by Jim Carrey
But large numbers of peasant dead were considered off-brand by Morgan Stanley, the Chinese government, and Louis Vuitton alike. A cover-up was concocted. Taylor Swift traded silence for the rights to bring her fashion line to the Chinese market with a runway show on the Great Wall; Koons was allowed to sculpt a gigantic Slinky on the steps of Beijing’s Forbidden City. Kaufman had been offered generous film financing, but had alone refused cooperation. Cinema, he’d always believed, mimics life as a system of disparate images effecting unified experience through the magic of sequence and speed. For him the mass grave’s surfacing was in all ways a haunting—a frame from the past usurping the present. And as the storm’s wind wheezed through skeletal cavities, he’d heard an anguished voice speaking from beyond time, imploring him: Remember us, Charlie! Tell the world of the monster who put us here. Don’t let us be forgotten once the army bulldozers have plowed us back under!
Back in Shanghai he stayed at the Peace Hotel, wondering how Mao’s crimes would best be treated in cinema, jotting ideas down as they came. Horror seemed the right genre. Something like The Omen, The Exorcist. What if Mao’s spirit was hatched—no, reborn? Yes, like a hungry ghost, refusing death, latching onto some equally gruesome modern entity? That was it. He’d popped a Xanax and gone for a walk along the Huangpu River, returning hours later to find his room ransacked, his laptop stolen, a new note scrawled on his pad, seemingly written in his penmanship by the Chinese Ministry of State Security agent already assigned to his containment: “Silence is golden.”
He’d fled with just his passport—and a hit of inspiration making clear the scope of his project, and its required star.
“I need you, Jimmy,” he said now. “You gotta be my Mao.”
“Madness!” Carrey hissed. “They’ll hang me for playing Asian!”
Kaufman had already addressed this. To take Mao head-on, as Daniel Day-Lewis might, would only arrive at the comic grotesque. But to channel him through the comic grotesque? Well, that might deliver the fullness of his horror. Kaufman’s Mao would be re-spawned inside the mind of a tormented actor, “Jim Carrey,” a star who, fearing his own collapse, explores the same dark appetites that guided Mao: the wish to be worshipped forever, to escape mortality by commanding history. A man who, convinced the character of Mao Zedong will be his Raging Bull, opens himself ever more to the tyrant’s spirit, his lusts, his vanities, until he is devoured completely. Carrey was appalled, and yet—in Charlie’s hands, who knew? It could be a masterpiece, his Oscar vehicle, something to make Tommy Lee Jones—who’d never given him his due and always called him a buffoon on the set of Batman Forever—croak of jealousy, that whiskey-soaked Harvard shit, God bless him.
Kaufman unfolded a worn treatment. Scratching out the opening sentence, he scribbled a new one in its place, and read it aloud: “Jim Carrey and Charlie Kaufman sit beneath a sky of depthless blues, the night air sweet with mangoes rotting in the trees above. The camera goes close on Carrey. ‘How does it begin?’ he asks, voice tinged with a tragic naïveté.”
Carrey closed his eyes, head spinning; imagining himself playing himself playing Mao, he asked, “How does the movie begin?”
“With the hunger. A long crane shot, digital, rising over a soaring pile of starving peasants. Thousands. Millions. Tens of millions. Infants, children, mothers, fathers, the elderly, their final breaths, gasps, rattles, joined in singing an ancient harvest song. These are the innocents whose lives Mao devoured, feed for his demon dreams. Slowly, the camera cranes up the piled bodies, pulling back as it ascends, ever further, until the moment of maximum removal when we see this is all an inverted image set in Mao Zedong’s milky, dying eyeball. He’s on a steel surgical bed. Hooked up to respirators. An affront to the word ‘alive.’ ” Kaufman lowered the script. “You’re perfect for this! Who else could do it?” Clearing his throat, he returned to the page. “Time misbehaves in death. Minutes cough up centuries. Seconds excrete millennia. So it is here. We go from Mao’s POV as the embalming team plug rubber tubes into his arteries, pump him full of formaldehyde. He’s trapped in his own body. Not alive and yet undead. Tormented by something just beyond the flesh, something that here, finally, holds him in its clutches. Reckoning, he can’t escape it. And as he shrieks inside himself like a man buried alive, the camera dissolves from Mao’s bloated, gruesome, famous face to…”
“To what?” whispered Carrey.
“To yours…”
CHAPTER 6
Charlie Kaufman was living on the run. He’d fled his bungalow for the Saharan Motor Hotel, an old Sunset Boulevard fleabag where he’d guide Jim Carrey’s spirit toward Mao’s.
