A meta-ranking of Charlie Kaufman's filmography

Charlie Kaufman films — Photo: Ben Kaller/Columbia; Mary Cybulski/NETFLIX; Everett Collection

Early in his career, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman acquired a reputation as one of our foremost creators of art about art, cemented by movies like Adaptation (2002), which stars Nicolas Cage as Kaufman himself. But his films are better classified as stories about stories — how we tell them, how we distort them, how they're shaped, and how they shape us. There's a word for this, and that word is "meta."

I don't have the space to delve too deeply into literary theory here, but, generally, wecan view "metafiction" as art that emphasizes and comments upon its own construction, often doing so to explore the relationship between art and life. Kaufman has created films like this throughout his career, including his Netflix film I'm Thinking of Ending Things. But what, precisely, qualifies something as "meta" is a slippery question, and Kaufman isn't known for making such questions easier to answer. Much of his work evades easy explanation or interpretation, challenging viewers to delve deeper into the morasses of neurosis and self-reflexivity he's crafted.

And so, delve we shall. I've attempted to rank Kaufman's first eight films in descending order of meta-ness, from his feature debut, Being John Malkovich, to I'm Thinking of Ending Things. This was a highly subjective exercise, and you may feel that I'm completely off-base — I'm not even sure I've placed all of them correctly. Perhaps I'd better get to the list before I second-guess myself. Enjoy!

1. Synecdoche, New York (2008)

A theater director (Philip Seymour Hoffman) mounts a play about everyone in his life, which steadily expands into a replica of his entire world, with ever more actors playing the actors playing themselves: Nothing illustrates the ouroboros-y nature of Charlie Kaufman's work better than his directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York. Hoffman's Caden Cotard is the most incisive version of the self-absorbed artist type frequently featured in Kaufman's movies. Anyone who's ever struggled to complete a novel or screenplay will wince with recognition every time Caden declares he finally knows how to do the play. And that play is a potent metaphor for how artists can become lost in the creative process, devoting themselves to their work at the expense of their relationships, burying themselves in a magnum opus that can never be completed to their satisfaction. As Caden's friends and family abandon him, he lives out his days in his constructed world, wandering the city he's had built inside the impossibly vast warehouse where he's staging the play. That warehouse, incidentally, eventually contains its own warehouse, which contains its own warehouse, and so on and so forth: a metaphor within a metaphor, wrapped inside a towering work of metafiction.

2. Adaptation (2002)

The quintessential meta Kaufman work, Adaptation takes the subgenre of the "writer's block movie" (see also: Barton Fink, 8 1/2) and twists it into a classic Kaufmanian knot of self-referentiality. Nicolas Cage plays a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman struggling to adapt a book about orchids, who ends up writing a screenplay about a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman struggling to adapt a book about orchids. (The movie came out of Kaufman's struggles to adapt a book about orchids.) Of course, the meta layers go even deeper with the addition of Kaufman's twin brother, Donald (also Cage), a fictional character who's credited as a co-writer of Adaptation. Depending on who you ask, the film's third act is either when it goes off the rails or when its genius reaches full bloom (pun intended, sorry), as it uses a parodic version of Hollywood storytelling to reflect on how stories can impact our lives. Either way, the result is a film that miraculously manages to look outward through its self-reflexive prism, exploring humans' capacity for change and growth within a trenchant self-parody of both high-minded artists and the lower-minded Hollywood machine.

3. I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)

I'm not completely sure this is where I'm Thinking of Ending Things belongs on the list. Nor am I sure I can explain why I've placed it here without spoiling it: Even giving this movie a ranking feels like a spoiler. Suffice it to say, I'm Thinking of Ending Things is intensely self-reflexive in its own bizarre way, twisting cinematic language in a thousand directions, and not-so-subtly critiquing other movies for their stubborn lack of audacity. And like many a Kaufman joint, the film can be read in several different ways, including as a surreal attempt to depict how we construct stories in our heads: how ideas take hold of us and won't let go; how we turn the stew of what we've read, what we've watched, what we've experienced into something "new"; how our particular fascinations, fears, and desires shape the stories we tell. Is "meta" the right word for that? It'll have to do until someone coins a better one.

4. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

Sixteen years before ITOET, Kaufman spun another, quite different story about how we construct (quite different) stories with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, the tale of a couple, Joel and Clementine (Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet), who erase their memories of each other after an acrimonious breakup. Set largely in Joel's head, the film ingeniously tracks how his view of the relationship changes as its rocky stretches vanish from his mind, leaving a much sunnier outlook on a fundamentally mismatched pairing. Memories, after all, are functionally little more than the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and those stories are highly susceptible to alteration, fictionalization, and distortion. Eternal Sunshine is a bold attempt to dramatize this, a story about how we turn our lives into stories and how those stories shape who we are. Is "meta" the right word for that? It'll have to do.

