Anomalisa Review

Michael Stone steps out of the shower and ties a towel around his waist. A small buzz begins forming and Michael wipes off the condensation from the mirror and stares at himself in the mirror. The buzz has turned into a deep drone, overpowering the senses. Michael’s face begins to contort into all different expressions. Who is Michael Stone? Is he a husband and father? Is he a customer service expert and motivational speaker? Is he an author? Is there anyone behind any of these expressions? Michael begins to peel off his face as it clicks and clacks with each new expression. Michael Stone is a puppet, and his bathroom is not a real room – it is a miniature replication of a bathroom. Michael’s identity is based solely on how he compares himself to others, and each of his actions are guided by something larger than he is.

Michael Stone is the protagonist (and antagonist) of Charlie Kaufman’s 2015 stop-motion film Anomalisa. We watch Michael’s 24 hours in Cincinnati, from flight to return home, as he attends and speaks at a customer service conference and grapples with his identity. By the time Michael has disembarked from his plane and is making his way through the airport, however, it is clear that Michael is the only unique individual in the film – all the other puppets share the same nondescript, generic face and are all voiced by the same actor with the same monotonous, deadpan delivery. Michael does not treat anyone he encounters as an individual – to him, and the viewer, they quite literally are not individuals. Michael comes to represent America’s capitalist power structure through Kaufman’s tour through his psyche.

Through this psychological analysis, Anomalisa shows the ways in which capitalism, specifically in post-9/11 America, strips identity from individuals and actually encourages apathy from those in positions of power. Ever since the end of World War II when America dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan, they have been firmly established as a global superpower. America’s industrial economy has continued chugging along through to the 21st century, wreaking havoc on the rest of the world and its own people. America is capitalist – big corporations are left untouched by the government, and, especially as of late, the wealth gap between the rich and the poor is growing exponentially. According to a report from Insider by Juliana Kaplan and Madison Hoff, “US families in the top 10% of the wealth distribution added about $60 trillion to their wealth from 1989 to 2019, while the bottom half of Americans added just under $1 trillion to their total wealth during the same time” and that the top 1% of Americans hold a third of its overall wealth. Amongst all this inequality, workers are worked tirelessly for criminally low wages all in the name of productivity. How could the owners and executives of these companies be so apathetic as to actually make the people who built up their empires struggle? Through Michael Stone, we are offered an insight as to why.

Michael Stone is a customer service expert, and he has made a living telling workers how they should behave in order to be most productive. Anomalisa is centered around one of these talks at a conference, and by the time Michael gives his talk at the climax of the film, his tone is surgical, with occasional, artificial inflections. Michael’s whole speech feels distinctly familiar – and that’s because it is. While lacking the glitz and glamor of a TED Talk as, contextually, that would not make sense for a customer service conference in Ohio, Michael is still speaking what Houman Harouni describes as the “language of TED” in his essay “The Sound of Ted: A Case for Distaste” in The American Reader. Harouni describes the language of TED as “a style that comes from corporate conference rooms, where product ideas are pitched to potential investors”, comparing it to “the fundraiser’s speech” where “everything you say and how you say it should be calculated, catering to the cold, calculating investor” (Harouni). Michael may not be looking for investors, but that does not matter – “the language of TED constitutes a special style that did not exist in the public imagination until 2006, and now it is so firmly planted there that everyone leans toward its sugary tone” (Harouni). Michael, as a customer service expert, gives directions to workers on how to behave, telling them to smile and put on a mask. For Michael, though, this job is his mask – he doesn’t believe any of the things he’s saying. He even begins to break down during his speech, rambling about the president and the state of the world, revealing his true feelings before insulting his audience. Through Michael’s tone, though, the performance he embodies for his job is the “language of TED” – a cold, disingenuous performance rooted in investment and American capitalism.

But, as Kaufman shows us, Michael’s job is more than just a performance. Because his job puts him in a position of authority, power, and has made him wealthy, Michael has actually made his social role his identity. When he exerts his power over others, he feels good about himself, like when he coerces his fan Lisa into sleeping with him, but when his authority, and his position in society, is questioned, he begins to doubt this identity he has built up for himself. This is represented in Michael’s face. Michael, like all other characters in the film, is a stop motion animated puppet. What separates him, though, is the fact he has a unique face plate and a unique voice – he is quite literally the only unique person in his world. To him, everyone else is the same and everyone else is unspecial. The cracks in his worldview begin to show, though, when his authority is questioned. After attempting to manipulate his ex-flame into sleeping with him and failing, Michael goes up to his room and showers. When he gets out of the shower, a loud droning begins and Michael begins peeling off his face-plate in horror, recognizing that he has no true identity.

In his essay “Six Ways of Looking at Anomalisa” that analyzes Anomalisa through six different specific lenses, David L. Smith writes that Michael “is horrified by the discovery that he might be ‘merely’ a puppet—presumably because he clings to that sense of self-awareness and self-determination that most of us associate with being human” (Smith 23). Michael positions himself as “the protagonist of his own world”, as “the only unique being” (Gerber), but just like everyone else, Kaufman makes Michael a mechanical puppet. Michael “stands apart, yes, but only on the outside, only by appearance” and “his ego is founded on distinction” (Gerber) and his separation from others. What Smith and Gerber fail to recognize, though, is why Michael constructed himself in this way. Michael is successful – in a niche, sure, but successful all the same – and we see many instances of him with distinct power over others. And, more often than not, Michael gets what he wants. The position of power afforded to him by his job, coupled with the fact his job requires him to construct a confident, slightly chauvinist persona, has erased any hint of Michael Stone, human, and created Michael Stone, customer service speaker, with nothing underneath.

