Psychoanalysis, Film

Theory, and the Case of

Being John Malkovich

Dana Dragunoiu

Being John Malkovich opens on a stage where a puppet's gaze

into a mirror leads it to perform what its maker, Craig Schwartz, calls
"Craig's Dance of Despair and Disillusionment." Raging against its
mirror image, the puppet discovers its dependence on the man who
pulls its strings, a puppeteer whom it strikingly resembles in name and
physical appearance. The puppet's performance is greeted by enthusi-
astic applause, but we soon discover that the theatre sits in the
puppeteer's home studio and that the applause is simulated by a
soundtrack.
The puppet's distress at the sight of its mirror image suggests a
state of self-alienation, a psychic division that is reinforced by the
puppet's physical resemblance to its maker. This psychic split recalls
Jacques Lacan's formulation ofthe human subject as divided between
a narcissistic total being (me) and a speaking subject (I), which fuels
its attempt to validate its (fictional) unity of being by convincing the
outside world to pronounce it authentic. Although the applause that
follows the puppet's dance seems to confer the external validation
needed by both puppet and maker, the fact that the applause is a re-
cording identifies the futility of the puppeteer's attempt to cope with
his own self-alienation by inventing the adulation of an audience. The
absence of real spectators alerts us to the psychic conflict that sets the

1
plot in motion—the puppeteer's desire to be someone else, someone
who enjoys the personal and professional recognition Craig does not
have.
As Xan Brooks has aptly observed, Spike Jonze's 1999 surrealis-
tic comedy is a flamboyant extrapolation of this opening scene. The
relentless search for outside validation at the heart of Lacan's concep-
tion of subjectivity fuels the film's provocative exploration of freedom
and manipulation, gender and subjectivity, consumerism and the cult
of celebrity. The film's investment in these discourses makes it deserv-
ing of a more rigorous examination than its current status as a clever
and entertaining pastiche might suggest. If the opening scene's invoca-
tion of psychoanalytic subject formation seems initially restrictive in
relation to other relevant accounts of subjectivity (postmodern social
construction, Warholian cult of celebrity), I would argue that this clash
of conceptions and discourses is central to the film's texture. Chris
Chang's observation that Being John Malkovich is "paradoxically ce-
rebral and patently ridiculous"(6) signals the possibility that the film's
combination of madcap comedy and serious cultural critique is in fact
a strategy for producing meaning.
Film theorists have rightly argued for a cultural affinity between
film and psychoanalysis, and reading film through the lens of Freudian
and Lacanian theory has become a critical orthodoxy in film studies.
Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze seem intent on
parodying this hegemony, and Being John Malkovich's most explicit
deployment of psychoanalysis is so reductive as to suggest a deliberate
caricature of a sanctified tradition. This, however, does not tell the whole
story, for Being John Malkovich's romp through the "greatest hits" of
psychoanalysis and what Christine Gledhill has called "cine-psycho-
analysis" is not merely parodic. The film's sophisticated deployment
of these two fields of study can be framed by invoking the familiar folk
tale of Br'er Rabbit, who escapes from the clutches of the fox by beg-
ging the fox not to throw him into the briar patch. The fox throws him
into the patch and discovers, to his dismay, that he has sent the Br'er
Rabbit home.
Like Br'er Rabbit, Being John Malkovich only seems to reject the
psychoanalytic terms on which it depends. Its strategic blending of the
serious with the comic is most explicitly announced in two scenes that
parody the most familiar concepts of Freudian psychology. The first of
these scenes depicts a chimp who, having been diagnosed by his psy-
chotherapist as suffering from feelings of inadequacy and repressed
childhood trauma, is confronted and cured by an event that reminds
him of the original traumatic experience. In the second of these scenes,
the film's two female protagonists chase each other through John
Malkovich's unconscious, which is structured like an oversimplified
Freudian case study of a child's development: young Malkovich watches
his parents copulate, sniffs a woman's undergarment, and suffers pub-
lic humiliation after wetting his pants on a school bus. Although these
caricatures of Freud seem defiantly to dare us to be so foolish as to
investigate the film in psychoanalytic terms, they play a crucial role in
