Antkind: A Novel. Charlie Kaufman

a planet in our solar system, as the hat finds itself nested in a field of wheat-like doll arms, rustling gently in a cosmic breeze. Now the hat has become animate, although no explanation is offered. It wanders through the wheat arms, aimless, disenchanted, as we follow from above. The hat is Harry Haller, of course. How Ingo achieves this connection is a mystery. This is, after all, a top hat, but I have not a doubt in my mind that it has become Haller. It is perhaps possible that Ingo, a sharecropper’s son, has never read Steppenwolf (although he is familiar with Jung, so …), but even in that unlikely scenario, some divine force has imbued the hat with Haller’s characteristics, most notably his panoptic despair. As I watch the journey of the hat, I find myself identifying with it. I, too, am Harry Haller, you see. I, too, despair at the mindlessness around me. And so as I follow this Hatty Hatter, if you will, on its quest for meaning in a bourgeois world, I shed a tear for us all. Suddenly the terrain shifts and we (Hatter and I) find ourselves at the foot of an impossibly large mountain, reminiscent of Daumal’s Mount Analogue, which, of course, is decades away from being written. No longer aimless, Hatter begins its climb. I watch from above as it struggles toward me. I am at the peak. This is where we will meet. But who have I become in this scenario? It climbs and climbs, inching ever closer, until it sits before me, eyelessly looking up at me, and I find myself filled with love. I reach down to lift it up, my hands now made of light, and I don it. I can no longer see Hatter because it is on my head (if I look up I can see a tiny bit of the brim). Then after a moment, I remove it, the hat now glowing with its own light. I flick it as one would a Pluto Platter, and watch it spin through black space toward the faraway Earth. Again, I find myself with it as it enters the Earth’s atmosphere and gets tossed to and fro through the still-churning storm (has any time passed at all on this plane?). We finally break through the cloud cover to reveal our gentleman staring up at the sky. The glowing hat alights on his head, filling the man with newfound calm. He continues on his walk against the wind, now buoyant and chipper. Instantly, the wind rips a large branch from a tree, smacks the man in the head, crushing it like a grape, and spraying his oil-black blood everywhere. The man dies.

      AND CHILDREN ARE born—the twins, whom we recognize as Momus and Oizys, but whom Ingo identifies (through an idiosyncratic sign language alphabet and key appearing screen right) as Bud and Daisy, botanical names both, which suggest “of the earth.” This reading, of course, further cemented by his choice of Mudd as their shared surname. Bud and Daisy Mudd are inseparable; they play together to the exclusion of all others. They jabber in a private, invented language (key on screen left). They are dressed in identical pinafores. This early-twentieth-century custom of dressing both little boys and little girls as little girls draws an uncomfortable parallel between infants and women (the women never outgrow these frocks, whereas the men become, by stages, by lengthening trousers, adults), but it also suggests that the boys need to “earn” their masculinity. As we now know, all fetuses begin as female. The “male” characteristics only develop later. The male “earns” his penis. At least that is what our forefathers (not to mention my own personal father, Jeremy) believed. Another and perhaps more accurate way to look at this quirk of genetics is that the male overshoots the goal of female perfection, developing past the ideal, much as the Irish elk grew a rack so large and unwieldy as to, in the end, lead to its own extinction, so the male, due to a flood of testosterone, develops a penis, that most unwelcome and unwieldy of racks (not to be confused with the so-called female rack, or bosom). Some have jokingly referred to it as a second brain, but in all humor there is, in addition to abject horror, a basis in truth. And we must wonder, as Ingo does, is the world better for these unwieldy penis “racks,” or will they, too, bring about the demise of a species?

      And then, and then, and then: Daisy is accidentally but viciously murdered by Bud during a child’s game of jacks gone terribly wrong. This is the metaphoric amputation of his feminine self.

       Important note:

       Wolfgang Pauli?

       Unus mundi?

       Spin theory?

       Must understand! Research!

      It was, of course, an accident involving the jacks game and a bayonet brought home from the war by the twins’ father. This ragged amputation from self haunts Bud and will lead to a lifelong separation anxiety, his pairing and re-pairing (repairing!) with his future partner (a predictive title card informs us) an effort to repair his severed anima. One is put in mind of the eternal un-pairing and re-pairing of hydrogen and oxygen atoms as they un-form and re-form water, recognizing this process is analogous to the eternal un-pairing and re-pairing of Mudd and Molloy (Mudd’s future partner, a second title card informs us) writ small (writ large!).

       Note:

       Water splitting? Research this! Did I pack my Lachinov? Check trunk (boot) at earliest opportunity!

      To further the analogy, Mudd alone is in truth two, in that Daisy is forever part of his psyche. The scars of her absence in his life, which exist as memories, provoke his every decision. Thusly, Mudd is the hydrogen (two atoms) to Molloy’s single atom of oxygen. Mudd is explosive and Molloy is corrosive. Yet together they sustain life. Surely this is what Ingo must be telling us in a title card that tells us this.

      The screen goes black, horribly, darkly black. Clack, clack, clack, clack …

       CHAPTER 10

      “THAT’S THE FIRST reel,” Ingo tells me, then adds: “It’s a comedy.”

      “This is extraordinary,” I say. “How much more is there? I’d love to watch the whole thing, if you’ll have me.”

      “It’s three months long,” he says.

      “Three months, as in months?”

      He nods, regarding me sagely through weary, rheumy, bloodshot, glassy African American eyes.

      “The film is three months long?” I say again. “Just so I’m clear.”

      “Give or take. I’ve been making it for ninety years. Give or take.”

      “You realize that’s about three times longer than the current record holder for length. I know this because I wrote an exceedingly long monograph—of record-breaking length in tribute—on long films called Shoah ’Nuff: The Undervaluation of Lengthy Films in Our Current Fast Food Film Culture. Perhaps you read it?”

      “It’s on my nightstand,” he says.

      “Well, when you find a minute. Well, not a minute. A year. My point is that the length of your film is a huge accomplishment in and of itself. What do you call it?”

      He thinks.

      “I guess I’d call it an accomplishment, too,” he says.

      “No, I meant the film. What do you call it?”

      “The title or are you asking if I have a pet name for it?”

      “The title,” I say.

      “There is no title. But I call it my girlfriend.”

      “That’s sort of brilliant. There Is No Title but I Call It My Girlfriend.”

      “No. It has no title.”

      “So you’re saying there is no title, not it’s called There Is No Title?”

      “You’re seeming a little willfully dense right now.”

      “Well, I—”

      “The purpose of a movie title is to give audiences something to call it when they purchase tickets or talk about it with friends. It is to allow marketing departments a hook. It is to reduce the film to something bite-size, manageable, understood.”

      “Well, I happen to like titles. I take great pleasure in constructing witty titles.”

      “Since I have no intention of sharing this with