Ever Want To Be Someone Else? | Exploring 'Being John Malkovich' in the Age of Social Media
There’s this particular song I know an ex-girlfiend likes. I was still thinking about her a while after we broke up and checking her social media feeds every day. So naturally, I posted a video of myself singing said song on my Snapchat story. Of course she messaged me and said something to the effect of, “I love this song,” and I got that sweet attention I was craving so badly. Social media enabled someone else to be a part of me from afar. It felt like someone was in my head, and I fed into it, shamelessly trying to get into someone else’s head.
Being John Malkovich is powerhouse writer Charlie Kaufman’s (Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, Synecdoche, New York) debut feature film. The film is also Spike Jonze’s (Her, Where the Wild Things Are) directorial debut. It’s a challenge for any movie to remain relevant throughout different eras, but I think both the bizarre antics and commentary about identity ownership in Malkovich are just as fresh and relevant today as they were when the film debuted in 1999. The movie revolves around Craig Schwartz (played by John Cusak) who finds a portal that allows him to live inside the mind of actor John Malkovich (who plays a fictionalized version of himself) for fifteen minutes before being spit out onto the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. Over the course of the film, Craig and those close to him discover they can influence Malkovich’s actions while they are inside his mind. Malkovich loses control over his interior life and his actions as other people claim an increasing part of it for themselves — an experience adjacent to the effect social media has on us.
We scroll endlessly. We think about other people’s posts. They stick in our head and become a part of our interior discourse with and about ourselves, even if we don’t want them to. It can become incredibly easy to lose sight of how genuine our thoughts and actions are versus how performative they are when we have such a reduced space for quiet self-reflection.
Humans are social creatures and have always been influenced by other people; we listen to our friends and family for a reason. But social media is a different beast — it cuts out the mediation of a face to face interaction. Without the context that would place two people in a room together it becomes much easier to make unnecessary lifestyle comparisons. This can create the feeling of being bombarded with the superiority of others. Just using simple statistical reasoning, the influence of people you don’t directly know on your interior life is going to increase if you’re able to see them all the time via social media. Before he finds the portal into Malkovich’s mind and body, Craig, a struggling puppeteer, watches television coverage of a successful puppeteer perform with a sixty-foot-tall Emily Dickinson puppet. He laments that “consciousness is a curse.” The potential for feelings of inadequacy like this have only increased during the explosion of technology and social media since 1999.
Being John Malkovich was written in part about the effects of obsession with celebrity culture in America at the time, both on the public and on celebrities themselves. Kaufman takes the stance that both lose their privacy. In a recent interview about the movie, John Malkovich discussed how strangers have felt entitled to his time when they see him in public. He also talked about how frustrating it must be for the general public to be inundated with inescapable celebrity gossip. The problem the film’s Malkovich faces is that he loses his privacy and himself in giving himself to the world, while the others in the movie lose themselves trying to be Malkovich.
The potential for this has massively ramped up twenty-one years after the debut of Being John Malkovich. Since then we’ve embraced smartphones and the popularity of reality TV. Many people wanted these things and enjoy them, but at a certain point their influence became hegemonic. We have now reached the point where it’s almost a requirement to have a smartphone to participate in everyday life, and this allows other people to take up much more of our lives than they did before.
The loss of privacy has fundamentally changed the way we think and behave — just ask your grandfather. Some of this change is for the better. But social media creates the ability for everyone to be a celebrity and increases the influence of already-established celebrities. Everyone wants to be heard, and the increased interconnectedness smartphones provide feeds into this desire. It can often feel as if other people are constantly fighting for your time and attention, much like how the characters in Being John Malkovich are fighting for a piece of Malkovich’s life.
“IT’S MY HEAD!”
Kaufman’s treatment of John Malkovich’s celebrity status is particularly interesting. Throughout the film, people view him as a C-list actor and constantly misidentify him. But they are all still ready to see life through his eyes because of his status as an actor and, mainly, because it’s a life that isn’t theirs. A woman Craig works with, Maxine (Catherine Keener), convinces Craig that they should sell tickets to the Malkovich portal. In one scene a man asks Craig and Maxine about what he’s paying for. What does the offer to be someone else mean? Maxine tells the man that he gets to be John Malkovich for fifteen minutes. The man says, “He’s my second choice,” but goes on to say he’s excited to be anyone but himself. This scene embodies how easy it has become to fulfill the desire to live vicariously through other people’s experiences — even if we don’t truly respect them.
I have definitely gone through the Instagram feeds of celebrities I like and had daydreams about living a life as glamorous as theirs. The thing is, though, I have also gone through Instagram feeds of people I think are annoying and have shitty personalities and still envied their lifestyle. I have had many hypothetical conversations with my friends and family about switching lives with a celebrity and most people tend to agree they’d trade lives with people they find unsavory if the perception is that they live a glamourous life. Social media compounds this thinking because of its ability to make normal peoples’ lives appear more appealing than our own. There are now hundreds of “John Malkovichs” that advertising and Instagram’s explore page throw at us constantly, making this perception more commonly available.
