How Serious is Charlie Kaufman?
A “review” of Antkind.
Disclaimer: I am not going to hold your hand walking through Kaufman’s oeuvre. We are not a couple and I am not your instructor. Although perhaps this is precisely what I want and I only stoop to this disclaimer out of guilt for never knowing how to give you readers precisely what you want. Though I think the precise problem with culture at this moment (and in previous moments) are the infinite predictions of trying to give people what they want. Good writing should surprise you, which Kaufman definitely does.
Disclaimer part two: this Guardian review of Antkind really doesn’t have any sentence I completely disagree with. But in the spirit of “art brings up questions which have been hidden by the answers” I think there needs to be a more nuanced interpretation for what Kaufman brings to the table.
As a longtime fan of Kaufman’s screenwriting, the uniqueness of his tonal accomplishments, I’ve never perceived much, if any, objective attempts at humor. Certainly “Adaptation”, on the page, must have sounded a little funny. And having Jim Carey star in one of your movies (“Eternal Sunshine”) brings levity to a burdened character. But in movies like “Synecdoche, New York” which could’ve desperately used a couple jokes, Kaufman gives us imagery which feels only self serious. (Note: I write this last sentence as an adult who in repeat viewings lost the “punched in the gut” feeling I had stepping out of Synecdoche for the first time at 20. Still, the first feeling did exist and must be acknowledged no matter the subsequent letdown of future viewings with more life under my belt. Not wanting to take everything so seriously.)
A slow reading of Antkind makes me wonder, however, if Kaufman always wanted to be funny. Without doing any research I know off the top of my head that he got his professional start being hired to write sketches for The Dana Carvey Show. I have watched “Being John Malkovich” with different types of people (one old friend, who now works as a school administrator, will occasionally refer to the time I made him watch “that one weird movie”) and I remember no laughter. Yet there is something inherently hilarious in the concept of Being John Malkovich. The office space to which we are introduced, in-between floors in a skyscraper (the 7th and 8th), where the ceiling is too low to save money on their lease — if such a place existed in reality one would have to laugh stepping off the elevator. Yes it would also feel claustrophobic and mind boggling — which is why no one actually lives that way — but the idea has a suisscant of humor. Not to mention the portal into a mind and the specificity of the portal being John Malkovich and how if that portal was someone else it wouldn’t have the same tone. “Being John Malkovich” could, in principal, be any other actor.
“Being Jaime Lee Curtis”
“Being Burt Reynolds”
“Being Nathan Lane”
These all seem wrong and tonally false choices. The specificity of the portal into another person’s consciousness needing to be John Malkovich has the practiced specificity of a good joke. That the author/joke writer has spent countless hours/days trying to perfect the phrasing for a punchline.
And yet it is profoundly hard to laugh at a Kaufman film. The same way it is profoundly hard to laugh at a Beckett play, even if he would’ve preferred laughter from his audience. (Evidence suggests Beckett’s favorite interpretation of “Waiting for Godot” was at a men’s prison in California where the audience was continually laughing.)
I begin my comparisons to Beckett here not only because they are apt but also because Kaufman actively invites them. His main character in Antkind B. Rosenberger Rosenberg — woke film critic — requests a copy of Malloy in a stay at the hospital. A fictional comedy team, “competitors” to Abbott and Costello in the film within the novel are named Mud and Malloy.
Beckett apparently loved the cartoon artist Ernie Bushmiller who drew comedic panels of hobos in America. Kaufman spends a huge chunk of Antkind playing with character ideas similar to Abbott and Costello and clearly has a fondness for the form of slapstick.
My journey into Beckett began at 19 with some of his shorter philosophical writings. Later I read many of the plays but it wasn’t until I was 28, listening to Malloy on audiobook during a long walk that I actually laughed aloud. It was a visceral gut laugh — not a cerebral wry smile. Something in the absurdity caught me at just the right angle and a torrent of thought followed. Did Beckett ever want us to take him seriously?
You may notice that the question I used to frame this article was; How serious is Charlie Kaufman? NOT; How funny is Charlie Kaufman? Primarily because the second question sounds patronizing but also, even though we might not be laughing, it doesn’t mean he’s serious.
Just past the halfway point of Antkind all sense of reality is tossed aside. Kaufman is no longer going to bother grounding you in anything. B. Rosenberger Rosenberg is a shrinking man living in a sock drawer. Shortly after this section in the novel Kaufman takes an aside to say how his character has escaped from him — and when we enter back into B’s world it is a continuous dreamscape.
This, I think by definition, can not be taken seriously. Dream analysis is an amusing pastime but has largely dipped out of favor for explanatory purposes (the seriousness of our explanations).
As such, I think it is safe to say that Antkind is a novel not meant to be taken seriously. I love this attitude for novels and I say this about Antkind with high regard. The changing point in my thinking about Novels came when I read Saul Bellow say about his Herzog that; “there wasn’t a serious word in it.”
The interplay of novels with reality is most interesting when it accounts for conscious play. Your average devourer of novels is mostly concerned with what is going to happen next to their characters, but where we begin to learn lessons about the world is not in hearing about beginnings or ends. True empathy means understanding the consciousness of moments. At least this is what I feel I’ve gathered from Beckett. There is much in the spiritual succession of Kaufman’s cinema to Beckett’s plays. Character’s stuck with their own limitations in impossible circumstances.
