Feel Free: Essays

by Zadie Smith

  It has no denomination, this belief of the boy’s: it belongs to a generalized American faith that long ago detached itself from any particular monotheism, achieving autonomy in and of itself. Believing in belief is what makes Luke a Jedi and Cinderella a princess and Pinocchio a real boy, and my children have been believers of this kind from the earliest age—ever since they could say “Netflix.” This is the lesson: If you believe—it will be real! The movie ended, more snow came down. I wiped the foam from my delighted children and we went back out into the light.

  By aesthetic coincidence, that evening I had a date to see Charlie Kaufman’s new movie Anomalisa with my friend Tamsin, a professional philosopher, a Nietzsche scholar by trade, but not averse to the odd Schopenhauer reference, should a layman—or woman—try to force one upon her. During that long week of solo parenting I’d been carrying around my little pocket Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World, and it had become, for better or worse, the filter through which I saw everything, from the wants of insatiable children, to the global bad news in The Times, to the snow falling from the sky. As we walked to the cinema we considered the idea that all Kaufman’s movies have been somewhat Schopenhauerean, in the sense that they concern suffering in one way or another: the experience of suffering, the inevitability of it, and the possibility of momentary, illusory relief from it. This relief tends to arrive, for Kaufman, in the form of a woman (although these women are almost always the cause of much suffering, too). I thought of Catherine Keener, as Maxine, in the film Being John Malkovich all those years ago, ravishing in her white shirt and pencil skirt, offering a schlumpy depressive—a classic Kaufman protagonist—fifteen minutes’ relief from his suffering:

  Erroll: Can I be anyone I want?

  Maxine: You can be John Malkovich.

  Erroll: Well that’s perfect. My second choice. Ah, this is wonderful . . . Malkovich! King of New York! Man about town! Most eligible bachelor! Bon vivant! The Schopenhauer of the twentieth century!

  Now, that last line was cut from the film, but I can take a hint. “It had puppets in it,” Tamsin noted, as we took our seats. “And this one’s all puppets?”

  “All puppets.”

  For the second time that day, then, I waited in the dark for something not quite human—and all too human—to begin. A model airplane flew into view through modeled clouds. Everything to be seen on screen was modeled, either by hand or digital 3-D printer, and is the work of the stop-motion-animation specialists Starburns Industries. In order to suggest the animate quality that surges through all living things—that makes plants reach for the sun or a woman fall to the ground or a man scream, turn, and run—these puppeteers move each model minutely, by hand, photograph it in that position, and then move it once again. The sixty seconds the model plane took to fly through those clouds therefore represented one week’s labor for God knows how many people. And on that little plane, in the year 2005, sits Michael, a British customer-sales expert, living in LA, but on his way to Cincinnati for a conference, who is now reading an old letter from an angry ex-girlfriend, Bella. As he reads she appears before him in ghostly puppet form:

  November 12th, 1995. Dear Michael. Fuck you. Just fuck you. You just walk away?

  After all you said to me? After all we did? After all those fucking promises? After all that fucking fucking?

  Many viewers, as soon as they hear Bella’s voiceover, must at once understand the central conceit of the movie, but I don’t think I was the only one initially misdirected by wonder. I was too busy marveling at the puppets, at the mixture of artifice and realism they represent, with their peach-fuzz skins of silicone, and their hair-like hair, and not-quite fluid and yet entirely recognizable human gestures. Although not physically proportional—they are slightly shorter and squatter than us—they seem to buy their clothes from the same big-box stores, and pop the same pills, and use the same neck rests. They fly the same bland planes and land in the same anonymous airports. But across their eyes and around their hairline they sport a visible seam, indicating where the separate plates of their puppet faces fit together. Usually these seams are obscured in post-production; Kaufman and his co-director Duke Johnson decided to leave them in, feeling they “related to the themes that were in the story.”

