Being John Malkovich

I saw Being John Malkovich at the Athena in downtown Athens, Ohio, when I was in grad school studying screenwriting. I wish I could say Being John Malkovich "changed me" or some other such profundity, but one raindrop doesn't matter much in a hurricane, and other shitty metaphors.

I was 24 then, away from home for the first time. Back home, my parents were going through their divorce after 26 years of marriage. I felt myself drifting apart from my friends, who all seemed to grow up immediately after I left Muncie. I knew no one in Athens and did not make friends easily. Dating was disastrous.

I was homesick from jump street. I found myself wearing Heorot T-shirts to class and idealizing Muncie. Do you know how hard you gotta work to idealize Muncie?

At the time, I didn't really know who I was, or what I wanted. I mean, if you'd asked me, I would've said I wanted to be a screenwriter, but I spent more time haunting used record stores and running the roads instead of writing. (Note: This has not changed.)

Mostly, I sat in my room, listening to Jawbreaker's Live 4/30/96, eating beef jerky, and feeling sorry for myself. Boo effing hoo.

Movies kept me upright even as everything else seemed to collapse. You're supposed to see a ton of films in film school, and I did, and everything I saw changed me by degrees.

With Being John Malkovich, I knew I'd seen something startlingly original, something that defied all the rules I was forced to swallow in my screenwriting classes, and something that explored themes consistent with my feelings of loneliness and pursuit of identity. But Being John Malkovich was just one example.

All of the following films came out during the 1999-2000 academic year:

American Beauty: A film about a man going through a midlife crisis, so he tried to reinvent himself by reliving some of his youth.

American Psycho: This one depicted a man whose life of material excess was so unfulfilling, he slaughtered people for fun, and when he finally tried to confess to all the killing, even his confession was meaningless.

Fight Club introduced us to a man whose lack of fulfillment and stifled primal nature led to a split personality.

High Fidelity depicted a glum, unfulfilled record store owner whose relationship was disintegrating because of his selfishness and failure to evolve into adulthood.

Magnolia was a pastiche of characters who were unhappy with their lives but unable to make changes as their lives careened out of control.

The Matrix was about a man who discovered the world around him was an illusion, and that he was really living out a constructed fantasy while his real body lay in stasis, feeding a machine.

The Sixth Sense gave us a dead man who did not know he was dead.

Seemingly every film of that brief period dealt with some sort of existential crisis, and that's exactly what I needed at the time. Maybe seeing these characters helped me see myself.

But that list isn't comprehensive. The list of films I watched in film school is longer than my arm, and luckily I've collected most of them on DVD and get to re-experience them. I can't wait.

So I can't say Being John Malkovich "changed me." "Helped" is a better word.