3. Being John Malkovich

(Spike Jonze, 1999)

What’s The Story? Puppeteer Craig Schwartz (John Cusack) stoops to a day-job at a finance company in Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s feature debut.

The ante ups when, behind a filing cabinet, Craig finds a portal to 15 minutes of fame where he transforms into John Malkovich.

He and colleague Maxine (Catherine Keener) tout the trip to punters, Maxine humps Craig’s wife via Malkovich’s body, and a chimp recalls childhood traumas.

Then things get a bit weird...

What’s It About? “I don’t know if I was consciously trying to do anything,” Kaufman claims, “but decide what would happen to these individuals.”

Despite the third act’s riffs on Oedipal desire and delusions of fame, Kaufman insists he just ran with the Malkovich idea to keep the film open (“I don’t have any solutions, and I don’t like movies that do.”)

Weird Fact: Far from softening the film, Malkovich asked Jonze and Kaufman to be meaner to him.

2. Eraserhead

(David Lynch, 1977)

What’s The Story? Against a bleak, post-industrial backdrop, sticky up-haired Henry (Jack Nance) is about to get a real shock.

During a dinner of still-twitching man-made chicken with his girlfriend Mary X (Charlotte Stewart) and her family, he discovers he’s about to become a father to Mary’s baby-creature.

When the child is born, it looks like a cross between a sperm and a calf foetus. Mary and Henry break up.

The baby wails incessantly. Henry dissects it, while a lady who lives behind the radiator sings about Heaven and stamps on foetuses...

What’s It About? Eraserhead is a murky excursion into fatherhood anxiety, post-nuclear nightmare and folksy Americana.

It’s also a self-referential wink at the idea of audience befuddlement: Henry’s final dissolution into the light is like losing one’s self in the film.

As Lynch claims, “I felt Eraserhead. I didn’t think it.”

And here’s another theory: Lynch’s wife left him a year into the making of the film and a few years after his daughter was born.

He’s called the film “my Philadelphia Story”, referring to the classic comedy about commitment anxiety. A veiled fear-of-marriage confessional, then? Maybe, but don’t ask Lynch (“I love the idea that one thing can be different for different people”).

Weird Fact: Lynch worked a paper round to help finance the film.

Next: The Wizard Of Oz...