Andy Kaufman was an entertainer in the late 70s and early 80s who would do anything to make people laugh, except tell jokes. He disliked conventional stand-up so tried his hand everything else instead, including sketch shows, performance art, music, dance, art and wrestling.
In 1999, Jim Carrey played Andy Kaufman in Man on The Moon – a film that tracks Kaufman’s rise from small comedy clubs to international fame. Carrey decided to commit to the role fully, staying in character between takes and refusing to acknowledge the existence of a ‘Jim’ behind the act. To all extents and purposes, he was ‘Andy’.
Then, in 2017, Chris Smith used behind-the-scenes footage of the 1999 film and intercut it with a modern-day Jim Carrey interview. In it, Carrey reflects on what it was like to play Kaufman, straying into deep questions about acting and performance, as well as reflecting on identity as a concept.
The first thing that strikes you about the film is the sheer intensity of Carrey. Like Kaufman, he refuses to draw boundaries around his characters: there is no simple beginning or end to his performance. Sometimes his commitment makes for uncomfortable viewing. Everyone on set, from the director to the make-up artists, have to put up with ‘Andy’ and all of his escapades, including crashed cars, emotional break downs and actual fist-fights.
But despite the annoyance, there is a general understanding that Carrey is doing something quite special. He is prepared to take the project wherever it leads him and is uncompromising when offered the easy out. After a particularly confrontational day on set, the director (Milos Forman) asks Carrey to tone down the act. Carrey claims that it is not an option: he either commits himself fully or simply offers an ‘impersonation’ of Kaufman. Forman sighs. “No, I do not want to end it”.
This is the crux of Carrey’s mission. He wants to go beyond ‘impersonating’ and fully abandon himself to another person’s thoughts and feelings. It is as if he has had the personality of Kaufman locked away in his own psyche; all he has to do is switch the other voices off.
The ease of this transition is disturbing. By not responding to ‘Jim’ and only acknowledging ‘Andy’, you slowly forget that the person in the footage is the same person you see reminiscing years later. It is as if the identity of ‘Jim’ is only maintained by the conventions of language; by rejecting the conventions and switching something in his head, Carrey forms a new identity. He makes a mockery of the idea that our identities are permanent or stable.
In the philosophical sphere, Carrey’s behaviour amounts to a rejection of reductionism. Reductionists hold that facts about identity can be reduced to facts about something else, allowing the concept of identity to be fully explicable. Famously, Locke thought that identity could be reduced to facts about memory, whereas other philosophers thought physical facts were vital. Either way, reductionists think identity has necessary and sufficient conditions, which can give us a full account of who we are.
The ease of Carrey’s transition seems to speak to another truth. Identity is not fixed, certain or determinate; it is loose, ambiguous and ever-changing. There are no simple facts, psychological or physical, that can provide a firm grip on who we are since our identity changes every time we walk into a room. I am, for example, simultaneously a son, a brother, a friend, a colleague, a student, a customer and a citizen. My identity permeates throughout other people, and I can be multiple different things at the same time. I’d like to think there is as single thread that unites the divergent parts into a unified whole, but how can I know such a thread is there?
Hume thought all knowledge comes from impressions, but we have no single or simple impression of the self. When I reflect on who I am, I just find my own perceptions – I can never “catch” the thing that is having the thoughts. It is like trying to experience the point at which you fall asleep or the moment the fridge light goes off when you close the door. Hume therefore argued that we have no knowledge of our own identity. Our imagination creates a semblance of continuity, which gives us the sense there is something more stable and fixed than our kaleidoscopic societal identities.
Carrey has made his home with this confusion and duplicity: he is “fine just floating” on his “quiet, gentle seat in the universe”. At points Carrey can sound glib (“there is just me and the tea cup”) but is also capable of teasing out some genuinely important ideas. His philosophy might not be fully developed in the film, yet it does raise some questions that we should all take more seriously.
Ultimately, however, who knows if this is ‘actually’ Carrey talking or simply another avatar in his head. Right now, he is a softly-spoken monk-type. Tomorrow, who knows. Maybe he will adopt another character and make a documentary of the time he made the ‘Jim & Andy’. This might help explain his erratic behaviour over the last couple of months, but it does nothing to answer the philosophical questions that the documentary poses.
Tom Knight 