Fool me once...then beat me up and steal my pocket money

Charlie Kaufman is a screenwriter and director born in
New York City, which I won't hold against him.

One of the greatest hoaxes pulled on the American people by cinema is the ridiculous notion of linear time. It's this unrealistic idea that human beings are reasonable and straight-thinking entities who record their lives directly, as if our senses are nothing but cameras, microphones and smell-o-vision (©2011 Dan Warner). Cinematic visual and audio clues have completely changed how we expect the world to behave, and when those cinematic rules are violated in film it forces the viewer to challenge their own expectations.

Charlie Kaufman has been crafting this type of cinema for years. His screenplays can only be executed by specific directors, such as Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry, who hold his worldview of subjectivity and the complexity of the human psyche. Basically, directors who are as crazy as he is and have his same lust for life.

Kaufman's scripts question memory and how it affects our decisions. Stories like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (which I admit, as a grown man who considers himself fairly stoic and tough, is one of the five films in which I cry each time I watch it) are literally timeless. The emotion that he invests in our memories and our perceptions of reality reaches far beyond that of filmmakers who ask similar questions.

Kaufman is clearly a neurotic on par with Woody Allen, but he lives with his characters and waits for them to die. While Woody cares about his characters and crafts beautiful stories around them, Kaufman works through the eyes of his characters rather than trying to figure them out from an outside perspective. Plus, his script for Adaptation drew the first performance from Nicolas Cage since Raising Arizona when Cage didn't come off as the biggest asshole alive.



Kaufman fights the cinematic norm by using the fourth wall as a plot device, by making fun of filmmaking itself, by assuring his audience that everyone is as confused as they are, that the world really is as complicated and beautiful as reflective people think it is. His first, and hopefully not last, dive into the world of direction, Synecdoche New York (the second Kaufman film in my crying five), is such a life-affirming and absurd cry for respect for life and memory and reflectivity over daily experiences, it attacks head-on the idea of watching a film and instead forces the viewer to be a part of the film.



A few days ago, I walked into a gas station and saw an Amish couple at the counter. From what I gleaned from their conversation, the Amish folks were asking the clerk for directions to a doctor's office. The clerk looked perplexed, turning from side to side as if he would find the office if he looked hard enough at the spinning taquitos. He then asked the ultimate question: "Well, did you, like, mapquest it?"

Again, they were Amish.

Kaufman uses moments like this to explore the pathways of our psyches. The absurd and hilarious ways in which we assume the world works, and then the real lack of self-assuredness most of us possess. Kaufman hates when we don't appreciate every moment we're given, and he wants so much to overcome those ideas of linear experience and human reason being logical.

I hate Kaufman's brilliance. He makes me wish I knew myself.



Unrelated, here are two photos from my actual life when I realized that my writing set-up was incredibly perfect. So here is writer heaven.

Outside of the frame there's also a mug of coffee. Writer's heaven.

Maybe cavemen had it right

George Saunders is a fiction writer and
professor at Syracuse University.

George Saunders can call people stupid to their face without their realizing it. He can make people think while telling them that they never think. He can draw people into a story so deeply that by the end they believe in ghosts and fantastic memory-removal machines and modern-day cavemen.

A friend of mine is a creative writing major at Columbia College in Chicago, and the day after I lent him Saunders’ collection Civilwarland in Bad Decline he called me. The conversation began with nearly a minute of silence on his end of the line, punctuated with him muttering, “I…I, uh…” and then laughing maniacally.

He finally managed to get out that he’d stayed up half the night reading the book through, and he described Saunders’ style best when he said that Saunders was the only writer he had read who can make him laugh at the beginning of a sentence and then begin to cry by the end.

Saunders was born in Texas but raised in Chicago, and it shows. His writing shows a Midwest sensibility that questions everything about the American lifestyle, from media to consumerism to daily interactions. And like many Midwesterners, Saunders is indeed weird.

His birthplace lacks influence in his writing, as there is no real Texan bravado. No offense to Texans of course, as Texan bravado is just A-okay in my book (if I ever visit Texas again and I encounter a blog-reader, I’d like to make sure that blood is the only substance coursing through my veins).

Saunders is clearly a student of Vonnegut in his sparse prose and ironic droll, but his criticisms are so much more specific and biting, whereas Vonnegut attacked the larger culture. Also, Saunders attacks without being obvious, as it seems more that he is wandering through American culture wild-eyed and just as confused as the rest of us.

I have nothing against Vonnegut—my facebook religious views are listed as Bokononist-Catholic—but let’s face it, he was an amiable asshole. Saunders pulls off amiable and emotional and intelligent all at once while railing against the arbitrariness of American culture. And he manages it without an ounce of preaching, as the reader is too caught up laughing and crying for his characters to even realize how the story is forcing them to question their assumptions.

With the obstinateness in American government growing more unbelievable by the day, Saunders' work becomes even more important. When the culture is absurd—and it is truly absurd what is happening with our political culture—the only weapon that can slice through is more absurdity. By suggesting insanity as if it were an acceptable way of life, we can show how insane our ideas of what's acceptable behavior have become.

In today’s confused culture, it’s easy to ridicule. It’s easy to criticize critics and point out pointlessness and laugh at the ludicrous television that many people laugh at (Two and a Half Men, someday I shall destroy you). However, it’s not easy to care about what you’re criticizing.

This is Saunders’ forte. He cares deeply about his characters even while criticizing their actions. He ridicules the mainstream by diving into it and trying to figure out each of the weird fish he swims past.

My Columbia friend has taken this method to heart. He recently sent me a text at 3 a.m. that read: “I would love you even if you weighed a thousand pounds. How’s that for poetry?”

By entering these weird mindsets, these perceptions of people as good or bad based on what our culture has taught us, Saunders (and my Columbia friend) make an earnest effort to understand while exposing the absurdity behind our preconceived notions.

As a writer and fan of counterculture, Saunders makes me furious. I wish I had written his stories first.