Antkind: A Novel. Charlie Kaufman

It’s staggering, I think, as my inexhaustible jealousy of all things I admire rears its head. How is this achieved? How, cinematically? Technically, what exactly is the trick? There is a trick, certainly. This dark and silent rectangle communicating so much about the room it portrays, about its occupant, about his life. Who is the filmmaker? I wonder. Why are there no credits, no title? And I decide it is the very lack of this information that buries the film so deeply in my brain, the part of my brain relegated to dreams and fleeting thoughts. It is an orphan film by choice, not by accident. The anonymity of the film worries me. It makes this film somehow dangerous. Even as I watch it, it integrates and vanishes, someone else’s glass of water poured into my own only partially full glass of water. This is not a movie I will remember properly. It lives only in the irrational, as does a dream. My rational mind, the bully, will strong-arm it away from me and fill in the blanks, add explanations, because it cannot let it be. This bully contaminates the dream, changes it into something smaller, manageable, tellable. The dream as it is cannot be told. So it is with this film. In the remembering or telling, it becomes something else, and so the truth of it is destroyed. And I go on with my life, with my anemic attempts to portray the world in its fullness.

      I think all this as I drift in and out of the thoughts of the unseen man in the bed. He is old, not like me. He struggles with insomnia, which is very much like me. He is tormented by a lifetime of these sleepless nights, years wasted worrying, attempting, failing. Beads of sweat form along his hairline high on his forehead as he goes over and over his career fumbles, his diminishing creativity, his failures, his humiliations, the looming deadline he faces, both metaphorically and literally. He lusts after inspiration the way he once lusted after women, a spark of some sort. It is the year 2015, the future, far in the future. Not as he expected it when he was younger, when he was my age. Now there are computers in every home. There is world peace. There are portable telephones that can be carried everywhere in semiportable little wooden boxes. There is an awful lot of diaphanous clothing, but still it is—there is delicious food in pill form—but still there is … oh!—universal human fulfillment—but still there is something wrong. He is not fulfilled. Every day, the homeopapes spout the good news, but all this happiness doesn’t seem to be enough for him; a wrongheaded competitiveness still lurks in his psyche. He longs to be admired even though he lives in a time when everybody admires everybody. It is both mandated by law and accepted by medical professionals as therapeutic. Indeed, this point in history has been dubbed, somewhat joshingly (but not in a mean way), The Mutual Admiration Society. It follows closely on the heels of The Society of Mutually Assured Destruction, which followed a period no one alive remembers, something about flappers, perhaps.

      The insomniacal thoughts of this man plague me as he struggles through the night. The alarm clock with the lighted dial is checked repeatedly, interspersed with tossing and turning and cursing and pillow pounding. I feel both the slowness of the passage of time and the relentless slogging toward morning light. How is this accomplished? Perhaps I am responding to ambiguous subliminal cues hidden in individual frames. Perhaps I am projecting all of this onto the scene and there is nothing of this there. I am put in mind of Dyrgenev’s experiments. He projected black, gray, and white onto a screen. People saw snowstorms in the white image. One man saw a snowstorm on a moonless night in the black screen. Just as I’ve concluded it’s my own psyche on this screen, a dim morning light peeks through a narrow opening in the drapes and I learn the room, exactly as I pictured it, is there before me: the dresser, the desk, the pile of clothes at the foot of the bed. The mundane horror of a night of wakefulness has been fully experienced, as well as the hopelessness attendant to an awareness that this is a nightly battle and has been since youth. The old man is exhausted. I am exhausted. I think, He could be me, if I were an old man, and I feel a sense of relief that I am not, that there is still time for me to figure this out, to not be conquered by a lifetime of sleeplessness.

      The old man thinks “time to get up” and does, tossing the tangle of sheets aside. There is not much of an erection these days, but there is something. I feel his thoughts, the routine acknowledgment of the semi-erect penis, the need to urinate. I compare it to my own morning experience. I become conscious of my own need to urinate. As he makes his way to the bathroom, I consider whether I can wait or if I should run out myself. I think it might be safe to make a dash for it now. I decide not much is going to happen in the next two minutes. But I don’t want to chance it. The movie is dull but also unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, and I can’t safely predict what might happen next. I check my watch and find that although I just watched him toss and turn in bed for six hours, only three minutes have passed. Maybe I don’t have to urinate. The old man flushes and leaves the bathroom. Oddly, my need to urinate is gone. In the upstairs hallway, he passes the door to his wife’s room. She is snoring behind it. I know that is why they sleep in separate bedrooms. I judge their marriage. This is not what marriage should be. I will never get this old. Even if I live to this age, I will never be old like that. It is a choice to become old like this. People can remain young at heart. The movie ends, no credits, no fade; it just stops. I leave.