German Romanticism Goes to Hollywood: Heinrich von Kleist's "On the Puppet Theater" and "Being John Malkovich"

This paper presents an analysis of Spike Jonze's 1999 film Being John Malkovich through the lens of its intertextual play with the German Romantic Heinrich von Kleist's 1811 essay "On the Puppet Theater." Based on Kleist's critique of the Enlightenment (especially its model of instrumental reason) and his essay's theme that true gracefulness in the theater can only be achieved after the removal of human consciousness, Jonze's film confronts us with a challenging allegory of the cinema, cinematic spectatorship, and the star system. In such a reading, the cinematic apparatus can be seen as the realization of Kleist's crank, with which one of the discussants in the essay seeks to replace the puppeteer. John Cusack's Craig, the film's initially unsuccessful puppeteer, undertakes a similar endeavor: entering the famous actor John Malkovich's body through a mysterious portal, he learns to control his new puppet, hence integrating puppet and puppeteer in one body and achieving effortless performances. But the portal does not turn out to be the "backdoor to paradise" from Kleist's essay. Instead, the film moves beyond Kleist's text by suggesting the absurdity of such metaphysical speculations (especially in the nightmarish scene when Malkovich enters his own portal). The constellation in Being John Malkovich amounts instead to a deadly struggle for power and identity, with Craig's "murder" of John Malkovich being the perfect crime which, according to Jean Baudrillard, marks the victory of virtuality over actuality. In accordance with this insight, I interpret the struggle between puppet and puppeteer allegorically as the struggle between actor and spectator. Viewed in this light, Craig's shift from gazing passively through Malkovich's eyes to taking full control over his body signals different models of cinematic spectatorship and functions of the star system. In its most extreme form, the star (Malkovich)—as a "pseudo-event" (D. Boorstin)—becomes a mere puppet for the spectator/puppeteer. The film is therefore not only about what it means to be John Malkovich for those who invade his body, but also about what it means for John Malkovich himself. In my reading of Being John Malkovich as a creative adaptation of "On the Puppet Theater," the actor John Malkovich, performing best when being violated by others, becomes one of Kleist's mutilated dancers (victims of war whose artificial limbs allow them to dance gracefully), hence indicating an intricate relationship be