Therefore, Michael Stone, a man in a position of power, comes to embody and represent capitalism’s treatment of working-class people through his more direct, interpersonal interactions with workers. Anomalisa spends much of its first half hour of runtime in uncomfortable silence or mundane small talk as Michael Stone makes his way from airplane to hotel room. When he gets in the cab to the hotel, we sit with him and the taxi driver for the whole ride. The unnamed taxi driver continuously tries to spark up conversation with Michael about anything from chili to the city’s famous zoo, and Michael continuously shoots him down, getting frustrated with his attempts at human interaction. To Michael, his taxi driver is just a taxi driver, whose purpose is to get him from one location to another – the driver’s attempts at genuine human interaction, which reveal the genuine personality that exists underneath the performance of the driver, frustrate Michael, who does not even see the driver as an individual. In his essay “Anomalisa, or the Effort of Recognition” for Epoché Magazine, Timofei Gerber looks at Michael’s interactions with service workers and how they reflect his feelings towards them. He writes that Michael is able to distinguish people and that “distinction aims at properties, the type, the genus people participate in, in virtue of their social and pragmatic duties; it attributes roles” (Gerber). What Michael is unable to do, then, is “to recognize people [...] he’s completely ignorant of the individual that assumes said role” (Gerber). Across America, workers are underpaid and given horrible working conditions. The cost of living continues to increase as the wealth gap grows ever larger. Michael, on the other side of this gap, treats these individuals as the American capitalist machine treats these workers – they are nameless, faceless, and expected to do a task.

Michael’s treatment of workers extends to his treatment of his personal relationships. But Michael Stone does not exist within Anomalisa as an individual – he serves to represent capitalism itself. In his essay for The Rumpus, “ANOMALISA, THE INSANITY OF CAPITALISM, AND THE POWER OF CULTURE,” Jacques Servin looks at Anomalisa as a critique of capitalism. He argues that Anomalisa is “not only about a ‘commonplace narcissist’ who is ‘fundamentally alone’”, but also “a culture in which even emotions, insights, and facial expressions are Taylorized for the sake of ‘productivity’” (Servin). To Michael, relationships are transactions, and everyone is reduced down to a puppet wearing the mask of their societal role. How, then, should we as individuals living under capitalism live our lives? If we have to spend so much time to fit in nicely to the role in society we perform, how do we build our own identities? Do we find ourselves in the people we surround ourselves with? In the media and products we consume? In the art we create? What does it mean to connect with people in a culture that discourages connection?

At the end of the movie, Michael is alone in a house full of people he doesn’t know with a family he does not love. Lisa, on the other hand, is driving into the sun with her friend, happily listening to music. Why has she, of a lesser social status, found herself so much happier than Michael? Why has she managed to retain such a positive outlook with just a fraction of what Michael has? So many movies and TV shows as of late have taken to lampooning the cataclysmic income disparity in America. Surprisingly, though, a lot of this media goes beyond parody and digs into the psychology of the uber rich. Shows like Succession, The White Lotus, and Mad Men, all of which are some of the highest rated programs in the past fifteen years, look at miserable, wealthy people and examine what makes them so miserable. Like Anomalisa, these shows demonstrate how marrying personal identity with one’s prestigious job or title creates an empty husk of a person incapable of forming meaningful relationships. These shows, along with films like Anomalisa, show a growing dialectical approach to wealth depictions in media, but what does it mean? Can the ultra-rich find personal happiness and an identity of their own to finally be able to empathize with the people they exploit? Is it even possible to separate yourself from your social position once you reach a certain level of wealth and influence? At what point do the two become one? Is there any way to separate them? And if there isn’t, how do we move forward as a society being ruled by apathetic people trapped within their social roles without sense of happiness or belonging, who run our world into the ground?

This new style of “eat-the-rich” show, still growing in popularity, raises all these questions and more. What they fail to do, however, is provide any answers. In fact, as Sam Rosenberg writes for Consequence of Sound in his article “The Menu, Glass Onion, and the Limits of the Eat-the-Rich Satire”, this growing number of wealth satires “simply view their characters as one-dimensional caricatures, whose toxic behaviors are punished but never fully explored” and they do not have the room “to build out the psychologies and motivations of their characters [...] to flesh out their satirical observations” (Rosenberg). Because these films are produced within Hollywood, where multi-million dollar productions are expected to turn a profit, eat-the-rich satires play it safe, promising fun revenge fantasies that are “just interested in telling us things we already know” without “[challenging] us to see beyond what we think we know” (Rosenberg). Rosenberg is particularly critical of the failures of big-budget Hollywood vehicles that satirize the rich, but notes that serialized productions like The White Lotus and Succession do a better job of pushing satire forward because they force us to confront uncomfortable truths – the uber-rich are not cartoonish caricatures of evil, but real and miserable people.

Even still, serialized dramas like Succession, The White Lotus, and even Anomalisa, which similarly uses the psychology of rich individuals to satirize wealth inequality, fail to answer any of the questions they pose. I can’t help to think that this is an intentional choice on behalf of the directors and writers. The people working on these shows are incredibly smart and talented – they could pose their answer to wealth inequality if they wanted to. Instead, they pose questions and problems and leave the viewer to sit with them and think about them. These pieces of media force the viewer to think critically about the problems the shows prove, putting a lot of trust in their audiences to engage with these serious ideas on their own terms and draw their own conclusions. In a country where the news is controlled by the wealthy and the education system is whitewashed and uncritical of the wealthy, these forms of entertainment double as an education on class inequality and different systems of power.