Antkind by Charlie Kaufman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Burdens of Privilege

Ideas lead to further ideas. Obvious, right? It’s how the world progresses. Or at least the human part of it.

But this is a scam, a con job of cosmic magnitude. It’s the way that demon Language has his (or her, or its, or thon’s) way with us.

We call it ‘thinking’, or the even more solitary activity of ‘imagination’. But it might more accurately be called ‘following’, or the even more communal ‘serving’. We are swept along in a current of ideas. They pop up out of nowhere, demand attention, and direct behaviour. Think about it: who is really in charge here?

Facility with language is how we get on in the world. Those who ‘master’ language or some significant part of it - doctors, lawyers, finance types - generally get on best. These are the folk who can connect ideas (that is to say, words) in acceptable, and sometimes innovative ways.

B (short for Balaam, like the biblical character with the ass) Ruby Rosenberger Rosenberg is just such an aspiring word master, a film critic who makes his living (as well as his life) by connecting ideas. His stream (or train) of consciousness is more a torrent (or freight load) of miscellaneous facts, celebrity names, hearsay events, random metaphors, and potential opportunities. He is obsessed by the correctness (political and otherwise) of the words he uses, even those he with himself (befitting a graduate of Harvard, of course). He wants everyone to know that he is kindly disposed towards African-Americans, that he is not Jewish, and that he can really make a contribution to the world by commenting (driveling?), in articles and at book-length, about the cinematic world. This he calls “monetizing” his ideas.

Researching his latest tome, B encounters the ancient part-time cinematographer (and former full-time caretaker at the Florida School for the Deaf and Blind in Saint Augustine), Ingo Cutbirth, a black man who is one of the great number of Unseen in the industry as well as society in general. From his position behind the camera, Cutbirth has made a film that takes three months to watch (and took ninety years to make). B senses an opportunity that is personal as well as professional. Cutbirth is a way out of B’s unexpressed but gnawing feeling of inauthenticity (and obscurity): “My privilege shelters me, and Ingo is the ax with which to hack away at the shelter that is the privilege which I have had,” he thinks. Ah, those pesky ideas, illusory, apparently self-serving but leading us down the garden path of perdition.

Hence the title Antkind: “Just as the Campotini ant is enslaved by the fungus O. unilateralis, so I have been enlisted to monomaniacally do the bidding of Ingo’s movie.” Among ants, the mind is communal. And, so B discovers, is his: “Where does the movie end and my mind begin?” Culture is something we consider as being possessed by ‘us’ when, being essentially linguistic, it actually possesses us. And yet we fight for it as its loyal minions, almost always at someone else’s expense. These are the Unseen who have less facility with language, but who are actually exploited to create the scenes we see. We call the result ‘reality’ but the Unseen are clearly not part of that.

Things quickly go awry for B. Cutbirth dies; his film is accidentally destroyed by fire; and B himself is physically transformed from the same cause. But, obsessed with the film, B is on a downward slide. “I feel a slippage; things are not steady,” he worries. It is language itself that he feels unravelling: “It is the slippage of my thoughts, my definitions, my mental landscape that terrifies me.” The stability of his life has been lost and “Everything is mysterious now.” Is this a mental illness or a process of awakening? Or perhaps just a dream?

Read it to find out. Be prepared for surprises.

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