Jim Carrey is Woke as Fuck
Either that or he’s completely nuts. Let’s unpack this real quick.
It’s possible Jim Carrey has been sent from the future to spread the gospel of the enlightened. It’s possible he has an overactive pineal gland that’s given him supernatural powers of perspective and an internalized understanding of the interconnectedness of the universe. It’s possible that when he looks at another person he sees the story of every atom in their body, from stardust to sperm to human and the eventual transformation back to stardust. He might only see infinite fractals of Technicolor light and he might communicate with the universe through thoughts. Seriously, look at the above image and tell me you don’t feel a cascade of wisdom pouring over you. It’s possible Jim Carrey can speak to dolphins telepathically.
Are these things likely? No. What I’m telling you is, there’s a chance.
The possibility that Jim Carrey can speak to dolphins telepathically is evidenced by his documentary, Jim and Andy: The Great Beyond. You should watch it. It’s about the time Jim played the role of Andy Kaufman in a biopic about Andy called Man on the Moon. For the role, Jim went, as they say, “full-Andy.”
Throughout the entire production of Man on the Moon, Jim was Andy, or Andy’s alter ego, Tony Clifton. His co-workers — actors, producers, director — could only refer to him as Andy or as Tony.
At one point, director Miloš Forman, apparently at his wit’s end with Jim’s full-blown identity swap, walks up to Jim (Andy) and asks Jim (Andy) if he would pass along a dinner invitation to Jim (Jim). It looks like someone talking to a crazy person, and it very well may have been.
Herein lies the crux of this documentary. It asks but never directly answers the question: Is Jim Carrey a lunatic, an asshole or a Machiavellian genius?
I’m planting my flag firmly on Machiavellian Genius Island. Here’s why.
1 Jim references wanting to make a movie about the making of Man on the Moon back when they were shooting in 1999. At one point during the filming of Man on the Moon Jim has Andy’s old girlfriend, a documentarian, come to the set to film him doing full-Andy stuff. Jim clearly had this documentary in mind then, which makes his histrionics seem contrived. Plus, actual crazy people usually don’t say “Hey, come film me while I lose my shit! This is going to be a great look for me!”
Then again, does making a movie about how crazy he goes while filming Man on the Moon rule out the possibility of him actually going crazy? No. Does it increase the likelihood of him actually going crazy? Maybe. Maybe Jim surrendered completely to his lunacy in the name of making his documentary. Or maybe he’s just really good at acting like it.
See the conundrum? It’s hard to tell where the acting stops and the crazy starts, which is either a testament to Jim’s skill as an actor or to his willingness to submit to the tides of madness, or both.
Being something and acting like you are something are two different things (I think). For example, Tom Brady is the quarterback of a perennial championship contending football team. Joe Flacco acts like he is. But what if Joe Flacco could act like the QB of a perennial championship contender so well that he became one? Well, then he’d be as good of an actor as Jim Carrey.
2 Man-on-the-Moon Jim Carrey was post-fame Jim Carrey (he’d recently made Ace Ventura, The Mask, Dumb and Dumber and The Truman Show). By 1999 he was an untouchably rich and famous movie star who’d issued himself a license to do untouchably-rich-and-famous-movie-star things. But while money and being worshipped like a god can free people of their inhibitions and give them the confidence to eschew cultural expectations (like not testing the limits of your own sanity at work), other things can too. Near death experiences, intense psychedelic trips and red pills offered by leather-clad bald guys named Morpheus are known to open peoples’ minds to a way of living that’s unconstrained by society’s standards. Which route to enlightenment did Jim Carrey take? We can’t know. But by 1999 he was living by his own rules. He was beginning to awaken; beginning to become the bearded sage that he is today, the type of person who says things like,
“There’s a quiet gentle seat in the universe that seems to contain everything and that’s where I am.”
Maybe Jim’s new liberated state was his excuse to act like an eccentric jerk, or maybe it was his secret sauce for cooking up an all-time acting performance.
3 When trying to tease apart the degree to which Jim’s work during Man on the Moon was insanity, asshole-ery or Machiavellian genius one has to consider young Jim Carrey. Young Jim’s mindset with regards to becoming a famous entertainer was resolute. From adolescence he was dead set on striking it rich in Hollywood. He decided, apparently after being homeless for a time as a youth, that he was going to sacrifice everything, his own sanity included perhaps, to reach acting superstardom.
He talks very directly about how he let go of himself in order to become this thing that people wanted. This thing that people would pay five dollars to be entertained by at a comedy club and eventually, that people would pay ten dollars to be entertained by at the movie theatre and that studio execs would pay millions of dollars to have in their movies.
“I knew what I wanted. I wanted to be a successful actor. But every night I would go home and ask myself, “What do they want? What do they want? Then one day, in the middle of the night, I woke up from a sound sleep and I sat up in bed and I thought, ‘They want to be free from concern!’ So that’s what I became… the guy who is free from concern.”
Jim Carrey puts his mind to things and does them. So if he puts his mind to making a documentary about the most inspired acting in the history of biopics, he makes that documentary, even if making it requires him to surrender himself to a method-acting-induced psychosis.
He opened his hands and let his sanity fly off into the great beyond, hoping it would eventually fly back.
With the documentary that became Jim and Andy, Jim wanted a movie that showcased the lengths he’d go to as an actor, but it didn’t end up being about his obliteration of the role. It ended up being about the perils of fame in a profession that demands psychological contortion from the people in it, and, ultimately, about Jim Carrey’s mastery as a contortionist. He twisted himself into a knot on purpose, and, somehow, he unwound himself again.