establishing psychoanalysis as the film's natural environment. Antici-
pating the terms of its own reception. Being John Malkovich dares crit-
ics to approach it through the very terms it parodies, all the while hid-
ing the fact that psychoanalysis is its rightful home. Likewise, the film's
parodic elements only seem to undermine the validity of psychoanaly-
sis and the film theory it has inspired, and the film finishes by under-
scoring its self-awareness as an artistic product entangled in cinematic
conventions and psychoanalytic imperatives from which it cannot es-
cape.
The need for external validation portrayed in the opening scene
offers one reason for the film's inability to transcend the psychoana-
lytic conception of reality that it parodies with such delight. The film's
comic appropriations of some of the most popular theoretical models
of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic film theory—Jacques Lacan's
formulation of subjectivity in his lecture "The mirror stage as forma-
tive of the function of the I" and his "Seminar on 'The Purloined Let-
ter,'" and Laura Mulvey's formulation of the spectator-screen relation-
ship in her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"—reveal that
the act of appropriation, or "purloining" to use Lacan's central meta-
phor, is a risky undertaking because the psychic structures illustrated
in these texts will inevitably have the final word against those who
dare challenge them. Like the pudoined letter that, as Lacan maintains,
"always arrives at its destination"("Seminar" 53), our split subjectivities
will always dictate the way we relate to ourselves and the outside world.
Because there is no professional validation for a puppeteer in "today's
wintry economic climate," Craig (John Cusack) lives in a dingy Man-
hattan basement apartment with his frumpy pet-obsessed wife Lotte
(Cameron Diaz). Deeply committed to his puppeteering, Craig peddles
his talents on street corners, only to be assaulted by an irate father
upset by Craig's risqu^ depiction of Eloisa's and Abelard's lust for one
another in their monastic cells. Compelled to look for a job, Craig dis-
covers that "puppeteering" does not even exist as a category of em-
ployment in the newspaper's classifieds' section; or, to put a comic
twist on the Lacanian terms I have invoked, Craig discovers that his
vocation has been excluded from his society's symbolic order—i.e.,
the structure of social, sexual, and linguistic relations that constitute
the family and society. The job search requires him to leave his street
comers and off-the-map basement apartment (with its noisy chimps,
parrots, ferrets, and iguanas), and enter the symbolic order.
One would expect the symbolic order to be a world of social inte-
gration and recognizable cultural conventions. However, the so-called
"real worid" Craig enters in search of a livelihood proves to be even
more bizarre than the one he leaves behind. LesteiCorp, the filing com-
pany seeking a man with "able hands," is located on the seventh-and-
a-half floor of the Mertin Flemmer Building, an extraordinary place
where the ceilings are so low that everyone is forced to walk with a
perpetual stoop, and where language has experienced a series of comic
dislocations. Dr. Lester (Orson Bean), the corporate boss who hires
Craig, insists he suffers from a (non-existent) speech impediment that
renders him incomprehensible to others. Despite possessing a doctor-
ate in Speech Impedimentology from Case Western, Dr. Lester's "ex-
ecutive liaison" Floris (Mary Kay Place) misunderstands every word
addressed to her. Moreover, this is a space fraught with unrequited sexual
desire: Dr, Lester makes no secret about his lust for Floris even though
he assures Craig that he is "not banging" her; Floris makes advances
on Craig, and Craig becomes hopelessly smitten with his new co-worker
Maxine (Catherine Keener).
Although this so-called "real world" seems too fantastic to repre-
sent Lacan's symbolic order, the seventh-and-a-half floor of the Mertin
Flemmer Building is another of the film's comic literalizations of psy-
choanalytic theory. Its empty world of language and deferred desire is
a direct evocation of Lacan's symbolic order where nothing can be
possessed in its fullness because language, the single paradigm of all
our psychic and social structures, is an endless process of difference
and absence that leads the human subject from one empty signifier to
another. Craig's discovery of a mysterious tunnel leading directly into
the mind and body of John Malkovich (the actor who plays himselO
leads to the more significant discovery that Craig, too, is a puppet whose
Strings are being pulled by the symbolic order that governs the world
he has entered.

