Antkind

by Charlie Kaufman

We are stuck in the present. An old man is old. A young man is young. A boy is a boy. We can’t see life as a journey. Where we are now is not where we started. It is not where we’re going. It is essential to see this old man not just as a reminder of my own mortality, but as a person, someone who might have had or might still be having a fascinating life with fascinating thoughts.

“I said unrelatable the first time, not completely unrelatable. Those are from different reviews. And it is neither. I was profoundly moved by the plight of the protagonist, B. Rosenstock Rosenzweig, as he, like his personal heroine, Bisadora Runcan, struggles to make one authentic gesture, albeit not in the world of dance, but in the realm of ideas.”

This is b

Comedy is a lie, too, of course. It’s a defense, an aggression. It is a thing created to separate, to say, “I am not like this.” It is Godlike in its judgment and, by definition, the antithesis of empathy. Comedy sits on its throne and states: You are ridiculous. You are pathetic. You are stupid. Your pain amuses me. Most important, I am not you. Even comedy directed at the self, the stand-ups, the Woody Allens of the world, is performed as an act of defense: I am in on the joke that is me, therefore the joke is not me.

The truth is I know I could never be of any interest to her and, I suspect, anyone in whom I might be interested. I am an ant. Even with an atomizer genie on my team, I am not able to fantasize myself younger or better looking or smarter or richer. Yet somehow I can fantasize myself easily into an even more impossible scenario, a body-hopping nightmare. I guess the truth is I crave humiliation. What is ironic or at least curious is that in my actual life, humiliation is the thing I most fear and I most experience. Yet I am not happy. Why?

Sadly, unless I can wholly translate this film into a novelization, I am the only one who will ever be able to visit his world. And while a world where one is a ghost is a world free of guilt, guilt and regret must be taken on if one is to live fully. A living creature cannot live without destroying other living creatures. We must eat one another, must we not? This is the way the world works.

“Most of us are invisible,” he said. “We live our lives unrecorded. When we die, it’s soon as if we have never lived. But we are not without consequence, because, of course, the world does not function without us. We have jobs. We support economies. We take care of children and the elderly. We are kind to someone. We murder. The existence of us, the unseen people, must be acknowledged, but the dilemma is that once acknowledged, we are no longer truly those same unseen people. Your Dardenne brothers, your De Sicas, your Satyajit Rays are honorable, talented filmmakers, decent and, I suspect, caring, but the work they do is wrongheaded. Once the Unseen are seen, they are no longer Unseen.

“B., we can never truly touch another thing. Touch is what we feel when two things repel each other. We are all isolated, even from ourselves. Our own molecules do not even touch each other. Since I can’t be touched, I cannot be hurt. Smoke does not get in my eyes because it cannot, and true love is not denied only to me but to everyone, to everything. I am not alone in being alone. This comforts me.”