Human Nature, directed by Michel Gondry from a script by Charlie Kaufman, was a box office flop and got mostly hostile reviews, but it’s a brilliant film. Basically, it’s a postmodern version of Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy”, which is a story about an ape who has been trained to become a human being. In Kaufman and Gondry’s film, the ape-turned-human is supplemented or mirrored by human beings who idealize (and want to go back to) nature; but the film’s sardonic reflections on humanness, language, and civilization are very much in the spirit of Kafka’s story. The man who was raised as an ape is “civilized” by being taught (along with language) refined table manners and the enjoyment of opera. He goes along with this charade because he presumes that becoming “human” is the only way he will ever be able to get laid; although his training includes brutal electric shocks every time he gives way to “animalistic” sexual urges. Of course, after learning language, he will never be able to go back to the wild, although he can make eloquent speeches about his desire to. Meanwhile, the twisted human characters are puppets of their own unanalyzed and out-of-control sexual desires, equally when they espouse the virtues of civilization, and when they seek to “return” to a more “natural” life. Kaufman, rather like Kafka, undermines and ridicules both sides of the nature/civilization duality, suggesting that high culture is in fact driven by base instincts, but that these base instincts, far from being animalistic, are only thinkable in linguistic human creatures.
By describing the film in these terms, however, I’m risking making it sound more like an intellectual, analytic exercise than it actually is. The script is definitely schematic in its outlines, but it comes across much more as a delightfully, cheerfully perverted comedy of manners. That is to say, it’s more late Bunuel than early Godard. Gondry’s direction is gorgeously anti-naturalistic, in a way reminiscent of his videos for Bjork, giving the movie the flavor of a fractured fairy tale. Or say it is as if Jacques Demy were recounting a tale that was a cross between an I Love Lucy episode and a short story by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. I’m flailing about here, giving absurd comparisons, because the film is quite sui generis, and can’t really be compared to anything less bizarre and ridiculous.
Human Nature
Human Nature, directed by Michel Gondry from a script by Charlie Kaufman, was a box office flop and got mostly hostile reviews, but it’s a brilliant film. Basically, it’s a postmodern version of Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy”, which is a story about an ape who has been trained to become a human being. In Kaufman and Gondry’s film, the ape-turned-human is supplemented or mirrored by human beings who idealize (and want to go back to) nature; but the film’s sardonic reflections on humanness, language, and civilization are very much in the spirit of Kafka’s story. The man who was raised as an ape is “civilized” by being taught (along with language) refined table manners and the enjoyment of opera. He goes along with this charade because he presumes that becoming “human” is the only way he will ever be able to get laid; although his training includes brutal electric shocks every time he gives way to “animalistic” sexual urges. Of course, after learning language, he will never be able to go back to the wild, although he can make eloquent speeches about his desire to. Meanwhile, the twisted human characters are puppets of their own unanalyzed and out-of-control sexual desires, equally when they espouse the virtues of civilization, and when they seek to “return” to a more “natural” life. Kaufman, rather like Kafka, undermines and ridicules both sides of the nature/civilization duality, suggesting that high culture is in fact driven by base instincts, but that these base instincts, far from being animalistic, are only thinkable in linguistic human creatures.
By describing the film in these terms, however, I’m risking making it sound more like an intellectual, analytic exercise than it actually is. The script is definitely schematic in its outlines, but it comes across much more as a delightfully perverted comedy of manners. That is to say, it’s more late Bunuel than early Godard. Gondry’s direction is gorgeously anti-naturalistic, in a way reminiscent of his videos for Bjork, giving the movie the flavor of a fractured fairy tale. Or say it is as if Jacques Demy were recounting a tale that was a cross between an I Love Lucy episode and a short story by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. I’m flailing about here, giving absurd comparisons, because the film is quite sui generis, and can’t really be compared to anything less bizarre and ridiculous.