Untangling Charlie Kaufman

McCarter, Jeremy, Newsweek

Byline: Jeremy McCarter

Up all night with the director of 'Synecdoche'

This is lame. I really should not be writing myself into an essay about Charlie Kaufman. Or should I? Kaufman does that sort of thing all the time. In "Adaptation," for instance: before we see Nicolas Cage, his voice-over tells us all we need to know about his self-loathing, creatively frustrated character--whose name is Charlie Kaufman. Does his self-dramatization mean that the way to disentangle his mysteries is through some kind of mimetic first-person device? This would be easier to do if I hadn't spent the previous two days clicking around polling Web sites like a rat pressing a bar for more crack. Now I'm blocked and past deadline. God, this is lame.

But then so is …

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Publication information: Article title: Untangling Charlie Kaufman. Contributors: McCarter, Jeremy - Author. Magazine title: Newsweek. Volume: 152. Issue: 19 Publication date: November 10, 2008. Page number: 61. © 2009 Newsweek, Inc. All rights reserved. Any reuse, distribution or alteration without express written permission of Newsweek is prohibited. For permission: www.newsweek.com. COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale Group.

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