You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Director: Spike Jonze
Distributor: Gramercy
In the closing lines of Philip Roth's The Counterlife (1986), Nathan Zuckerman reluctantly concludes, It may be as you say that this is no life, but use your enchanting, enrapturing brains: This life is as close to life as you, and I, and our child could ever hope to come (p. 324). This sobering resignation to life-as-it-is comes at the end of a novel in which the characters have relentlessly searched for an alternative existence that might reverse their fate. The theme of throwing off the shackles of one's apparently meaningless life and undergoing a miraculous transformation into another person is a ubiquitous motif in literature and film. Indeed, our understanding of the psychoanalytic concept of projective identification owes a debt to the Julian Green novella, If I Were You, in which the protagonist vacates his own body to inhabit the minds of others. Klein's classic 1955 paper, ‘On identification’, places this novella at the centre of her exposition.
A recent cinematic variation on this theme was the 1999 winner of the National Society of Film Critics' Best Picture Award, Being John Malkovich. Directed by Spike Jonze and written by Charlie Kaufman, the film tells the story of a beleaguered puppeteer named Craig Schwartz (John Cusack). He likes puppeteering, he says, because it enables him to place himself in someone else's skin for a while. Stuck in a dreary marriage to his drab and animal-obsessed wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz), Craig lives a life of quiet desperation. In the opening minutes of the film he says, Consciousness is a terrible curse. I think, I feel, I suffer.
Craig's transcendence of his despair begins when he applies for a filing job in a New York office building. To his dismay he discovers that there is no elevator button for the seventh-and-a-half floor where the office is housed. A good Samaritan riding with him in the elevator turns on the alarm button to stop the elevator between the seventh and eighth fl