  The effect is uncanny, but not of the Polar Express kind. The seams feel Brechtian: reminding us that Michael is not real, but representation. Running contrary to this, though, are his eyes, which really appear to see as we see. Images pass over their surface, light filters through them. “The eyes were a big thing,” Caroline Kastelic, the head puppeteer on the film, told the Hollywood Reporter. “They had to have realistic eyes that reflected the light properly.” A special enamel was found—one that wouldn’t bubble—and hand-painting them took weeks. The digital eyes of Hero Boy cannot compare. And yet I would not say that Michael’s eyes look real, exactly: they look like a puppet’s eyes. He belongs to a strange new category: a puppet who can see, who feels pain—who suffers! Not an analogy for us, in the Brechtian sense, but rather an example of us, in the Schopenhauerean sense, for Schopenhauer thought puppets are essentially what we are:

  The human race . . . presents itself as puppets that are set in motion by an internal clockwork . . . I have said that those puppets are not pulled from outside, but that each of them bears in itself the clockwork from which its movements result. This is the will-to-live manifesting itself as an untiring mechanism, as an irrational impulse, which does not have its sufficient ground or reason in the external world.

  Yes, to look in Michael’s eyes is to know he’s suffering. The question is: why? You find yourself diagnosing him by his symptoms. The kind of man who pursues a woman, falls deeply in love, only to then leave—the moment the love is returned—without any explanation, not even one he can give himself. The type who suffers intensely from the boredom and banality of everyday life, who sits in the cab from the airport, wincing in pain as his driver offers unsolicited tips for the overnight visitor:

  The zoo is great. World class, they say . . . Ya, you should check it out. And you gotta try some Cincinnati chili. It’s chili like you never had . . . You don’t need more than a day for the zoo. It’s just zoo-sized . . .

  More than anything, Michael suffers from acute loneliness, which can strike you particularly strongly if an overly friendly bellboy called Dennis happens to lead you into the perfect brown-beige sterility of an upscale hotel bedroom (king-size, smoking) and leaves you there.

  But it was only at this point, as Dennis shut the door behind him, that I realized the bellboy had the same voice as the cab driver, as Bella, as everyone on the plane—as everyone in the world. That all these people look alike—despite their various heights, weights, genders and hairstyles—is a little more difficult to discern, but also true. Everybody is one person (with the voice of Tom Noonan) except Michael (with the voice of the British actor David Thewlis). When Michael calls room service, it’s Noonan who answers. When he phones his wife and son, they’re both Noonan. Rewind a little and you notice the name of the hotel Michael has just checked himself into: the Fregoli, a reference to the Fregoli delusion, a rare psychiatric disorder in which a person believes that many different people are in fact a single person. But a narrowly neurological interpretation of Anomalisa (i.e., the trouble with Michael is he has a brain lesion) can’t account, I don’t think, for the profound identification the viewer feels with Michael’s experience, or the strong part desire plays in the scheme of his suffering.

  The ex-girlfriend Bella sounded like no one else when Michael wanted her and then like everybody else when he didn’t. One obvious diagnosis, then, might be that Michael is suffering from a bad case of misogyny. It’s a misogynist, after all, who puts a woman on a pedestal only to knock her off, who believes she is speaking to him only, with a voice unique among her kind, until, all of a sudden—and usually after he’s detected some minor alteration in her person—she sounds li
ke all the rest of ’em. (“Did you change?” asks Michael of Bella, during an ill-fated reunion in the Fregoli’s bar. “Did anything change? Did a change occur?”) But if it were only misogyny, it’s unclear why the sameness of Michael’s experience should affect everyone he comes across equally, from the bellboy up to and including his own son. Narcissism, then? Certainly Michael has his moments (“They’re all one person,” he cries out, during a vivid dream. “And they love me!”) although far more frequently we see him straining toward compassion.

  Michael wants to know and understand the people he’s hurt, and never exhibits any self-love. But if not narrowly narcissistic Michael is surely solipsistic in the obvious, wider sense that we all are, limited, as he is, by his own subjectivity, his only possible window on the world. Our eyes—popularly “windows on the soul”—work precisely the other way around, bringing the world to us, in the form of a representation of reality, and it happens that through Michael’s own hand-painted enamel everybody appears as one person, or (which amounts to the same thing) as nobody in particular. (In the final scene—the only one Michael is not in, and therefore separate from his subjectivity—we see characters restored to their unique faces and voices, no longer phenomena presented to Michael’s consciousness but precisely people in particular.)

