Are Charlie Kaufman and Christopher Nolan the same person?
“Don’t compete with me, Christopher Nolan. You will always lose. I know who you are, and I know I am the smarter of us,” says Charlie Kaufman in his literary debut Antkind, which saw the light of day earlier this year. It is as though he wanted to gently suggest there is some kind of rivalry between them, and that – of course – he is the stronger competitor in this regard as well. Ironically enough, both Kaufman and Nolan are enjoying their five minutes in the spotlight right now, as the Netflix-produced I’m Thinking Of Ending Things is taking Twitter by storm and Tenet is trying to claw back its budget in its embattled cinematic run marred by COVID restrictions and general audience anxiety.
Believe it or not, this is a unique occurrence, as both of these storytellers have historically never had to co-exist in the same frame of the zeitgeist and fight for the attention of the same corner of film fandom keen on visually audacious and cerebrally stimulating entertainment. In fact, it has been pointed out before that Kaufman once considered abandoning work on what later became Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind upon seeing Nolan’s breakout hit Memento, which potentially means these two storytellers have been more or less consciously avoiding stepping on each other’s toes. But what if this gentle feud Kaufman casually alludes to in an off-hand remark found in his novel is nothing more than a smoke screen obscuring a possibility that both Charlie Kaufman and Christopher Nolan are the same person after all?
Now, let the record show that the author of this article did indeed spend eight minutes performing an Internet image search to disprove this theory by trying to find a photograph where both filmmakers were seen in the same room – unsuccessfully. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume for the purposes of this discussion that – ridiculous as it is – this theory might hold water, which naturally brings about follow-up questions: which one is Dr Jekyll and which one is Mr Hyde? Which one is Tyler Durden and which one is Jack, the anxiety-riddled insomniac? Did Kaufman invent Nolan as his alter ego, or was it the other way around? Or maybe is it possible for the two to be imaginary figments of a third party who has successfully remained in the shadows, puppeteering their respective careers from a god-like vantage point?
Given the fact Kaufman is, in fact, quite a bit older than Nolan and has been active considerably longer, it is logical to assume he is the Stephen King in this equation and that Nolan is his Richard Bachman, an invention. But, then again, nobody invents an alter ego without a valid reason; King conjured Bachman to freely explore other genres and experiment with his writing. Hence a question: why would a confident storyteller on the precipice of a great career opt to divert some of his finite energy resources to concoct a persona he clearly sees as a lesser version of himself? The answer lies in the body of evidence – the movies. Even though they were eventually handed off to be directed by other filmmakers, Kaufman’s early scripts (Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind) were unmistakably his: cerebral, thought-provoking, and thus challenging to the viewer. They did not offer much help to unsuspecting cinema-goers who were left to their own devices when trying to figure out what Kaufman’s stories were truly about and what they were supposed to take home from them. Naturally, there is a lot of value in storytelling, which allows latitude to project various interpretations onto the narrative or to treat many of its aspects completely symbolically, though it has to be acknowledged that it comes at a cost. Not everyone will be able or willing to commit time and effort to connect the dots or to extract thematic value from the subtext of any film, let alone one that hides its subtext within a puzzle box and swallows the key. After all, many viewers want to be entertained and there is a limit to the amount of legwork they are willing to do to achieve that goal.
What Kaufman needed were training wheels to give to his audiences, because he wasn’t happy sitting atop his ivory tower and looking down at the unwashed masses incapable of deciphering the works of his idiosyncratic genius. Therefore, he invented Christopher Nolan, a young suave Londoner whose films would lure young adepts of cinema with their opulent spectacle and entice with their seemingly enigmatic narrative traits and elements of symbolism. But they would be much easier to decode to the vast majority of viewers. After all, it’s impossible to accuse Nolan of intentionally keeping the viewers at arm’s length, because all of his original scripts have consistently relied on introducing notions which are seemingly difficult to conceptualise – relative time dilation, entropy reversal or narrative fragmentation – and carefully holding their hand as the story was unfolding. This way, such films as Memento, Inception or Interstellar could reverberate with mass audiences by finding the middle ground between teasing people’s brains and offering digestible entertainment. Unknowingly, by indulging in Nolan’s head-scratching blockbusters, the viewers were being trained and groomed to seek out ever more intellectually-challenging entertainment. And where were they being gently prodded? Exactly – right into the hands of Charlie Kaufman and his modern-day bonkers absurdism.
But this isn’t where this conspiracy theory ends; if it did, it would portray Charlie Kaufman as a wholly self-serving puppet master bent on patronising his audiences into understanding his cinema. And it is not a great look to have. While entertaining, this push-pull dynamic between Nolan and Kaufman as two sentient personalities trapped within the body of one artist has a higher purpose. Not only does it introduce young and supple minds to the concept of intellectually-challenging cinema, it gives them a trajectory to follow. After all, having been infatuated with Nolan’s Inception and graduating to Being John Malkovich is just a beginning of a life-long journey that turns one onto progressively more challenging and mind-boggling filmmakers. It isn’t too hard to imagine that someone who has just come back from a socially distanced screening of Tenet or finished watching a string of explanatory Youtube videos disembowelling the symbolism behind I’m Thinking Of Ending Things would one day be keen enough to discover Richard Kelly or Terry Gilliam. And from there, it’s only a short jaunt to David Lynch, Roy Andersson, Jacques Tati and the great Luis Buñuel himself.
Therefore, while it is most certainly true that the Kaufman-Nolan split personality equivalence is nothing but a narrative construct, it might be more than just happenstance these two exist within the same era. It may be kismet. Destiny. And although Charlie Kaufman might see himself as superior to Nolan as a storyteller – “Starbucks is the smart coffee for dumb people. It’s the Christopher Nolan of coffee”, to quote from the same passage of his book once more – they exist in a strange symbiotic relationship. In fact, upon reflection it could be argued that Kaufman needs Nolan more than Nolan needs Kaufman. However, it is important to underscore that their interdependent relationship, which has seemingly begun to tighten with Tenet turning out to be the least accessible of Nolan’s works, is a pivotal cinematic contraption in its own right.
Merging an entertainment value of a theme park ride with potential usefulness of a catapult, their respective filmographies form a rather interesting concoction of gateway drugs for budding cinephiles of the current era. Although many fans will be perfectly content staying within the undoubtedly rewarding confines of what these two artists have to offer, some will invariably be hurled back in time to discover some truly great works of cinema. And while both Kaufman and Nolan can be dismissingly filed under the umbrella of avant-garde lite, it is conceivable and perhaps even expected that the great film critics of the future will have been able to trace the origins of their love for cinema to their teenage experiences with Tenet and I’m Thinking Of Ending Things, which will have lead them to discover Eraserhead, Play time and The Exterminating Angel.
