If you’re unfamiliar with Kaufman’s writing, it’s likely because you know him for his film projects: he wrote Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. He directed Synecdoche, New York, Anomalisa, and I’m Thinking of Ending Things. I have thoroughly enjoyed his film projects and admired their overreaching quality while they nonetheless remain grounded in the emotional affectations of their characters.
Antkind takes its cues from Kaufman’s films—it has layers like a sprawling nesting doll. Where Synecdoche, New York proliferates characters imitating characters imitating characters back to their originary source, Antkind takes things a step further by suggesting that time is simultaneous, each moment contained within another. By extension,the future can be deducted from the present and the future can reach into the past to alter it. Like the characters in this book, though, I’m getting ahead of myself.
The novel focuses on B. Rosenberger, a film critic who has written on every obscure subject there is and who boasts a 7-viewing process when deciphering films. While on assignment, Rosenberger meets a man named Ingo Cutbirth, whom he discovers is an amateur filmmaker. Cutbirth has taken ninety years of his life to produce a single film, the run time of which is an entire three months (but don’t worry, he has built in nap and bathroom breaks!). Rosenberger commits to viewing the film and quickly decides it’s a masterpiece. While Rosenberger is viewing the film, Cutbirth dies and Rosenberger starts heading back home with the film intent on creating his legacy by analyzing, in his mind, the most important film of all time. There’s one catch: on the way back home, the film is lost forever in a fire (I guess there are two catches: Rosenberger goes into a coma and awakes with failing memory). Anyway, Rosenberger commits to recreating the film from memory to preserve this masterful work.
At over 700 pages, the novel is a sprawling and chaotic mess. There’s an essay to be written here—one I will never write—about the reason why so many white male American postmodern writers engage with film as their subject matter. David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest introduces a film that drives people to disturbing lengths of obsession, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves hovers around a documentary film that doesn’t exist, and now Charlie Kaufman creates a film that couldn’t possibly be created due to its incredible scope.
More specifically, Cutbirth’s stop-motion film is most compelling for that which is unseen. Cutbirth’s project is impressive in the size of its final product (what is seen on screen), but also for everything that doesn’t make it on screen. Cutbirth has thousands of figures and models that he would move between every shot of his stop-motion masterpiece. All of them are off-screen, observing and living their own lives. Later in the book, Kaufman sorts them into tiers: the seen, the seen unseen, and the unseen unseen—it is the latter that most commands Cutbirth’s attention.
These conceptual components are the most engaging parts of Kaufman’s novel. When he waxes philosophic, I find the novel introduces some compelling premises. Kaufman explores determinism in the section where Rosenberger tries to deduce an entire film from a single frame. He measures the trajectory of motion and anticipates the next moment, and the next, and the next. As a result, each moment predicts the future. By extension, the future can be traced far into the past. Cutbirth seems to understand this principle and operates in the world using that information. As such, when he and Rosenberger meet Cutbirth is able to communicate as if by telepathy when, in fact, we find out later that he anticipates what Rosenberger will say before it is said and responds before it was said, when it only existed as a thought. The other core concepts are the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the notion that observation changes the outcome of situations (hence why the Unseen figures of Cutbirth’s film are so critical).
At times, Kaufman engages with the human consequences for such ideas. Rosenberger, for instance, reflects on his experience of derealization when watching Cutbirth’s film: “Just as the concept of zero was revolutionary in the history of mathematics, so must the concept of nothing be understood by future humans sometime in the future. I am experiencing nothing, which on the surface might seem oxymoronic: the notion of experiencing the negation of experience. But I am indeed, and I shall attempt to communicate it. Imagine a vast room with nothing in it. Go on. Now subtract the room. Now take away yourself imagining it. Now take away yourself imagining it you’ve taken away yourself imagining it. Now repeat the process again and again and again. Now take away the concept of time that allows for the notion of ‘again and again and again.’ This is nothing” (110). There’s another section hundreds of pages later in which Rosenberger is de-personalized again and there’s an entire section with lines that begin “Here’s what I no longer think” (590). He lists a set of notions that have disappeared from consciousness—that have become unthought—and I find that to be a poetic compelling moment in the text.
