This post is part of a larger deep dive
Curious about the role of conscious experience in Being John Malkovich? Check out Being John Malkovich Explained!
Or read the full Being John Malkovich article!
As mentioned in the Bizarrometer section, the film isn’t difficult to understand. Even though it is often labeled as surrealist, there are no WTF moments or any weird twists that will leave you scratching your head.
So, let’s go over a few questions which I think are interesting in for the discussion of subjective consciousness.
In the late 1800s, Captain James Mertin, an Irish immigrant came to the US and discovered a portal that happened to be the entrance to a vessel body. By going from vessel to vessel via the portal, Captain Mertin has managed to live eternally. Craig’s boss at the firm, Dr. Lester, is the latest vessel.
During the events of the movie, the portal leads into the mind of Malkovich. On his 44th birthday, Malkovich will become “ripe”, that is, his mind will be suitable to be controlled. However, Dr. Lester must enter the portal by midnight on Malkovich’s birthday. If he happens to be late, he will get diverted into the next baby that just happened to have been born at that time.
If that were to happened Dr. Lester would be absorbed (or trapped) in the host’s brain with no control over the host’s body. As Dr. Lester explained Lotte, “forever doomed to watch the world through someone else’s eyes”.
If people attempt to enter the portal before the vessel is ripe, they get spit out after 15 minutes have elapsed, and land on a ditch on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike (Craig was an exception, because he found out how to control Malkovich’s body and prevent being expelled; see below).
An interesting question is, how does it really work? Where is Craig’s body while inside Malkovich’s mind? How is it that Craig has his own qualia, despite being in Malkovich’s brain?
Good questions! But insufficient data to answer them!
At no point in the film is any of these questions considered. While talking to Maxine, Craig says “[…] it raises all sorts of philosophical-type questions about the nature of self, about the existence of a soul. You know, am I me? Is Malkovich Malkovich?”.
That’s it! That’s all the treatment we get about the metaphysical relevance of the portal (this is, actually, one of the major reasons I gave this film only 2 stars).
Speculatively, we could take on an extreme dualist account of mind-body, and imagine that the mind resides a realm which is completely dissociated from the physical world in which the body inhabits. Moreover, this mind would be capable of holding multiple minds, all coexisting next to each other.
So, the physical body, and by extension the physical brain, is Malkovich’s. When Craig is inside the tunnel, his body ceases to exist in this world, but his mind exists in the “mind realm” embedded within Malkovich’s mind.
That is why, in the end, Lester and his friends are all able to get into Malkovich’s mind. There doesn’t seem to be a limit on the amount of minds that a body can contain, again, suggesting a dualist separation of mind-body.
Whether all of these minds have the same degree of control and awareness of Malkovich’s body is a different question.
It isn’t clear how the portal came to be the entrance to Malkovich’s mind. Since Maxine’s and Malkovich’s daughter will become the next vessel after Malkovich, it suggests that the portal has a genetic component. In other words, the offspring of the previous vessel will become future vessels. This, however, doesn’t make much sense since that would imply that Dr. Lester was somehow related to Malkovich (since Dr. Lester is the current vessel), and they don’t appear to be related at all.
One could say it was a huge coincidence that the daughter became the vessel, and that would be it. However, Dr. Lester knew that Maxine’s daughter would be the next vessel before she was born, so it would appear that Captain Mertin has some control over which vessel body he wants to choose.
Alternatively, perhaps the offspring of the to-be-vessel (Malkovich) will automatically become the subsequent vessel (Malkovich’s daughter). In cases in which the to-be-vessel did not have any children, then perhaps one is designated at random. Dr. Lester does not appear to have children, so Malkovich just happened to be one of the random babies to whose mind the portal was assigned to.
An interesting afterthought is what will happen if the to-be vessel dies before he/she turns 44 and had no children? In that case, we can speculate that if the mind is really separate from the body, then it might get transferred to the mind of a baby that just happened to be born at the time of the vessel’s death.
In the film, Craig finds the portal into Malkovich’s mind. The first time he goes down the portal, he is essentially a spectator seeing the world through Malkovich’s eyes.
