Charlie Kaufman On Metaphysical McGuffins

by John Holbo on January 4, 2011

No, he doesn’t call them that. But here’s what he says:

I think you can be as outlandish as you want or as surreal as you want, as long as the characters are based in something real. You can put them in any situation or any reality as long as their reactions have something to do with humans beings and you’re focused on that element of it. I’m not interested in necessarily doing realistic things, obviously. I like fanciful stuff. But it can’t be just fanciful without people in it. Then it’s of no real interest. If you decide that people are turning into carrots or something as your story idea, then I think that I would have to figure out why that’s important to me as a person and why that story resonates in some way. Otherwise there’s no story. It’s just a gimmick. (10)

Quoted in Charlie Kaufman: Confessions of an Original Mind [amazon], by Doreen Alexander Child. (No, I don’t know whether it’s good. Just started.)

This isn’t the most incandescently brilliant theoretical formulation I’ve ever encountered, but … it deals with an issue that arose in comments: namely, why is Groundhog Day a good example and The Dead Zone not such a good one? In each case the protagonist gets a weird gift/curse for no clear reason. Not clearly scientific or magical. Just sort of is. Why aren’t they both Metaphysical McGuffins, in my sense? Before we fight about the term, the difference in the stories is that, in The Dead Zone, the protagonist’s ‘gift’ is just an occasion for writing a psychic detective story. It’s pretty good. I definitely have a soft spot for early Stephen King. (Haven’t seen the TV series.) But the story is driven by ‘wouldn’t this make a ripping crime-horror yarn?’ rather than “what does it have to do with human beings” – as they really are – that they might react to receiving this weird gift in this way?

[UPDATE: as pointed out in comments, I have a soft head for early Stephen King, too. I’ve forgotten half of what the book was about. A dead zone. That, or as a young teen I only cared for the detective bits. Honestly, that’s all I remember. So bad example. But point still stands.]

Now, you’ve got to be careful. Because it’s not as though Groundhog Day is realism, or psychological realism, or any kind of realism. It’s a comedy, and comedy is a genre, with rules, and the film more or less follows them. But it’s about – in a semi-allegorical/semi-thought-experimental way – real human attitudes and issues in a way that The Dead Zone is … not so much. (Alternatively, of course, Groundhog Day is just a rewrite of Hegel’s Phenomenology on the theory that Andy McDowell is even more awesomely desirable than Prussian bureaucracy, or whatever Hegel decided was best.) It’s the difference between Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis”, and rewriting the end so that Professor X. saves Gregor S. and invites him to attend his Special School for Transmogrified Youth, after which he joins a crack team for solving crimes no one else can. (He teams up with The Nose, among others.) If the point of the weird thing is just to tell a standard genre story, it’s a Metaphysical McMuffin (as someone suggested in comments.) If it sticks to your ribs, it’s a Metaphysical McGuffin.

But seriously. It needs to be sort of half-thought experiment and half-allegory. It needs to be a thought-experiment that is half-wrecked up by being allegory. And an allegory that is made absurdly cluttered up by thought-experimental lab equipment, as it were. (Obviously I’m making up the rules as I go along, to get the result I want.)

Final note about the term itself. Hitchcock means ‘McGuffin’ to mean, as it were, nominal excuse for getting the action going. That fits The Dead Zone as well as Groundhog Day. McMuffin should be as good as McGuffin. It’s a non-nutritional thing that people will, predictably, swallow. My narrowing/ennobling of this use does seem to stand in some need of justification, yet feels to me justified. A lot of the charm of these productions, the kind I have in mind, have to do with the counterpoint between deep – metaphysics: reasons! – and shallow – no reason for the metaphysics. Of course, Hitchcock’s own use was, as it were, deep through superficiality. The world’s just one great big McGuffin, kid, so up and at ’em! That’ll do for now.

{ 34 comments }

1

John Holbo 01.04.11 at 1:31 pm

Now that I think about it, we should get Alan Moore to write “The League of Para-Allegorical Gentlemen” – with Gregor Samsa, The Nose – and who else? – help me out here. Ubu Roi and his Financial Horse could back them with money, so they can afford a nice base of operations.

2

Lemuel Pitkin 01.04.11 at 1:41 pm

Who else?

The Breast.

3

John Holbo 01.04.11 at 1:43 pm

Where’s the Breast from? I mean: not in a literal, anatomical sense?

4

Lemuel Pitkin 01.04.11 at 1:52 pm

Philip Roth novel. It’s an update/parody of The Metamorphosis.

5

digamma 01.04.11 at 2:57 pm

Er, the detective story in The Dead Zone is a subplot. The main plot is about Greg Stilsson’s rise to power. Plus there’s a lot about Johnny’s relationships with his old girlfriend and his parents.