Courtesy MOMA

This comes as a surprise to Craig, who, unschooled in the tenets

of post-structuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, subscribes to a
Cartesian notion of selfhood, and, in consequence, believes himself to
be his own master. In a scene that precedes his decision to give up
puppeteering, Craig calls his chimp Elijah fortunate because "Con-
sciousness is a terrible curse. I think. I feel. I suffer. And all I ask in
return is for an opportunity to do my work. And they won't allow it
because I raise issues." Craig's assumption that his subjectivity is con-
stituted by his thinking, feeling, and suffering allies it with the Carte-
sian cogito, but his simultaneous yearning for public recognition as a
compensation for his consciousness suggests a socially constructed
subjectivity that is compelled to seek the extemal validation of the Other.
The film stages this subtle movement from the cogito to a Lacanian
notion of selfhood by having Craig make his confession to a chimpan-
zee in a scene that recalls the opening of one of Lacan's most famous
lectures—"The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I"—in
which Lacan advances his argument against the Cartesian formulation
of subjectivity. Lacan glosses his decision to rewrite Descartes' "I think,
therefore I am" as "I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do
not th\nk"(Ecrits 166) by distinguishing between a very young child's
response to his reflection in a mirror and that of a young chimp. Lacan
maintains that an infant, even at an age when he has less instmmental
intelligence than a chimpanzee, nonetheless already recognizes his own
image in a mirror (Ecrits 1). By means of this comic allusion, the scene
between Craig and Elijah signals a paradigm shift that suggests that
Craig's subjectivity is not constmcted by a Cartesian metaphysics of
presence (as he tells Elijah) but rather by a series of identifications
with various signifiers Craig (mis)recognizes as his doubles: his mir-
ror-image puppet, the emasculated Peter Abelard, and John Malkovich,
the Hollywood celebrity.
Although this scene between Craig and Elijah demonstrates the
film's complicity with a Lacanian theory of subjectivity, the film un-
settles this "straight" version of Lacan by collapsing his distinction
between child and chimp: Elijah is humanized by being granted a trau-
matized unconscious, and Craig is made more simian because of his
failure to recognize himself in his commercial rival, the successful
puppeteer Derek Mantini. Like Lacan's chimp who does not recognize
his own image in the mirror, Craig fails to see his double in Mantini,
whose signature puppet show—William Luce's 1976 The Belle of
Amherst, staged with a 60-foot-tall puppet of Emily Dickinson—has
much in common with Craig's humanist assumptions. Based on the
life of Dickinson, the play is deeply informed by logocentric assump-
tions and by the supremacy of the cogito; Luce claims to provide a
portrait of "the essential Emily," who asks the audience to "Pardon
[her] sanity"(Preface xiv) and to share her view that words are "sacred
beings" and poems are "essences [...] labeled for immortality"(7, 10).
The psychic life and linguistic discourse at LesterCorp is neither
"sane" nor "sacred" but wildly irrational and profane, and Craig's first
journey through the portal demonstrates that there is nothing "essen-
tial" about the self, if only because "being" is so escapably tied to "see-
ing." Having seen the world through Malkovich's eyes, Craig bursts
into Maxine's office to share with her a discovery that, he seems to
intuit, challenges his earlier invocation of a Cartesian notion of subjec-
tivity. As he explains, the existence of the portal "raises all sorts of
philosophical-type questions about the nature of self, about the exist-
ence of the soul. Am I me? Is Malkovich Malkovich?" The answers
offered by the subsequent chain of events reveal that Craig is not Craig,
and Malkovich is not Malkovich. Instead, their identities are deter-
mined by their position in the symbolic order and by the point of view
from which they see the world.
The portal's ability to change one's position within the symbolic
order and its role in the construction of gender and subjectivity turn it
into the type of pure signifier described by Lacan in his "Seminar on
The Purloined Letter.'" The objective of Lacan's gloss on Poe's story
is to show how individual subjectivity is determined by one's position
in the symbolic order, or, to quote Lacan, how the symbolic order con-
stitutes the subject by demonstrating "the decisive orientation which
the subject receives from the itinerary ofa signifier"("Seminar" 29).
The signifier in question is the purloined letter that functions Hke a
pivot around which revolves a shifting set of human relations. The let-
ter determines subjectivity because an individual's possession or lack
of the letter determines that individual's relationship with the Law. The
letter's clandestine origins lead to an infringement upon the King's
royal prerogative, and the King's ignorance of the drama surrounding
the letter renders his position as one of intrinsic blindness. Due to the
letter's subversive relationship with the Law, those who come into its
possession find themselves occupying a feminine position, as happens
to the cunning Minister who steals the letter in order to manipulate the
Queen by threatening to reveal its contents to the King.
In Being John Malkovich, the purloined letter becomes the anoma-
lous portal that plays a pivotal role in the distribution of power, author-
ity, gender, and subjectivity. However, the film further complicates its
exploration of subjectivity by situating it within the context of film
theory and praxis. This exploration is worth discussing in relation to
Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." In this de-
fining text of cine-psychoanalysis, Mulvey argues that classic Holly-
wood film narrative encodes a specific gendered response. The per-
spective ofthe central male hero is privileged in such a way that male
and female spectators alike are seduced into identifying with his gaze
and drawing pleasure from the image of the woman on screen whose
function is to be passive and serve as erotic spectacle.' Much like Lacan's
signifying chain, the cinematic apparatus determines the spectator's
(gendered) subjectivity by positioning his or her ga2e in a specific re-
lation to the film's world. The "masculinization" of the spectator posi-
tion that is crucial to Mulvey's argument finds its literal fulfillment
when Craig. Lotte, and others travel through the portal and become
locked into Malkovich's perspective. To distinguish (and to parody)
this special way of seeing, the conventional subjective camera is
radicalized by cropping the edges of the screen, creating the illusion
that the characters and the audience have been actually transported into
the elliptical point of view from which Malkovich sees the world.
The portal's dual status as pure signifier and masculine gaze sets
in motion the film's changing social relationships, gender bendings,
and displaced desires. As a Hollywood celebrity, Malkovich holds a
social position analogous to that of Poe's King.^ Like the King who is
blind to the drama surrounding the purloined letter, Malkovich is un-