Carrey had stayed at the motel when he came to Hollywood in 1982, arriving with just six hundred dollars, a suitcase of clothes, and a secondhand copy of an apocalyptic bestseller, Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth. The author claimed to have cracked secret codes in the Bible, and through them to have learned that nuclear annihilation was only months away, the end of everything at hand. Carrey had read it in a sun-warped plastic chair overlooking the Saharan’s swimming pool, fetid water bobbing with cigarette butts and candy-bar wrappers, the haggled ecstasies of hookers and johns sounding from nearby rooms. Sometimes, lonely, he joined them. Sometimes he made his cruddy mattress wince with Tammy the peroxide blonde in the white leather miniskirt who worked outside the Comedy Store; sometimes with freckled Vicky from Montana who wished for soap-opera stardom while hustling the rush-hour traffic. Sometimes Vicky’s fake Chanel perfume lingered on his skin as he read The Late Great Planet Earth above the motel pool, and sometimes, looking up, he’d daydream a thousand ICBMs streaking silver across the sky, could hear them all whistling down toward impact, and braced awaiting the moment when the motel’s bricks and the book’s pages and his own flesh would be vaporized, then blown out to sea by cleansing desert winds.
Vanishment, obliteration—strange imaginings for an aspiring star. But in his most desolate moments, when his jokes didn’t land, when he feared returning home to Canada a failure, he’d wanted it so badly, anything to spring him from the stretching rack of dreaming.
But the missiles never flew, and the person of Jim Carrey only grew across the decades, soaring from blockbuster to blockbuster.
Those early days were far from his mind as he entered the Saharan that week. Kaufman greeted him in footed pajamas printed with fifties images of Tonto and the Lone Ranger. He gave Jim a squirrelly nod, turned to a figure splayed out on the bed, a paunchy man in a once-ivory linen suit, now splotched with sweat stains. The man drew three drama-teasing breaths, then flicked up the brim of his battered Panama hat to reveal a famous face in the morning sun.
Carrey gasped. “Hopkins…”
It is impossible to overstate the importance of Anthony Hopkins’s participation in the entire Mao affair. He was the first of Hollywood’s masters to endorse Carrey’s dramatic talents, writing the star to hail Dumb and Dumber as a fearless exploration of “the savageries of class and the miracle of friendship.” They had bonded at the 1998 Golden Globes after realizing they both inhabited characters through the spirits of animals: Carrey had based his Ace Ventura on an intelligent bird; Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter was a hybrid crocodile-tarantula with infinite patience. “The Menagerists,” they’d dubbed themselves, and remained close. Kaufman had asked Hopkins to play the memory of Richard Nixon in the mind of “Jim Carrey” playing himself preparing to play Mao, a ghost inside a ghost. He’d accepted, offering to join in preparations. For Carrey his presence transformed the sordid motel room into a place of destiny.
“You once called me the Lewis and Clark of the dramatic wilds,” said Hopkins. “But as old age brings sexlessness, am I not just as much your Sacajawea? I think so. The child I hold to my bosom is Art. My teat’s milk is Craft. Let us, then, cross these frontier wilds. Let us find our fair Pacific, our…”
He yawned—then seemed to forget he�
��d been speaking at all. He held a glass of Burgundy, the crystal clouded with lip prints; Jim wondered what had brought Hopkins back to the bottle.
It was a woman. Hopkins had spent that winter directing Titus Andronicus at Yale’s drama school, and there had fallen in love with a poet, Elise Evans, author of a Pulitzer Prize–shortlisted collection, The Scarified Heart. She’d lost her first husband, the mountain climber Chugs Stanton, to a Himalayan avalanche. Her second, an archaeologist, had left her for an older woman. She’d forsaken love as a biological ploy. Until Hopkins arrived. They’d spent that winter in her faculty suite, sharing warm baths as blizzards howled beyond the leaded windows. Hopkins felt his whole life had been a prelude to her touch, and with April’s early blossoms decided the rest of his days should be just like these. He’d bought a sapphire engagement ring and booked flights to Mustique. At the York Street J. Press he was fitted for the ivory linen suit in which he’d hoped to marry her, sucking in his gut before a three-way mirror that refracted him into an infinity of bliss. Just a few more seasons together was all he’d wanted; in a flash of sunshine it had seemed so tauntingly possible. But his bones had betrayed him, femur and tibia grinding arthritically as he kneeled to propose, pain searing the joint, leg buckling beneath him. Crumpled before her, he’d begged the universe to go back just five seconds. His heart wilted as her lips touched his forehead, the kiss of a mourner, not a lover. Looking up he saw her eyes flooded with feared loss, tears trickling off her lips as she said, “Oh Tony, I can’t, I’m so sorry…”
Damned fool, he’d cursed himself, riding Amtrak down from New Haven. Goddamned fool, done in by your own creaky skeleton. How many loves does life owe anyone? None. So what were you thinking? That she’d nurse you into senility? Change your diapers? Goddamned fool! he’d ranted aloud, causing at least one other passenger to believe Hopkins was berating him as they stood in the café car.
