One of my most memorable and wonderfully bizarre moments from a movie.
Spike Jonze’s auteurship is marked by a reputation for bewildering the viewer by weaving reality and fiction into one another. Adaptation is no exception but is perhaps the most naturalistic of his movies, encouraging his viewer to simultaneously relate while feeling perplexed. Maintaining suspense and excitement is difficult when dealing with a lonely, rejected Kaufman, alone in his room trying to write a film script but Jonze manages it exquisitely and with ingenuity. But then Kaufman is not really alone, the viewer is with him, charged with the task of co-writer of this script and the movie itself.
Adaptation consists of 3 narratives: one is about a film being made, one is about orchid thievery and one is about the deceptive combination of fiction and real life. Initially, Kaufman was hired to adapt Susan Orlean’s nonfiction book The Orchid Thief, a marvellously meandering meditation on orchids, inscribed with a Darwinian philosophy, and the mania for collecting them. When Kaufman can’t figure out how to adapt the book into a conventional drama, he ends up inserting himself into his own script and what he ends up writing turns out to be the film we are actually watching. Once we get over the trippy overlap of realities and the idea that we are the writers of our own lives, then we must try to comprehend the order and meaning of a bric-a-brac of events. It’s a little confusing and we’re not sure how or whether to relate to our characters but nonetheless it’s a fantasy full of action and philosophy that is thrilling for our sagacious minds to wrestle with.
While the film can appeal to many a millennial and reality questioner, the film is no doubt primarily a plaything for film studies fanatics. Not only because of the acknowledgement of itself as a film, but because of the story it tells, in an almost allegorical fashion, of the film industry. Primarily it depicts cinema’s ongoing conflict of whether to present reality in order to connect to the audience or to use artificially plot-driven narratives in order to entertain. This too is Kaufman’s struggle throughout the process of writing the film, constantly challenging what is ‘realism’ and what is Hollywood spectacle.
During a script-writing lecture which Kaufman attends, Robert McKee argues that in fact conflict and character arcs are the stuff of reality. After Kaufman becomes convinced of Mckee’s principles, the plot is sent on an undreamed adventure of drugs, sex and violence. Here the film-maker is making a subversive point about Hollywood’s capitulation to commercialism but also acknowledges its relevance as a part of film evolution. Kaufman realises that to progress and to create, one must adapt to this commercialism. The central orchid motif is a metaphor for Adaptation. Jonze tells us this directly through the use of a montage of various frames taken from different moments of the film and a close-up of the ghost orchid. Jonze speeds up the film during this section, which parallels the speeding up of earth’s evolution that is shown at the beginning of the film, informing the audience that these characters are too evolving and adapting.
With all the diabolical happenings which seem more like Kaufman’s plot theories, it’s the eccentric darkness of the performances that makes this movie consistently fascinating. One of my most memorable and wonderfully bizarre moments from a movie; when Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep) and Kaufman attempt to recreate the sound of a dial tone by humming at slightly different frequencies. Perhaps in some bizarre way paralleling the multiple frequencies upon which the film’s genre, style and narrative finds itself.