Antkind

by Charlie Kaufman

The men’s room is a nightmare. One wonders what people do in public restrooms that results in feces spread on the walls. And it is not an uncommon occurrence. Yet how?

It’s complicated to be a male, especially a white male, with all this lack of sympathy, with all this incessant talk of privilege, with this constant admonition to “Sit down. You’ve had your turn. Now it is time for you to step aside and adopt the attitude of self-loathing,” an attitude I have all along been prone to anyway, by the way. Only now that it is insisted upon, I bristle. If I am to self-loathe, I want it to be my choice, or at least the result of my own psychopathology.

So now as I approach my own doddery, I find that repulsion more and more directed inwardly. Rather than discovering empathy for them, I find I hate them and myself all the more and that I look longingly and jealously at the young, at the taut of skin, at the sharp of mind, at the perfect of form, at the cocky of spirit, at the tattooed of arm, at the pierced of wherever. Granted I see them as stupid and shallow, in their baseball caps with factory-flat bills, stickers still adhered, in their ignorance of international affairs, in their inability to see me, to be sexually attracted to me, to admire me. “You, too, will get old and die,” I have on occasion screamed at groups of teens who have called out “baldy” or “beardy” or “baldo” or “beardo” or “baldhead” or “beard face” at me from the safety of the 7-Eleven parking lot. At times I have screamed it at teens who have said nothing to me. Whom I am not repulsed by are the elderly genius directors amongst us. The Godards, the Melvilles, the Renaiseseses. Although I am not homosexual by inclination, I do feel a certain romantic interest in these men.

No one can know the trouble he’s seen, certainly not I, with my milk-white skin and my degree from Harvard, which I went to. Sure I have tramped, ridden the rails, lived in a hobo jungle, but that was part of a summer program at The New School, sanctioned by Union Pacific, our hobo jungles simulated, the hobos improvisational actors from Upright Citizens Brigade. Granted it gave us the flavor of the rootless life, but there was at least a hint of a safety net. When Derek Wilkinson had an allergic reaction one day during hobo luncheon (the beans had been prepared in a factory that processed nut products), there was a nurse (dressed as a yard bull) with an EpiPen at the ready. One can assume that an actual hobo with a nut allergy would be on his own in such dire circumstances. Or her own. The assumption of male gender in hobos has hindered the dreams of more female hobos than I as a white man can imagine. Perhaps it is best to refer to all hobos as thon.

The earliest example: Heinrich Telemucher’s 1891 short feature Ich Habe Keine Augapfel, in which two eyeballs drop from a man’s face and roll around for a long while on the floor. The film is important for two reasons other than its significance to the timetable of the history of animation. Number one, it is the first film in which someone’s eyeballs fall out. And secondly, this device became a staple of both Romanian silent films and early Japanese talkies. Whereas Romanian cinema used the device as a metaphor for the 1918 union of Romania with Transylvania, Bukovina, and Bessarabia, the Japanese used it for straightforward comic purposes, often having the newly eyeless character exclaim, “Now I can see the way two balls on the ground see!” or “I look much taller from down here!” It eventually became so commonplace in Japanese cinema that one Japanese film critic quipped pithily, “All those eyeballs falling out is enough to make one wish one’s own eyeballs would fall out so one would no longer have to watch even one more movie in which someone’s eyeballs fall out.” Granted, it is pithier in Japanese, in which the entire sentiment is conveyed in kanji with just one character.

We must look at loss in all its forms, mustn’t we? Loss of relationships, loss of love, loss of power, loss of memory, loss of status and the panic that ensues. We must accept that loss is a basic element of existence. The element of absence. All will be lost. “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain,” says replicant Batty of Blade Runner fame, in a rare moment of poetry and coherence in that inept, wrongheaded film by a director who cut his teeth in television adverts and seems unwilling or unable to recognize that the purpose of cinema is antithetical to that of selling toilet tissue. Be that as it may, this is a profound line that exists only because it was improvised by the brilliant Dutch acteur Rutger Hauer. So I am forever grateful to him and his gevoelige geest.

I attempt to think of a film in English I know as well as I know Moutarde. It is a difficult task. I do not expend much energy on American films, as they are generally not worth the effort. I consider the work of Apatow, the Great Exception, as he is known among we enlightened few. There is one scene in This Is 40 that jumps out and smacks one in the face, even in that veritable sea of Apatow brilliance. I’ve deconstructed this scene. I’ve written about it at length. I’ve performed the Paul Rudd part in my acting for critics classes. I know it. So I attempt to play it back in my mind, just to see if I can. PETE: We’re turning forty and we’ve been married a long time and there’s no passion anymore. DEBBIE: And we have two kids. I hope they don’t hear us fighting. PETE: No, you shut up! DEBBIE: I’m turning thirty-eight. PETE: But you lie about your age, so you’re really turning older than that. DEBBIE: We’re Simon and Garfunkel! PETE: Look at my anus through a magnifying glass! DEBBIE: Did you get me a present? PETE: Shut up or I’ll kill you! Amazing. That is indeed forty. It is as if Apatow had a camera in my house when I was that age. Even though I know I did not get the scene verbatim, it’s a testament to the power of the writing (and the performances of Ruddmann, as I have dubbed Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann, so organic and believable are they as a couple!) that I still find myself simultaneously laughing and crying as I recall the scene. The raw human emotionality is palpa...

How will my obituary read? I ponder this as we make our way west. I imagine it often. Not only the obituary but the online praise in the form of tweets from folks in the film industry. The Rest in Powers, the cited snippets of profundity from my writings, mentions of my selflessness, my friendship, the times I brought soup or consoled the brokenhearted (I must remember to do some of that sometime), the teeth-gnashing about how I was too young, how I was “a critic’s critic.” I imagine myself trending. Just for a little while.