Jim Carrey Prophesied the Anxious AI Age. Did Anyone Listen?

Editor-in-Chief, Samuel Loncar

"None of this is real and all of it is true."

Jim Carrey

Director Victor Taransky, played by Al Pacino, enters a vast warehouse, turns on a futuristic computer set up, and confronts the crisis of his success: the press wants to meet his leading actress, but she has been invented by AI.

I thought of this scene from the brilliant (and underrated) movie, Simone, by Andrew Niccol, when I read Jim Carrey’s Memoirs and Misinformation, co-authored with Dana Vachon. The central anxiety of Carrey’s character in Memoirs and Misinformation is Jim Carrey being replaced, at the urging of his own agent, by AI. AI can copy his essence and bottle it to make movies from him eternally. The profundity and relevance of this prophetic AI anxiety seems to have been ignored when the book appeared, perhaps because no one outside of the AI industry understood that Carrey was giving an insider’s take on what he correctly saw would be the imminent future, now arrived, of Hollywood.

Carrey’s book was largely ignored by critics and philosophers. Now its storyline is the surreal landscape of the news. In other words, like most of his movies, Carrey’s book is a major spiritual event, attentive to the most pressing problems of the present, years before they were headlines. In a body of art that has reached a mass global audience and critical acclaim from The Mask, to The Truman Show, to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—Carrey’s work has been obsessed with the central concern of philosophy, according to Socrates: the question of what an authentic human life really is.

His honest questioning of the entire reality that made him successful in Memoirs and Misinformation is the culmination a career-long arc of philosophical courage and authenticity, of public self-deconstruction without any obvious rebirth. His spirit channeling powers reveal a new genre of Hollywood that his own work helped create and show the commercial power of—movies of Meta-Reality. It turns out, as Memoirs and Misinformation shows, that Carrey is the presiding spirit over our anxious AI age, where we all ask: what is real?

Jim Carrey and Dana Vachon, Memoirs and Misinformation. Knopf: 2020. 272 pages. $26.17 (hardcover)

The obvious candidates in the Meta-Reality genre like The Matrix shouldn’t overshadow movies that may not be considered, like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, The Truman Show, Groundhog Day, or the genius work of Zach Helm, the writer of Stranger Than Fiction. Hollywood in the 1990’s was bold and eager to fund a range of aesthetically remarkable existential stories— like Equilibrium, The Truman Show, or The Matrix—all of which depict different forms of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” in which humans are deceived about their surroundings, manipulated, and actually imprisoned in chains inside of Someone Else’s Story. There is an uncanny resonance between Plato’s existential myth of being trapped in a Story you don’t understand or control and the life of a famous celebrity and actor, trapped inside the system of their success.

Carrey has always been rattling the chains of spiritual captivity. Memoirs and Misinforation is hard to understand and easy to enjoy because it reads with pleasure though it avoids a clear plot, instead opting for an effective kind of comic surrealism mixed with recurring dark nightmares and intense low-points, offset by sudden transitions to lightness and humor. By effacing the fiction-fact, novel-memoir distinction, Carrey creates scenes like the one where he and his friend, the character Nicholas Cage, are sitting with a spiritual guru at the Esalen Institute. Cage feels at once completely crafted as a comic character and totally plausible as the person himself. Scenes like this read as humorous send ups and completely serious memories of events whose meaning Carrey seems to regard with ambiguity and distrust, creating a strange but powerful disturbance in the reader’s sense of reality. This isn’t surprising, since Jim Carrey has been saying for over a decade that Jim Carrey does not exist.

Carrey’s humility in having an explicitly listed co-author is, for me as an editor and writer, is an example of his genuine willingness to confess that even his own story is something he needs others to help him tell, and that the anxiety of even the greatest actor in Hollywood arises from the reality that so many people are responsible for making us who we are—so many people want to tell us who we are, want to control who we are—and even, in the end, want to buy our essence.

What is the price of your essence?

This is the ultimate question Carrey’s character faces in the book. Agents and directors are only too happy to put a price on it, but Carrey himself, as a character, isn’t so sure.The apparently psychedelic eschatological ending, also strangely prescient given its UFO themed final scenes, I read as a poignant kind of scripture for our times.

Thus far from being a celebrity memoir, ghostwritten and tailored to some imagined fan base, Carrey’s book is more like experimental art, a work I can neither categorize nor easily describe except that it is as profound and pained as the artist who produced it. Art and artists are life to me, not recreation or entertainment, so I don’t see Carrey as a celebrity, or a wonderful actor and comedian, though he is that. I see him as a real philosopher.

A real philosopher is not an academic but a person willing to face their worst pain and fears for the sake of life, a person willing to suffer the price of being human, which means feeling as lost as we truly are and searching for answers to our deepest question: what does it mean to be human, to be myself?

Carrey’s portrait in the book of taking on the role of Mao, and the dark places it lead to, convey the spiritual power and danger of acting. Hollywood is the last great temple of Dionysus, the mysterious god of ancient Greece associated with Greek drama, with dark rites that remembered his brutal dismemberment and rebirth—the god of wine, festivity, frenzy, and art. Jim Carrey as author, and Jim Carrey as character in Memoirs and Misinformation, merge into the perfect Greek mask: Jim Carrey, prophet of Dionysus.

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Samuel Loncar, Ph.D. (Yale) is the Editor-in-Chief of the Marginalia Review of Books, the Director of the Institute for the Meanings of Science, the creator of the Becoming Human Project, and the founder of Olurin Consulting. His speaking and consulting clients include the United Nations, Red Bull Arts, Oliver Wyman, and Flagship Pioneering. His work focuses on integrating separated spaces, including philosophy and poetry, science and spirituality, and the academic-public divide. His book, Becoming Human: Philosophy as Science and Religion from Plato to Posthumanism, is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. Learn more at www.samuelloncar.com X@samuelloncar