Being John Malkovich may be the ultimate puppetmaster movie, given that its protagonist is a literal puppeteer. It marked the first collaboration of Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman, and they burst onto the independent movie scene in a big way. John Cusack starred as Craig Schwartz, whose vocation consists of making and performing with marionettes. In an absurd twist that Kaufman is now known for, Craig stumbles upon a portal that allows him to inhabit the body of respected thespian John Malkovich.
It’s a whole new art form for Craig, who takes his puppet act to the next level, at first simply observing but eventually controlling the thoughts and actions of John Malkovich as he goes about his days. Of course, he had been training for this his whole life. But it’s one thing to make inanimate objects seem to come to life; Craig finds out it’s another matter entirely to take a living, breathing human being and treat him like one of his marionettes. He has to fight against Malkovich’s own desires and impulses to make him his own, and as he states outright, it poses a host of philosophical questions about identity, the nature of the self and all that. That’s not just true with the Malkovich experiment, but by extension the notion of identity for made up characters, how much of them are an extension of the artist’s identity and how much comes from somewhere else. It’s about puppeteering as an art, to an extent, and features a beautiful scene consisting of Craig’s actual wooden figures.
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