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Charlie Kaufman’s intricate scripts have been received with great acclaim by critics all around and have slowly won him the place of a subject supposed to be an artist in Hollywood, as well as defined a certain audience as subjects supposed to recognize artistic merit. In the ocean of adaptations which now covers almost the entirety of Hollywoodian film scripts, Kaufman’s original scripts attract attention like a little fishing pond - where the fishes swim backwards.

His directing debut, Synecdoche, New York (2008) was no different. Premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, it represents the very epitome of the work he had been developing as a screenwriter.

The film tells the story of Caden Cotard, a theatre director who, as his life veers wildly off the track, struggles to mount a new ambitious play. Through his failed marriage with Claire, the agonizing absence of his daughter who left for Germany with his ex-wife, the suspended love affair with Hazel and the awful discovery of his strange disease, slowly shutting down each of his autonomic functions, we watch Caden’s depressive life moving deeper and deeper into total despair. And while we watch all these threads develop, we also witness the ever-growing scale of his new artistic project.

Caden gathered a huge ensemble cast into a warehouse in Manhattan and builded there a small mockup of the city outside. The cast then started to play mundane characters, trying to create a piece of ‘brutal and realistic’ theatre. As Caden’s life plunges into complete emotional misery, it also gets more and more implicated in the play he is making, as he decides to create, inside the mockup city, another warehouse, where actors play actors playing their part in his play, and so on. He also hires someone to play himself directing the play (and this actor later enacts the hiring of yet another ‘Caden’ to play the actor playing the actor etc).

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The structuring of the narrative as a story-within-a-story, which so clearly drives his latest film, is surely the most defining element of Kaufman’s work. So, let us briefly recall the appearance of this repeated trait in his original scripts:

- Being John Malkovich (1999): the possibility of being inside John Malkovich’s mind while at the same time keeping one’s own consciousness. A mind inside another mind.

- Human Nature (2001): the Kaspar Hauser scenario - the possibility of watching from the outside (as a scientist) the “becoming human” of an otherwise wild monkey-man.

- Adaptation (2002): A writer includes himself in the script he is writing, which turns from the direct adaptation of a book into the story of a writer adapting a book.

- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004): A man consciously watches his memories being taken away from his own consciousness. Also, the scientist watches from the outside the inner workings of the other man’s consciousness.

- Synecdoche, New York (2008): A man writes a play which features him writing a play, ad infinitum.

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The summed up description of these stories already make it quite evident that there are two ways - which tend to appear intertwined - in which the story-within-a-story scenario is played out:

a) The Other as an other: the author inscribes himself into his own work:

Malkovich uses the portal to experience his own consciousness from outside; Kaufman (Nicholas Cage’s character) includes himself in the story he is adapting (a gesture which repeats what Kaufman the author himself did); Joe Barish consciously witnesses his memories fading away from inside his own consciousness; and Caden writes himself into a play.

b) An other as the Other: man watches from the exterior the development of another man’s interior:

Craig Schwartz and many others experience Malkovich’s mind as if from outside; Dr. Nathan Bronfman watches Puff become a gentleman out of the wild beast he was; Donald Kaufman, Kaufman’s made up brother, tells Kaufman how to end his script - and thus also his own personal story; Dr. Howard Mierzwiak re-structures patients memories from outside; and Dianne Wiest’s character starts at some point to narrate Caden’s thoughts and actions to himself through an ear piece.

These two stances could be described as two different movements: a movement towards an infinite inside (of the inside, of the inside etc) and one towards an infinite outside (of the outside, of the outside, and so on).

In between the two, we find the main characters. They rely on one of the two movements to make sense of themselves - as if an outside perspective could tell ‘what it all means’ - while using the other one to stop the first’s infinite spiraling. As an example of this, just recall how Kaufman’s brother (in Adaptation) and Millicent Weems (in Synecdoche) appear to stop the infinite reflexivity of the main character’s inscription of himself within the story. As the character loses himself into this inward reflexion, and the film tends to lose itself as well, we get the agency from another character who, from the outside, if it were, gives the lost character some ‘divine’ sense.

The opposite is also true, the repetition towards externalities, the opening of the question: so who’s watching the watcher?, is solved in Human Nature, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich by getting the watcher to watch himself somehow. Dr. Bronfman is obliged to tell his story over and over in limbo; we find out that Dr. Mierzwiak had the procedure done to himself; John Malkovich goes through that little door into his own head, etc.

