How Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation Brilliantly Adapts an Unadaptable Novel
Novels have been the subject of film adaptation since the early days of cinema. However, some novels possess a heavy dose of medium-specificity, meaning that it is inherently difficult to adapt them to the silver screen. Mix this with the frustration of a screenwriter, and you have the example of a mental roadblock that is virtually impossible to overcome. In a stroke of genius, Charlie Kaufman, through director Spike Jonze, decides to face this frustration head-on by meta-cinematically using this as the content of Adaptation, a direct affront to the difficulties he experienced in translating Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief. Using his own mind-numbing experience, Kaufman lives vicariously through the representation of himself by Nicolas Cage, and interestingly uses the blankness of the canvas to create his own piece of art.
What Is 'Adaptation' About?
Adaptation tells the story of Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage), who is tasked to write an adaptation of the book The Orchid Thief. Kaufman identifies that it is not an easy job to write a movie solely about flowers, compared to transforming it into a film about an Orchid heist, or transposing the flowers into poppy seeds and turning the story into a flick about drugs. Seeing that he is exasperated in his screenplay, his fictional freeloading twin brother Donald recommends that he enter into a screenwriting seminar taught by Robert Mckee (Brian Cox). Reluctantly, he attends, and flies to New York after to meet with Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep) herself, who has entered into an intimate relationship with her book's protagonist John Laroche (Chris Cooper).
It is revealed that Laroche has been using the native Seminoles to take the Ghost Orchids from the native land to manufacture them into drugs, which led to his arrest and subsequent banishing from the orchid culture. Laroche steals one orchid from the native land and brings it home, where he and Orlean try the processed drug. Donald discovers this by snooping on the couple, and they are chased into the swamplands by Orlean and Laroche. Donald subsequently dies from a car crash upon escaping, Orlean is arrested while Laroche is killed by an alligator as he continues to look for Charlie. The surviving Kaufman returns home, finishes the script, and is filled with a newfound appreciation for both his life and his art. In meta-cinematic fashion, Kaufman creatively plays with himself and his experiences, and adds a bit of flair and panache to come up with a narrative that both entertains and fascinates.
The Adaptation of an Un-adaptable Novel
One of the main driving points of Adaptation is Kaufman's perception of its medium-specificity as its main artistic quality. Orlean's The Orchid Thief, at least from Kaufman's point of view, is not easily translated into the movie world, with its prose heavily reliant on flowers and a writing style that is complex. It interweaves narratives from the Seminole and Laroche court case, the characterizations of Laroche, and the culminating run to the Fakahatchee swamp to swipe the Orchid. Stuck in what can only be called a severe case of writer's block, Kaufman ingeniously uses his discouragement into the entire plot of the film. Instead of trying to find a way to adapt the work page by page, Kaufman places himself as a character, to which many facets of his vexation are turned into characters, the most important of which is his twin brother Donald.
Donald represents the other side of his personality and his disgust with the rabid cannibalization of formulaic tropes. As the film shows, his twin brother writes a stereotypical crime script which astoundingly gets a lot of five-figure offers, while he lays there contemplating on whether to chase the grand artistic vision or to just follow the same path. He detests the existence of his brother, as he is the representation of what he hates in his pursuit of a higher artistic production. Not only does Kaufman use his troubles to be the plot of the film, he also personifies them and deepens the examination of a human struggling to accomplish what should come easily to him.
'Adaptation's Reflexive Nature
This reflexive nature of Adaptation unravels with the very first scene, where it begins by presenting a behind the scenes shot of another Kaufman creation, Being John Malkovich. Cage as Kaufman is artificially inserted into the "real-life" footage of the film's creation, and depicts the lack of recognition given to screenwriters when he is immediately asked to leave the set, even though he was the one responsible for the creation of the script. One can glean that it is representative of a hidden feeling he carries as a scriptwriter, representative of the lack of recognition they get even though their work is the main foundations of a movie.
Moreover, the striking self-awareness of not only his film, but of Hollywood's conditions and characteristics is what makes this meta-comedy anchored on some sense of realism. One of meta-cinema's conventions is to inform the audience that what they are watching is a film, while mixing some things that would make the audience still immersed in its fictionality, or lack thereof. In Adaptation, Charlie directly mentions to movie adaptation proponent Valerie Thomas (Tilda Swinton) that he does not want to make it the run-of-the-mill film that turns it into an "ordinary Hollywood thing" (such as the aforementioned flower heist film, turning it into a drug-centered story, etc.), and why it cannot be just a movie about flowers. However, the film becomes a gray area of sorts. It embraces what Kaufman reflexively hesitates to become. The film is about a flower heist, and the storyline eventually centers on the Orchid becoming a drug that triggers fascination. Kaufman delicately balances these two polar opposites and finds a common ground, crafting an end product that manages to be both artistic and generally appealing.
The Ending Is the Connecting Thread
The presence of these engrossing elements is woven by its creative ending. Kaufman also mentions before that he doesn't want to make a film that stereotypically teaches some life lessons in its ending, but one of the final moments of interaction between the two brothers seems to directly overturn this statement. As they lay hiding from the gun-toting Laroche, Charlie mentions that he doesn't want to die and has always admired his brother. Donald mentions to Charlie that "you are what you love, not what loves you". It is the final link to the attempt at connecting the things, at least in the movies, that Kaufman detests with the things that he loves. Adaptation offers paradoxical thoughts on high and low art, and Kaufman blends them together to present a picture that carries aspects of both. It is in this "middle ground" that he magically finds a way to adapt an "unadaptable" novel while simultaneously informing the viewers of the difficulties of screenwriters. In essence, Kaufman masterfully uses meta-cinema to find a gap where there is none, a splash of color in darkness, and a new lease on life, similar to what Charlie Kaufman the character finds as the picture ends.
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