Antkind
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Antkind is the 2020 debut novel of American screenwriter and film director Charlie Kaufman.
Synopsis
Neurotic, white, failed film critic B. Rosenberger Rosenberg stumbles upon what may be the greatest artistic achievement in human history: a three-month-long film, complete with scheduled sleeping, eating, and bathroom breaks, that took its reclusive auteur, a psychotic African-American man named Ingo Cutbirth, ninety years to complete. B makes it his mission to show it to the rest of humanity. The only problem: The film is destroyed when he stops for a soda, leaving just a single frame from which B must somehow attempt to recall the film that might just be the last great hope of civilization. The novel grows to encompass a vast array of concepts and plotlines.
B is obsessed with proving his leftist bonafides, boasting of his relationship with a Black sitcom star and his constant use of a strange non-binary pronoun "thon". His daughter is an estranged filmmaker whose work receives negative reviews from her father, who is himself obsessed with both ultra-obscure experimental films and the works of Judd Apatow. B's attempts to psychologically reconstruct the three-month movie send him to a wide variety of psychiatrists and hypnotists, most notably the sinister Barassini, whose work begins to have perverse effects on his body. He finds himself beginning to shrink in size, and is constantly falling down manholes. He becomes addicted to ketamine, and develops a clown fetish. At one point plastic surgery is conducted on him without his consent. He is forced at another point to pursue careers selling shoes at Zappos or working in a laundromat to impress a woman. His knowledge of film is seemingly deteriorating, as he constantly and surreally misquotes and misremembers many movies.
Several other plotlines concern the St. Augustine Monster, a war fought between android clones of Donald Trump and a fictitious fast food restaurant called Slammy's, a murder attempt by Abbott and Costello on a rival comedy team Mudd and Molloy, which is depicted in Cutbirth's film, and several forms of time travel, including by a precognitive meteorologist, clones of other characters (including Trump and a more financially successful B), and a virus invented by a sapient ant living in the distant future.
