Being John Malkovich.

Udla

Film school

Indie Films

18-11-15

José Andrade                         CIN 611-1                                707957

Being John Malkovich

Where is the soul, but here and now? On the mechanical reproduction of art, the origin gets lost. It leads to the lost of the aura and the essence of the play. Besides, trough the mechanical reproduction, the beauty is replaced by the shock and the novelty of something new.  Correspondingly, the work turns to a commodity or a product. Using the film ‘’ Being John Malkovich’’ (Jonze, 1999) as an example, I ‘ll further explain these arguments on the following essay.

The soul is here and now. With the mechanical reproduction, the essence and aura of the play gets lost by simply not being present in the performance of the play. It gets an exhibiting value only.  We can see this idea on the film as Maxine and Craig start a business from the essence, soul or aura from John Malkovich.  Take for example the life of a person, Malkovich in this case, as a work of art. Life at it best expression. The mechanical reproduction of his life, meaning letting other people enter to his body and mind, kills the aura and soul of the original John Malkovich. Every time he gets himself reproduced is a lost of his own nature, letting Craig to take the control of him as a person and finally be erased as a soul in the body.

New is always better. As the mechanical reproduction can be distributed to thousands of people, the novelty of something new replaces the beauty of the work. The work lost prestige as is something that everybody can have, so more than the beauty that the play offers, is the novelty of something new what the public enjoys the most. On the film, for example, we get thousands of people waiting in long lines just to try something new, rather than assimilate the unusual experience of being somebody else for 15 minutes.  Even for Lotte, it is the initial shock that she experiments, what makes her feel sexy or confident, what she gets from the experience, rather than the discovery of a unique portal. The actual piece of art is the portal and de capacity to be someone else, but what the public wants is the shocks, the sensations, and the weirdness.

There is a quote that says, when you are good at something, never do it for free. Even art gets to be a product. Trough the mechanical reproduction, a personality outer from the character is created. On the film, we see the life of a person being sold way to cheap by some money-interested people. The art, the experience and the soul become a product ready to be sold to a hungry audience waiting to feel like a star. But it’s a miss concept to think that life, in these case in cinema, is as presented in a movie. The mechanical reproduction builds an entirely new personality apart from the actual character, where it creates an idea of wellness or even heroism. In the end, it creates a false consciousness.

In conclusion, as we saw on the film ‘’Being John Malkovich’’ (Jonze, 1999), in the mechanical reproduction of art work, the origin and essence gets lost, as it becomes a product for massive consumption, replacing the beauty of the aura in the present moment for shock and novelty, and deteriorates the soul and message of the work as it becomes something everybody is able to reproduce at any time almost everywhere.  On a general level, mechanical reproduction does kill the essence of the art work and can even be used as a political tool for propaganda or commercially as advertising, but it brings a huge advantage for learning proposes, where almost any persona can access to valuable copies of great ideas and interpretations. These can lead to a better-educated humanity and culture that will find the way to actually appreciate what it has on his hands.

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