MADNESS IN THE METHOD?
Actor-comedian Jim Carrey sends out a message from the great beyond
Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond Now streaming, Netflix
In the new documentary Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond — about his embodiment of absurdist entertainer Andy Kaufman in the 1999 movie Man on the Moon — the former superstar of slapstick wants to share something other than a cartoonish yawp or his talking buttocks.
“The door is the realization that this — us — is Seaside,” Jim Carrey says. “It’s the dome. This is the dome. This isn’t real. You know? This is a story.”
Seaside is the fake town in The Truman Show, a 1998 movie in which Carrey played a man who slowly discovers that he’s the unwitting star of a television program. Carrey then made his Kaufman biopic, Man on the Moon, which dramatized the late comedian’s quest to challenge audiences with a bewildered interrogation of reality itself. These two films are the tent poles of the documentary.
They are also the keys to the artistry and celebrity of Jim Carrey, who applies the lessons of fame to a society drowning in fiction, distraction, advertisement and self-imaging.
“Jim Carrey was a great character, and I was lucky to get the part,” he told Jimmy Kimmel in May. “But I don’t think of that as me anymore.”
“I don’t believe that you exist,” he told an E! News correspondent at New York Fashion Week days later. “There is no me ... There are clusters of tetrahedrons moving around together ... We don’t matter.”
Kaufman “was about breaking that wall, and not stopping when the cameras stopped,” Carrey says in the Netflix documentary. He wanted “to turn reality on its head. To completely blur the lines.”
Is Carrey attempting to do that now, in a kind of meta-performance with a 20-year arc? Or is Jim Carrey ... unwell? Carrey, after winning the role of Kaufman in Man on the Moon, surrendered himself to the spirit of the long-dead entertainer, and allowed himself to be filmed behind the scenes.
“Andy Kaufman showed up, tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Sit down, I’ll be doing my movie,’” Carrey says. “What happened afterward was out of my control.”
Carrey stayed in character on set, either as Kaufman or as Kaufman’s cantankerous lounge-lizard character Tony Clifton.
Director Milos Forman pleaded at first with his possessed star — but eventually understood that he had to address Carrey as “Andy” to get anything from him. The most startling sequence in the documentary involves wrestler Jerry Lawler, who in 1982 “fought” Kaufman in Memphis until the latter had to be taken away on a stretcher. It was a gag, apparently, but it was hard to tell fact from fakery.
Carrey goaded Lawler for days between takes — until Lawler really went after him. Carrey, seemingly injured, was carted away on a real stretcher, by a real ambulance, leaving both cast and crew flummoxed.
The Carrey of today, addressing the camera, admits he had doubts about going too far — an admission that Kaufman himself never would’ve made.
This moment of self-doubt is important, because Carrey is the documentary’s only contemporaneous interviewee. Forman, Lawler, co-star Danny DeVito and Kaufman confidante Bob Zmuda appear only in the behind-thescenes footage from years ago, though their exasperation is clear.
“At some point in your life,” Carrey says, “you have to go: ‘I don’t care what it looks like. I’ve found the hole in the psyche and I’m going through and I’m going to face the abyss of not knowing whether that’s going to be OK with everybody.’”
According to Carrey, he confronted the abyss after he finished Man on the Moon, and discovered that he didn’t know who he was anymore.
“Truman Show really became a prophecy for me,” Carrey says. “It is constantly reaffirming itself as a teaching, almost, as a real representation of what I’ve gone through in my career — and what everybody goes through when they create themselves, you know, to be popular or to be successful.
“It’s not just show business. It’s Wall Street. It’s anywhere. You go to the office and you put a monkey suit on, and you act a certain way and you say a certain thing, and you lie through your teeth sometimes. And you do whatever you need to do to look like a winner.” He has a point. Pairing the prophecy of The Truman Show with the resurrection of Man on the Moon, Carrey’s message descends from the realm of celebrity into the life of the viewer. We’re all acting, to a degree. We exaggerate our abilities, we craft a careful image on social media, we allow what others think to infect our behaviour.
These days we are all Truman — and sometimes it takes an Andy to point that out.