Jim Killeen: The Man Who Found Himself

The failed L.A. actor sought out other Jim Killeens after a Google epiphany. (Courtesy Of Jim Killeen.)

"Your name is one of the main anchors for your self-concept," says Cleveland Evans, a psychology professor at Bellevue University in Nebraska and author of "The Great Big Book of Baby Names." "They are one of the earliest things that most kids get in terms of language development."

Names are so personal, so meaningful -- but only to us. If your name is not Jim Killeen, you have never thought about what it would be like to be Jim Killeen. If it is, those letters take on totemic power. You might take special interest in J.K. Rowling, for example, or J. (F.) K. You might find deep meaning in the life of an ordinary community health center CEO in Melbourne.

The rise of Google made what was once casual narcissism into an obsessive extracurricular activity. While Google can't track vanity searches, Douglas Merrill, vice president of engineering, points out that when a new tool is created to answer questions, people tend to ask four to five times the number of related questions they did pre-tool. In the puzzle of which came first, the narcissism or the Google, the answer is narcissism -- inflated by search engines.

Merrill calls the multiple Jim Killeens produced when L.A. Killeen wanted only to locate himself "an interesting technology problem." Search technology tries to anticipate the exact result the seeker is looking for. It knows, for example, that a search for "Apple" is about the company, while "Apples" is about the fruit. But human names are confounding. What is the best result? Google wonders. Who is the best Jim Killeen? Without any way of anticipating the appropriate results of a vanity search, Google spits back every possible answer. "You have to figure out," says Merrill, "if they're all you."

But isn't that the metaphysical query Killeen was trying to untangle? Were the Jim Killeens in St. Louis and Australia, in some way, him ? Had they figured out what it meant to be Jim Killeen in some way he had not?

Is it possible to find yourself by finding others with whom you share nothing but 10 common letters?

That notion is a bizarre combination of humanistic oneness and total self-absorption. The "community" of Jim Killeens is not even a community so much as it is a random group of men thrown together by the fact that none of them goes by "James."

"Google Me" (which is still being edited but will be shopped to film festivals in the fall) might have begun as a gee-whiz exercise in egotism. But, Killeen says, it quickly became much more. As he traveled the globe, he asked each Jim Killeen (seven appear in "Google Me") the same set of 30 questions -- What are you most proud of? What would make life unbearable? What is man's purpose? What's your favorite color? -- and was moved by the common threads in each Jim's responses. "With varying degrees, people basically thought [their purpose] was to help other people."

And while Killeen's fellow Killeens were initially dubious -- he got a Whaddaya, nuts? from the New York cop -- by the end of the filming, when L.A. Killeen brought seven of them together (in Killeen, Tex., natch), they, too, began to feel that the project had magnitude. Not, perhaps, because their name had forced them to be the same, but because their name had given them an excuse to find out how they were actually the same.

"Answering the questions meant coming to grips with what you believed in," says St. Louis Killeen. "It was so exciting to see how the rest of the guys answered. You don't really go to a cocktail party and talk about all of these things."

As for L.A. Killeen, what he ultimately found was not a better way to be a Jim Killeen, but an inspiring (if "Breakfast Club"-y) truth about being human. "People are fundamentally good. They will invite you over to their houses. They will meet you halfway." The guys might have been initially more receptive to a Jim Killeen filmmaker, but, ultimately, the common moniker didn't end up being all that important.

Says Killeen, "Your name is just a label, just an arbitrary thing. I don't think you can use it to tell that much about a person."

He does admit there were logistical benefits to being a Killeen. "It would have been a nightmare if I were a Smith . . . or a Galakowitz."