Thus we have as the basic structure of Kaufman’s films the fantasy of an Other of the Other, which appears either by repeating the place of the author, externalizing it, having an author of the author or by repeating the place of the character, internalizing it, by having the character of the character.

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This double structure - story within story - was discussed by Freud, when he articulates in the Traumdeutung the book’s main thesis - that a dream is the fulfillment of a wish - in relation to dreams in which the dreamer either acknowledges that ‘this is only a dream’ or has another dream inside of the actual dream:

“When the thought ‘this is only a dream’ occurs during a dream, it has the same purpose in view as when the words are pronounced on the stage by la belle Hélène in Offenbach’s comic opera of that name: it is aimed at reducing the importance of what has just been experienced and at making it possible to tolerate what is to follow. It serves to lull a particular agency to sleep which would have every reason at that moment to bestir itself and forbid the continuance of the dream - or the scene in the opera. It is more comfortable, however, to go on sleeping and tolerate the dream, because, after all, ‘it is only a dream.’ In my view the contemptuous critical judgement, ‘it’s only a dream’, appears in a dream when the censorship, which is never quite asleep, feels that it has been taken unawares by a dream which has already been allowed through. It is too late to suppress it, and accordingly the censorship uses these words to meet the anxiety or the distressing feeling aroused by it.” (Traumdeutung, Chapter VI, Second Revision (I))

So Freud argues that this meta-formal element appears to discredit the representations in the dream, making them more bearable for the dreamer and thus allowing the unconscious desire to be enacted in the dream without waking the dreamer.

We find here an use for the fantasy of there being an outside of the dream, while still within the dream: it neutralizes the intensity of the unconscious desire by referring to it as a ‘mere’ dream. The position from which this soothing insight is enunciated - somehow being outside of the scene so to look at what is happening and cal it a dream - is the position of this Other of the Other, a place which is not touched by the developments and consequences of the actual situation. Literally, it is obscene - ob (out of the) scene.

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But what could be the uncomfortable representation which feeds on this structural recurrence in Kaufman’s narratives? What gets to be displayed on account of fact that the frame within the frame is ‘just a mere narrative’? Here we should turn to another element which is featured in all of his scripts and, rather than an aspect of formal organization, like the one we have been describing, is its very operating agency.

From Being John Malkovich to Synedoche, New York, the possibility of this meta-reflexion is always connected with the idea of a business which turned the strange reflexivity into an affordable service:

In Being John Malkovich we have the ‘experience being John Malkovich’ service, for 200$. In Human Nature the on going behaviorist research of Dr. Bronfman is funded ad infinitum - and the same goes for Caden’s play-experiment in Synecdoche, New York, which is funded for almost twenty-years by a mysterious ‘MacArthur Grant’. Adaptation also relies on Kaufman’s “free pass” to work on the script for as long as he likes, while Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, very much like the Malkovich movie, also offers the memory erasing service for a cheap price - we don’t know the exact figure, but everyone seems to be able to afford it.

Couldn’t we say that there is a strange correlation between the infinity of scenes (within scenes) and the infinity of resources which actually allows for the formalist infinity of the story in the first place?

The re-doubling of the narrative takes the foreground over the actual vertiginous stance that is apparent as a minor representation in the story: the almost totally resourceful/demanding Other which sets the story in motion by providing a continuous flow of money into the character’s spiraling stories - this ‘Bank’ figure is, at the same time, hidden or discredited by the reminder that it is ‘just’ a film (within a film). It becomes another little funny, quirky element of this already ‘absurd’ storyline.

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So we have used Kaufman’s particular way of structuring stories to establish how an otherwise complex, articulate and highly sophisticated narrative, which seems to be playing with the very fabric of its making, by doubling its form within itself, can actually serve as the diversion to a much less spectacular fantasy: that of an endless flow of money.

Extrapolating - but then again, not that much - don’t we find an homologous structure in the broad spectrum of current social phenomena?

Let us consider the two main social movements today: one towards an always greater externality - the growing importance of ecology and the new ‘anti-specist’ conception of it, which demands that we expand our notion of ethics to include animals as well - and one towards greater internality - the cult of the body, of the inner-self, and the “me-ist” demand of personal expression.

