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When Charlie Kaufman’s Human Nature was released in 2001, it met with a mixed response, not only from those who had previously applauded Being

John Malkovich and were curious about Kaufman’s next project, but also

from professional film critics, whom the movie connoisseur rightly expects to contribute more than a shrug of the shoulder, or observations too cursory or incidental to deepen their (critical) appreciation of it—unless, of course, it is the kind of movie that invites comparison to a cheap, off-the-peg suit: just about adequate for an evening’s entertainment in town, but otherwise unremarkable and not worth talking about. What saves Human Nature from an unflattering verdict, it seems to me, is not so much what its critics have to say about it—indeed, they often say disappointingly little—as the complex tapestry of autobiographical, literary, popular scientific, and philosophical considerations that inform Kaufman’s exploration of the movie’s subject matter.

Some of these, including the autobiographical and literary influences, provide useful background information for a better understanding of the movie, and should be noted for the record. The remainder, especially some of the movie characters’ philosophical assumptions about the nature of language, love, and evolutionary biology, invite further critical reflection and are worth highlighting for this very reason. That the screenplay is the product of such a diverse range of intellectual stimuli and influences is not always apparent, however; nor do descriptions of the movie as “an acquired taste,” “uniquely offbeat,” “a dash of the avant-garde fused with humour,” or “a crazed, joyous romp” do much to show why its appeal to potential audi- ences should be greater than that of, say, a tub of popcorn.1 _{Roger Ebert, too,}

indeed that if “it tried to do more, it would fail and perhaps explode,” though he is happy to concede that “at this level of manic whimsy it is just about right.”2 _{Ebert’s final verdict on Human Nature is that it is “slight without be-}

ing negligible,” as it raises interesting questions about the relation between natural human impulses and the “inhibitions” of civilization, though he does not elaborate on how exactly the movie illuminates that relation.3 _And

Kaufman himself? He certainly agrees that there is a sense in which his movie really does have “nowhere much to go,” openly admitting, “I don’t know where the characters are going to go or what the screenplay’s going to do. For me, that’s the way to keep it alive and make it interesting and worthwhile.”4 _{This does not mean, however, that he is merely experiment-}

ing with a set of strange characters placed in slightly surreal scenarios. It is rather that his creative endeavors are not driven by an ideological agenda, let alone a theory about any of the phenomena explored in his work. “I don’t subscribe to anything,” he once said in an interview. “I sit there and I try to think about what seems honest to me.”5 _{While Kaufman}

does have something to say to his audience, he is reluctant to pander to the prejudices of social convention, cinematographic fads, or the parameters of scholarly theory. Instead, his mission is to embark on an imaginative quest for new perspectives and ways of looking at the familiar, no matter what fashionable -isms or -esques his viewers may subsequently choose in characterizing his work. And when, in this connection, critics such as Warren Curry remark on “the absurd, somewhat esoteric, elements of the script,” they are unwittingly highlighting Kaufman’s own conviction that the terms real and surreal, far from expressing a sharp dichotomy, may actually condition each other in a way that deepens, rather than obscures, our relation to the phenomena or experiences in question.6 _{As Kaufman}

puts it: “Realistic and naturalistic are not the same thing. And I think it’s interesting to play with surrealism or dream logic and try to create a poem, a metaphor, something that conveys a feeling or makes something happen in your gut that you don’t necessarily intellectually understand.”7 _{On this}

account, Human Nature, too, is much more akin to a metaphor than it is to a conventionally naturalistic depiction of, say, a human relationship, an individual’s attitude toward his natural impulses, or a scientist’s conception of animals. And this much is surely right: the power of a (good) metaphor or poem lies precisely in its capacity to move, even to yield insight, in a way that is not translatable into a series of mundane factual statements

68 Mario von der Ruhr

or captured by hypotheses deduced from some highfalutin theoretical framework—into something, in other words, that belongs predominantly in the domain of reason, rather than feeling.

Regardless of whether Human Nature succeeds in providing such insight, one merely needs to think of poetry, music, painting, and sculpture to ap- preciate Kaufman’s skepticism about rational deliberation as the only, or even the most reliable, avenue to understanding the human predicament. Indeed, one recurring motif in Human Nature, revealed in the transient affections and loyalties of its main characters, is that the very experiences that affect an individual most deeply, including those of love, sexuality, and loss of trust, also seem to be the most resilient to rational explanation and resolu- tion. (I shall return to this theme later.) As for the role of art in human life, Kaufman would no doubt have applauded the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who rightly observed: “People nowadays think scientists are there to instruct them, poets, musicians etc. to entertain them. That the lat- ter have something to teach them; that never occurs to them.”8 _{For readers}

unfamiliar with the movie, it should be pointed out that Wittgenstein receives an honorary mention in it toward the end, when Nathan (Tim Robbins) comments on the apish grunts (“Ugnh”) of his formerly more civilized ap- prentice, Puff (Rhys Ifans): “Oh please, is that as articulate as you can be after all the time I spent teaching you? We’ve discussed Wittgenstein, for God’s sake. Not that you ever had anything enlightening to say on the subject.”9

As such, Nathan’s cryptic reference to Wittgenstein doesn’t contribute much to the development of the plot, but then Kaufman can hardly be expected to abandon his own artistic vision for an ad hoc emulation of Louis Malle’s

My Dinner with André (1981) merely because one of his characters has just

mentioned the name of a European philosopher.

What, then, is the point of this name-dropping? Is it decorative verbal confetti that had better be cut from the script? Kaufman’s hint at his charac- ters’ inability to speak with any depth about this thinker? An ironic revelation of Kaufman’s own cursory reading of Wittgenstein? Or clever signposts for those who, like Kaufman, are deeply puzzled by the movie’s central themes and want to dig deeper than the constraints of the story line and a ninety- minute time frame will allow? The film itself does not tell us which, if any, of these readings comes closest to the truth, but it confronts the audience with an important question: Which of them would make Human Nature the more interesting movie?