aware of this portal, the very existence of which, along with the fact
that it can be appropriated by others, challenges his power, authority,
and self-determination.
Possession ofthe portal, like possession ofthe letter, bestows upon
its possessor not only the power and authority associated with the Law,
but also the feminization associated with the phallic inversion that sets
in when, to quote Slavoj Zizek, "the demonstration of power starts to
function as a confirmation of a fundamental impotence"( 157). Maxine's
confession to Craig that she could never be interested in a man who
plays with dolls is premature, for shortly after he discovers the portal
she telephones to tell him that if Malkovich is, as Craig claims, a celeb-
rity, then she needs Craig to help her set up "JM Inc.," a company that
charges $200 for a fifteen-minute trip into John Malkovich. Elated by
this new position of power, Craig tells her that he is scared ofthe portal's
implications but regains his confidence when Maxine promises to pro-
tect him. A similar dynamic governs the scenes in which Craig, thanks
to his puppeteering skills, succeeds in gaining permanent control over
the portal and becomes Malkovich. Although Maxine is conducting an
affair with Lotte at the time, she changes her allegiance and decides to
marry Craig as soon as she realizes that the portal has come into his
potentially permanent possession.Overaperiod of eight months, Craig
and Maxine redirect Malkovich's acting career to puppeteering, which
enables them to lead an affiuent and very public life together. Although
Craig should now enjoy a position of absolute power, he finds himself
in a position of absolute weakness, and not only because he is being
manipulated by Maxine. As Jonathan Romney points out, even though
Craig's spectacular skills as a puppeteer are solely responsible for a
renewed public interest in this artistic medium, it is Malkovich who
"reaps the rewards of fame and a new existence, while Craig remains
anonymous and in the cold"(41). Like the Minister whose possession
of the letter makes him "exude the oddest odor difemina"{"Seminar"
48), Craig's control of Malkovich places him in a historically feminine
position: though gifted and hard-working, Craig remains hidden from
public view, his accomplishments unacknowledged and forgotten.
But it is Lotte's subjectivity that is most radically affected when
she travels through the portal and becomes convinced that she is a trans-
sexual and would therefore benefit from sexual reassignment. She aban-
dons this idea when she realizes that she can fulfill her transgendered
desire by falling in love with Maxine, who begins a sexual relationship
with Malkovich in order to be with Lotte. But as with Craig, Maxine
consents to be Lotte's lover only when Lottie inhabits Malkovich. By
noting that the two women use "Malkovich's identity as their penis-
bearing middleman," Michael Atkinson alerts us to the fact that they
need the authority conferred by the phallic signifier to conduct their
lesbian affair.
Lotte's extravagant identification with Malkovich signals most
explicitly the correspondence between the portal and the camera's
"masculine" gaze. When Lotte sees Malkovich drying himself after a
shower and when she (mis)recognizes herself in the mirror as a "sexy"
man, her sexual excitement suggests a regressive return to the pre-
Oedipal phallic phase of her development (before femininity curbed
this active stage and turned it into passivity), and a corresponding re-
turn to narcissistic omnipotence that Mulvey argues is at the center of
the female spectator's pleasurable identification with the screen hero.
Craig tries to curb Lotte's dramatic response to "being" John Malkovich
by reminding her that she is merely experiencing the "thrill of seeing
through the eyes of someone else," a thrill which, he assures her, will
pass. Lotte, however, finds this excitement addictive, a symptom com-
parable to the addiction experienced by the film aficionado who never
tires ofthe thrills of cinema and the vicarious experiences it affords.
Just as the film is unwilling to give us a "straight" version of Lacan,
it introduces various complications into Mulvey's formulation ofthe
spectator-screen relationship. The camera's radically subjective point
of view when representing Malkovich's perspective suggests that the
spectator does not merely identify with the male hero on the screen but
becomes him, controlling his thoughts and actions just as Lotte suc-
ceeds in convincing Malkovich to meet Maxine for dinner and Craig
forces him to relinquish all control of his own mind and body. The
cinematic absurdity that ensues when the traditional division between
spectator and screen surrogate is collapsed seems every day to become
less and less absurd given the explosive success of reality television, a
genre that closes the gap between the lay person and the Hollywood
celebrity.
Being John Malkovich suggests that appropriating the gaze ofthe
screen hero fails to satisfy our deepest desires. As Lotte and Craig find
out, seeing through the eyes of Malkovich is not enough, and they both
try, with varying degrees of success, to control him. As a comment on
our love affair with Hollywood cinema, the film seems to predict its
own demise as a form of representation and entertainment, a demise
fuelled by our persistent seeking to find new genres and technologies
that will forge increasingly closer identifications between ourselves
and the celebrities we admire. Indeed, the prominent association be-
tween the word "portal" and the conceptual domains of virtual reality
and cyberpunk is indicative of a movement towards systems of repre-
sentation that will refuse to acknowledge any gap between ourselves
and our screen surrogates.
The projected demise of the ontological autonomy of the screen
actor is anticipated by Maxine and Lotte's relationship, which follows
the pattern outlined by Mulvey when she argues that the female specta-
tor, by identifying with the male hero on screen, relates to the woman
on screen as an erotic object. One of the film's most original depar-
tures in this context is its suggestive conceit that the female star, the
femmefatale, allows herself to be seduced by the male-mediated gaze
of the female spectator; as Maxine explains, she loves looking into
Malkovich's eyes and feeling Lotte's "feminine longing" peering out
from behind "the too-prominent brow and the male pattern baldness."
But Maxine's initial insistence upon a relationship mediated by the
masculine gaze gives way to a same-sex union that no longer requires
this phallic intermediary.
Maxine and Lotte's fmal union engages on several levels with
Muivey's assertions about classic Hollywood cinema. First of all, it
parodies Mulvey's thesis by conflating the symbolic with the literal
when it suggests that Mulvey makes going to the movies a risky under-
taking for heterosexual women. If sharing the hero's eroticized mascu-
line gaze is so liberating, pleasurable, and addictive, why have not all
female moviegoers turned to lesbianism? The film proceeds by offer-
ing its viewers a playful reductio ad absurdum of M\i\\ey's argument,
a comic travesty underscored by the sentimental bathos that informs
Maxine and Lotte's teary reunion after the obligatory chase scene at