6

nate dorward 01.04.11 at 3:08 pm

I think Kaufman’s formulation is a paraphrase of something one of the Monty Python troupe said (Cleese? Palin?)–I remember it running something like “it’s OK if you have everyone dressed up like carrots, but if someone walks into the room and ISN’T dressed like a carrot then there’s got to be a good reason”. The point being that a silly premise is great but it needs to be worked out with a certain internal logic.

7

Lemuel Pitkin 01.04.11 at 3:12 pm

(credit to lt in the other thread for The Breast, btw.)

8

someguy 01.04.11 at 3:22 pm

Because the car accident and brain damage is the explanation. Like it or not.

Bad mysterious mumbo jumbo explanation and no explanation are very different.

9

R. Carter 01.04.11 at 3:27 pm

Oshino Hanzaburo, from that Akutagawa story.

10

John Holbo 01.04.11 at 3:32 pm

Well, OK, so I’m misremembering the Dead Zone as more detective story than anything else. (Haven’t read it in 25 years.) But I do remember it as being unclear that ‘brain damage’ was really even nominally supposed to be an explanation of it all. I remember it being more or less impossible to believe that brain damage really could begin to explain it. Which made it nicely eerie. Or maybe I was just young.

11

David Moles 01.04.11 at 3:33 pm

Pretty sure The Nose is a villain. Master of disguise and all that.

12

Henry 01.04.11 at 3:37 pm

My memory of the Dead Zone is only slightly better – about ten years old or so – but as best as I recall, there is a _lot_ in there about how one would live one’s life if one could see the future, the shitty consequences this has for one’s ability to maintain personal relationships &c&c.

13

John Holbo 01.04.11 at 3:40 pm

Hmmm, ok, maybe I need to reread The Dead Zone.

14

Anon 01.04.11 at 4:44 pm

The Hairy Ape?

15

Bruce Baugh 01.04.11 at 4:50 pm

Yes, the burden of a kind of knowledge we have no experience with or preparation for is a big part of The Dead Zone. Other people can do thought experiments, but Johnny has to actually do something – including, if he decides, deliberately not choosing to act – and it’s really not a lot of fun for him.

But it is, as I mentioned in the other thread, very much a story that appeals to the authority of science. There’s no definitive explanation but a solid sense that there is a science to it. The tumor that is killing Johnny is tied in to the brain damage he suffered, and the clearly anomalous neurological activity he generates while having a precognitive/clairvoyant vision.

I wonder if King’s The Colorado Kid counts here. It’s a short novel, with two old newspaper guys telling their intern about the one genuine mystery of their careers. A dead guy is found on the beach of their Maine island one morning. His identity gets established, and it turns out to have been just barely physically possible for him to have gotten from his regular life in Colorado in time to die when and where he did, but there’s a huge missing matter of motive and no way to possibly establish one with the available evidence, such that something Fortean ends up feeling more plausible than a mundane answer even though the story offers no ground for believing that anything like that is possible in its universe.

16

bianca steele 01.04.11 at 4:55 pm

Taking off on a suggestion made by Petunia on the other thread, it’s possible that one difference is that it’s possible for competent but not outstanding films along the lines of The Dead Zone to be made by people who aren’t geniuses on the order of King and Cronenberg, where films along the lines of Groundhog Day too often end up like The Lake House.

There are two corollaries: (1) At that point the filmmakers surely have to ask themselves why not make The Bucket List instead. (2) It seems to be strangely impossible to make a competent but not outstanding film along the lines of ESotSM (which I don’t love).

17

Petunia 01.04.11 at 6:03 pm

Could the Tailor’s Dummies from Street of Crocodiles join the League? They might play the cannon-fodder role of the Enterpise’s red shirts.

18

Henri Vieuxtemps 01.04.11 at 6:31 pm

I think maybe the difference between The Dead Zone and Groundhog Day is that the psychic thing is a cliche, while the repetition thing is something newly invented. A new radical situation for the main character to deal with.

For that matter, Memento, without any fantastic stuff at all, is pretty impressive as well.

19

Louigi 01.04.11 at 8:52 pm

Shouldn’t the McMuffin be the one that sticks to your ribs?

20

Bruce Baugh 01.04.11 at 9:18 pm

Henri, Groundhog Day has quite a few precedents, and Harold Ramis in particular is an sf fan, I’ve read. Ken Grimwood’s Replay is one such.

21

Matt McIrvin 01.04.11 at 9:31 pm

Many, many precedents, to the extent that people keep claiming Groundhog Day was ripped off from the one they know about.

But the setup alone wasn’t what made it work.

22

Henri Vieuxtemps 01.04.11 at 10:33 pm

Well, still, not as cliche, in pop-culture, as seeing the future.

