FILM PHILOSOPHY

Anomalisa: a humbling film to contemplate our existence

Charlie Kaufman stirs audiences to poignant reflection of their individualistic lifestyle while noting the beauty of human imperfection. The whole story (spoilers) and its greater, somewhat philosophical, themes revealed here.

The distraction that was Anomalisa (2015) stimulated the humbling realisation that life could be much, much worse — or, are we unwittingly living such a life already? The lingering sensation since watching this film pales in comparison with the drab, coffee-coloured lens that presents a dismal life.

The viewer of Anomalisa is introduced to her from Michael Stone’s perspective, the film’s main character. To give you some context, Michael is a best-selling author in the customer service industry, who has traveled to Ohio to give a keystone talk on his book. He is also a puppet, like everyone else in this quaint, miniature world. However, it has been designed with maybe too many of the imperfections of our world.

Who is Anomalisa and why is she significant?

Anomalisa takes its title from Michael’s nickname of a woman, Lisa, given in tender adoration of the deformation on her face. Due to her birthmark, Lisa is shy, yet sensitive.

The film is entirely animated in the style of a puppet show, and every character, except Michael and Lisa, has the same androgynous features — an almost immobile mask with eerie seams that distinctly trace the contours of the face. The director/producer duo, Charlie Kaufman and Duke Johnson, manage to incorporate this detail, and the visual style, to heighten the awareness of the conscious design behind the film’s world, drawing attention to their own roles as creators, in an overarching question — why did they design such a world? Why would anyone design a world like the one we live in?

Lisa’s imperfection is beautiful and unique: to some it is ugly, but to some it is worth noting, and adoring. Her sensitivity makes the viewer love her all the more.

To add to the drabness of this little world, almost every character has the voice of Tom Noonan, which renders individuals as uniform, possessing the same bland voice uttering from every featureless face. This add to the lustreless interactions that Michael experiences with flight attendants, hoteliers, and even his own wife and children. Only two people are exempt from the sea of indistinguishable personalities: Michael and Lisa. Can you imagine such an empty life, where everyone is almost artificial, and then suddenly you hear one other human across a bar?

The encounter and how it can change their lives

Lisa and her friend are middle-aged ‘groupies’ who admire Michael’s book ‘How May I Help You Help Them?’. The title already hints at the blankness he experiences in his personal life — a stream of identities that run into each other and dissolve into transparency like minerals in water. Why is he cursed to live in such a lonely existence — why is he cursed to live as a puppet?

They meet at a bar after Michael has made contact with an ex-girlfriend (also erotically — that’s sarcastic — voiced by Tom Noonan) that he abruptly left ten years prior. He still lusts for her body, yet the woman’s voice is sexless and flat and Michael remains unsatisfied and bored.

However, there is one voice that sores above the rest, and when Michael hears it, he is struck by the beauty of its uniqueness, instantly enchanted. Is this the excitement of love?

The pinnacle of the evening

We follow them to his hotel room, down a long, endless corridor, which effectively visualises their enduring awkwardness. Lisa has tentatively decided to stay with him for the night after their short encounter over cocktails in the hotel bar. She is enticed by Michael’s genuine elation at being awakened from his monotonous dream, devouring her every presence with his gaze and his ears, and finally his touch.

The audience experience an uncomfortable knee-jerk when we see the puppets take each other’s clothes off and partake in the pleasures of human touch, or “puppet touch”. The viewer might experience a sense of absurdity by the fact that Kaufman fabricated miniature genitals for the sole purpose of showing us this erotic yet stirringly human scene, punctuated by tentative questions and raw sounds of movement. This almost comically absurd scene emphasises Kaufman’s focus on the purpose of the film and hence, the purpose of our lives and desires. There is of course a biological explanation, but what if we were puppets, what would the explanation be in that situation?

What are the greater messages?

The cinematography of Anomalisa contrasts the unsettlingly realistic series of events, and such detailed shots that are riddled with the same realism you would experience in the real Cincinnati, while persistently remaining a miniature, but accurate, synthetic recreation of Cincinnati. The jerks don’t just stop there, if you are familiar with such British vernacular. The audience is exposed to the characters’ imperfections and the injustices that pester the vulnerable, embodied here by Lisa.

In Synecdoche, New York (2008), Kaufman’s directorial debut, the viewer becomes familiar with a theatre director obsessively trying to simulate a city inside a warehouse; he attempts to recreate crime, death, age — the slow, painful passing of time. Why would a creator pursue such imperfections? Kaufman seems to be searching for the same genuine experience by imposing his intentions on every aspect of the artwork that he can, his conscious deliberation on every aspect of the film that you can think of. It is the search for genius that is also poison to creativity, imperfection, and the extraordinary — all qualities that Michael is starved of in Anomalisa, and that he rediscovers in Lisa.

The sense of scale is crucial to Kaufman’s work. In Synecdoche, New York, the theatre direction always tries to go larger, while in Anomalisa, the director tried to contain and minimise, which may mimic the average, middle-aged male’s day-to-day consciousness and his constricted vision. It is also a small universe in the sense that it consists of only a few complex characters, as Michael experiences, while he cannot escape his own sense of insignificance and the worthlessness of the world he inhabits. In fact, in the end, we see that he cannot escape his predictability at turning everything he touches to dull dust.

The same, subtle horror of Synecdoche, New York that startlingly wakes you from the trance of a slow paced day, is evoked in Anomalisa, particularly when the audience experiences the passion float away from Michael the next morning, as Lisa’s voice morphs into Tom Noonan’s voice too! The spider’s web creeps back over his vision and smothering any spontaneity that could have unchained him from his murky existence. The film ends with nothing altered, and Anomalisa left hurt and helpless, only subjected to Michael’s middle-aged dissatisfaction.

Lasting impressions

I could not shrug off the injustices experienced by the film’s muse, Lisa, imperfectly yet sympathetically portrayed with her birthmark, timidness, and slightly plump build. She did not possess the self-belief to reach out of her day-to-day reality of working in a call-centre, but nurtured her yearning that was muffled by her shyness nonetheless. However, she found enough curiosity and will to venture out from behind her comfortable veil, only to be led, like a lamb for slaughter, to a self-centred man.

Equally, you experience the pain that traps Michael, who may have soured to the world by his hedonistic, materialistic lifestyle, or did he simple spoil, like overripe fruit, dulled and maimed by the relentless tide of time?

A culmination of this, and much more, leaves Anomalisa in my mind as one of the most sobering pieces of animation to be can watched — right behind or shoulder to shoulder with Rocks in My Pockets (Baumane 2014).

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