  Yes, only when Michael desires someone does she become fully real to him. At all other times he is struck by an all-encompassing Weltschmerz, into which misogyny, narcissism, solipsism—and a brain tumor!—might all easily be folded. Weariness pervades everything he says and does, the simplest human interactions elicit sighs and groans, and yet this weariness of the world includes his own part within it; or, to put it another way, whatever is driving all the phenomena of the world surges up through Michael, too, taking the form, in him, of a kind of blind striving, a relentless desire for something, which, the moment it is achieved, is already exhausted. After you get what you want, runs the old song, you don’t want it. When you get what you want, you don’t want what you get. This is, essentially, the charge Bella lays before Michael. Schopenhauer saw it as a general malaise:

  Desiring lasts a long time, demands and requests go on to infinity; fulfillment is short and is meted out sparingly. But even the final satisfaction itself is only apparent; the wish fulfilled at once makes way for a new one.

  Once Dennis has left the room, Michael picks up his hotel phone. He is hungry, thirsty. His needs are not complex. But when he tries to order the Bibb lettuce salad and the salmon, this happens:

  Room service: Yes, sir. Would you like anything to drink tonight?

  Michael: No. I’ll find something in the mini-bar.

  Room service: Very good. Dessert? We have a lovely—

  Michael: No, no, no, no thanks.

  Room service: Very good, sir. So that’s a Bibb lettuce, Gorgonzola, prosciutto and walnut salad . . .

  Michael: Yes.

  Room service: . . . with honey raspberry vinaigrette dressing . . .

  Michael: Yes.

  Room service: . . . and the wild-caught Copper River Alaskan salmon almandine . . .

  Michael: Yes.

  Room service: . . . with baby asparagus and black truffle broth.

  Michael: Yes.

  Room service: Very good. And that’s for room 1007?

  Michael: Yes.

  Room service: Very good. It’s . . . 9:13 now. It should be there within thirty-five minutes, which will make it . . . 9:48.

  Michael: Thank you.

  Room service: Thank y—

  One way of dealing with the boredom of our own needs might be to complicate them unnecessarily, so as always to have something new to desire. Human needs, Schopenhauer thought, are not in their essence complex. On the contrary, their “basis is very narrow: it consists of health, food, protection from heat and cold, and sexual gratification; or the lack of these things.” Yet on this narrow strip we build the extraordinary edifice of pleasure and pain, of hope and disappointment! Not just salmon, but wild-caught Copper River Alaskan salmon almandine! And all to achieve exactly the same result in the end; health, food, covering, and so on:

  [Man] deliberately intensifies his needs, which are ordinarily scarcely harder to satisfy than those of the animal, so as to intensify his pleasure: hence luxury, confectionery, tobacco, opium, alcoholic drinks, finery and all that pertains to them.

  When Michael hangs up on room service his puppet face is struck through with boredom, an emotion unknown to wild animals, whereas, for us, boredom “has become a veritable scourge. Want and boredom are indeed the twin poles of human life.”*

  Michael’s hotel room is, in literal miniature, the concrete expression of the problem. In such a room you can, in theory, get whatever you want, and many things you didn’t even realize you wanted. (Try the chili! insists the cover of the glossy yet depressingly parochial magazine on Michael’s side table. It’s zoo-sized! screams the billboard outside his window.) Hotel rooms exist to satisfy. The water in your shower may at first be too hot and then too cold (“Fuck you! Fuck you!” screams Michael, naked under the shower head) but you can be sure the perfect temperature is achievable, and that when you adjourn to your king-size bed you’ll find a chocolate on your pillow. Yet if hotel rooms exist to anticipate desire, to meet and fulfill all our needs, why do we so often feel despair in them? Is the fulfillment of the desire itself the despair?