10
gun-point through Malkovich's unconscious.
But this parodic critique is also accompanied by a sincere en-
gagement with Mulvey's argument. According to Mulvey, the
spectator's identification with the gaze of the male protagonist on screen
can be subverted through the promotion of a "passionate detachment"
between spectator and male protagonist, something that post-classical
Hollywood cinema has already begun to promote by highlighting the
temporal and spatial materiality of the camera's gaze (69). Being John
Malkovich pursues a similar project when it underscores the intimate
relationship between the Hollywood celebrity, the camera's gaze, and
the spectator's voyeuristic position, but it also deploys a strategy an-
ticipated by Virginia Woolf when she enjoined women to write about
friendships between women. Woolf s celebration in A Room of One's
Own of simple but revolutionary literary premises such as "Chloe liked
Olivia"(76) is, once again, comically radicalized in Being John
Malkovich, but Lotte and Maxine's escape from the contingencies of
their phallic intermediary through a passionate love for one another
suggests a similar trajectory of emancipation that substitutes the re-
ductive masculine gaze with the loving gaze of a woman.
In another conflation of the symbolic with the literal, Maxine and
Lotte's relationship suggests that if Mulvey is right about the spectator's
identification with the male actor on screen, then "being" a Hollywood
celebrity involves an inevitable emasculation. The film implies that if
the female spectator draws visual pleasure by going to the movies and
identifying with the hero's point of view, the hero is feminized by be-
coming a mere receptacle for the spectator's penetrating gaze.When
Malkovich discovers that he is a conduit for lesbian desire, he feels
rightly abused and violated. The film figures this loss of autonomy as
a "feminization" of the celebrity position; during Lotte and Maxine's
trysts, Malkovich is reduced to a passive acquiescence and even the
appendages that facilitate sexual intercourse seem only to get in the
women's way. This reduction enacts a phallic inversion of Mulvey's
formulation of the spectator-screen relationship, as Malkovich's ini-
tially empowering masculinity transforms him into a passive recep-
tacle of phallic feminine sexuality. As Lotte observes after her first
journey into Malkovich, his portal is not only phallic but also vaginal:
"It's sexy that John Malkovich has a portal. It's like he has a vagina.
Like a penis and a vagina." The portal's depiction as a long, muddy
tunnel leading into Malkovich ("a dirt tunnel of a maroon, purplish

