Antkind

by Charlie Kaufman

And I suspected I had a chance with her. This would do amazing things for my self-worth, as well as my stature in the academic community.

Has he ever been with a man, even? Not him! Despite his full head of hair and an extremely successful wine distributorship. I am the rebel. Not that I have been with a man, but I would. I fall in love with people, not body parts. I would be with a man! Or even, I wouldn’t even ask. Let it be a surprise.

In addition to the unenlightened gender explorations, the movie features a troubling racial component. Each of the African American characters is portrayed by a white actor in African American face.

But let me take this opportunity to reiterate that I do not support any form of abuse of children, physical, emotional, or sexual. However, I would just add, as a matter of fact, that there is a popular misunderstanding of the term pedophilia. It specifically and only refers to sexual attraction to prepubescent children. Interest in young teens is hebephilia and interest in teens older than fifteen is ephebophilia. Look it up.

There should be a psychiatric term for old people.

I should add here that I have always been violently repulsed by the elderly.

We need to know The Tiger is a dangerous animal. We need not know that all tigers are not. Identifying the personalities of individual tigers does not serve our need to survive. Granted, it might make us more enlightened individuals and friends with some tigers, and I am all for that.

It’s got a nice nose to it, as they say about those wines with nice noses to them.

Suddenly I suspect perhaps he is African American and wearing Caucasian American makeup, more commonly called whiteface or paleface or cracker countenance or trash visage or clown white.

“I have an African American girlfriend,” I tell him as the door closes.

I worry that this carless sad man will in the future ask for car favors now that he has been made aware of my carfulness,

“Well, I do make up stories but they’re just for me. They keep me company. I get lonely. Always have.

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.

This film, even if over the next three months it descends into incomprehensible drivel, must be protected for posterity. The world must see it. But most important, I must see it seven times.

We as Americans take gravity for granted, I think you’ll agree. Perhaps this is true in other cultures; I do not feel qualified to say. But here gravity is just whatever: Stuff falls, get used to it.

Then by performance: actor, actress, thon, supporting actor, supporting actress, supporting thon, ensemble, thonsemble. Then by direction, cinematography, editing, score, writing, casting, best LGBTQIA films: best thon, best thon, best supporting thon, best supporting thon.

Without these lists by truly educated critics, laypeople would find themselves at the mercy of Hollywood marketeers and celebrity sycophants.

I activate the Nameless Apenessness of my soul—which I can do almost instantaneously after years of study and practice of some or another Eastern-style religion—through a quick intake of air. “Go,” I grunt apily.

I perform CPR, which I don’t know but I know there is pounding and I believe it is on the chest. It doesn’t work.

The World Was Never Meant for One as African American as You.

It is filled with notebooks, yellowed with age. Jackpot. Ingo in his own words. I will read these books with the greatest care and empathy, then put his words into my words, so as to be better understood by others, and share them with the world (others).

It is the reason I write film criticism: so that audiences can learn why a film is good.

I recall meeting and being charmed by his lovely girlfriend at a reception for The Wonderful Mr. Fox (fantastic movie!)

Perhaps they see the intelligence in my eyes or the compassion in my mouth. I pride myself on my humility, so I feel a certain embarrassment even speculating about such things.

The thought of her welcoming arms, and dare I say, vagina, keeps me focused.

My Florida transgender film monograph has been given to a hack half my age and twice my gender.

What is anger if everything is part of an inevitable machine? Simply another aspect of the machine. Nothing more than my dancing donkey urn.

If only I had an eidetic memory. But of course I don’t because it is a myth. A myth that has left me high and dry, for I am certain if eidetic memory did exist, I would have it. I am just the type to have it. That I don’t have it is proof that it doesn’t exist.

I wander the streets of New York looking forlorn, as is my way, in order to attract women who might think I’m deep or that I need to be saved, a technique that has not yet proved fruitful but I am confident will.

I nod encouragingly and also to indicate how much I’m learning, which I think is appealing and so different from the reaction most women get from most men.

I am neither highbrow nor lowbrow. I am simply brow.

I am proud to say that my rejection of these woman was handled so gracefully that there were no hard feelings, and, in fact, in all of the cases, I convinced them that they were the ones rejecting me.

Ocky, my oldest and dearest friend, is a terrible person. The thing is he is even more cisgender than I.

“If it ain’t woke, don’t fix it,” she says.

Actors dress in tights and pretend they can fly to amuse the differently mentally abled masses.

Ingo, who foresaw the future, who understood on some gut level that the artificial would insinuate itself into our lives and, moment by moment, step by step, imperceptibly, replace the authentic.

The thing Jung wrote about has been commandeered by corporations. Yes, we all have the same dreams now, but that is because we all watch Grey’s Anatomy. We all live in Shondaland, for the love of God. Now we dream of Tide and Buick. We long to be Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie. Our shadow self is Scar from The Lion King, and rather than struggle to incorporate even that anemic animated cartoon darkness into our being, we attempt to eradicate it, because Disney has taught us that Scar is evil and must be destroyed.

One day, he steals an old lady, and he accidentally kills her by repeatedly stabbing her until she is killed.

It’s called Who Shall Remain Nameless and it’s actually a metaphor for the modern world in which we now live, how technology isolates us, and how we are all cogs in this brutal machine we call civilization without air quotes but it should have air quotes.

The room spans or whatever the plural of spin is.

It’s astounding how quickly I can go from feeling like a girl to feeling like a big boy, but his calling me a man did just that, which oddly makes me feel like a girl.

There! She’s walking north. Of course: the best direction. I walk north, too. Not as good when I do it.

I feel so lucky she wants to hurt me.

I grew the beard back out of habit and laziness and also because I enjoy sucking at the mustache and discovering flavors from yesterday.

I vowed never to masturbate in a stairwell again, especially in this the age of toxic masculinity. But I can’t help myself.

“Yes. It’s frighteningly vivid. I’m frightened. By the vividability of it.”

Am I misremembering? There is no Internet here in my mind to research it.

I think about how much times have changed and how lucky we all are, except for men.

I pop a cube of white-flavored cheese into my mouth.

What good is a mass killing of thirty-seven people when last week’s mass killing was fifty-eight? One’s outrage needs to build in order to sustain.