Adaptation

Spike Jonze

Emilie Bickerton

In 1972, Keith Arnatt stood in front of a concrete wall with a sandwich board and declared to the world 'I'm A Real Artist'. This was self-portrait not only of Arnatt, but of a new generation of artists who increasingly took themselves as the subject of their work. This subjectivity has of course reached its crescendo (or rock bottom) with Tracey Emin, her journals, her bed, her everything on the floors and across the walls of modern art galleries.

It's clear that, in the absence of any other source of inspiration beyond themselves, narcissism pervades the work of these artists. But the increasingly subjective nature of art is, more broadly, a pertinent expression of the excessive scepticism towards objective truth, and claims of originality felt by both artists and their audiences today.

Spike Jonze's latest offering Adaptation seems to be a cry from a frustrated artist who wants desperately to be original but is locked in the belief that, because we are natural beings, this originality is not possible. He responds by indulging in narcissism and finally sabotage. The film tells the tale of how Charlie Kaufman (the film's screenwriter) adapted the novel, The Orchard Thief, to eventually make Adaptation.

His first problem is that the book is about flowers. Is it really possible to adapt it for film? The deeper question for Kaufman is whether by working on an adaptation he is betraying himself as an artist. The problems of the artist are immediately linked to the problem of the art itself. 'Can there be a truly original thought?', ponders Kaufman at the beginning. Meanwhile Susan Orleans, the author of The Orchard Thief, faces her own struggle to 'whittle things down', to strip away external influences and find the essence of her own creativity.

The two stories are intertwined of course in narrative, but they clearly resonate in meaning, perhaps most pointedly when Susan admits to having 'one unembarrassed passion. I want to know how it feels to care about something passionately'. Both characters are plagued by the suspicion that what they think of as creativity is really just a product of circumstances: 'adaptation' in the Darwinian sense, leaving no role for conscious thought.

Adaptation prods and probes at these questions of artistic originality, of identity and the possibilities of change. For many struggling artists out there, who feel a movie script or a great novel is simmering away somewhere, the image of Kaufman; fat, sweating, desperately incoherent among a pile of notes and highlighted books, is like the struggle writ large on screen. How sweet the moment at the typewriter when the voiceover tells us the artiste really dreams of coffee and muffins … what a relief, we're supposed to think, he's just like us!

But the question of real creativity runs much deeper, and it is here that Adaptation, in short-circuiting to sabotage, really fails to illuminate. What is the artistic struggle all about? Is it about original genius versus the crushing demands of the industry? Or is it the original genius battling his own demons, struggling for truth and plagued by self-doubt. (Maybe, just maybe, Donald, with his script about a serial killer with multiple personalitites, 3, is the great writer, not Charlie). Or is originality an illusion? Is the real problem the terrible poverty of choice: we simply adapt to survive?

Adaptation does bring all of these issues boiling to the surface, creating an extremely enjoyable, and often hilarious movie. But the struggle for originality is presented with such self-conscious solipsism that it elevates narcissism even as it parodies it.

The film begins with a reference to the first Kaufman/Jonze collaboration, Being John Malkovich (1999). John Malkovich is directing a room full of his doubles, reminding us of the famous scene when the actor entered his own 'portal'. The film presents creativity as a paradox. The more you delve into your own mind in order to understand things, the more you are faced with yourself. Your subjectivity is ultimately all-consuming, and muddies the waters of objectivity. John Malkovich jumping into his own portal is thus logically faced with a terrifying vision of the world populated only by John Malkoviches, talking, laughing, arguing, but effectively communicating nothing, as the single word coming out of their mouths is Malkovich.

Malkovich cannot see himself objectively: the message seems to be that it is impossible. It could be interpreted as a strong criticism of such a narcissistic approach to creativity - trying to understand who you are through an almost literal act of navel gazing and without any appeal to the outside world and other people can only end in this subjective implosion.

If Adaptation is an attack against the excessive narcissism and, at the same time, self-loathing ('I'm fat, sweaty, ugly, pathetic') of our time, then great. But I suspect this is not the case. It seems more plausible that Kaufman is implying, following the YBAs of recent years, that this implosion of analysis is the best we can hope for. If originality and even objectivity are futile ambitions, then art must adopt the more modest ambition of documenting the artist's own pathetic tragedy.

Hope, positive change, the triumph over personal obstacles - all of these are squeezed into the last 25 minutes of the movie, when the 'wow' factor of Hollywood is parodied, with alligators, drugs and guns thrown in all at once. Kaufman is making the point that the 'principle' of filmmaking (according to the film guru McKee) that the audience must be shocked, shaken, stunned, taken on a journey of personal discovery, is wrong - on the contrary, we are quite happy to watch Kaufman's self-doubting struggle.

So the last 25 minutes are a crude and clumsy aberration. This sabotage is the final trick, making the argument ironically that a great movie is all about 'whittling something down' rather than blowing it up. The irony of the ending, however, is debilitating. Hope, change and betterment all come under that same ironic umbrella, so that, when Kaufman eventually tells Amilia he loves her, and, (joy) she loves him too, the audience is being asked to scoff at the impossibility of it all, to think how this never happens in real life. Real life is nasty, brutish and short.

So, we hate the Hollywood movies because they aren't realistic enough? Because they don't depict things how they really are? The point makes you wonder what the movies were ever about, if not, in a lesser or greater form, aspiring to something more than the mundane, expressing something more than failure, or at least, enlightening some little piece of life in whatever form. And such aspirations need not mean the wow factor, the mindlessness of the Third Act, or the insistence on depicting 'reality', but only a dark, murderous, ultimately tragic reality (as McKee gleefully sees things). God knows how many films are open to such a criticism. But laughing at hope and change and progress along with all of this makes the world a very stagnant, self-referential place.

'Is it possible to have a truly original thought?' I feel Adaptation was a frustrated cry at Socrates for telling us that nothing comes from nothing (if not, then - a frustrated cry at the idea that we are evolved beings, so how can we ever be truly original), as though development was somehow reduction, making the thing, the person, the idea, less special because it developed from somewhere else. But that's just a scepticism at the idea of progress.

Surely the point is that as human beings we are not simply evolved from nature, we don't just adapt and survive, like other animal species, we also aspire to more. As human beings we transcend nature as well as being a part of it, being both subject and object. We create ourselves even as we adapt.

Adaptation cannot be repeated, it is unique. But inspired, brilliant ? I worry about the next Kaufman/Jonze collaboration, hoping they move on from this, and their next movie doesn't get crushed under the self-referential weight of two past movies. They argue inspiration comes from within, rather than from the outside world.

But surely creativity doesn't exist in a vacuum, great art was not made on desert islands, but drew inspiration from the society and life around which does not reduce the greatness and originality of the art itself. In that sense, Adaptation can be understood less as an original piece of work, and more appropriately as a parody of its own, ultra cynical and navel-gazing times.