“The other day, I was lucky enough to be at an event to bring the arts back into schools and got to see an amazing collaboration between Yo-Yo Ma and a young dancer in LA, Lil Buck. Someone who knows Yo-Yo Ma had seen Lil Buck on YouTube and put them together. The dancing is Lil Buck's own creation and unlike anything I've seen. Hope you enjoy.”
This is the preface given by Spike Jonze, to a video he filmed in April of 2011. In this video, an L.A. street dancer named Lil Buck performs a style of dance, which is commonly referred to as “gangster walking”, while classical musician Yo-Yo Ma accompanies him on the cello. The performance cannot be compared to anything else – the blend of street dancing and classical music is truly a unique combination. It’s a combination that we don’t see in everyday life, a distortion of reality – which is most likely why Jonze was drawn to the idea. From his early days as a music video director and all throughout his career, Spike Jonze has had a penchant for escaping the confines of reality. From one of his earliest music videos, which plays in reverse, to films like Being John Malkovich and Where the Wild Things Are, in which he literally brings the viewer in to a new reality. This distortion of reality is a mirror of Spike’s obsession with straying from convention, in narrative and filmmaking technique. While Spike and his characters may seek to escape the confines of reality, what they are really seeking under the surface is acceptance. Spike’s work reveals a common human tension – the desire to be unique, yet also accepted.
One reoccurring theme that reverberates through much of Jonze’s work is the idea of a distorted reality. Jonze has proven to be a master of manipulating the techniques of filmmaking to create this effect. During his time as a music video director, Jonze directed a video for The Pharcyde’s “Drop”. In this video, one does not even begin to realize until about 30 seconds in that something is a little strange. Then, the realization slowly dawns on the viewer that the whole video was actually filmed with the band doing everything backwards. Afterwards in post-production, the entire video was reversed to make their motion appear normal. That is, until the band members begin levitating off the ground and even onto trucks at certain points.
Jonze again manipulates different filmmaking techniques to create a distortion of reality in which the audience sympathizes with a desk lamp, in a commercial that he directed for Ikea. In this commercial, a woman is throwing out her old lamp. Spike Jonze does something very interesting after the woman picks up the lamp. The camera follows the lamp as it’s being carried out of the apartment, and then shows the apartment from the lamp’s point of view, as if it had eyes, and could see that it was leaving the warmth of the apartment. Then the lamp is taken outside, and the warmness disappears. The lamp is now left in a harsh, cold environment, with garbage on either side of it. Spike Jonze uses the wind effectively, as it makes the lamp rattle, almost as if it is shivering. Jonze utilizes all all of these elements of filmmaking, the camera movement, the shot composition, the lighting, in a way that makes us feel sympathy for an inanimate object.
Not only is Jonze able to distort reality through the technical aspects of filmmaking, he does it through his stories as well. In Being John Malkovich, Jonze incorporates real life actor – John Malkovich – into the film’s narrative. The film follows a puppeteer named Craig who discovers a portal into the mind of actor John Malkovich. Once you enter the portal, you experience the world as if you were a view looking out through Malkovich’s eyes. After 15 minutes, you are ejected from his mind and dropped in a ditch on the side of the New Jersey Turnpike. Jonze takes the incorporation of real people and the “meta” elements of Being John Malkovich and takes them one step further in his follow-up film, Adaptation. This time, the main character of the film is Charlie Kaufman, who wrote Being John Malkovich. However, Kaufman does not play himself, and is instead played by Nicholas Cage. The film even begins on a fabricated version of the set of Being John Malkovich. The film follows Kaufman’s attempts to adapt the novel “The Orchid Thief” into a feature length film. Real life author Susan Orleans is a main character in the film, played by Meryl Streep. By incorporating real people into a fictitious story, Jonze is creating a world that may bare semblance to reality, but is ultimately distorted.
Jonze distorts reality in order to bring a sense of uniqueness to otherwise conventional pieces of filmmaking. Without the reversed footage, the music video for “Drop” would have just been a video of guys walking down the street rapping. But the reversed footage gives the rappers a very unique style of movement, which ultimately makes the video much more entertaining. What if Jonze had filmed a ballet dancer accompanying Yo-Yo Ma? While I’m sure it would still be a pleasure to watch, it would not be anything new – ballet and classical music go hand in hand. But by bringing a street dancer to “gangster walk” alongside an esteemed classical cellist, Spike Jonze is creating something entirely new, something that is both unique and entertaining.
