Head Canon: Being John Malkovich in the social media age

“Consciousness is a terrible curse; I think, I feel, I suffer…”
– Craig Schwartz, to a chimpanzee

In Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s beguiling 1999 comedy Being John Malkovich, John Cusack plays Craig Schwartz, a sad-sack who begrudgingly takes an office job as his puppetry career refuses to take off. At the office, he and his new work crush, Maxine (Catherine Keener), discover a mysterious door behind a filing cabinet, which leads directly into the head of noted star of stage and screen John Malkovich. After a few test runs, Maxine and Craig hatch a plan to monetise their access; Craig, Maxine and Craig’s wife, Lottie (Cameron Diaz), end up in a psychosexual love triangle; Malkovich starts to notice something’s up; chaos ensues.

This is a film that draws you in with Jonze's trademark surreal-to-zany flourishes, from the half-height ceilings of Schwartz’s new office workplace, to Craig and Lottie’s bizarre menagerie of animals including the aforementioned chimp, to an iconic scene in which John Malkovich goes into the head of John Malkovich and suddenly *everyone* is John Malkovich.

But pretty quickly, the film starts to hit you with something darker and more existential. It asks the classic body swap question – ‘What if you could see the world through the eyes of another?’ – then answers it with a strained expression and a ‘cut it out’ hand gesture.

Take our first trip into Malkovich. Craig crawls down a low, dank tunnel that almost seems to be sweating and breathing, before he’s violently sucked in, the darkness descending and the door slamming behind him. All of a sudden we take Malkovich’s point of view, but there’s a disconcerting thrum in the background, and a haziness to the edges of the image. We clomp about in John’s shoes, and we squelch and crunch and slurp our way through breakfast. The sound is bassy, the speech is muffled, the camera is juddery. We’re in his body, but we are interlopers, sticking our heads through the door and nosying around. We are not, in any meaningful sense, John Malkovich.

As their visits to Malkovich continue, characters gain more control over the Malkovich body, and start to reflect on gender, power, their relationships with one another and with themselves. But in 2025, the ability to temporarily dive into another body and experience worlds through the eyes of another does exist – and it feels quite telling that in the real world, nobody seems to want it. The biggest technology companies the world has ever seen, during a pandemic where many people had nothing else to do, couldn’t make virtual reality or the ‘metaverse’ stick as anything other than a punchline about Mark Zuckerberg’s legs.

Being in your own body can be gross enough, with your blocked nose and itchy skin and thoughts and feelings, without taking a leap into someone else’s. Rather than jumping from vessel to vessel, the hardware and software of the 21st century are about observing anything you want, at a safe remove that comes with holding a rectangle 12 inches from your face.

But in an environment saturated with text, images and audio, you need a hook. Parasocial relationships, where audiences are encouraged to see stars as friends rather than distant unknowable beings, are the cornerstone of modern life. Finished a book? You should follow the author on Instagram! Liked that song on the radio? Watch this video to find out what the singer takes with them on a plane! But Being John Malkovich pushes the idea one step further. When you log in for your 15 minutes with the star of Con Air, you aren’t just tracking what John gets up to on his day off, or watching an actor get ready for his big night out; you *are* the actor, and it’s your night out. It’s this breach of the pact between performer and audience that sends Malkovich spinning, and results in Schwartz taking full control of his host and turning him into a literal puppet to act out his greatest desires (which involve remaking John Malkovich as the world’s greatest puppeteer – metaphor is truly a hell of a drug).

As much as the new century has changed how we interact, there is still a desire and a deep need for some division between our personal and private lives, to turn off if we want to and turn away when we have to. Being John Malkovich presses and prods at the edges of this division then punches a great big hole in the wall, challenging the viewer to think about what we actually want from our relationships with celebrities, society and those closest to us, and what it means to be ourselves when we're so immersed in outside influence. We’re in the future where everyone can and will be famous for 15 minutes – but we won’t all get to be John Malkovich.

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Being John Malkovich was released in UK cinemas on 17 Mar 2000

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It's available to stream on Sky and Now Cinema, and available to rent from sundry VOD platforms