other. Joel loved Clementine for the parts of her that complemented himself, which brings up Nitcheze’s theory of eternal recurrence. “Blessed are the forgetful, for they get even the letter of their blunders.” Nietzsche’s theories are heavily stoic in nature, meaning they are not formed through/concerning human emotion, which accounts for how heartless the idea of Kaufman’s memory loss procedure is. Nietzsche believes that people need to be able to forget their experiences. Remembering every detail of life would drive people crazy, so forgetting is essential to staying sane. Kaufman challenges Nietzsche with the idea that remembering acknowledges all elements of life that lead us to live an authentic life because, in Nietzschean philosophy, even if something is doomed, the present should still be celebrated. Kaufman demonstrates this through Clementine and Joel reliving their relationship to see the flaws and how it ends. The themes of entrapment and repetition show a sense of fatality flipped on its opposite. Kaufman and Nietzsche both see traps set for us in our minds and surroundings.

“My formula for greatness in a human being is Amor Fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but love it.”

Kaufman’s screenplay asks the existential question: is what I want now what I will want for the rest of my life? Joel and Clementine are faced with this question, and both make the intangible decision of not deciding at all. They are both faced head-on with these questions by having to relieve their choices in their relationship, but the true beauty of Kaufman is that they don’t learn from their mistakes. They draw no lessons from their choices, and like amnesiacs, they choose a life of dull wisdom because they choose to forget. They believe that ignorance might be bliss. Joel and Clementine are some of the purest representations of Nietzschean figures because they transcend suffering in short, pure life affirmations. The almost entirely universal desire to be loved unconditionally by someone else. They believe their good experiences supplant the pain they will inevitably suffer when their cycle repeats.

One of Charlie Kaufman’s first screenplays was turned into the 1999 film Being John Malkovich, directed by Spike Jonze. Like Eternal Sunshine, this film’s premise is quite peculiar. Set in New York City on the 7½ floor, a puppeteer with a severe lack of artistic recognition named Craig (John Cusack) discovers a metaphysical portal where people can live through the eyes of actor John Malkovich for 15 minutes when he is forced to leave the puppet world to enter corporate America at a boring office job. Craig serves as the audience’s portal into Kaufman’s absurdist fantasy version of New York City and as a canvas to paint themes of personal identity and subjectivity. The movie’s John Malkovich portal is a play on the saying “15 minutes of fame” because those who enter the portal can only experience Malkovich’s senses for 15 minutes.

Craig is a deeply flawed main character. He ignores his girlfriend, Lotte (Cameron Diaz). He pursues another woman, Maxine (Catherine Keener), with whom he turns the Malkovich portal into a profitable business for other soul-searching humans in NYC. Craig uses the portal for his personal gain, which is a way for Kaufman to explore the spiritual substance of Cartesian dualism.

Cartesian dualism, famously supported by René Descartes, argues that there are two kinds of foundation: mental and physical. This philosophy states that the mind can exist outside the body, and the body cannot think. This is directly represented in the POV shots and scenes where outsiders enter the eyes of John Malkovich. People who enter the portal see what it is like to shower as John Malkovich, what it is like to enter a taxi as John Malkovich, and even what it is like to have sex as John Malkovich.

Nietzsche is not forgotten in this film, and his theory of the individual as a comprised hierarchy of dominance of submissive drives is one of the most dominant themes of Being John Malkovich. Kaufman’s screenplay proves that he believes Malkovich’s character is one of the weak wills, and Nietzsche’s philosophy indicates his belief that someone who wins is the one who incites action. Kaufman and Nietzsche believe that individuals have power drives and that we are our actions and the ability to become who we turn on our strength of will. The people we idolize. Those upon pedestals in our hearts. The sculptors (and, in this case, puppeteers) of our inner temples.

This brings up the point of “unfree wills” as mythology; there is only free will, an individual’s capacity to choose between unimpeded different possible courses of action. Craig and all the other characters in the movie strive and struggle to reach their full potential. They view the portal as the solution to their problems, and the portal then turns into an existential escape from the mundane and tedious truths of their livelihood.

