This was Jesse Shapiro’s term project for Professor Dorothea Barrett’s class Sex, Politics and Religion in Italian Literature.
The assignment is very open. You can do anything you like, so long as it is an original analytical engagement with something we read. Jesse’s project was about postmodernism. He writes in the style of Italo Calvino in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, using the second person. The script is a reworking of the postmodern film Being John Malkovich, which I used as an example of postmodernism when explaining it to the class. In the film, people line up by a little Alice-in-Wonderland-type door. The door leads to a slide; you go down the slide and end up in the mind of the American film star John Malkovich. Malkovich may be doing anything at the time you enter his mind – making love, eating a sandwich, you name it. Fifteen minutes later (and this is my favorite bit), you are ejected from the mind of John Malkovich and dumped on the hard shoulder of the New Jersey Turnpike. Jesse wrote a scene that wasn’t in the film but could have been.
Dr. Dorothea Barrett
Calvino’s “Being John Malkovich” not by Calvino, by Jesse Shapiro
If you chose to be here and not anywhere else at this specific moment in your life, I am very concerned for you. In fact, there might even be something wrong with you. You wonder what it is like to be someone else, which is normal. You never won an Oscar. You have never been on Broadway. People do not recognize you on the street. Odds are, you probably do not think you are “good enough” as it is. I mean, if you did, that would probably be a bad thing. People who think they are good enough are typically the worst kind of people.
Whatever the reason may be for your experience today, whether it be insecurity, desire, hatred, depression, sex, I will not judge you. If these feelings are common, I guess you are common as well. Is this bad? Well, that is not for me to say. I am simply the facilitator of questions. I am neither here nor there. Whatever you do, do not look at me like a salesman of any kind.
The fact of the matter is you are here right now. You are on the 7 and a ½ floor of an office building at a filing company, have waited in line for 8 hours with your head cranked to the side because the ceiling is 5 feet tall, and the time has arrived for you to step into the portal. The portal is a secret, but pretty much everyone knows about it. So, crouch down. Lower! Fling yourself inside the man that interests you more than you are interested in yourself. A sad thought truly.
To tell you the truth, which is a dangerous subject, most people waste their time there. 15 minutes. That is all you get. Baffles me that you are shocked that you got what you signed up for. You are inside the head of John Malkovich. He could be on the toilet, on the phone with his mother, having passionate sexual relations, or taking a nap. If you came without a plan, that is a waste of $250. Are you serious? Again, it baffles me. Maybe you will be different. This is what I tell myself. Most people are the same, though.
As I stare at you across the desk, I see someone who saw the ad to “Be John Malkovich for 15 Minutes” and thought to themselves, “wowwww, that sounds incredible.” Again, interesting. Most people do not even look at the ads in the newspaper. It is only out of some sort of desperation that they would take any sort of action.
To be John Malkovich is like being inside of a movie. Most of the people that come to my office claim to love movies. They love to talk about all the movies they have been planning to watch for ages, the movies they have been hunting for without success, the movies dealing with something they have been working on at the moment, the movies they want to own so they will be handy just in case, the movies they could put aside maybe to watch this summer, the movies they need to go with other movies, the movies that fill them with sudden, inexplicable curiosity, not easily justified.
Do people even get pleasure out of movies anymore? I find that all the movies today just get more and more and more screwed up in the head. Someone gets brutally murdered on screen and people laugh. Is this funny to you?
You look down and think that you do think that brutal murder is funny. Don’t you worry, it has already been established that you have a screw loose. Again, this is completely normal and there are no refunds here at the John Malkovich experience.
So you are looking at this portal that takes you into a man that has accomplished more than you have or will ever accomplish in your life. The wind shakes you to your core. The nervous energy is building up a little bit inside of you. Please do not be alarmed. Everyone experiences this feeling. You are not special. It almost feels like a slip and slide.
I see on the sign up sheet that you never wrote your name down, sir. “Why would I sign up? I mean, it seems like we are all the main attraction anyways.”
I ask the man again. “Sir, I need your name for tax purposes and in case you make a mad dash for it. We have a non-refundable policy.”
“My name… you want to know MY NAME!”
This man needs to calm down. You are always calm. “I am the art. I am the vision. I am the entertainment that everyone waits in line to see. You see, Craig, you really, really messed up.”
This guy is a classic lunatic that we get all the time at the John Malkovich Experience.
Nothing to worry about. Do not be alarmed in the slightest.
“I AM JOHN MALKOVICH,” says Mr. Malkovich.