This juggling act between unconventionality and “mainstream” has become a huge priority for contemporary filmmakers. In her essay, “Chronology, Causality . . . Confusion: When Avant-Garde Goes Classic”, Cornelia Klecker explores how “mainstream” films have begun to incorporate unconventional elements in their narrative. Klecker notes that linearity has remained a staple characteristic in Hollywood films until very recently. Upon review, Klecker notes that the number of popular contemporary films that utilize a nonlinear plot is, as she puts it, astonishing. Klecker states, “Now that we have entered the twenty-first century, the old traditional conception of a linear movement of time has, if not yet completely disappeared, at least lost its formerly unshakable foundation” (Klecker 25). It has become noticeable that filmmakers are now beginning to reshape the conventions of Hollywood, making what was once nontraditional into something that is accepted by both critics and audiences alike.
Jonze has helped paved this pathway for nontraditional elements to float to the mainstream. All three of Jonze’s films feature films have been both praised for their unconventionality and successful at the box office. Yet, in the movie Adaptation, Jonze creates a character that struggles to find the balance between uniqueness and entertainment. The film itself is primarily about the difficulty in writing something original, and the inevitability of having to succumb to unoriginal devices to make this work. The film follows Kaufman’s attempts to adapt the novel “The Orchid Thief” into a feature length film, without resorting to using conventional Hollywood elements. However, Kaufman (the writer, not the character), step-by-step throughout the film, resorts to one cliched device after another to keep the plot moving. It starts with the fact he portrays himself as a split personality: the "real" Charlie, who is an exaggerated form of his true self, and his identical twin Donald, who represents everything he resents about scriptwriters and Hollywood. When his script "just about flowers" seems destined to go nowhere, he introduces the next device by creating a love interest between Orlean and Laroche. Towards the end of the film he makes the devices more and more obvious, with the car chase, the sex, the drugs, and the deus ex machina in the form of a killer alligator. The film ends with Kaufman realizing how he should end his screenplay. But then, the ending is intentionally bad and device-driven, so why is Kaufman that satisfied? Is he just glad to get the film out of the way? Or has he realized something greater, that writers need to employ certain devices in order not to completely alienate their audience?
The reason why Kaufman is so satisfied is because he feels that he has created something that will be accepted. This desire proved to be more powerful than his desire to create something unique. He wants to create a film that doesn’t have car chases or unnecessary romance, but he ends up including these elements anyway, because he wants his screenplay to be accepted by the studio executive, and accepted by those who will eventually watch his film.
This tension between uniqueness and acceptance has been in conflict since the inception of art itself. In his 1939 essay “Avant-Garde and Kitsch”, Clement Greenberg outlines two distinct categories that he believes all art falls into: avant-garde, and kitsch. Greenberg defines avant-garde works as “art for art’s sake”, ones that push the boundaries of art. We see Greenberg put this idea of avant-garde on a pedestal very early on in his essay, when he says that avant-garde poet tries “to imitate God by creating something valid solely on its own terms, in the way nature itself is valid, in the way a landscape -- not its picture -- is aesthetically valid; something given, increate, independent of meanings, similars or originals” (Greenberg I). Greenberg values art that is independent of similar or originals, an idea that has carried on throughout the generations. Greenberg believed that this avant-garde art was a way to combat the dumbing-down of society, caused by another art form – kitsch. To Greenberg, kitsch is everything that is wrong with art – “popular, commercial art” that is spewed out for the masses. Greenberg is resentful of the profitability and recognition accrued by kitsch art, using terms such as “irresistible attractiveness” and “virulence” (Greenberg II).
So how does Jonze succeed where Kaufman in Adaptation cannot? The difference between Adaptation’s Kaufman and Jonze is the motivation of fear. Kaufman’s whole life is driven by fear – the fear of creating an unoriginal Hollywood film; the fear of being rejected by the waitress in the diner; and ultimately, the fear of writing a screenplay that doesn’t cater to the needs of his audience. Critics like Clement Greenberg have instilled a fear in the minds of many artists, where any thing popular or commercial is not only unoriginal, but detrimental to our culture. So here we have artists who are too afraid to truly express their creativity in fear of losing an audience, but are too afraid to “dumb-down” their work because some critics say that is unacceptable to be dependent on similars. Ultimately, Adaptation’s Kaufman is a representation of an artist who has succumbed to the pressure of this tension – an artist who has let fear trump his own creative desires.
