Adaptation (film, 2002)
“I suppose I do have one unembarrassed passion — I want to know what it feels like to care about something passionately.”
August 17th, 2021
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Author
Auth / Charlie Kaufman
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Absurdism
Film opens with a self-loathing monologue and a hot scene contextualized as "Hollywood, CA - 4 billion and Forty Years Earlier". Evolution, development, extinction, a beautiful juxtaposition. All that happening – so that you could have your little middle aged crisis monologue in your head.
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Is a moment worth sharing?
How to tell the story of a moment, of a feeling? Adaptation shows there's no single way to tell a story. So many aspects to be considered, to be made salient. There's always another angle. A story brings forward personal struggles of the story teller; emotional frame, aspirations, anxieties. Current feelings flowing into task-at-hand:
“To begin. To begin. How to start? I’m hungry. I should get coffee. Coffee would help me think. I should write something first, then reward myself with coffee. Coffee and a muffin. Okay. So I need to establish the themes. Maybe banana-nut. That’s a good muffin.” — Nicolas Cage as screenwriter Charlie Kaufman
Storytelling is laden with intention. Intentions matter. The adventures of Susan Orleans in Florida served as comedic fodder for her partner and friends in New York. Susan feels it betrays the feelings she had as a result of those experiences, the meaning she found in them. Those moments with Laroche, they felt like something. And the beauty contained, the semantic beauty of the moment, was being betrayed in ridicule. The meaning undignified, misunderstood. It's easy to use remote happenings as entertainment in a New York dinner party.
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Adaptation features deep commentary on storytelling and the pains of writing, on the route the practice has followed and what that says about us. Charlie attends a storytelling seminar in New York led by McKee:
McKee, speaking to auditorium:
So... what is the substance of writing? Nothing as trivial as words is at the heart of this great art.
Literary talent is not enough. First, last, and always the imperative is too tell a story.
Twenty-three hundred years ago, Aristotle said, when storytelling goes bad in a society, the result is decadence. (deadpan) Well, just look around you.
Your goal must be a good story well told. Craft is the sum total of all means used to draw the audience into deep involvement, and ultimately to reward it with a moving and meaningful experience.
Charlie, in the audience (voice over):
It is my weakness, my ultimate lack of conviction that brings me here. [Looking for] Easy answers. Rules to short-cut yourself to success. And here I am, because my jaunt into the abyss brought me nothing. Well, isn't that the risk one takes for attempting something new. I should leave here right now. I'll start over -- (starts to rise) I need to face this project head on and --
McKee (continued):
... and God help you if you use voiceover in your work, my friends. God help you! It's flaccid, sloppy writing. Any idiot can write voice-over narration to explain the thoughts of a character. You must present the internal conflicts of your character in action.
More McKee:
Long speechs are antithetical to the nature of cinema. The Greeks called it stykomythia -- the rapid exchange of ideas. A long speech in a script, say a page long, requires that the camera hold on the actor's face for a minute. Look at the second hand on your watch as it makes one complete rotation around the clock face and you'll get an idea of how intolerable that would be for an audience. The ontology of the screen is that it's always now and it's always action and it's always vivid. And that's an important point. We are not recreating life on the screen. Writers are not tape recorders. Have you ever eavesdropped on people talking in a coffee shop? Then you know how dull and tedious real conversation is. Real people are not interesting. There's not a person in this world -- and I include myself in this -- who would be interesting enough to take as is and put in a movie as a character.
Charlie, timidly raising hand:
What if a writer is attempting to create * a story where nothing much happens, where people don't change, they don't have any epiphanies. They struggle and are frustrated and nothing is resolved. More a reflection of the real world --
McKee, interrupting:
The real world? The real fucking world? First of all, if you write a screenplay without conflict or crisis, you'll bore your audience to tears. Secondly: Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day! There's genocide and war and corruption! Every fucking day somewhere in the world somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else! Every fucking day someone somewhere makes a conscious decision to destroy someone else! People find love! People lose it, for Christ's sake! A child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church! Someone goes hungry! Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman! If you can't find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don't know much about life! And why the fuck are you taking up my precious two hours with your movie? I don't have any use for it! I don't have any bloody use for it!
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Writing is a journey into the unknown that becomes all too predictable when things become “an industry”... like moviemaking, screenwriting.
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A Work in Recursion
Donald is Charlie, but in different potentiality. Donald is Charlie's ability to play by the book, to entertain and deliver story Hollywood-style. Charlie is Donald's ability to create something beautiful. The way Mr. Kaufman plays with this tension is artful, a true study in recursivity.
Adaptation is a work in recursion with Orlean's book, in recursion with Kaufman's psyche and context, and in recursion with screenwriting itself. Repeated scenes featuring the filming set of Being John Malkovich even give a sense of recursion into Mr. Kaufman's own work. Intimacy in recursion, a sense of involvement. Beauty.
TNC / Recursivity, Recursion, Mirroring
TNC / Representation, Remediation, Medial Adaptation
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An example of serendipity when Charlie goes to the orchid show with the girl from the café in dream :)
TNC / Serendipity
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“A movie about flowers.”
Kaufman straddles the broader, deeper meaning of adaptation by bringing together motifs of adaptation in movies, adaptation in life, adaptation to context, morphological adaptation, psychological adaptation, affective self-regulation. Consider this beautiful Flower-Insect monologue:
TNC / Adaptation
Laroche:
See that nectary all the way down there? Darwin hypothesized a moth with a nose twelve inches long to pollinate it. Everyone thought he was a loon. Then, sure enough, they found this moth with a twelve inch proboscis.
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Laroche:
Point is, what's so wonderful is that every one of these flowers has a specific relationship with the insect that pollinates it. There's a certain orchid look exactly like a certain insect so the insect is drawn to this flower, its double, its soul mate, and wants nothing more than to make love to it. And after the insect flies off, spots another soul-mate flower and makes love to it, thus pollinating it. And neither the flower nor the insect will ever understand the significance of their lovemaking. I mean, how could they know that because of their little dance the world lives? But it does. By simply doing what they're designed to do, something large and magnificent happens. In this sense they show us how to live - how the only barometer you have is your heart. How, when you spot your flower, you can't let anything get in your way.
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~By simply doing what they are designed to do, beautiful things emerge.~
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Charlie:
“I don’t know why I thought I could write this.”
Resonates with this whole project; remembering is a doing. Writing helps, but can't be all.
Old / « Hello, Reality! »
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"There are too many ideas and things and people, too many directions to go. I was starting to believe the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size."
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Full script: