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In Being John Malkovich directing by Spike Jonze in 1999, Jonze uses quite a unique style in telling the story. John Malkovich is a real actor that plays an exaggerated, fictionalized version of himself. He appears in many different films, making him recognizable to people in general, however his wide-ranging choice of roles has kept him just out of the area of being worldly known (as for example Julia Roberts would be). Craig Schwartz, a master puppeteer, gets a job as a filing clerk on the 7 ?floor of a building. The 7 ?floor can only be arrived at by stopping the elevator between the 7th and 8th stories and prying open the door with a crow bar. Already, the film shows that this is no ordinary story.
At one point when on the job, Craig, while trying to obtain a file that was lost behind a filing cabinet, finds a small hidden door. Going through it, he is pulled into a gateway that takes him inside the mind of John Malkovich, where Craig looks out Malkovich's eyes and can experience what he feels. Although it only lasts for fifteen minutes, he is then pushed out and dropped from the sky into a muddy field by the highway. Afterward, he tells his wife, Lotte, and Maxine, a co-worker whom he is attracted to. Maxine then decides to make a profit by this new found door, giving anyone who wants to be someone else?for fifteen minutes for a bargain price of $200. Lotte, too, decides she wants to see what it's like to be someone else after Craig explains to her, so she could experience being John Malkovich. Immediately during her occurrence as Malkovich, she come to a decision that she has to be a man. Maxine also comes to know and like John Malkovich. In one scene, she notices that Lotte is in Malkovich's head and that realizes she can have both Lotte and Malkovich when she has sex with him. A love triangle between Lotte and Maxine, and Craig and Maxine emerges, with Malkovich the host for all three of them. Craig learns of Lotte and Maxine's affair and come to the decision that he has to be Malkovich. Soon after, Craig was able to, after practicing, control him like one of his puppets for as long as he wanted. Originally, Malkovich's mind and body were supposed to be reserved for Craig's boss when the time was right, so he could live forever.
Being John Malkovich is a film that Spike Jonze wanted to make look surreal, which worked well because the characters had no idea that they were in some kind of distorted reality. Like in the film and book Alice in Wonderland, Jonze drew those watching the film into the story being told rather than distancing them by forcing them to look at the proceedings from the outside thinking it's unreal.
Many scenes show how the likenesses, and sometimes a parody, of it to Alice in Wonderland. Craig Schwartz, when finding the elusive small hidden door, crawls through the door and is then in a muddy hole, where he's sucked into a new world, Malkovich's mind. Just as Alice found a small door leading to another world as well by going down a dirty rabbit hole. That is the most obvious similarity to each other. Generally speaking, the two have the same reality. For Alice, it's only a dream which is realized when she awakens and all confusion is understood. However, it's Craig's surreal life and world that he lives in. The only confusion is when finding the door to Malkovich's mind, yet the characters are not worried or concerned of how it's possible and merely accept it. Alice accepts the same reality?at the time yet still questions it every once in a while. In Being John Malkovich, everything is accepted at one point or another, nothing is totally misunderstood. This could be seen as looking through the looking glass?into our world's reality as we see it. If Craig, or any other character in Being John Malkovich, were to look through that looking glass into our world's reality, he would be confused by how our world works. The same reaction would take place if any one of the general public were to look through the same glass into his reality?
In Being John Malkovich, Jonze directs the film to make up the surreal reality for Craig and the other characters. It could be that Jonze wanted to make a parody of Alice in Wonderland to help in making the surrealism style for the film. In any case, Jonze uses a very exceptional style in revealing the story's plot and alternate world.
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