The invariant struggle of acquiring potential in the film mirrors 20th-century philosopher Abraham Maslow’s theory of “self-actualization,” which in philosophy is the very process of a person reaching their full potential. Maslow created the “hierarchy of needs” on how an individual can achieve pure self-fulfillment. In Kaufman’s screenplay, the characters use the Malkovich portal to work their way up the pyramid.

Unlike Eternal Sunshine, Being John Malkovich asks what art represents, if it even means anything at all. The film is utterly existentialist, and all characters, most notably Craig, frequently think about their purpose in life and if their art is actually important. The characters in this world have high expectations for themselves as humans, and living through Malkovich lets them confront themselves to their truest extent, which shows how Kaufman has utilized David Hume’s conclusions about self-identity.

18th-century philosophy David Hume believed that the self was an illusion and a “bundle of perceptions.” Hume declares that we have no experience of a simple, individual impression that we can call the self—where the “self” is the entirety of someone’s cognizant life. Being John Malkovich supports Humean conclusions about self-identity because the film reads as an exploration of the existential position of selfhood and becomes a critique of the autonomous self.

Kaufman’s ideas of self are apparent in the script, yet he doesn’t aim to solve any of the problems that the philosophers who influenced him posed regarding self-consciousness; he actually makes them more problematic. Kaufman has created an utterly absurdist work of art from assorted philosophers’ ideas of self. While ideas of “self” ring through the whole film, this film is also a statement on one’s internal ego, celebrity culture, and pretentious inauthenticity.

Toward the film’s end, Kaufman poses a new question to the audience: why is there something instead of nothing? This relates to Jean Baudrillard’s views on how humans use their self-identity to protect egos. For Baudrillard, self-identity can become a tool for responding to how people view the world and how they believe it has treated them. The film’s protagonist shows the modern predicament of chasing after celebrity culture instead of pursuing an authentic self-configured art form. Craig claims to suffer for his art, but he really means that he suffers for the banality of his art. “We can live without a mode of identity because the nothingness of the self is liberatory,” claims Baudrillard. “Nobody is looking for a puppeteer in today’s wintry economic climate,” claims Craig Schwartz.

Baudrillard’s theories complement Nietzsche’s because the film explores people from the inside out, not the outside in. Both Baudrillard and Nietzsche believe in the “dissolution of the will” and rejecting the ego, which is Kaufman’s message through the script. Kaufman warns viewers that the failed desires of artists are an allegory of the nature of desire and the structuring of the desires of contemporary art itself. His protagonist believes he’s missing the metier that will unify him; his quest for fame poisons his view to see his selfhood as illusory. Because Craig measures his life in the equivalent terms of a social acceptance of his art rather than the more deeply formed change form of creative alterity, he never realizes the psychological danger of what he’s doing. Kaufman and Baudrillard both encourage a destabilization of the commonsensical idea of conceited personal identity, and because this is an absurdist Kaufman movie, Craig never learns his lesson.

At the film’s utterly absurd climax, Craig discovers that he can control Malkovich forever, and he inhabits him for the next eight months and uses Malkovich’s fame to turn himself as Malkovich into the world’s greatest puppeteer. Even after all Craig has witnessed through Malkovich, he lusts after his celebrity reputation and knows that while Craig, the office worker, cannot become a famous puppeteer, John Malkovich, the actor, can and will succeed. But things don’t end so smoothly for Craig. While in this new body, he also marries and impregnates Maxine. When Craig’s ex-wife, Lotte, demands that he leave Malkovich’s body, he is eventually tricked into it. Lotte and Maxine unexpectedly declare their love for each other, and Craig quickly tries to re-enter the Malkovich portal, but the doorway to Makovich has closed, and he has entered the mind of Maxine’s unborn daughter, who passed on the portal to her. Craig ends the film permanently trapped in the daughter, forced to watch Maxine and Lotte live happily ever after.