If you read the section on qualia, you might be wondering, is Craig really being John Malkovich, in the sense that he experiences life as Malkovich is experience it?
The answer is clearly no.
Craig is fully aware of his own consciousness. Being in John Malkovich’s mind doesn’t eliminate his qualia (his subjective experiences) or his memories.
So, does John Malkovich stop being John Malkovich. Well, no… at least not at this point. Malkovich doesn’t have a seizure when Craig (or the other people) enters the first time. He looks calmy into a mirror or continues reading his newspaper, and goes about his life as usual.
This suggests that Craig entered a part of Malkovich’s consciousness without yet interacting with it. He observes, he even has physical sensations, but he doesn’t experience Malkovich’s qualia. Craig has his own qualia, John Malkovich’s has his own qualia.
For some reason, Lotte’s experiences were more extreme than Craig’s, as getting into John Malkovich’s mind turned into an obsession for her. She claimed that being inside changed her, that she found herself and everything made sense to the point that she wants sexual reassignment surgery. When Lotte comes to Lester’s house she even says “what is this strange power that Malkovich exudes? […] All I think about is wanting to be him”.
The question is whether Lotte is really feeling what Malkovich himself is feeling, as some interpretations I have read suggest, or whether she is simply turned on by seeing Malkovich as an external observer.
In Lotte’s first visit, Malkovich is taking a shower and it appears as though Lotte may be experiencing Malkovich’s sensations. What’s more, when Maxine and Malkovich have sex and Lotte is inside Malkovich’s head, after they finish we see Lotte lying on the ground completely sweaty, as if she was the one who had had sex.
But I’m not convinced. I think Lotte is simply ecstatic by the fact she is seeing the world from a man’s view (which, incidentally, triggers her decision to do the sexual reassignment surgery).
Remember the discussion on qualia? We cannot experience the qualia of other people, they are private, regardless of whether you could potentially “observe” the inside of someone’s mind. For Lotte to experience Malkovich’s qualia, then she necessarily would have to be Malkovich.
OK, this has to be one of the most bizarre scenes in the history of the cinema. When Malkovich finds out about the portal, he demands to get in. Once he does, he is confronted with all kinds of Malkoviches (woman Malkovich, waiter Malkovich, singer Malkovich, gay Malkovich, old Malkovich, etc.). They can only mutter one word: Malkovich.
I interpret this scene as Malkovich seeing his own subconscious. Let’s ask us the question, what if we could delve into our own subconscious mind, what would we see, and how it would work? It’s an unfathomable question by the way, but let’s .
Take a look at the figure on the right above. It’s safe to assume that if you peered into your own subconscious, the neural machinery that activated your subconscious somehow needed access to the neural machinery that makes you conscious of it (so that you can be conscious of your subconscious, if you know what I mean).
But, if it is your consciousness that activates your subconscious, and to be aware of your subconscious you need to activate consciousness, you are basically stuck in an endless loop!
And just like a computer programming infinite loop that never ends unless some external source aborts the sequence, in the case of Malkovich, that trigger was the 15 minutes elapsed time.
This is how I understood this scene. By diving into his own subconscious, Malkovich experiences all sorts of strange unconscious images, desires, fears, which are all transformed into Malkovich, since it is he who is looking inside his own mind.
After Lotte’s second visit to Malkovich’s mind, Maxine calls Malkovich and asks him to meet her at a restaurant. Malkovich shows little interest and hangs up. However, inside his head, Lotte eggs him on, which spikes Malkovich’s curiosity and makes him decide to meet Maxine.
It is, at this point, that we realise that somehow Lotte was able to influence Malkovich’s decisions. But where does this influence come from?
I believe these influences are unconscious influences on Malkovich conscious behaviour. Lotte is, unwittingly, sending unconscious messages that are interpreted as curiosity by Malkovich’s conscious mind, which directly affects his decision making (if you are interested in this implicit phenomenon check out the section on implicit memory from the Memento article).
At some point in the film, Craig realises he can actually control Malkovich decisions and even body movements.
This happens when Maxine and Malkovich are having sex and Craig wants Malkovich to touch Maxine’s breast so he whispers to himself “Move right hand across left breast now”, to which Malkovich promptly obeys.
