Lecture 6, Thursday 4.3.2004
Bent Sørensen
Adaptation (the film, 2002)

Adaptation (2002) is a movie (directed by Spike Jonze, screenplay by Charlie Kaufman), which addresses head-on the issues of adaptation, genre, character and representation. It is “quite simply” a story about a screenwriter (this real fictitious character is also named Charlie Kaufman) who is given the impossible task of creating a Hollywood movie out of an intellectually restrained and cool piece of New York non-fiction (the book The Orchid Thief, written by Susan Orlean (real book, real writer)). Kaufman (the character) increasingly stumbles over problems with his research, with his personal life, and with the conditions his Hollywood employers impose on him. The end result is a monumental writer’s block, which he can only exorcise by taking advice and inspiration from unlikely sources, which include his suddenly successful twin brother Donald (also a screen writer (although not real, despite the fact that he has a fan website), but of the most clichéd type of Hollywood genre drivel (both brothers (real and fictitious) are played by Nicholas Cage in the movie)); Susan Orlean, whom he develops an obsessive (masturbatory) fascination with; the main character of The Orchid Thief, John Laroche (who of course really was/is an orchid thief); Robert McKee, a real Hollywood screen writing guru (author of Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting, a real manual); and, chiefly, his own personal life (he writes himself into the adaptation of Orlean’s book). The movie culminates in a number of genre twists, which highlights the problems of representation made particularly obvious by the adaptation process.