Adaptation.: an adaptation of an adaptation

In 2002, Charlie Kaufman wrote a script about Charlie Kaufman writing a script. He called the project Adaptation. The movie, which is directed by Spike Jonze and stars Nicolas Cage as Charlie and his twin brother Donald, is a work of postmodernism in that it raises ontological questions regarding what it means to be a character, a screenplay, and a film. It is also a piece of metafiction, in which an entire diegesis, or filmic world, is projected as a fictionalized text. Throughout the course of Adaptation., Kaufman toys with traditional storytelling methods by combining symbolism with the film’s narrative structure. By a performing a close reading of Adaptation., one can unearth Kaufman’s rejection and ironic embrace of the Hollywood studio system.

Kaufman, a writer and an auteur who specializes at exploring the psychosomatic depths of his characters, is obviously discontented with the way Hollywood operates. If the contemplative voiceovers and pessimistic comments provided by Nic Cage aren’t enough to prove this, perhaps an examination of Donald Kaufman will suffice. Donald, simply put, symbolizes Hollywood convention. He attends writing workshops, seeking help from icons in the already-established film industry rather than carving ideas and storytelling strategies—as Charlie attempts to—from within; he pens a clichéd thriller that features an all-too-familiar multiple personality disorder twist ending; and, finally, he methodically churns out this script with little-to-no effort—and in a very time efficient manner. This process of production resembles a production line, a mechanical entity.

Donald’s production process is satirized because of the vast amount of screen time spent on Charlie’s psychological labor—“That’s what I need to do—tie all of history together,” Charlie thinks to himself. Because Jonze and Kaufman (the writer) work to have us sympathize with Charlie (the character), Donald’s—and thus conventional Hollywood’s—production method is meant to be rejected—not embraced—by the viewer. Kaufman’s position is armored when, in the narrative, Charlie’s agent nonchalantly tells him to “invent” a story within Susan Orlean’s novel. It is here that we realize how the Hollywood ideology supports the construction of films as business products, rather than aesthetically charged works.

It's Donald (left) vs. Charlie (right). It's a fight to the death!

Once Kaufman’s stance is established, he continues with a quasi-satire of the Hollywood system at its most shameless. As Donald—who we’ve already concluded denotes the Hollywood ideology—is called in to help Charlie finish his screenplay, we see the film change in both tone and direction. Gone are the scenes depicting Charlie pondering life’s truths within desolate rooms; in their place are sequences saturated with twists, sex scenes, gunfire, voyeurism, and suspense. In addition, the pacing of events becomes askew, with plot points firing rapidly in succession. Our characters are for the first time faced not just lackadaisical cerebral dilemmas, but with high-speed physical danger.

This shift in filmic content is in line with Robert Mckee’s remarks to Charlie at the bar. Mckee, the experienced writer whose workshop is used as a springboard for wannabe authors, says, “Your characters must change, and the change must come from them.” And the characters do just that, as John Laroche transforms into a drug dealer, and Susan Orlean becomes an unhinged pornographic model. Because McKee can also be considered a Hollywood archetype, as he opposes—quite abrasively—Charlie’s vision, Kaufman’s act of dramatically altering characters can be seen as an embrace of Hollywood convention.

However, this isn’t an honest adoption. When we see Susan Orlean posing on a cheap porn website, we don’t feel bedazzled; we feel a sense of the contextual absurdity this character change presents. Kaufman’s implementation of a conventional moment of revelation is ironic because of the aforementioned involvement of Donald, whose script features a moment much like this—when his character’s multiple personality disorder is revealed. Donald’s caper script also seems to contain an epic climax, which exemplifies McKee’s comment to Charlie: “The last act makes a film. Wow them in the end, and you got a hit.” Likewise, the climax of Adaptation. features a car crash, a shootout in a swamp, an alligator swallowing Laroche, and the death of Donald—wow.

It can be suggested that with Donald’s demise comes the end of Kaufman’s commentary on Hollywood conventions in Adaptation., since, at the film’s conclusion, Charlie is finally satisfied with both his work and his life. But finding that contentment was a long, perilous—both physically and psychologically—ride. Kaufman rejects elements of the Hollywood system, sure, but he realizes that audiences today won’t relate to his, what he calls, “pathetic” frame of mind. To compensate, he not only provides us with topsoil—a firework ending—but he buries a criticism of the Hollywood film deep for those of us willing to dig. Kaufman didn’t want to “cram in sex or guns or car chases, you know...or characters, you know, learning profound life lessons”; but today’s audience just needed to know: “You are what you love, not what loves you.”

(Photos © Columbia Pictures)