In the movie, aside from the few people who know about the portal, the only time anyone sees or interacts with John Malkovich is by chance public interaction, so their attention is only on Malkovich for a small amount of time. Social media allows us to see celebrities and their lives nearly constantly. The pervasive and irritating influence of celebrity status that Malkovich talks about in his interview has become nearly inescapable because of social media. Celebrity gossip is now more common, and the threshold for celebrity has become lower. The lower threshold for celebrity has stimulated the amount of celebrity gossip, making the presence of this virtually inescapable. I really can’t open Snapchat or go to a news website without seeing some type of celebrity gossip. I end up spending time interacting with content about people I don’t even care about just because of its prevalence.
There’s a recurring joke of people mistaking Malkovich for an actor that played a jewel thief. In the first scene we see with Craig in Malkovich’s head, a taxi driver makes this mistake. After Malkovich tells him he’s never played a jewel thief in his career, the cab driver insists that it was Malkovich in the movie. This scene is quick but important. It displays how celebrity status takes a person’s narrative out of their own control, so much so that even when Malkovich tells other people the truth about himself their own ideas cannot be changed. Once you have established an online personality for yourself, people form an idea about you, and it can be difficult to change the representation they have of you in their head.
The people’s collective memory is difficult to change even with hard facts. Social media can feed into a person’s predetermined notions, making it much harder to change ideas about someone once they’re formed. Meeting someone in real life is a much more dynamic situation. It commands empathy better because there’s a real person interacting with you, not an idea of a person informed by a picture and a caption. The capacity for miscommunication is an inherent and obvious flaw in online interactions, which makes it much easier for people to take the things you express out of context and then spin a narrative that you have no control over and become beholden to. Once you create a public persona for yourself, you really give yourself to other people. Malkovich has already done this before the start of the movie and loses total control over his life and narrative once Craig decides to stay in Malkovich’s mind long-term.
How many times have you thought about someone’s post while they weren’t around? How many times have you posted something with a specific person in mind? Probably a lot if you’re anything like me. Being bombarded with the most glamourous snapshots of people’s lives so frequently leaves less time for quiet reflection, which in theory means less time for original thought. People take on ideas they see in their feeds and repost things with little thought.
The idea that it’s possible to lose control of my own thoughts because of discourse on social media makes me nervous. Like I said, I’ve posted things specifically hoping for an ex to see it. In essence, these people have lived in my head (fuckin’ rent free) and controlled how I interact with the world. My wants have stopped being my own and have become about controlling the attention of someone else, similar to how Craig struggles to control the type of attention he receives. This has bled into my real life at times. I have mimicked the behaviors of celebrities that I like because I saw them do it on social media. I have behaved in ways to try to spite or self-improve for people no longer in my life. These actions weren’t about myself, but someone else. Some of these people would not take up so much space in my mind if I wasn’t able to spend an embarrassing amount of time scrolling through their Instagram and Twitter feeds.
This type of selective posting makes me question the authenticity of many posts I see on social media. If I have posted things performing for a specific person, what goes through the minds of people with a real audience? The line between authenticity and performativity is blurred. Over the course of the movie, Craig alienates his wife, Lotte (Cameron Diaz), through his pursuit of escaping himself. Seeking attention inadvertently distances oneself from their real friends. Some of my friends have posted things that present a personality wildly different from the one I know in real life. These posts are often obnoxious and leave a bad taste in my mouth. I have also posted things that present a high level of confidence — something I don’t have in real life. A few of my friends have called me out on this, and the reality is that the posts weren’t for them. They were for people I don’t actually know but who I wanted to create a cool and edgy aesthetic for. This is the ecosystem of social media: trying to create something more appealing than what we are. The low threshold for celebrity that social media enables makes this trope of alienated reality much more common.
I’d like to be clear — I’m not trying to be a curmudgeon just talking shit about Instagram. I don’t think that social media has a net negative influence in our lives. I think it’s great for increasing communication between people and challenging users' ideas, as well as providing a haven for that empowerment of underrepresented and lonely people. So many niche interests find representation on social media (I follow Instagram accounts dedicated to comic books).
But more importantly, social media can serve as a testing ground for new identities. Lotte’s experience with Malkovich mirrors the feeling of empowerment that comes with discovering one’s true identity. She finds strength being in Malkovich, and the experience helps her realize she identifies with a masculine body. Certain subcultures of social media have become places for LGBTQ+ people to turn to for testing identities and finding support. These spaces are instrumental in empowering people who may not easily find acceptance in their day-to-day lives. One of the meme pages I follow on Instagram is run by a trans person who regularly uses his story posts to answer questions and provide support for LGBTQ+ people who are questioning or struggling with their identity. Profiles like this can be an indispensable tool for people who do not have similar resources in their community. When Lotte tells Craig about her self-discovery, he tries to talk her out of it. Lotte is the only example of a person who finds an authentic self through Malkovich.
Genuine self-discovery is one of the best uses of social media, but it’s also a less common use of it. In the film, most of the people that enter the Malkovich portal are looking for something separate from themselves. The characters in Being John Malkovich share a desire for a life in which they find more meaning and control. As someone who’s spent far too much time scrolling through Instagram seeking out the same thing, these characters are easy to empathize with. This search easily becomes more personal when looking at social media. If my life is lacking in purpose, then emulating people who seem to have lives full of meaning is an obvious path to follow. But when that search becomes less for yourself and more performative, you risk losing sight of the purpose you sought out in the first place.