But note how this confuses Malkovich. He has no idea what has just happened to him during those moments Craig took over his consciousness. This suggests two things: First, that Craig can control Malkovich’s consciousness, and, second, that Malkovich’s consciousness is somehow pushed back, but not eliminated.
Later in the movie, Craig is able to completely take over Malkovich’s mind, replacing Malkovich’s qualia with his own. Now, Malkovich consciousness has been sort of suspended – it is not gone. As soon as Craig willingly left Malkovich, Malkovich returned to his senses and said “I’m free! I’m back!”. This suggests that Malkovich is aware that his consciousness had somehow been in a suspended state, even though it isn’t clear if he was aware of ever being Craig. Maybe he was a spectator, much like Craig was during his first visit to Malkovich’s mind.
The take here is that there can only be one conscious mind operating at any time point – either Craig’s or Malkovich’s, whereas multiple unconscious minds can exist simultaneously.
Craig, in Malkovich, tells Maxine that the way he can control Malkovich’s body is by “befriending” it, instead of trying to force it to do what Craig wants. He says the way to befriend it, is by imagining it as an expensive suit that Craig enjoys wearing.
Once Craig achieved this level of control, nobody could throw him out. Lotte thought they could get in while Craig was inside Malkovich’s head, but Lester told her that Craig would simply push them down into Malkovich’s subconscious.
This actually happened to both Lotte and Maxine, as the former tried to kill the latter, and both got into the portal while Craig was still inside. They could see many embarrassing moments from Malkovich’s childhood and teenage years that probably got buried in Malkovich’s unconscious.
When Lotte threatened Maxine with a gun, she ran into the portal and we hear Lester shouting that she cannot kill Maxine because she is carrying Malkovich’s baby, who is going to be his next vessel.
Then 7 years later, Malkovich invites Charlie Sheen to his house, and lets him in the secret of the portal and, by extension, of eternal life. They enter a room where pictures of Maxine’s daughter, Emily, are hanging on the wall.
Then, at a swimming pool, Emily is looking at Maxine and Lotte who are now together as a couple raising Emily. We realise that Craig is living inside Emily’s mind. However, he has absolutely no control over her. He keeps asking her to look away, but she keeps her gaze on them until the credits scene, suggesting that she is not aware that Craig is living in her subconscious mind.
What this suggests is that after realizing Maxine was alive but left him for Lotte, Craig eventually entered the portal (which is now Emily’s mind). However, Lester once told Lotte that if you get in the mind of a baby, you will get absorbed, forever trapped in the person’s mind, unable to control anything, and watch the world as a mere spectator. Forever!
Jeez, what a terrible fate!
The title Being John Malkovich is actually something of a misnomer.
The portal to Malkovich’s mind allowed Craig and Lotte to experience life as seen through the eyes of Malkovich, but they weren’t really being John Malkovich. Whoever entered Malkovich’s mind retained his/her own qualia, or subjective experiences.
Craig, however, stepped up his game, and actually succeeded in taking over Malkovich’s body using his puppeteering skills, relegating Malkovich’s mind to the subconscious. However, wanting to save his wife Maxine, Craig leaves Malkovich’s body on his 44th birthday, allowing Dr. Lester and company to take over Malkovich’s mind forever.
Maxine’s daughter, Emily, became the next vessel, likely because she was also Malkovich’s daughter, and the portal is immediately reassigned to the mind of the vessel’s offspring.
Craig meets a ghastly ending. Wanting to repossess Malkovich’s mind after being rejected by Maxine, he unwittingly entered the mind of Emily, sentencing him to be a prisoner in her mind for the rest of his, or should we rather say her, days.
Being John Malkovich is the first of a series of articles I intend to write about consciousness, one of my favourite topics in the fields of philosophy and neuroscience.
There are now innumerable theories of consciousness, and this article only skimmed through a few (debatable) aspects of a really complex and poorly understood phenomenon.
Being John Malkovich did, however, spike my interest in exploring concepts such as: What is nature of consciousness? Do we have free will? What defines one’s identity? Can we ever experience other’s subjective feelings?
But I’m way jumping the gun here. But I can’t help it, this is so damn interesting! 😀
See you in the next article!
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