Fiction January 1, 1

The lead characters in the 1999 movie Being John Malkovich discover a portal that lets a traverser actually be, for fifteen minutes, John Malkovich. When Malkovich himself, learning of the portal, traverses it, he finds himself in a nightmarescape in which everyone is a variously distorted version of himself: his head on all the different bodies, and all those various selves able only to mumble, repeatedly, “Malkovich.” It’s a kind of nightmare of influence not of being influenced, but of influencing.