These two movements, being products of the capitalist discourse, are not finite demands, they aim towards an infinitude: after animals, we will need to include plants, and then minerals. After expressing ourselves through a Blog, we’ll do it through Facebook, and then move on to Twitter.

And, last but not least, while we relish in the sophistication of our two infinite horizons - Ecology as Echo-logy and Budism as Buddy-ism - this ideological spectacle makes it easier to bare the actual phantasmatic Other at play: the one which would support this big circus with an apparent endless and consequence-free investment of cash.

After all, wasn’t the answer to the financial crisis the rise of the fantasy of a stance that could feed back into the endangered banks huge amounts of money, thus keeping the economy alive, and consequentially our own noble ambitions?

Couldn’t we say that the current worry about the environment and the concern with the world’s demise (to be read as: we are just one more species) - as well as the undivided attention to questions of tolerance and the Other (to be read as: we are just one more culture) - hides its very reliance on an agency that funds this reflexive movement endlessly, supporting the actual unconscious fantasy: the environment is at risk, the world could end at any second, morals are going down the drain - but capitalism is a-ok: it is immortal.

And, in an ultimate analysis, what we get here is quite an interesting structure, for we are faced with basic the elements of St. Thomas Aquinas’ cosmological proof of God: we have infinities moving towards an ungraspable beyond and an immortal cause at the beginning/end of it. What a surprise it would be to find out that the broadest frame and the deepest Self coincide...in the Capital!

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Now that we had a glimpse of how intimately connected Kaufman’s films are with the current structure of social-economical life, it shouldn’t be difficult to see why he is the author of such seductive scripts: offering themselves as complex, meta-formal cathedrals, the stories can incite our desire to ‘broaden our minds’ or ‘to go deeper’, giving us the taste of having gone through some sort of highly philosophical experience. But, like dreamers, if we are by chance confronted with the terror of our own unconscious desires - for example in the explicit fantasy of this always-absent fountain, from which money is supposed to spurt out - we are reassured by Kaufman’s film, which whispers back to us, not in its content, but in the level of its very form: don’t worry, its just a dream!

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Against the dismissal of the scene as a ‘mere’ dream, we join in unison Garcia Lorca’s good advise given to that very same New York , in his Ciudad sin Sueño:

“No es sueño la vida. ¡Alerta! ¡Alerta! ¡Alerta!


This affirmation of the scene as there where it happens is the very essence of Badiou’s Affirmationist Manifesto. To disavow it, in the name of a proximity of the Real, supposed to expose all framings, showing the “behind-the-scenes”, is just to choose the route of pornography: to sacrifice all eroticism for the sake of ‘reality’ - pornography now includes the camera man, the whole stage is on display, everything is done in the name of ‘the passion of the real’, as Badiou calls it, which is supposed to arouse us to the utmost, but then...all sexuality goes out of the window (the only frame left!). And we are left then with the "spectacular exposition of desires, phantasms and terrors."

Thus, when a certain situation is dismissed by someone with a ‘but it’s only a dream’, an affirmationist shall reply: ‘yes! it is only a dream but you are not the dreamer!!”

And, as our conclusion, Badiou’s own words:

“The Affirmationists will, of course, defend the totality of contemporary artistic production against the current reactionary attacks. We will distrust all those who try to use provisional theoretical weaknesses in order to impose the restoration of our pompous heritage, or even worse. But we should not be blind to the problem we have in common: the domination in the arts of all the figures of “me-ist” or communitarian expressivity, which is nothing but degraded Didactic-Romanticism, a kind of avant-gardism without avant-garde. In a certain way, it combines with a recurring pomposity. Pomposity proposed violent technologized and grandiose decoration as affect, and it dominates Hollywood cinema and even certain sectors of architecture or multimedia design. But the artists of the post-modern circuit merely oppose it with a poor anti-Classicism whose single resource is Spinoza’s phrase: “We do not know what a body can do.” With this meager viaticum, a number of them (a majority?) continue to search in a paroxystic particularity, be it ethnic or “me-ist,” for something to affirm the ruin of both the Classical conception of art and the absolutist affirmation of subjective expression, private or public. Now, the motif of the expression, whatever its modalities might be, saturates the artistic gesture with a Romanticism whose only known variants are funereal Romanticism or ludic Romanticism, depending on whether one pronounces the morose end of the human race or one pretends to celebrate it.