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That set the tone for our conversation. Although Kaufman resists being pinned down about his life or work, I found him playful and accessible. His message is that he has no message. His movie has provoked comparisons to Franz Kafka and Lewis Carroll, but he reminds me more of Larry David, who with "Seinfeld" created a TV series "about nothing."

"I really don't have any solutions and I don't like movies that do," said Kaufman. "I want to create situations that give people something to think about. I hate a movie that will end by telling you that the first thing you should do is learn to love yourself. That is so insulting and condescending, and so meaningless. My characters don't learn to love each other or themselves."

What this calls to mind (or at least calls to my mind) is David's famous dictum, "No hugging, no learning."

In a way, "Being John Malkovich" is Seinfeld through the Looking Glass. (Maybe this film's instant popularity isn't so mysterious, after all.) It contains a host of hapless New Yorkers, including a woebegone puppeteer, Craig Schwartz, (John Cusack), and his maritally frustrated, animal-loving wife, Lotte (Cameron Diaz), who find relief from despair and confusion only when they enter a mucky portal that drops them into John Malkovich's brain.

Invention, thy name is "Malkovich."

"Seinfeld," too, mixed self-absorbed central characters and supporting crazies with creatures from the Zeitgeist -- the camera often put us inside George Steinbrenner's brain. And when George Costanza turned the bottom of his office desk into a bedroom, or Kramer transformed his apartment into the set of "The Merv Griffin Show," it flirted with the surreal.

But "Being John Malkovich" jumps into the surreal head-first (so to speak). And that gives the comedy a whiff of transcendence that explodes the characters' possibilities and makes them intriguing enough to follow for longer than a sitcom running-time -- unlike the folks in David's feature debut, "Sour Grapes."

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

The blurbs proclaim a great movie; great fun is more like it. Kaufman prizes his creative partnership with director Spike Jonze, yet I found Jonze's visual monotony and deadpan tone increasingly numbing. Apart from the performances, including Malkovich's delicious turn as a blank version of himself, and Catherine Keener's acid yet sexy rendition of a caustic single career woman (like Elaine in "Seinfeld" stripped of camaraderie), I enjoyed "Being John Malkovich" for the slyness of its slinky-toy narrative. And that's why I enjoyed talking to Kaufman.

Since his script is a grand joke on the eternal mind-body problem, I asked him if he meant the only heroic character to be Lotte's pet chimp, Elijah, who gets to work out a childhood trauma and feel comfortable in his own skin. But Kaufman saw through my gambit as one more case of a journalist trying to tie his creation to a theme. "Is Elijah heroic? He seems to be rather heroic, but who really knows what's going on inside him. I just happened to be thinking about Elijah, too, but about little things I like. In the flashback to the jungle, his parents call him Elijah. And he's Elijah to Lotte, too. How did Lotte know that Elijah was his name? And what happens to Elijah, anyway? Does he go inside Malkovich?"

I wondered whether Kaufman worried that having Lotte surround herself with animals might seem too whimsical -- or, given her hunger for a child, too heavy-handed. "I don't know," he said. "I don't normally think about that sort of stuff when I'm working. If it's heavy-handed, I may still find it funny, and then if it's embarrassing, I'll take it out. Or," he laughed, "maybe not."

In short, he works on inspiration -- but perspiration is never absent. "When I talk the way I do about it," Kaufman said, "and it's taken out of context, some people assume that I just wrote this thing in one night. But once you put it down, you explore the thing -- restructure it, refine it. I throw out so much more than I keep. It's not as if I'm not using any kind of craft. But I would make my work smaller if I didn't leave it open; and if I were working to make any conscious point it would become banal. The fact that people are analyzing the film and coming up with different conclusions is the most wonderful part of the experience." Kaufman is afraid he'll curtail this interpretive cornucopia if he's too forthcoming about his own view of the material: "People might think, 'that's what the writer said, so that's what it is.'"

"Being John Malkovich" started out, Kaufman said, "as a story about a man who falls in love with someone who is not his wife." It began to evolve when he introduced ideas meant as much to entertain him -- and to keep him from getting too settled and pleased with the writing -- as to keep an audience on comic tenterhooks. The first of those ideas, he said, was "The seven and a halfth floor" -- an office-building floor originally built for little people and now a magnet for marginal businesses because of "the low overhead." That's where Craig Schwartz goes to work as a file clerk for LesterCorp, which is run by a randy aging loony (Orson Bean). "At that point Malkovich was nowhere to be seen. But you get these ideas that make it fun to write, and then you start to build a world, and justify a world, and make it work; you put in odd stuff but you have to make it organic to this world." Eventually, that grew to include the moist, eerie umbilical that deposits its contents into Malkovich.

To me, "Being John Malkovich" is the satiric ne plus ultra of the headline that became addictive to slick-magazine editors in the '90s: "It's Frank's World, We Just Live In It." (The headline has been used for everyone from Sinatra to Regis Philbin.) Kaufman conceded that what he was doing "is sort of parallel to that. A lot of it comes from the idea of not wanting to be yourself and being envious of other people. There is for sure the idea of looking out in the world and feeling you don't deserve to be there. How do you come to feel you have as much right as anyone else to be on this planet, when you have a barrage of information telling you that you don't have a right to be here, or that you have to change yourself to be allowed to be here? I took each character and on an instinctive level explored how they would react to that anxiety."

Next page | "I don't think my characters are a joke"