Being John Malkovich (1999)

directed by Spike Jonze

Lee Anderson

The first time I watched Being John Malkovich, I’d only been out publicly as “not cisgender” for a few weeks. I was muddled in identity soup somewhere between nonbinary and transmasculine and generally feeling like shit about it. Naturally, my girlfriend figured a surreal comedy about body-swapping with a celebrity would be the perfect thing to watch in the middle of my existential gender crisis.

I wasn’t thrilled about it. I told myself I was watching the film for Cameron Diaz as Lotte Schwartz, a frizzy redhead who looked like most of the crunchy girls I’d had crushes on growing up. I didn’t expect her to play any role beyond “weird wife,” raising more animals at home than she had room for and taking her chimpanzee surrogate son to psychoanalytic therapy. Her husband, Craig, who I guess is supposed to be the protagonist but I couldn’t stop imagining as a David Foster Wallace incel parody, discovers a door to the inside of John Malkovich’s brain. She demands he take her there so she can experience it if he gets to, and then something shifts.

After being John Malkovich, Lotte begins wondering aloud how she can go on living her life as she did before, knowing that a method of piloting a man’s body is out there. Not just any man—a man the film deems the pinnacle of masculinity, soft and warm and built like a bald brick. A celebrated man. A handsome man that women want. A man secure in his masculinity like other bald, house-shaped men wished they could be. It made everything made sense, like she’d been walking in the dark and someone turned on a light. Like Lotte, I hadn’t realized I’d been living in the guttural ache of dysphoria for years before one little thing shifted sideways and I felt levity for the first time. I couldn’t go back to shouldering it anymore.

By the time Lotte declared she’d figured out she was a transsexual, I’d revoked my “bad movie watcher” title, phone away, thoughts wired across the room from my brain to the TV screen with red strings. Lotte mentioned seeing their allergist to talk about sex reassignment surgery because he’s the only doctor they trust, and their eagerness and naivety are played off as jokes. Craig is an asshole about it the whole time. His character falls prey to his own hubris repeatedly throughout the film, but without a blink of self-awareness, still tells Lotte that “men can feel unfulfilled, too. Now you know switching bodies won’t solve your problems.”

To watch a bodyswap movie after you’ve accepted you’re not cisgender (and accepted that you don’t really know what to do with that information) is an exercise in having big feelings. For years, I’d told myself that if I were just prettier, I’d feel better; with more knowledge and college-aged pseudo-wisdom, I told myself if I could just shed the expectations of the patriarchy I wouldn’t have to feel like I had to be prettier. Neither train of thought worked out. Instead, I’d daydream about how easy it would be to just show up one day in someone else’s body, a body I didn’t feel completely disconnected from, or maybe disconnected from in a way that eventually went away. Everyone gets to be someone else in the film, and it was almost unfair that I couldn’t, that I was stuck in this flesh prison for the past 22 years and might be stuck forever.

In the meantime, I was still trying to keep up the act of being a polished, perfect woman. Granted, it was one who looked like an otherworldly creature with non-human bone structures, one who I couldn’t ever place as “woman,” but tried as hard as I could. Knowing I no longer fit somewhere in the binary didn’t stop me from trying my damndest to still be hyperfemme. Just barely out of my first semester of grad school, where students called me “ma’am” before pausing, not knowing if they were supposed to correct themselves or not, I was trying harder than ever before to maintain some sense of beauty on the outside of myself. Believing that femininity was the only thing that gave me any grace in the public eye, I could only view myself through the lens of the public. But seeing Lotte at the end of the film, still with big hair and a bikini top, was different. Maybe it was possible to be both not a woman and objectively beautiful; to look like that and be wanted by beautiful women in the way I’d always wanted beautiful women to want me.

I couldn’t stop talking about the film after I saw it. I paraded it—it was my new favorite, despite the weirdly sexual puppets and unfortunate late-90s edgy humor, because it had earnest transmasculine representation. I don’t know if Kaufman wrote it intentionally; metaphysics as a concept is so core to the trans experience that it can be hard to not read trans themes into it. But the idea of being so outwardly feminine and still recognized as masculine like Lotte was something I didn’t know I wanted, let alone something I could have.

After entering Malkovich, Lotte is only referred to with feminine terms once, and it’s by a 105-year-old-man. Lotte grins hard after in that way that tries to push platitudes through the bite of a misgendering. I recognized that smile from every photo of myself I could find. In the last third of the film, they yell multiple times about their dick and fight Craig. As they come into themselves, the innate power that comes with secure gender recognition frightens Craig. They become masculine equals vying for power and love from Maxine, their cold, power-clenching mutual interest. Maxine only wants Lotte, particularly when she is Malkovich. In the final moments, Maxine tells Lotte that they are the father of her unborn child, while Craig suffers. Lotte and Maxine get together and Lotte never looks different.

