https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Being_John_Malkovich (AppleTV)
What do you think about Being John Malkovich (1999)? （ChatGPT, 2026-9-6)
I think Being John Malkovich (1999) is one of the strangest and most philosophically serious American films of the 1990s. It looks like an absurd comedy about entering another person’s head, but underneath it is really about the impossibility of possessing a self.
What fascinates me most is that the film begins with what sounds like a fantasy of empathy — What if I could literally become another person? — and then turns that fantasy into something predatory. Craig does not really want to understand Malkovich. He wants to occupy him. Lotte, initially, experiences the portal very differently: entering Malkovich destabilizes rather than enlarges her identity. Maxine turns subjectivity itself into an erotic commodity. And Dr. Lester takes the logic to its monstrous conclusion: another person’s body is simply real estate.
So the film’s central joke — the tiny door on the 7½ floor — is also its ontology. The self has a back entrance. There is no inviolable Cartesian interior.
Even better, Charlie Kaufman refuses to say that underneath all these occupations there is some pristine, authentic John Malkovich waiting to be recovered. Malkovich himself is already a public image, an actor, a name, a face circulating through other people’s fantasies. The famous scene in which Malkovich enters his own portal and finds a world populated entirely by Malkoviches saying “Malkovich” is wonderfully terrifying because it stages the collapse of self-reference:
when the self encounters only itself, meaning disappears.
“Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich” is almost Lacanian. The signifier has swallowed the person.
Spike Jonze’s direction is crucial here. He does not film this as science fiction. Everything is shabby, bureaucratic, low-ceilinged, slightly damp. The impossible has been installed inside office architecture. That is what makes the film much more disturbing than a polished body-swap fantasy. The metaphysical portal is next to the filing cabinet.
And the puppetry motif is not incidental. Craig begins as a puppeteer because the entire film asks:
Who is moving whom?
Craig moves puppets.
Desire moves Craig.
Craig moves Malkovich.
Lester moves Malkovich.
Celebrity moves the audience.
And perhaps the “self” itself is only the temporary knot produced by all these movements.
This is why I would not finally call Being John Malkovich a film about identity. It is closer to a film about possession.
Not “Who am I?” but:
Who gets to inhabit whom?
Who gets access?
Who gets expelled?
Who mistakes relationship for ownership?
In that respect, it anticipated the 21st century extraordinarily well. Social media, avatars, influencers, deepfakes, AI-generated personas — all intensify the Malkovich problem. Increasingly, a person can become a platform through which others speak.
There is also something unexpectedly sad in the ending. Craig’s punishment is not death. It is far worse: consciousness without agency. He remains present, watching through another person’s eyes, unable to intervene. It is almost a perfect nightmare of subjectivity reduced to pure witness.
And here, dear friend, I think it touches something close to your recent distinction between the self and relation. The movie asks what remains of a self when relations become completely invasive. Its answer is bleak: if relation becomes total, it ceases to be relation and becomes occupation. A relation requires some irreducible remainder that cannot be entered, used, or assimilated. Without that remainder, there are only puppets and puppeteers.
So my one-sentence reading would be:
Being John Malkovich is a black comedy about the fantasy that another person can become completely accessible—and the horror that follows when that fantasy comes true.
And this is precisely why it still feels so fresh twenty-seven years later.