11
hue" as the screenplay would have it [32]) suggests that each journey
is an act of rape. When Dr. Lester tells Lotte that his loneliness in the
Lester vessel has made him decide to take others along with him into
the Malkovich vessel, the extended figurative correspondence between
the film's plot and cinematic experience is amplified to include not
only the isolated spectator but a multi-membered audience. The scene
showing Dr. Lester and his friends entering Malkovich in order to pro-
long their lives in his younger body suggests a gang-rape, a violent
metaphor that anticipates the screen star's fate when millions of people
will be able to "jack into" virtual reality versions of John Malkovich
and other Hollywood celebrities.
The conceit that screen stars are "raped" by the gaze of the audi-
ence is a grimly comic rendition of a much more serious critique ofthe
cult of celebrity, but the film verges on banality when it suggests that
the consequence of our all-consuming desire to identify with media
icons is a mental and bodily violation. The film, however, is particu-
larly adept at mixing the conventional platitude with the profound ob-
servation, and its investigation of our fixation on celebrity moves be-
yond the commonplace by deploying Lacan's formulation of desire, a
formulation that cultural studies have used so successfully as a means
of illustrating the dynamics of consumerism and commodity culture.
According to Lacan, the split nature ofthe subject in the symbolic or-
der forces us to seek to plug this gap at the center of our being by
convincing the Other into pronouncing us authentic. The desire for
external recognition can never be fulfilled, however, because we can
never recover the pure (if fictive) completeness we knew in the pre-
Oedipal phase. We enact this longing for unity by moving from one
substitute object to another—the objetpetit a which, according to Lacan,
is not the object of desire, but the object which sets desire in motion
(Fundamental Concepts 179,194). In consumerist terms, this explains
why there is always something else to buy, or, in the context of the
film, why there is always another trip to take through the portal.
Uninterested in Craig's philosophical speculations about the na-
ture of the self and soul, the entrepreneurial Maxine transforms the
portal into a cash cow by convincing Craig to become her business
partner. It becomes quickly apparent that for the numerous clients who
line up to take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity, being John
Malkovich is not the object of desire but the catalyst of a much more
nebulous yearning to become someone else. The company motto—
12
"Be all that someone else can be"—revises the U.S. Army's commer-
cial tagline "Be all that you can be" so that it comes to resemble Lacan's
oft-repeated formula that "Man's desire is the desire of the
O{hev"{Fundamental Concepts 235), and JM Inc.'s customers do not
much care who they can be, as long as they can be someone else. Being
a celebrity is the best thing of all, since the celebrity is one of the most
privileged signifiers in a commodity-driven culture. But celebrity is an
empty signifier, a catalyst in a chain of perpetually deferred desire rather
than an object of intrinsic value. "I am a fat man," confesses one of
Craig and Maxine's customers in order to explain why he seeks their
service, and declares that being John Malkovich, though not his first
choice, will be entirely sufficient.
Malkovich, of course, is portrayed in the film as a Hollywood star
whose films no one remembers and who is repeatedly identified with
characters he never played. His celebrity status hides a perfectly ordi-
nary and surprisingly anonymous existence: those who travel through
his portal discover him taking a cab and being misrecognized by the
driver, drinking tea and eating toast, rummaging through a half-empty
fridge, or ordering a bathmat from a mail-order catalogue. And yet
these kinds of discoveries have no effect on celebrity seekers, and the
man who pays $200 to be Malkovich while he orders a bathmat is
thrilled by his experience.
The desire to be John Malkovich is fuelled by a lack, or more
specifically, by a longing for recognition by or unconditional love from
the Other. Craig's desire for public and private recognition of his work
as a puppeeter is matched by Lotte's desire for unconditional love that
manifests itself in the various pets she nurtures and her longing to have
a baby. Dr. Lester's desire for eternal life is more specifically grounded
in his desire to be young enough to be attractive to Floris, which he
does become when he comes into the possession of the portal. Simi-
larly, one of the friends who accompanies Lester into the Malkovich
vessel explains to Lotte that she is doing this because she has always
wanted to know what it would be like to have a penis. Like Craig and
Lotte, the men and women who pay money for the opportunity to use
the portal articulate a dissatisfaction with their lives and identities, and
after each trip, they express the need to return, to buy one more journey
through the portal.
This irrepressible need to seek the validation of the Other is a
symptom of our unconscious desire to return to the primary narcissism