I turned the television off after sitting past the darkness of the credits for a few minutes. That week, I made the decision to start taking testosterone. I don’t know how exactly I came to that conclusion. It was just something impulsive and visceral, like if I had to go another day without it I’d break my teeth from clenching my jaw too hard. Lotte always lingered in the back of my mind—maybe if I just tried hard enough, found a portal to go through, I could find a way to be happy with my body as it was—but it didn’t work. Instead, I grew bitter that Lotte could have that happiness-without-transformation and I couldn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to watch the film again.

By the time I finally felt like I could circle back to Being John Malkovich, my beard was full enough that my friends called it “handsome” instead of “hilarious.” I still didn’t feel steady in an identity other than “not a man but not Not a man,” but had developed some sort of self-concept within masculinity’s crumbling framework. Floating out in the world somewhere between “trans masculine” and “lesbian,” transmuting my identities from one thing into another point of newness, I had become a shiny thing just for my own consumption. And Being John Malkovich was a much worse film the second time through.

The closeness I’d once felt to Lotte Schwartz was gone. I missed them in the way you miss yourself in the past, but the cringe I felt rising up around them through the rest of the film offset remaining positive feelings. My girlfriend watched me press my shoulder blades into the back of my chair, hide my face in my phone, take notes in all caps like “THIS IS A MOVIE FOR EGGS” and “IS MAXINE A CHASER” and “OH GOOD LORD, FUCK THE PUPPETS.” Being John Malkovich straddles the line between dashingly trans-allied and transphobic depending on how you’re feeling that day and who in the film you choose to align yourself with.

The film is both Kaufman and director Spike Jonze’s firsts, and it has big first-film energy. Being John Malkovich sets up Kaufman’s future much like Eraserhead does David Lynch’s: metaphysical, bizarre, not as funny as he thinks it is, and unequivocally trans. I’m not sure if Craig, the DFW of puppets, is supposed to be a writer self-insert, but he seems to beckon to the “common” male artist, one who struggles with self-worth and compensatory self-importance. He’s not supposed to be sympathetic, I don’t think. At least I hope he’s not.

Everything Lotte says is taken as a joke, particularly by Craig, even when they’re dead serious about it. The thing is that they turn out to be right in every situation. Even their comments about the chimpanzee’s repressed traumatic experiences become key to their success when he realizes that Lotte is another parent he can’t bear to watch die and rescues them from the birdcage Craig has locked them into. Lotte is always right, despite the odds, and this time I wonder why they don’t transition at the end. By then, all we have left is Maxine, their child conceived when they were Malkovich, Craig stuck inside the mind of the child like some kind of horror-based mythological punishment, and Lotte. Much in that same mythological vein, Lotte is the same: still granola Cameron Diaz, albeit in sunglasses in the future.

Are we the same person if we inhabit different bodies? If my brow line is now thick and legs so entirely muscular that I can’t even do my subcutaneous shots in them anymore because there’s just no fat left, am I still the same as the me who used to wear dresses to sorority recruitment events and broke down sobbing at pad commercials because I hated being even tangentially associated with periods? Reading Lotte’s lack of visible transition as a lack of transition—be it a joke, a lesbian awakening, or a giving up—is easy to do, but in the same breath I want to receive hope. Malkovich is used as an escape from the horrors of an unfulfilling life, even by Malkovich himself. Lotte finding their true self through the escape he allows is a poignant metaphor: sometimes, enough breathing room is all we need to figure ourselves out.

Lotte is the only one who finds true joy through being John Malkovich. Even without transitioning, whatever that means to them, they seem relaxed by the end. Happy, even. There’s this sense of interpersonal grace and dendritic layering of identity, never outgrowing the old self but forming a new self aligned with who we were. With enough time, we can heal.

“How dreary to be something,” croons Craig’s puppet rival early in the film during a news montage of his puppet shows overtaking a bridge, “how dreary. Like a frog.”

“All I can think about is wanting to be him,” Lotte admits partway through.

I gasped laughing when it’s mentioned at the end of the film that Malkovich was born in the same Chicago not-quite-suburb I live in, reborn, now. I don’t know if the person I see now in photos is still me, or a new me, or if looking past my old self’s hyperfeminine beauty actually did me any good, but I see someone who knows how to smile. He looks happy.

Lee Anderson is a trans writer from the Pacific North-, Mid-, and Southwest. They have been published sporadically but with zest in places such as Salt Hill Journal, The Rumpus, and Gertrude.