Spike Jonze directed another Kaufman screenplay just three years after Malkovich. Adaptation (2002) is a wildly different film from the past two discussed. Not only is it a movie about making movies, but it’s also a movie about Charlie Kaufman himself, and the meta-ness of the film adds a layer of honesty, comedy, and empathy to the film and the characters. Kaufman is incredible at blurring the lines of fiction and reality, and Adaptation feels as though it meets the documentary and drama genres at the halfway point at both ends. The movie is about the making of itself, and the audience watches scenes of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicholas Cage) writing the scene we are watching presently, creating an unremitting hall of mirrors effect of meta-reflexive self-scrutiny.

The context of the film is that Charlie is hit with a terrible case of writer’s block as he attempts to adapt "The Orchid Thief," by Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep), into a screenplay. Orlean and Kaufman’s lives become entwined as their respective searches for self clash with one another. The movie is a piece of dramatic fiction, but it is about a non-fiction book that, technically, by definition, makes it a non-fiction film, which is the true genius of this screenplay. The audience is constantly questioning what they are watching, and so are the characters. The audience and the characters go on this journey of discovery together, and no one knows more than the other at any given point about what is occurring on screen.

This film is repeatedly mindful of the push-pull dynamic between depicting real life and the imaginary sensationalism that’s important for any endeavor to retell a narrative through the silver screen. Kaufman combines Hollywood genre norms with incredibly abstract yet self-aware declarations that it’s almost impossible to tell what is real and what is a fabrication. The magical mystery of Kaufman is that he doesn’t compel you to find a disparity between the two.

As mentioned previously, Adaptation stands distinct from Eternal and Malkovich because it is a pure meta film. The opening shot is just a dark screen, and we hear Charlie’s forlorn voice as he lists all the things he hates about himself: “I’ve got a fat ass” and “I’m bald.”

Part of why this movie is so unique is its use of deconstructionist components. Deconstruction is a form of philosophical and literary analysis popularized in the 1960s by French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Deconstruction questions the fundamental abstract distinctions in Western philosophy through a tedious reevaluation of reason and rhetoric in literary and philosophical texts. The resistance contested by deconstruction has been ingrained in western philosophy since the Ancient Greeks began exploring philosophy and aspects of are intrinsically “binary” and “hierarchical.” This philosophy relies heavily on a pair of representations in which one part is fundamental and the other is derivative. This can be seen in mind and body, nature and culture, literal and metaphorical, and inside and outside, among countless other examples.

Exploring deconstruction means exploring the uncertainty and contradictory nature of the hierarchical sequence that is socially accepted and sometimes explicitly claimed in the philosophical texts one can analyze. This is especially important when the text or other aspects of the text’s meaning are implied or indirect, depending on metaphorical or performative wording. Through this type of analysis, the resistance exhibited becomes a product or construction of the text. One of the most essential parts of deconstruction is exploring boundaries and binaries that Western philosophy has relied on for centuries.

Adaptation completely removes the border between the writer and his story, which turns the visionary writing process into the plot but simultaneously keeps the narrative ambiguous. The book being adapted into a film is a significant part of the action but presents most of his emphasis on the frustrations of being a writer. Both Kaufman and Derrida go against set genre norms. The most notable use of Derrida’s deconstruction within Adaptation is how the movie can make fun of itself and victimize itself with cathartic reflection. To write this screenplay, Kaufman had to deconstruct his own creative process and disable any foundational intent of confidence he had in himself.

Unlike Derrida, philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed that culture and society are corrupting and overpowering energies that evolve out of an idyllic “state of nature” in which humans live in self-sufficient and tranquil seclusion from one another. He believed that nature precedes culture, but there is a sense that nature is a product of culture, and what matters as “nature” is laboriously dependent on the culture of the moment. For Derrida, the purpose of deconstruction is to displace the resistance, not just invert it.

While Adaptation is the most blatant sample of this, part of what makes all of Charlie Kaufman’s screenplays so immersive, humorous, tragic, and fun is that they summon analysis. Every line of dialogue, every shot, and every sound heard in his movies links back to an underlying conception or chorus of the film. Possibly, it is Kaufman’s sharp commentary on the human mentality and experience that I have both identified with and drawn inspiration from that keeps me rewatching his movies or maybe I just enjoy burdening myself with the weight of existential queries. I still don’t know what to make of these films, and I feel like that’s exactly how Kaufman wants it.