The novel’s pockets of philosophy, though, are overshadowed by its absurdist humour. There’s a lot of silliness in the text. Between Rosenberger developing a fetish for clowns, sections of Cutbirth’s film mimicking Abbott and Costello routines, fast food ads serving as the soundtrack for human history up until its downfall, and so on—there’s a lot that falls flat. The novel explores the aesthetic value of humour; Kaufman considers the inherent pain of humour and its targets. It’s a worthwhile consideration, but it makes a lot of the jokes seem either purposeless or in poor taste.
The one recurring bit of humour that I actually appreciated was the ongoing intertextual engagement with Molloy, which I recently reread with my class. When Rosenberger wakes up from his coma, he identifies his name as Molloy: “What does it mean? From whence does it come, to drop unbidden into my consciousness like a speeding metal bar? I recall that Mollow is a character in the eponymously named Molloy by S. Barclay Beckett. It is a book I have never read, even though I have heard of it sixty-three times, I believe, and have pretended to have read it many of those times. Could that be the Molloy I am thinking of? It is a mystery. Perhaps I will find my answers there. Then I recall that when I woke from my coma, I asked if my name was Molloy. Molloy, it seems, is some sort of key to all this” (114). After introducing the Beckett character, some components of the novel start to make sense. Kaufman draws from the absurdity of Beckett for the sake of silliness. Whereas Beckett’s absurdism, though, feels human / more-than-human—he seems like he reaches to the very core of human experience—Kaufman’s deployment of similar absurdity feels like a superficial engagement with the work.
That being said, I enjoyed it whenever Mudd and Molloy showed up in Antkind. They create their own comedy duo, and Kaufman literalizes some of the motifs from Beckett’s work for his own purposes. When Rosenberger is watching Mudd and Molloy on screen, he doesn’t know whether it’s an earlier scene or a flashback. He comments, “If Moutarde has taught us one thing, it is that rigid sequence is a fiction. My eyeball self hovers in the back of the house, then slowly glides toward the stage, over the heads of the audience. It is a beautiful and graceful shot, which I am magnificently performing” (322). I like this moment because it feels like a really authentic moment where Kaufman finds the spirit of Beckett. In the later sections of The Unnameable, the narrator seems to become a disembodied eye. Kaufman applies that eye to engage in filmic commentary, but also explore time and cause and effect; I like how the interests of the books intersect in that moment. After, Rosenberger is “suddenly embodied, no longer just a floating eyeball, wandering old New York, searching for Molloy” (325). He questions a policeman in a top hat, and the moment feels like it could have been lifted from the initial section of Molloy.
The critical problem of the book, in my view, is the narrative voice. I have a very difficult time articulating precisely why the narrative feels imbalanced. Rosenberger is relentlessly rambling in his meditations, so much so that I got 300 pages into the book and wondered if it was actually going anywhere. Moreover, he feels compelled to justify himself to the audience on a continual basis, which leads to problematic engagement with social issues. Antkind sets up a trap for progressive readers. Rosenberger continually satirizes ‘wokeness’ by over-performing progressive values, all the while missing the point. It’s pathetic, for instance, how much Rosenberger begs to befriend Black people to prove that he’s not racist and it’s ridiculous the lengths he goes to when avoiding gendering people—to the extent that he negates peoples’ actual experience in the name of some more woke power. The humour felt like it was continually punching down, and I couldn’t reconcile it with the philosophy of humour Kaufman outlined elsewhere; if we acknowledge that humour is rooted in pain, the pain seems misplaced here in the person who acknowledges his privilege while refusing to let go of it. I wanted to believe that Rosenberger was being criticized for his misguided progressiveness, but the more I read the less sincere it felt; it felt more like an actual critique along the lines of “why can’t we just make films anymore—just because I’m a white man nothing I do is acceptable?”
I’d find Rosenberger’s ridiculousness easier to dismiss if it weren’t for the fact that Kaufman’s self-critique throughout the novel cannot possibly be sincere. Rosenberger continually praises Judd Apatow and continually disparages Charlie Kaufman films. Knowing that Kaufman wrote Rosenberger, I can’t believe he would realistically disparage himself in such seriousness. As such, it feels like we’re not supposed to believe in Rosenberger’s attitudes. In turn, it feels like we’re not meant to align with Rosenberger’s progressive values. It’s a difficult through-line. At the end of the day, it just feels like Kaufman is being an alarmist who has missed the point but so it goes.
A lot of the middle section of the novel avoids progressing the story in any meaningful way, but in the last hundred pages Rosenberger engages once more with Cutbirth’s film. The boundary between fiction and reality thoroughly blurs. It is unclear what is happening in the film and what is happening in Rosenberger’s life, especially when Rosenberger starts to rebel against his creator. When he falls down a manhole (he corrects himself to say personhole) a new Rosenberger emerges. Three copies Rosenberger emerge in succession, each with their own affectations.