“There’s much to accomplish,” he said to Carrey now, half of him still lost in the pain of love’s memory. “Let us begin.”
So Carrey settled beside Hopkins as Kaufman flicked on the flatscreen to play the first scenes of a carefully planned character indoctrination, footage from Mao’s famine recently sent to him with a note that read, You have friends in Taipei.
Charlie had set the reels to slow motion, one-sixty-fourth real time, wanting Carrey to fully absorb every frame of Mao’s murders. That day they lay on the king-size bed for six hours, watching hell on earth. Panning shots of starving people tending to crude blast furnaces, lining up for meager rice rations, patrolled by men with guns. Interiors of huts packed with children too near death to even eye the camera. On and on, a man-made hellscape. Carrey, who knew nothing of Chinese history, soon wondered why all these people were suffering.
“An earthquake? Flood? War?”
“Worse.” Hopkins sipped his wine. “A dream. A grand design! Mao traded all the grain to Russia for capital goods, guns, the dangled hope of atomic power. He collectivized the land, made the peasants melt down their plows for steel. He wanted China to surpass Russia in wealth and stature. He wanted radios in kitchens and cars in driveways. Stalin engineered a famine to industrialize, so Mao did the same. He thought it a path to paradise.”
“Utopia,” said Kaufman. “More gruesome than Gomorrah.”
“Yes,” said Hopkins. “Mao promised a Great Leap Forward. Deliverance from feudalism! He never said how he’d get it done.”
“What did he do?” Carrey asked.
“China was poor in everything except people,” said Hopkins. “So he devoured them, taking lives as raw fuel.”
Guru Viswanathan, we will remember, had once taught Carrey to visualize the coloration of his aura. As Kaufman showed him what Mao had done while the millions died—reels of the despot dancing with silk-clad starlets at Shanghai garden parties, gorging on pork and whiskey, smoking his beloved cigarettes—he felt a spiritual pollution, a dimming of his rose-gold glow.
“He doesn’t even care,” Carrey gasped.
“Power never cares!” said Hopkins. “Watch how Mao lived while they died. Decadent parties, wild orgies, all raged in his villa while the masses starved.”
And as Mao danced his lovers across the screen, fear roiled in Carrey’s mind. Heath Ledger had lost himself to the Joker. Willy Loman had dragged Philip Seymour Hoffman into the void. Carrey regarded Ledger as an exceptional talent struck down too young. But Hoffman? Philip Seymour Hoffman? He could do certain things that Hoffman couldn’t, but Hoffman. Just the name. His toes clenched. There was an artist. The unassuming excellence, magical. The depth of transformation. Hoffman was great, maybe in the line of Brando and De Niro. Hoffman, dead on the floor of a West Village apartment: the man had everything and still found this life so unbearable he numbed himself into oblivion. Carrey thought, now, of those early maps of a flat earth, water and ill-fated ships cascading off the edges, monsters playing in the margins, and he wondered if they were not geography at all, but renderings of the inner self. Keep to the warm seas, stray not from trade routes.
It was madness to conjure Mao’s demons. And yet…the rewards. Hoffman as Truman Capote. Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln. The acclaim. Sweet fame, mother’s touch, fellating validation. Now want of greatness overrode fear, blinding him to the misery on the flatscreen. He saw himself at some future Oscar ceremony wearing a sleek Armani tux, thin lapels (he’d have lost twenty pounds by then), the whole world marveling at his fitness while scenes of his Mao played on giant screens before a fawning Academy. He saw Tommy Lee Jones there in the audience, gaunt and gizzard necked, slumped in his seat, reduced to seething by the sheer power of Carrey’s artistry. The dopamine hit just when, as often happens in the movies…there came a knock at the door.