23

Henri Vieuxtemps 01.04.11 at 10:50 pm

It’s true, of course, that the setup alone isn’t what makes it work. But the setup is what we are talking about here. You take a person, place him (usually him, sometimes her) in an extraordinary situation, anything from losing his car in the mall’s parking lot to turning into a cockroach, and see how the character behaves. That’s the story. What makes it work is your talent.

24

Tom T. 01.05.11 at 2:37 am

I’m afraid the answer is simpler and more ineffable. Groundhog Day works because it stars Bill Murray, an actor who can make anything work (up to and including even Garfield). To Kaufman’s point, Murray can make the viewer interested and invested in whatever he’s doing, no matter how absurd; he even made the icy Andie MacDowell seem like a reasonable object of desire. Dead Zone‘s Christopher Walken, by contrast, tends to have the opposite effect, making even the most mundane activities seem off-puttingly odd or threatening.

25

John Holbo 01.05.11 at 2:45 am

No, Christopher Walken can do McGuffin. Just think about that uncomfortable watch he had to wear in Pulp Fiction. Which is to say: McGuffin can be odd and threatening. (Also, Walken can let all that go, as in the Fatboy Slim dance video.)

I haven’t seen Garfield, but I doubt Bill Murray’s ability to save it, on a priori grounds. The Only way to save Garfield is “Garfield Without Garfield”, which turns it into a Charlie Kaufman-style production, somehow. Metaphysical McGuffin without the mcguffin. Which is, as it were, the purest case.

26

yeliabmit 01.05.11 at 4:14 am

Holbo: “The Only way to save Garfield is ‘Garfield Without Garfield’…”

As it happens, Garfield without Garfield does actually save the strip, in a bizarre kind of way — see: http://garfieldminusgarfield.net/

27

John Holbo 01.05.11 at 4:25 am

Oh, sorry I was misremembering the title, yeliabmit. I do know about that and meant to refer to it. (Sorry, I don’t want to pretend to be the isolated genius who reinvented this brilliant scheme all on my own.)

28

Kent 01.06.11 at 12:44 am

Andie, not Andy, McDowell.

“If the point of the weird thing is just to tell a standard genre story, it’s a Metaphysical McMuffin (as someone suggested in comments.) If it sticks to your ribs, it’s a Metaphysical McGuffin.” –> you’re missing a “not” in there, somewhere.

29

John Holbo 01.06.11 at 12:53 am

“If it sticks to your ribs, it’s a Metaphysical McGuffin.” —> you’re missing a “not” in there, somewhere.”

Maybe I should have one, but I didn’t mean to. The idea is that these stories are shallow, in the sense that the ‘reason’ or ‘motive’ or ‘engine’ of the story is nominal, occasional, shallow. Just something to get us started. Yet, oddly, they feel ‘substantial’. They seem ‘deep’, or philosophical, in a way that is, admittedly, contrary to Hitchcock’s sense. (But then, I think, in a deeper sense it may be congruent.) This has to do with some sort of meta sense of ‘depth through superficiality’ – whether in a Wildean or Nietzschean sense or what have you. Thus the paradox of empty calories that really stick to your ribs.

At this point some folks will say the sense is an illusion. These films aren’t deep, just clever and comic, in a way that appeals to former Monty Python fans who turned philosophy profs who now want, somehow, to combine their day job with the fact that they like these movies. There might be something to that, or there might not.

But you are definitely right that it is spelled ‘Andie’.

30

Twisted_Colour 01.06.11 at 2:49 am

The kwyjibo.

31

Tom T. 01.06.11 at 4:03 am

Well, as long as we’re allowed to get metaphysical, I happen to think Bill Murray would even be awesome as Garfield in “Garfield Minus Garfield.” That’s how good he is.

32

Henri Vieuxtemps 01.06.11 at 4:38 am

I dunno, Murray’s been typecast as a wise-ass, and he’s good at it, very convincing. But overall, I think, Walken is a better actor.

33

JP Stormcrow 01.06.11 at 4:48 pm

I happen to think Bill Murray would even be awesome as *not* playing Garfield in “Garfield Minus Garfield.” Sort of a Homeopathic McGuffin, to stretch the original meaning of the terms beyond all fucking recognition a bit.

34

Treilhard 01.06.11 at 5:21 pm

But Garfield has already saved itself!

The only proper reading of Garfield is that it is a sort of MMcG. Garfield is a delusional stray squatting in a board-up. The Arbuckle household is a fantasy constructed by the stray in denial, incapable of coping with the reality that he has been abandoned by his owner. The disturbing excess of lasagna & all that…

http://www.gocomics.com/garfield/1989/10/24/

Comments on this entry are closed.