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.