Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2001 Allegheny College

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 enthusiastic 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 of the 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 recording 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 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 surrealistic comedy is a flamboyant extrapolation of this opening scene. The relentless search for outside validation at the heart of Lacan's conception 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 deserving of a more rigorous examination than its current status as a clever and entertaining pastiche might suggest. If the opening scene's invocation 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 cerebral 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-psychoanalysis" 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 begging 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 psychotherapist 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 public 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. Anticipating the terms of its own reception, Being John Malkovich dares critics to approach it through the very terms it parodies, all the while hiding the fact that psychoanalysis is its rightful home. Likewise, the film's parodic elements only seem to undermine the validity of psychoanalysis and the film theory it has inspired, and the film finishes by underscoring its self-awareness as an artistic product entangled in cinematic conventions and psychoanalytic imperatives from which it cannot escape.

The need for external validation portrayed in the opening scene offers one reason for the film's inability to transcend the psychoanalytic 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 formative of the function of the I" and his "Seminar on `The Purloined Letter,'" and Laura Mulvey's formulation of the spectator-screen relationship in her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"--reveal that the act of appropriation, or "purloining" to use Lacan's central metaphor, 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 purloined 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 Manhattan 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 risque depiction of Eloisa's and Abelard's lust for one another in their monastic cells. Compelled to look for a job, Craig discovers that "puppeteering" does not even exist as a category of employment 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 corners 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 integration and recognizable cultural conventions. However, the so-called "real world" Craig enters in search of a livelihood proves to be even more bizarre than the one he leaves behind. LesterCorp, the filing company 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 doctorate in Speech Impedimentology from Case Western, Dr. Lester's "executive 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 represent Lacan's symbolic order, the seventh-and-a-half floor of the Mertin Flemmer Building is another of the film's comic literalizations of psychoanalytic 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 himself) 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.

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 "Consciousness 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 constituted by his thinking, feeling, and suffering allies it with the Cartesian 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 external 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 chimpanzee 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 think" (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 instrumental 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 constructed 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 mirror-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 unsettles this "straight" version of Lacan by collapsing his distinction between child and chimp: Elijah is humanized by being granted a traumatized 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 assumptions 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 "essential" about the self, if only because "being" is so escapably tied to "seeing." 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 subjectivity. As he explains, the existence of the portal "raises all sorts of philosophical-type questions about the nature of self, about the existence 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 determined 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 constitutes the subject by demonstrating "the decisive orientation which the subject receives from the itinerary of a signifier"("Seminar" 29). The signifier in question is the purloined letter that functions like a pivot around which revolves a shifting set of human relations. The letter 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 anomalous portal that plays a pivotal role in the distribution of power, authority, 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 defining text of cine-psychoanalysis, Mulvey argues that classic Hollywood film narrative encodes a specific gendered response. The perspective of the 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. (1) Much like Lacan's signifying chain, the cinematic apparatus determines the spectator's (gendered) subjectivity by positioning his or her gaze in a specific relation to the film's world. The "masculinization" of the spectator position 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. (2) Like the King who is blind to the drama surrounding the purloined letter, Malkovich is unaware 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 of the portal, like possession of the 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 celebrity, 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 of the portal's implications but regains his confidence when Maxine promises to protect 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. Over a period of eight months, Craig and Maxine redirect Malkovich's acting career to puppeteering, which enables them to lead an affluent 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 di femina"("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 transsexual and would therefore benefit from sexual reassignment. She abandons 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 return 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 comparable to the addiction experienced by the film aficionado who never tires of the 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 of the 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 succeeds 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 of the 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 between the word "portal" and the conceptual domains of virtual reality and cyberpunk is indicative of a movement towards systems of representation 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 spectator, 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 departures in this context is its suggestive conceit that the female star, the femme fatale, 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 final union engages on several levels with Mulvey'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 undertaking for heterosexual women. If sharing the hero's eroticized masculine gaze is so liberating, pleasurable, and addictive, why have not all female moviegoers turned to lesbianism? The film proceeds by offering its viewers a playful reductio ad absurdum of Mulvey's argument, a comic travesty underscored by the sentimental bathos that informs Maxine and Lotte's teary reunion after the obligatory chase scene at gun-point through Malkovich's unconscious.

But this parodic critique is also accompanied by a sincere engagement 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 anticipated 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 reductive 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 becoming 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 initially empowering masculinity transforms him into a passive receptacle 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 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 prolong 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 audience is a grimly comic rendition of a much more serious critique of the 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 particularly adept at mixing the conventional platitude with the profound observation, and its investigation of our fixation on celebrity moves beyond 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 of the subject in the symbolic order 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 objet petit 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 nature 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--"Be all that someone else can be"--revises the U.S. Army's commercial 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 Other"(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 ordinary 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. Similarly, 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 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 uncanny 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 consists 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 revulsion. 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 mechanisms we invent to bring us closer to the primary narcissism of the pre-Oedipal are symptoms of a collective psychic and cultural dissatisfaction whose final destination is best never reached.

Perhaps it is best, then, that the proposition of a return to the imaginary is untenable, and the film evokes the hopelessness of trying to heal one's split subjectivity by seeking recognition from the Other, if only due to the logical impossibility of seeing oneself 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 entertainment, and as cyberpunk literature and film reveal (one thinks of William Gibson's The Neurornancer and Larry and Andy Wachowski's The Matrix, for example), we cannot simultaneously exist in two different worlds or "see" from two different perspectives. Should we fulfill one day our yearning to "be" a celebrity or favorite action hero, we will still continue to seek, perhaps as listlessly as John Malkovich with Maxine, the external 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 intermediary, and the penultimate scene shows them several years later in a blissful familial relationship with their young daughter Emily. (Emily's "father" 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 "unlawful" social arrangement. Their seemingly permanent union seems to have achieved that specifically feminine 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 alternative 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 counterparts.

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 inherited the portal (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 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 symbolic 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 asking 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, because 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 expose 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 often uses psychoanalysis to theorize about film and the cinematic apparatus that determines its meaning, Being John Malkovich uses its own special 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 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 instrument of comedy 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, Andrew 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.

(1) 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 cinema. 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 Psychoanalysis and Cinema (6-32), Lucy Fischer's "The Image of Woman as Image: The Optical Politics of Dames," and Sandy Flitterman's "Woman, Desire, and the Look: Feminism and the Enunciative Apparatus in Cinema."

(2) As Allan Pero has pointed out to me, this analogy is strikingly corroborated by the fact that "malko" means "king" in Syriac, the ancient Semitic language of Syria.

Works Cited

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Dana Dragunoiu is a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of English at Princeton University. Her dissertation explored the nexus of science, philosophy, and political theory in Vladimir Nabokov's writings. She has published articles on Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, Coetzee's Foe, and Nabokov's Invitation to a Beheading and Bend Sinister.

Named Works: Being John Malkovich (Motion picture) - Criticism and interpretation