  From his upscale hotel room Michael calls Bella; it’s been eleven years since they last spoke. The conversation is awkward. She compliments him on his lodgings. (“It’s boring,” he groans in response. “Everything’s boring.”) Somehow he manages to convince her to meet him in the hotel bar for a vodka Martini. It goes badly: he can’t explain why he so suddenly stopped wanting her, and when he asks her up to his room to discuss it further she walks out. He finds himself out on the street, drunk, still pursued by a ghostly vision of Bella (“And the next minute you’re out the door with barely a good-bye!”) and seeking a store in which to buy a present for his insatiable son, Henry. In the only kind of “toy” store that’s open at night, Michael finds an antique mechanical Japanese sex doll. She consists of a mechanized torso, half covered in porcelain, with the face of a geisha and her mouth permanently open. She stares out at Michael with her dead zombie eyes. He stares back with the glazed, happy look of the momentarily satisfied customer.

  “Thus the subject of willing,” Schopenhauer writes, “is constantly lying on the revolving wheel of Ixion, is always drawing water in the sieve of the Danaids, and is the eternally thirsting Tantalus.” But what, if anything, lies on the other side of all this endless wanting, getting and wanting again? Back in his room, Michael takes that shower and begins singing Delibes’s “flower duet” from Lakmé, in which two voices so beautifully merge they can seem to be one. We heard it in the airport, too, playing on Michael’s iPod, and again when Michael tried to hum it to himself in the back of the cab. (Driver: “That’s British Airways!”)

  Approaching the mirror, he wipes away the steam, stares at himself. He seems on the brink of a realization. We realize his face is moving without him consciously willing it, just like a puppet’s face: his eyebrows jerk up and down, his mouth makes odd, unnatural shapes, and dozens of distinct expressions dart over his features. Out of his mouth come strange, unindividuated noises: the indistinct chattering of many people, then the clatter of mechanical gears—or perhaps it’s the striking of typewriter keys—and finally a rushing, whooshing kind of emptiness. (Ah, that’s what the world would sound like, I found myself thinking, illogically, if there was no one present to hear it.) Michael reaches for the separate plates of his face: he’s about to peel them back. Is there a way out of wanting? Perhaps if he were not Michael at all? With his unique face, voice, desires? If he were, in reality, someone, or something, else? Something both less and more than Michael, something . . .

  Michael: Jesus! Someone else!


  Just then, Michael hears a voice in the corridor, a unique voice, unlike all the others! Whatever he was about to realize he instantly forgets: he lets go of his face plates and they click back together. He rushes around the room, seeking his trousers. It is the sound he was afraid he’d never hear again! The voice of someone else! And when this voice speaks, Michael, just like Hero Boy, hears something nobody else hears, something that makes him believe. Madly he runs down the corridor, half dressed, deaf to the warnings of Schopenhauer, as if he’s got no idea at all what’s going on here, as if he thinks this whole bloody film is about him, Michael, when in reality of course it’s all about Schopenhauer:

  The striving of matter can always be impeded only, never fulfilled or satisfied. But this is precisely the case with the striving of all the will’s phenomena. Every attained end is at the same time the beginning of a new course, and so on ad infinitum.

  Her name is Lisa. She’s staying a few doors down and she’s a lovely, homely girl, perfectly average. She has a scar on her face that she tries to cover with hair: people usually prefer her friend Emily. She likes grande mocha frappuccinos, and Cyndi Lauper and Sarah Brightman, she works in a call center in Akron, drinks mojitos made with apple schnapps, and is generally the very definition of what we might call, if we were being uncompassionate, a basic bitch. To Michael, though, she is the only other person on earth. She has “a miraculous voice” (which belongs, in reality, to Jennifer Jason Leigh). And to Lisa, too, Michael is magic, an especially individuated individual, because he’s famous, he wrote the book How May I Help You Help Them?, a customer-service guide that raised productivity, Lisa informs him, by “90 percent” in her department. When he walks her to his hotel room for a nightcap, she’s so anxious she falls flat on her face, succumbing to the will of the world, in the form of gravity. “It happens all the time,” she assures him.*