13
of the pre-Oedipal imaginary order, with its lack of distinction between
our image and the outside world. The appeal of crawling through the
"wet and membranous"(Kaufman 32) portal conflates consumerism
and psychoanalysis, as the commodity reveals itself to be a symptom
of our desire to heal our split subjectivity by a return to pre-Oedipal
plenitude. Being John Malkovich parodies this longing in its most un-
canny scene, in which Malkovich travels through his own portal and
discovers a narcissistic world where everyone looks like him (his date,
waiters, lounge singers, children, dwarves) and where language con-
sists of the repetition of the single word "Malkovich." As a surrealistic
rendition of Malkovich as spectator attending his own film, the scene
parodies the repressed narcissism that fuels our various attempts to
recapture the plenitude experienced in the pre-Oedipal; we become
actors, we go to the movies, we participate in reality television, and we
impersonate our favorite action heroes in interactive computer games.
Malkovich's journey through his own portal brings about precisely this
type of ideal union between one's image and the outside world, but
instead of experiencing plenitude, Malkovich feels only horror and re-
vulsion. As he tells Craig, "I have been to the dark side, and I have seen
a world that no man should have to see." Should it ever be fulfilled, the
movie suggests, our longing to return to the imaginary order can only
lead to trauma and psychosis. The world that was repressed during our
entry into the symbolic cannot be resurrected, and the various mecha-
nisms we invent to bring us closer to the primary narcissism of the pre-
Oedipal are symptoms of a collective psychic and cultural dissatisfac-
tion whose final destination is best never reached.
Perhaps it is best, then, that the proposition of a return to the imagi-
nary is untenable, and the film evokes the hopelessness of trying to
hea! one's split subjectivity by seeking recognition from the Other, if
only due to the logical impossibility of seeing on^je//through the eyes
of the Other. As the camera attests, whenever Craig or Lotte travel
through the portal and see through Malkovich's eyes, they can no longer
see themselves, and the only self-recognition available to them (when
Malkovich happens to look into a mirror) is a misrecognition. This
double bind also applies to other possible worlds and forms of enter-
tainment, and as cyberpunk literature and film reveal (one thinks of
William Gibson's r/ie A'ewrama/icer and Larry and Andy Wachowski's
The Matrix, for example), we cannot simultaneously exist in two dif-
ferent worlds or "see" from two different perspectives. Should we ful-

14
fill one day our yearning lo "be" a celebrity or favorite action hero, we
will still continue to seek, perhaps as listlessly as John Malkovich with
Maxine, the extemal validation of the Other.
The film closes with one last challenge of psychoanalysis and
cinematic narrative convention. During the film's climactic moment,
Maxine and Lotte unite for the first time without a phallic intermedi-
ary, and the penultimate scene shows them several years later in a blissful
familial relationship with their young daughter Emily. (Emily's "fa-
ther" is Lotte, because, Maxine explains, she was conceived when Lotte
was inside Malkovich.) Unlike the men, Maxine and Lotte seem to
have escaped from the symbolic order, settling peaceably into an "un-
lawful" social arrangement. Their seemingly permanent union seems
to have achieved that specifically femin'me jouissance, which, Lacan
asserts, exists beyond the phallus. This jouissance, however, as the
screenplay suggests, depends upon an abandonment of identity and
public life. As they plan their future life together, Maxine quotes the
second stanza from Emily Dickinson's 1861 untitled poem (109):
I'm Nobody! Who are you?
Are you—Nobody—Too?
Then there's a pair of us?
Don't tell! they'd advertise—you know!
How dreary—to be—Somebody!
How public—like a Frog—
To tell one's name—the livelong June—
To an admiring Bog! (133)
The poem suggests an altemative to the dynamic that has governed so
far the characters' interpersonal relationships. If one could renounce
the hopeless search for external validation and accept the anonymity
that would accompany such a decision, then perhaps one could escape
the fate of the foolish frog and her even more foolish human counter-
parts.
This idyllic portrait of symbolic subversion is undercut, however,
by the fact that Emily (named after the poet) is the bearer of a portal
that has already been discovered by Craig and Dr. Lester (the latter of
whom has now become John Malkovich). As the screenplay makes
explicit, Emily is John Malkovich's daughter and has therefore inher-
ited the porta!(101). Moreover, Emily is already inhabited (though not
controlled) by Craig, who continues to love Maxine through the eyes
of her daughter. According to Dr. Lester's cursory explanation of how

IS
the vessel system works, Craig, by entering Emily's vessel before it
has "ripened," has been "absorbed" by Emily's unconscious, and is
now "forever doomed to watch the world" through her eyes. Craig's
presence in Emily's unconscious and his lust for her mother set up the
Oedipal complex that anticipates Emily's imminent entry into the sym-
bolic order from which her same-sex parents seem to have escaped.
The penultimate image of Craig's imprisonment within Emily's
gaze can be read as a suggestive inversion of Mulvey's formulation of
the spectator-screen relationship. Although the film concludes by ask-
ing us to consider the potential effects of such a cinematic possibility,
it does not care to comment about what these effects might be. We can
only speculate whether this may provide the impetus for the radical
subversion of cinematic conventions and the attendant "new language
of desire" called for by Mulvey (60), or whether the "masculinisation"
of the spectator position will persist, in spite of such inversions, be-
cause of the continuing identification of the "active" and "passive"
with a specific gendered subjectivity.
Being John Malkovich is, in the end, all about being a film. As a
comic, self-reflexive expos6 of the processes of its own production and
reception, it investigates the nature, the limits, and the possibilities of
film narrative as a system of representation. Whereas film criticism of-
ten uses psychoanalysis to theorize about film and the cinematic appara-
tus that determines its meaning. Being John Malkovich uses its own spe-
cial properties (plot, characterization, narrative conceits, special effects)
to comment on psychoanalysis and the film theory it has influenced.
This inverse critique is at once radical and conservative, and the film
makes no secret of its profound implication in the very hegemony it
challenges, destabilizes, and then often reinstates.
In terms of the film's more strictly psychoanalytic concerns, the
Oedipal note on which it ends suggests that there is no escape from the
imperatives of the symbolic order and the structures that keep us away
from ourselves. No matter how you slice it, subjectivity is split, and this
being so, the best we can do is allow ourselves to be "played" by the
ridiculous dynamics of a consciousness that thinks where it is not, and is
where it does not think. Ironically, this response is anticipated by Lacan
when he notes that "only the rank of the protagonists" of Poe's fable
about the subject's orientation in the symbolic order saves the story from
collapsing into vaudeville. The fable's psychoanalytic underpinnings not
only co-exist but are made possible by the fact "that everyone is being