Spike Jonze has become such a prolific artist because he never seems to let this fear creep in. He creates the art that he wants to create. He began by incorporating the distortions of reality – this style became associated with Jonze and his work. After the showering of critical praise for Being John Malkovich, what does Spike Jonze do? He helps co-create Jackass, a program that aired on MTV, in which men in their 20’s fart on each other and injure themselves. Then he comes right back and creates another masterpiece with Adaptation. We then don’t see a feature film from Jonze in 6 years, until he releases a big screen adaptation of the children’s book “Where the Wild Things Are” by Maurice Sendak. It’s this unpredictability that proves that Jonze has no fear in what he creates. He doesn’t let these preconceived notions of avant-garde and kitsch cloud his mind – instead, he creates what he wants to create.
But this fearlessness in creation does not explain why Jonze’s films have been so successful, critically and commercially. Yes he is bold and unpredictable, but that is not why his films are beloved. In Adaptation, Kaufman attends a seminar on screenwriting held by a man named Robert McKee. Robert McKee is yet another real figure that Jonze has inserted into a fictional story. In real life, our reality, Robert McKee is best known for what some people refer to as “the screenwriter’s bible”. The book is entitled, “Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting”. McKee begins the book by making several claims about what makes a successful story. The third claim he makes is this: “Story is about archetypes, not stereotypes” (McKee 4). In other words, a successful story identifies a common human emotion rather than a common human occurrence. Too often do artists attempt to capture an audience by making something familiar in appearance rather than in feeling. McKee provides this example to back his claim:
“For example, Spanish custom once dictated that daughters must be married off in order from oldest to youngest. Inside Spanish culture, a film about the nineteenth-century family of a strict patriarch, a powerless mother, an unmarriageable oldest daughter, and a long-suffering youngest daughter may move those who remember this practice, but outside Spanish culture audiences are unlikely to empathize. The writer, fearing his story’s limited appeal resorts to the familiar settings, characters, and actions that have pleased audiences in the past. The result? The world is even less interested in these clichés” (McKee 4).
Writers like Adaptation’s Kaufman get so hung up on trying to be different but TOO different, or mainstream but not TOO mainstream, that they lose sight of what storytelling is really about – connecting with the audience. Being John Malkovich may be unconventional in its construction, but boiled down to its essence, it’s a film about escapism and finding our own identity. Where the Wild Things Are is ultimately about childhood and the journey we traverse to grow up and mature. Even Jonze’s Ikea commercial plays on feelings of loneliness and abandonment. Jonze’s unconventionality has certainly earned him his merits, it’s these common human archetypes that Jonze plays on that ultimately win over the viewer.
If Jonze shows us anything, it’s that an artist is like a rope in a game of tug-of-war. The artist is being pulled by one side to be different, to be unconventional, to stand out from the rest. The other force is pulling them in the opposite direction, telling them that their work has to entertain. It has to sell. This constant tugging back and forth is the death of many artists. Like Adaptation’s Kaufman, they are unable to balance the two and succumb to one pulling force. But by telling a story in an unconventional way while still holding onto the heart of the story, Jonze withstands the pull. He shows that an artist can be unique, and they can earn a living in the meantime. Whether it’s a struggling screenwriter, a puppeteer with access to the mind of a celebrity, or a little boy lost in a world among wild things, Jonze balances imagination and empathy, proving that successful art can distort reality while illuminating and remaining true to our own.
Works Cited
Opening Ceremony Blog Exclusive - Spike Jonze Presents: Lil Buck and Yo-Yo Ma. Dir. Spike Jonze. 2011. Online Video.
The Pharcyde - Drop. Dir. Spike Jonze. 1995. Music Video.
Being John Malkovich. Dir. Spike Jonze. Perf. John Cusack, Cameron Diaz, Catherine Keener. USA Films, 1999. Film.
Adaptation. Dir. Spike Jonze. Perf. Nicolas Cage, Tilda Swinton, Meryl Streep. Sony Pictures Entertainment, 2002. Film.
Where the Wild Things Are. Dir. Spike Jonze. Perf. Max Records, Catherine O'Hara. Warner Bros., 2009. Film.
Klecker, Cornelia. "Chronology, Causality . . . Confusion: When Avant-Garde Goes Classic." Journal of Film and Video 63.2 (2011): 11-27. Print. Greenberg, Clement. "Avant-Garde and Kitsch." Partisan Review (1939): n. pag. Web.
McKee, Robert. Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting. New York: Regan, 1997. Print.