“Who’s that?” Kaufman slipped his hand under the pillow, grabbing the ivory-handled Colt revolver he’d hidden there. He’d been fascinated by this weapon since boyhood nights spent watching Gunsmoke. Caressing its cylinder, he saw, again, his boyhood self on the Coney Island carousel, watched by his spinster aunt Fiona, her every maternal instinct channeled onto him, little cherub Charlie, beaming as he drew toy pistols from his holsters, while he blasted away at Richie and Josh Kirschbaum, spoiled dentist’s sons who mocked his secondhand winter coat, bang-bang-bang, carousel jingle scoring the slaughter and—
“Who’s at the goddamn door?” Kaufman said, clenching the gun.
“Who…?” Hopkins emptied his Burgundy. “Or what?”
“Who. A person knocks. A person is a who.”
“But what does that person represent? What might that person bear? In drama as in life some people are whos, but most are merely whats. Geisel knew this well.”
“Fine,” said Kaufman. “Who or what is at the door?”
“Right now?” said Hopkins. “Rising tension! But in a moment, once I open the door, revealing the who or what behind it, well, Chuck, you’ll see I’ve brought a touch of the ephemeral, the visceral, and, yes, whimsy, but also woe, to our endeavors. Hide in the bathroom, Jimmy. We don’t want your famous face mucking this up.”
“You’re pretty recognizable, too.”
“Don’t worry,” said Hopkins, “I shall make a mask of geniality.”
And so Carrey shuffled into the bathroom, and Hopkins opened the door to reveal Lenny Weingarten, a thirty-one-year-old delivery boy for the Neon Dragon Bistro, bearing four Happy Family Meals sweating grease through paper bags.
“You’re not Chinese,” said Hopkins.
“I’m Lenny Weingarten.”
“The website shows a fully Chinese staff.”
“Those are stock photos.”
“What are stock photos?”
“Pictures of people who sell their images to others without concern for context or truth.” Weingarten had studied semiotics at UC Santa Cruz.
Now Hopkins, feeling himself the victim of false adverti
sing, pressed a crisp fifty into Weingarten’s hand and slammed the door in his face.
“You tried to get a Chinese guy in here?” said Kaufman.
“And what of it?”
“It’s highly insensitive.”
“You’re the one casting a white guy as Mao Zedong.”
“I’m casting Mao’s spirit inside a white guy. And offering both as avatars of the über-demon, a raceless, genderless, devourer of generations. You’re using the service economy to try and make an ethnic Chinese person bear witness to it.”
“If it’s all so innocent what’s the problem?”
“We live in a crumbling multiethnic Ponzi-scheme society requiring a highly policed cultural environment to avoid outright chaos. That’s the problem.”
“You live in a crumbling multiethnic Ponzi-scheme society requiring whatever it was you said,” said Hopkins, refilling his Burgundy. “I—am an Englishman. As for that Chinese delivery boy, he was a Jew. Would you have him out of a job?”
“What?”
“Anti-Semite!”
In the bathroom Carrey was already grappling with Mao.
At first the star tried to hedge, hoped to manage the role with safe impressionism, creating the tyrant only skin-deep. He contorted his eyes, stuffed his cheeks with toilet paper to effect Mao-ish bloatedness—but that only achieved an Asian Ed McMahon. Then he slicked back his hair with water, grinning maniacally—but that only sent McMahon careening into Ronald Reagan. The soul, an Esalen tantra instructor taught him, speaks through dance. So he began to move like Mao in the film reels with his Shanghai harem girls, undulating before the mirror, Reagan and McMahon falling away from his composition, clowning passing to conjuring. A harem. Intimacies with Georgie were still suffering from mutual distrust. Mao’s grin coiled up through his own skin. He felt an erection stirring. And he enjoyed it—until, in the mirror, he saw a sooty haze about his person. His aura! The rose-gold glow completely gone. Now coal dust. He felt, again, the old impressionist’s fear, that the throne of the self was not only empty, but not a throne at all, just a creaky barstool worn down by the weight of ten thousand asses. Where was Jim, in this moment? Who was Jim? What would a Jim even be if Jim was ultimately just the creation of a billion strangers’ minds? Jim was the sense of Jim persisting from moment to moment. What, then, of these lost moments? Panicked, closing his eyes, taming inner chaos with the shiny rod of grammar—“I am Jim; Jim is me; me is I.” But how could all these things be both different and the same? He sought grounding in pure reflection, but that wasn’t him or me or I there. There was only Mao’s specter, grinning, taunting. He tried scrubbing away the darkness with desperate splashes from the faucet, but Mao’s grin only grew, wider and wider, like Guy Rolfe in Mr. Sardonicus, leaving him horrified at his reflection like some small boy in a grisly Halloween mask. The Neon Dragon Bistro’s aromas wafted in, waking roaring hunger.