5. Being John Malkovich (1999)

It's easy to misconstrue Being John Malkovich as a meta film, given its central conceit involves the titular actor playing himself. But the movie is far more interested in how real people would react to that conceit — a portal that transports you into John Malkovich's head for 15 minutes at a time — than in using it to probe questions about acting, storytelling, or art. In a way, you could look at Malkovich as a movie about the movies, which, at their best, give us temporary windows into other people's experiences. But really, going to the movies is just an extension of the universal human desire at this particular movie's core: the yearning to experience a life and reality besides our own.

6. Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (2002)

Kaufman famously disavowed this film, the directorial debut of one George Clooney, who apparently reshaped the writer's screenplay into a more conventional thriller...or, at least, as conventional as a biopic of a game show host–turned–alleged assassin can be. (The film is based on the "unauthorized autobiography" of The Gong Show host Chuck Barris, in which he claimed to have been a hitman for the CIA.) Confessions is a strange movie, almost playing like another collaboration between Adaptation's Charlie and Donald — the few signature off-kilter touches that remain are some of the film's highlights. Still, the movie flirts with becoming yet another story about how we construct stories: in this case, the stories we use to delude and aggrandize ourselves. (You could easily imagine a more Kaufman-y movie in which Barris' CIA escapades are a more direct reflection of his artistic frustrations.) That's enough to put it a notch above the rest of Kaufman's filmography on the meta scale.

7. Anomalisa (2015)

Anomalisa, Kaufman's second film as director, eschews the myriad affectations of Synecdoche and ITOET in favor of one major affectation: Every character except the protagonist, Michael (David Thewlis), has the same face and the same flat voice (provided by actor Tom Noonan). Until, that is, Michael meets a unique woman named Lisa, who speaks with the voice of Jennifer Jason Leigh. Despite its strangely (for Kaufman) straightforward plot, Anomalisa has as many layers and digs into as many big questions about humanity and existence as any of his other films. None of those layers are particularly meta, however. Don't be fooled by the veneer of stop-motion animation: This is one of Kaufman's most unvarnished depictions of real life, in all its loneliness and mundanity and fleeting — but not unattainable — beauty.

8. Human Nature (2001)

Kaufman's first collaboration with Eternal Sunshine director Michel Gondry deals less with the cerebral and more with the primal. Human Nature follows a cast of characters bizarre even by Kaufman standards: a man raised by apes (Rhys Ifans), a sexually repressed scientist (Tim Robbins) obsessed with manners and decorum, and a woman with hair all over her body (Patricia Arquette), whose starved libido drives her to return to society after years spent in the wilderness. Devoid of Kaufman's usual artifice, Human Nature has been largely overlooked — it's hardly his best work, but it's an amusing musing on themes of nature vs. nurture, what separates people from animals, and what sustains human relationships. It's Kaufman through and through. Meta, though, it ain't.

9. Synecdoche, New York (2008)

Nothing illustrates the outward-looking nature of Charlie Kaufman's work better than his directorial debut Synecdoche, New York. Widely viewed as an exercise in pure narcissism, the film has an expansive vision it's not always given credit for, an ambitious drive to depict the full experience of human life through its central metaphor of an impossibly massive play. Those who praised the film tended to pick up on this: "Synecdoche, New York is not a film about the theater, although it looks like one," Roger Ebert wrote in his four-star review. "A theater director is an ideal character for representing the role Kaufman thinks we all play." As the title hints ("synecdoche" is a figure of speech in which a part of something represents a whole), the misery of Hoffman's Caden Cotard is intended to reflect universal human struggles — fear of encroaching death, the desire to live a meaningful life, the endless fight for connection and companionship. As the cliché goes, we all see ourselves as the protagonist of our own story, manipulating and compartmentalizing the supporting players in our lives, not so different from what Caden does with his immense company of players.

None of this negates what I argued at the start of this list. Synecdoche contains multitudes enough to support various readings and explore numerous ideas, and your perception of it can shift wildly across viewings as you attempt to decipher its cacophony of symbolism, artifice, and ambiguity. I don't quite agree with Ebert's assertion that it isn't a film about the theater — it isn't just a film about the theater, but it engages with themes of art and artistry even as it extrapolates outward from those themes. The true wonder of Synecdoche is not just that it can be Kaufman's most and least meta film simultaneously, but that it epitomizes the nature of his oeuvre. For all his mind games and meta-structural devices, Kaufman's chief concern is the experience of life and how we process it. His art grapples with the questions that weigh on us most deeply, even as it argues that art can't hope to answer those questions. Is "meta" the right word for that? A better one might be "human."

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