Eventually, Rosenberger (which one?) is able to watch the film again—or maybe the film; in the calamity of war it’s a little hard to tell. He watches a big rectangle light up on the cave wall; Antkind is largely influenced by Plato’s allegory of the cave. Rosenberger watches the rectangle and says, “A big rectangle lights up the cave wall. I am reminded of myself. A big rectangle lights up the cave wall. I am reminded of my beloved Rectangulists, as I always am at thes tart of any and every film, except those of the lone German Circulogue Edward Everett Horshack. But this is different. This is Ingo’s film, somehow also reborn from its own ashes (as I have been thousands of times from my own) and it is not at all as I remember it” (623). B. Rosenberger then explains differences with the film, which is now a “simple white rectangle, unencumbered [...] a blank canvas, a blank page [...] an empty room, an uncluttered mind in the form of a quadrangle” (623). The scene is an extended depiction of a white screen gradually giving birth to an image, perhaps over the span of years. Rosenberger’s considerations are that of the reader: “Is it a masterwork? Is it a sham? Am I being enlightened, or am I being conned? It is, it occurs to me, nothing more and nothing less than what I bring to it” (623). By this little deflection, Kaufman avoids responsibility for his text. I return once more to the section where Rosenberger develops a clown fetish. Did I get anything out of that? Did it mean something deeply human? If the text is “nothing more and nothing less than what I bring to it”, Kaufman is able to skirt responsibility for a lack of a cohesive vision because I didn’t do enough.
While reading the text, I kept telling myself: this book is going to need a powerful ending to make this all worthwhile. I was thinking about Kaufman’s film Adaptation, which seems like it goes off the rails until one of Nicholas Cage’s characters delivers a monologue that serves as the argument to the film and brings it all together. While I wouldn’t say that Antkind does that exactly, the ending is reasonably compelling.
Kaufman offers a meditation on time and film. Through Rosenberger, he says, “Let us say [...] time functions just as a motion picture through a projector, in that it is made up of discrete moments, that true movement is an illusion of perception paired with the mechanism of a cosmic ‘projector’” (682). He elaborates on the idea of an element of reality traveling, i.e. disappearing to anyone moving forward. He discusses the idea of an organism that reverses entropy. He considers forward-moving organisms in contrast to backward-moving organisms that consume the present in order to propel themselves further into the past, “ingest[ing] thoughts and memories and fantasies in the brains of forward-moving creatures, us[ing] the resulting energy to multiply, leaving the brain of these creatures, finding other brains further into the past, where it does more of the same, depositing waste products in those brains, which are the digested thoughts, memories, and fantasies of the previous (future) brains” (686). This idea of moving backward, of considering how the present affects the past connects meaningfully to the idea of identity. If all experiences are what we bring to them, and we don’t know yet who we are when we experience any given moment, it can radically alter what it means to have an identity. This in so many pages what Kierkegaard summarizes in a line: “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.” To explore the idea, Kaufman needs to invent and experiment with verb tenses: “what might I have done to the past by creating it?” (682).
Ultimately, the novel engages with some compelling ideas but its emotional core seems to be missing. Where Kaufman’s films have miserable characters that are sympathetic in the midst of the high-concept approaches, Rosenberger is such an unlikable narrator that I kept expecting to experience a revelation that would change my perception, that would give him the perfectly relatable humanity that would make the book worthwhile. I don’t think Kaufman ever quite gets there. Maybe he needs an actor to help sell it.
Kaufman has written and directed a number of great films. I have watched them many times and find them worthwhile and enriching experiences. It’s unfortunate that Antkind demands itself to be sprawling. The impossibility of the film demands itself to be lengthy, absurd, layered. What the book would really benefit from, in my mind, is some editing; some of the moments really shine, some of the moments bellyflop into redundancy. Even so, I found myself turning the pages over and over again. For a book so long, I wouldn’t have thought I’d finish it so quickly; I suppose it did produce the desire in me to know more, the invitation into obsession alongside Rosenberger.
I’m writing this review several weeks after finishing the book and my notes are somewhat incomplete, so I apologize if my review is as disorienting as the book itself. Nonetheless, I wish you happy reading—but more likely happy viewing.
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