16
duped" (joue or "played" in the French original—i.e., determined by the
signifying chain beyond his power to control) "which makes for our
pleasure"("Seminar" 33). Psychoanalysis becomes the instniment of com-
edy and vice versa, not only in Poe but also in a film that manipulates
us and pleasures us with its deceivingly humble pretensions.

Notes
I would like to thank my colleagues Ann Martin, Luke Tromly, An-
drew Wallace, and Sarah Wilson for their insightful comments on an
earlier version of this essay. I owe a special thanks to Allan Pero for
making a number of astute suggestions that played an important role in
shaping my argument. My two readers at Film Criticism also offered
valuable advice for bringing this manuscript into its final form.
' Since the publication of Mulvey's essay in 1975, feminist film theory
has focused a great deal of attention on the codes inscribing the female
subject as spectator and screen image in the domain of traditional cin-
ema. Among the most thoughtful and provocative are Teresa de Lauretis'
Alice Doesn 't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (1 -36), Mary Ann Doane's
"Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator," Kaja
Silverman's The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanaly-
sis and Cinema (6-32), Lucy Fischer's "The Image of Woman as Im-
age: The Optical Politics of Dames" and Sandy Flitterman's "Woman,
Desire, and the Look: Feminism and the Enunciative Apparatus in Cin-
ema."
^ As Allan Pero has pointed out to me, this analogy is strikingly cor-
roborated by the fact that "malko" means "king" in Syriac, the ancient
Semitic language of Syria.

Works Cited
Atkinson, Michael. Rev. of Being John Malkovich, dir. Spike Jonze.
Mr. Showbiz 1999. 4 Apr. 2001. <http://mrshowbiz.go.com/re-
views/moviereviews/movie2s/BeingJohnMalkovich_1999.html>
Being John Malkovich. Screenplay by Charlie Kaufman. Dir. Spike
Jonze. Perf. John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener, and
John Malkovich. Universal, 1999.
Brooks, Xan. "Higher Powers." Rev. of Being John Malkovich, dir.
Spike Jonze. Guardian Unlimited 17 March 2000. 4 April 2001.

17
<http;//film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Guardian_r.../
0,4267,147632,00.htm>.
Chang, Chris. "Head Wide Open." Rev. of Being John Malkovich, dir.
Spike Jonze. Film Comment 35.5 (1999): 6-9.
De Lauretis, Teresa. Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.
Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Tho-
mas H. Johnson. London: Faber, 1970.
Doane, Mary Ann. "Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female
Spectator." Screen 23.3-4 (1982): 74-87.
Fischer, Lucy. "The Image of Woman as Image: The Optical Politics
of Dames." Genre: The Musical. Ed. Rick Altman. London:
Routledge, 1981. 70-84.
Flitterman, Sandy. "Woman, Desire, and the Look: Feminism and the
Enunciative Apparatus in Cinema." Cine-Tracts 2.1 (1978): 63-8.
Gledhill, Christine. "Pleasurable Negotiations." Feminist Film Theory:
A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: New York UP, 1999.
166-79.
Kaufman, Charlie. Being John Malkovich. London: Faber, 2000.
Lacan, Jacques. Merits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York:
Norton, 1977.
—. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Book XL Ed.
Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Norton,
1978.
—. "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter.*" Trans. Jeffrey Mehlman.
The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida & Psychoanalytic Reading.
Ed. John P. Muller & William J. Richardson. Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins UP, 1988. 28-54.
Luce, William. The Belle ofAmherst: A Play Based on the Life of Emily
Dickinson. Boston: Houghton, 1976.
Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Feminist Film
Theory: A Reader. Ed. SueThomham. New York: New York UP,
1999. 58-69.
Romney, Jonathan. Rev. of Being John Malkovich, dir. Spike Jonze. Sight
and Sound \03 (2000): 40-41.
Silverman, Kaja. The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psycho-
analysis and Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1988.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas. Intro.
Hermione Lee.London: Chatto & Windus, 1984.
Zizek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989.
18