Such conceits exist humorously but without laughter. This conception might be best categorized as the difference between comedy and dark comedy (a piece non-serious with intentions closer to tragedy than anything overtly comedic — like a marriage plot or farce). As far as I understand it, the traditional definition of comedy is the lack of tragic elements. No character ends any worse off than how they started. By the simplicity of this definition Antkind is then not a comedy because it could easily be argued that B. Rosenberger Rosenberg’s situation only deteriorates (literally out of corporeality). But is this not also true of the body? It doesn’t feel accurate to imply all of our lives are tragedies by default. (Or if we do call this accurate then the meaning of tragedy essentially disappears if everyone is tragic. If everyone is tragic then no one is.)
The first time I read an argument that someone did not view their life as a story I was very compelled. Because for as much as story and metaphor have been my primary interests for decoding reality — my own brain life never felt very story like. Especially looked at from a universal level where our own observations of ourselves feel so myopic compared to the incomprehensible vastness of outer space. And each day, each year has no story like feeling — yet the fact that the sun rises and sets — this is a story structure. The primary question might be how much time is one willing to give for a particular “story”. Is star creation and collapse itself a story? Yes must be the answer to that question, since all of our own stories were created from the heavy elements of collapsing stars. In more human terms, when we read lots of long novels which are paced more closely to reality is there ever tragedy?
My argument here, being; every novel is a dark comedy whether they like it or not. I think Kaufman would agree. He can hardly resist writing a joke when one crosses his mind. “The rats were as big as German Shepherds, not the dogs.” There are a couple runners throughout the novel which I have purposefully avoided looking deeper into. The first occurs quickly in the novel and is used continuously. B. Rosenberger Rosenberg insists that he is not Jewish. People accuse him of it and he refuses vehemently. Later, B. kills and takes over the life of an alternate reality (more successful) version of himself which is Jewish. I have no earthly idea whether Kaufman himself is or is not Jewish. I could look this up in the flick of a finger but I have resisted. Mostly because I like how the novel lets the reader exist in two realities at the same time. One: where Kaufman is self deprecating Jew who uses a character that insists he is not Jewish to make the statement about his ancestry having any relevance look absurd. The other: a tongue-in-cheek joke about people misinterpreting his last name throughout his career.*
The other runner, which would be more difficult to deduce, is B.’s love for the films of Judd Apatow. Knowing what Kaufman has done with his career in film it would seem obvious that his style and Apatow’s style are antithetical to each other. By having his narcissistic, so woke he’s anit-woke, main character, B. Rosenberger Rosenberg be a fan of Apatow is a dig at the stupid simplifications and shortcuts that broad comedy utilizes to make audiences laugh. Yet I can imagine a reality where Kaufman has legitimate respect for broad comedies as a form and a style he feels he could never do well. Again, Kaufman lets the reader exist in both realities at the same time.
It is these meshings of realities at which Kaufman excels — and has done so his entire career. The last third of Antkind is populated with clones of his main character. The spin of realities within realities are often plain difficult to follow. But so is much of Beckett’s work — so is much of life.
To put on a reviewers’ hat — which for a novel like Antkind feels like it misses the point — but to anyway engage with the form and qualify my enjoyment of the novel I’d give it a 3/5 star rating. I can also imagine another part of my personality which gives Antkind a 5/5 (perhaps if I had encountered it at 20 like I did with “Synecdoche, New York”) simply for how unique and challenging it attempts to be. I also have to give respect to the idea of writing a novel when one could get other things made. I remember a quote from the writer Alex Garland (“Ex-Machina”) who started off by writing a novel and then making his way into screenwriting. He said, in paraphrase, “maybe I’ll go back to novel writing when I’m again lonely and have no other options to make movies.” The number of individuals who have started off in the visual entertainment biz and moved into prose, after, is small and largely undistinguished. It’s hard to pin down why crossover is often so difficult. My speculation is that mastery of dialogue gets boring in prose.
Luckily (for the reader) Kaufman’s internal tone and style has a good fit for crossing over — and Kaufman is the best writer I’ve personally read who made a late career switch from the visual medium. My star rating of Kaufman is simply based off of the compulsion I had to return to his sentences — just enough to keep me going — which honestly should be worth everything if one is making art. There are many other tricks a writer can use to manipulate the reader into compulsion to follow their story but forgoing these tricks leaves only pathos and dedication and a certain type of luck. The task is very difficult and the payoff little — but still like many of his films one will walk away from Antkind with a feeling like they’ve learned something. Even only if what they’ve learned is that life may only be “a relentless comedy.”
*I have my suspicion that Kaufman is Jewish per a scene in chapter 63 where he makes a commentary about the clothes David Sedaris wears on a talk show and a father figure asks if Sedaris is purposefully trying to look like a schmuck. The father then suggests that the “interviewer is anti-Semitic” because he let Sedaris dress this way and/or encouraged it. Kaufman also suggests that this scene within a scene is perhaps “the God particle” for the whole novel.
