/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/ZH33GIGDTJBLDPUPRVMSUTDIUY.jpg)
"None of this is real and everything is true."
As a statement of principles, the phrase that can be read in Memories and misinformationit sounds like a magician's maxim, according to Orson Welles in front of a camera, with a playful black cape accompanied by his usual mocking gesture. There is something of that in Jim Carrey and Dana Vachon's book: a delusional parodic self-fiction in which Carrey turns into a trompe l'oeil Carrey, a person who may or may not be, a crude and sad portrait of today's anesthetized Hollywood by Netflix through the vicissitudes of the comedian and his friends and acquaintances with quite a few true autobiographical bases. Yes, Carrey considers that his great love in life has been Renée Zellweger, but the actress did not abandon him to get involved with Morante de la Puebla, nor did her ex-boyfriend follow the adventures of the happy couple - including ear that the bullfighter gives to his beloved - Through the Navarrese newspaper Diario de noticias.Everything in Memories and Disinformation (in Spain the novel will be published by Temas de Hoy next week) sounds credible, especially the philosophical reflections of its protagonist, because in the game between truth and fiction the mist wins ... until the alien invasion: in the world written by Carrey there are no limits.
- Jim Carrey: "Fame is like the moon, everyone wants to go without knowing the risks"
- Jim Carrey and subversive honesty
John Travolta, Gwyneth Paltrow, Goldie Hawn, Anthony Hopkins, Kelsey Grammer, Steven Spielberg, the all-powerful agency Creative Artists Agency (CAA), Disney, Netflix, Variety, the Cannes Film Festival, The Hollywood Reporter, Linda Ronstadt (with whom the real Carrey had a six-month affair when he was a newcomer to showbusiness), the Golden Globes, Jack Nicholson, Leonardo DiCaprio, Sean Penn, the spirit of Rodney Dangerfield, Tom Hanks ... they all come out in Memories and disinformation. Only one name appears under a pseudonym: Tom Cruise, who for legal reasons - in a half-joke, half-serious pun to underscore Hollywood's demand culture - is referred to as Laser Jack Lighting. And above the rest reign Nicolas Cage - one of the great friends of the royal Carrey since they met on the set of Peggy Sue got married, and another interpreter who has achieved the status of a mythological animal devoured by his characterizations and who in the book he speaks like his characters-, and the director and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, responsible for the script for one of the best films the actor has ever worked on, Forget about me !, and from whose style the writer couple clearly drink. “It is a satire and a parody, but it is also done with a lot of admiration. I venerate most of the people who appear in the novel, and although I did not notify them now, I have sent them dedicated copies, "said the writer in the US promotion of the book last month.
They all interact with a Carrey fed up with life, sunk in his mansion-fortress guarded by two Rottweilers (the dogs are called Affection and when the actor cries they lick the tears from his beard), voluntarily anesthetized with Netflix sessions, where he lets the algorithm choose what he sees, YouTube and TMZ gossip, and with an actress girlfriend who wants to go far. The race has escaped him down a sinkhole, but he is still Jim Carrey, one of the most famous Canadians in history.
In an interview in The New York Times, the 58-year-old actor noted: “The Jim Carrey in this book is actually a projection of whoever is in my position. The avatar of the artist, of the celebrity, of the star; a reflection of that world of excesses, gluttons, and vanities. And it is a very current scenario. The reader simply won't know which is which. Because, in addition, the fictions of the novel reveal a truth ”. The character Carrey searches for meaning in his existence and his work, through the intricate jungle of Hollywood egos, he faces fires, a group of eco-terrorist girls and even an alien invasion. You must decide whether to star in a biopic of Mao Zedong - yes, Carrey as Mao - for what he rehearses with the best actor he knows, Anthony Hopkins - who does not live his best moments in real life either - or acts in a large studio film based on in a toy (something already common, seen the success of the Transformers saga ). Facing a digital shoot with an infamous title, Hungry Hungry Hipos in Digital 3D, he understands that he will only survive if he appears at a box office.
Because - he assures in the book, and he probably thinks so in real life - his two best performances were in The Truman Show and in Forget about me !, without the Oscars paying attention to him, and his effort in Philip Morris I love you! he was rewarded with a trip to hell. In Memories and Disinformation it is pointed out that this romantic comedy about a man who discovers his homosexuality after a car accident, in which Carrey invested his money and prestige, was demonized by its detailed sequence of anal sex, in which the protagonist he enjoyed too much for an ultra-religious audience: “A CAA psychologist expert on the masses has already warned him: 'America has trouble with sodomy,” write Carrey and Vachon. Radical Christian groups erased him from their favorite star lists.
In fact, they deleted him from any list other than the cursed characters. "The Truman show was not a mistake," he tells The New York Times. “I'm a guy who one day looked up and began to see all the machinery and the lights falling from the sky. Each project contains part of me recreating myself, tearing apart the old me and exploring something new. My whole career is based on asking the public for an effort and he has allowed me this risk. In a way, I think that's what they expect from me, that I don't fall into the conventional. " And the eight years dedicated to the book - the last with the two authors locked up for up to twelve hours in marathon days of brainstorming - follow that path.
Delusions and canes
In real life, Jim Carrey has not been a little angel either. And he has gone through periods of alienation, as shown in the documentary Jim and Andy, which illustrates the brutal transformation Carrey underwent to play Andy Kaufman in Milos Forman's Man on the Moon in 1998. Kaufman's former girlfriend, Lynne Margulies, and Bob Zmuda, the creative partner of one of America's most beloved comedians (Kaufman, star of the Taxi series , died at the height of his career at age 35 in 1984) recorded more than 100 hours of that spiral crazy.
Carrey, years later, acknowledged that it was believed that he was Kaufman and his alter ego on stage, Tony Clifton. About this and other delusions, the actor says in a promotional interview for his book: “There were moments when I was very afraid. I see John Lennon dead on a stretcher on YouTube. And I am completely crazy because I realize that they will record my autopsy when I pass away. Someone will see it as a novelty. That terror of wanting to leave a beautiful corpse took me for a while to put on makeup in the bathroom before going to sleep and thus, if I died in the middle of the night, I would be presentable to the general public ”.
Nor has he been spared from excesses such as spending part of his salary in Batman Forever to buy at auction the real cane that Charles Chaplin used when he was transmuted into Charlot. There are several jokes about that acquisition and Cage's compulsive bidding for any geek item in the book. And yes, the thing about the cane is true: he showed it in the middle of July in an online interview with Howard Stern, where he also told that he visited Dangerfield on his deathbed and about the fear he lived when in January 2018, while in Hawaii , he and the rest of the inhabitants of the islands were alerted that a North Korean missile was going to sweep them off the face of the Earth in 10 minutes by a message that had been sent by mistake.
In Carrey's life and in his book one of Charlie Kaufman's commandments is faithfully reproduced, which is reflected in Memories and disinformation: “Charlie told him one day that the effect on which the illusion of continuity in the cinema is based , that is to say, the rapid succession of frames, is the same trick that our mind uses to create the evolution of time. Past and present are invented concepts, necessary fictions ”. What's the true? That's a lie? And matters.