Winning the Battle Against Yourself

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. In the fall of 1999, a new film debuted in just 25 theaters across the United States. Its name was Being John Malkovich. The premise was outlandish. A down-on-is luck puppeteer named Craig finds a small hidden door at the office where he works.

When he crawls inside, he goes through a strange portal and ends up inside the mind of the actor, John Malkovich. For fifteen minutes or so, he gets to inhabit the actor's body before being spit out on the side of the New Jersey turnback. Things only get more wacky from there. Craig and a co worker start charging people to go through the portal, and soon plenty of people have had the experience of being John Malkovich. When John Malkovich, the real John Malkovich, inevitably learns about this, he is determined to go through the portal himself.

When he does so, He enters a world where everyone has his face and can only say one word. Malcolm. The movie is thought provoking and has long been one of my favorites. That might be because it is a metaphor for a central idea that we explore on this show.

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