Kaufmanesque. It’s up there with “Spielbergian”, “Disneyesque” and “Hitchcockian” as one of the few personality-based adjectives to have entered moviespeak. It is derived from the works of the 46-year-old award- winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (an Oscar winner for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind in 2005, after nominations for mere fripperies such as Adaptation in 2003 and Being John Malkovich in 2000). It typically describes a madcap narrative in which a sweetly bamboozled protagonist is confronted by a metaphysically unstable world that can be redeemed only by core values such as romantic love or artistic truth.

Take this week’s Stranger than Fiction (reviewed on page 16), for instance. Here the guileless Everyman Will Ferrell wakes up one morning and discovers that he is, in fact, a fictional character in an artificial world, and only his love for a tasty baker (Maggie Gyllenhaal) can provide his crazy existence with essential meaning. Very Kaufmanesque. And, indeed, had this movie emerged in the late 1990s it might have even been original. However, something has happened since the release of Kaufman’s startling debut, Being John Malkovich. Hollywood, always true to its cannibalistic nature, has gone Kaufman crazy. From indie sleepers to mainstream megaliths, the metaphysical head-scratcher has become the narrative form for anyone interested in both artistic and commercial credibility. Thus sci-fi blockbusters such as the Matrix trilogy play like straight-faced versions of quirky Kaufmanesque paranoia — ie a man wakes up one morning and discovers that he is part of a giant cyber scam called the Matrix!

Meanwhile Jerry Bruckheimer’s new blockbuster Déjà Vu (released on Dec 15) posits a world in which the title phenomenon actually exists as a repeated reality. And even Adam Sandler’s recent family comedy Click had all the hallmarks of a Kaufmanesque adventure — beleaguered but kind-hearted male accidentally turns the metaphysical rules of the Universe on their head.

The arthouse movies are no better. Two of the hottest properties for the 2007 film calendar are The Science of Sleep and I’m Not There. The former, from Michel Gondry, the director of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, is about a man whose reality is overcome by dreams, while the latter is a movie about Bob Dylan that’s not really about Dylan, but stars seven different actors playing Dylan. Very Kaufmanesque.

The crisis here, of course, is one of originality. How do you remain uniquely Kaufmanesque when everything around is Kaufmanesque too? When does quirky existential eccentricity become habitual and quotidian? And if the madcap metaphysical storytelling of Hollywood hipsters has become the new quotidian, then surely it won’t be long before traditional linear narratives as told by the likes of Eastwood and Spielberg become the new Kaufmanesque?

These issues are clearly vexing the original Kaufman, who is currently in the process of delivering to the world of wannabe Kaufmans a movie that’s so Kaufmanesque that it might just out-Kaufman Kaufman. The intriguingly titled Synecdoche, New York is about a theatre director who thinks he’s dying. It will be the first screenplay that the writer will direct himself. It will be, according to a recent insider leak, the most ambitious movie the writer has concocted. It will focus on the blood, faeces and urine-soaked essence of human life. And it will utterly redefine, through sheer power of genius, the term Kaufmanesque.

Of course, until Synecdoche, New York hits our screens in late 2007 we’ll have the pleasure, or not, of experiencing more madcap adventures of more dim-witted Everymen in more topsy-turvy worlds. A man wakes up one morning and discovers . . .

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