Let's begin with Malkovich himself. In the story he is the "vessel body", a conduit which the characters enter and are able to see the world through his eyes for a brief period before being dumped out on the side of the highway. In this sense they are able to "be" John Malkovich, as they call it, and it's generally assumed that this is the "being" to which the title refers. However, I believe that the title has another much more direct and literal meaning. What if the movie is just simply about what it's like to be John Malkovich? What if it's all just an abstract study of one man's existence? What if we've been looking at all in the wrong way?
Imagine for a moment, a realm populated by ghosts. These are not the ghosts of the living who have died. These are ghosts who have never lived. They are ghosts by the virtue of their own non-existence. There are merely the ideas of people, half-formed and without substance in reality. One day, they find out about a man; a man that can give them solid shape and real existence for a brief time; a man who can portray them; a man who can be them, and so also, in a sense, they can be him. What would such an experience be worth to them? Consider the customers lining the halls of the 7th & a half floor, waiting to take the Malkovich "ride". They hand their money over willingly. They show no skepticism about the ridiculousness of the idea, and they find the experience of being Malkovich for five minutes while he eats toast exhilarating. Why? The characters in the movie themselves speculate that it's the stepping outside of one's self that gives these mundane experiences such a sense of wonder. But I believe that it's the taste of reality that being Malkovich gives them that drives their obsession.
Now, think about what an actor does for a living and reconsider the description I gave of Malkovich's function in the story. I said that he's "a conduit which the characters enter". Isn't this a fairly accurate and concise description of an actor's job? He portrays characters on the stage. He channels the idea of a person who exists only on paper. He allows this non-existent person to be him for a brief period until the curtain drops and he takes his bows. But being an actor is more than just a job. It's not a switch that can be turned on and off. An actor is an actor even when he pays his bills or eats his toast. Some have even suggested that it's a sort of psychological defect, and actors have no personality of their own, only pieces of a personality borrowed from the characters they inhabit. They might even find themselves slipping involuntarily into character in the back of a taxi cab.
Given this unpredictable nature of their ability, it's conceivable that an actor could find themselves overwhelmed by one of their characters, locked into a performance that they can't control. It's possible that the strong, aggressive, and compelling personality of the character could come to eclipse their own. Haven't we seen actors who fall into a certain routine in the later years of their career, trapped in a self-imposed type-casting? Couldn't an actor drop out of acting all together, grow a long beard, and declare that they want to become a hip-hop artist....or a puppeteer?
No, it's no mistake that John Malkovich was chosen as the title character. He is specifically known, not merely as another movie star, but as a serious actor. He appears to be the object of the movie, but he is actually it's subject. He is the protagonist. The other characters are just that, characters, existing only in Malkovich's mind and on the written pages of the script. Turn the film sideways and they recede into two dimensions, mere optical illusions of depth and substance on a strip of celluloid. Note that Charlie Sheen, the only other "real life" person, is also an actor. The two of them are the only real people in the movie and beyond it's frame as well. As I said, the movie is quite simply and quite literally just about what it's like to be John Malkovich. In it's own strange and surreal way it explores the reality of being an actor. At one point Malkovich goes through the door and descends into his own mind and finds himself in a hall of mirrors where everything and everyone reflects himself, an actor portraying himself portraying himself. In a sense the entire movie is Malkovich going down his own hole.
