Feedback Friday: Is Adaptation really an adaptation? (Patreon)

Our recent pairing of Spike Jonze' meta-movie Adaptation and the modern meta-riff The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent naturally sent us off in a meta-direction, discussing whether Adaptation actually does enough to adapt its supposed inspiration, Susan Orlean's non-fiction book The Orchid Thief, and whether it can be considered a worthwhile project if it doesn't. A listener responds to that argument, and to another Adaptation question: What does it mean to the narrative when "Charlie Kaufman"'s fictional brother "Donald Kaufman" dies, and how are we meant to feel about it? Jamsheed writes:

Is Adaptation an adaptation?

Regarding the Scott-Tasha disagreement about whether Adaptation treats the source The Orchid Thief as merely “grist for the mill,” I think it might be possible to split the difference (and probably leave both sides unhappy!) I should note at the outset that I haven’t read The Orchid Thief, so take the following accordingly.

My immediate inclination is to think that Tasha is right that as a general matter it’s perfectly fine if a work of art treats another work as grist for the mill to create something new and interesting. There are probably various famous examples of this, but Vertigo strikes me as a possible example, where Hitchcock uses the source material (as I understand it) as essentially raw material and takes the film in a radically different direction.

But I think Scott is right that in the case of Adaptation, it would be a failure if the film only treated the source novel as grist for the mill. Because the film would fail on its terms: it seems to me that’s an essential ambition of the film is to successfully adapt The Orchid Thief, so if the book only ends up only being grist for the mill, then the film as a work of art is a failure.

And I do agree with Scott that the film is not a failure, precisely because it seriously grapples with the themes of the book — partly by way of making Susan Orlean and John Laroche such key characters, but also by having quite a lot about orchids, as well as passages from the book in the movie. Until the third act, Adaptation seems to me pretty clearly a self-reflective adaptation of the source. And what follows doesn’t negate what went before. But about that third act…

What to make of Donald Kaufman?

I don’t think the finished film reflects an endorsement of Charlie’s artistic sensibility and a rejection of Donald’s. Rather, I think the film is supposed to represent a union of the two artistic sensibilities. The first clue to this is that (as Keith notes), both Charlie and Donald are credited as screenwriters for the film we’re watching.

But then there’s also all the drama of the third act, which is a reversal of the authenticity Charlie has been insisting on and is much closer to Donald’s approach. And of course this all comes about after Charlie meets McKee and brings Donald on board. So the film strongly suggests that the added drama of the third act (which I believe isn’t part of Orlean’s book) is Donald’s contribution.

But most crucially (and here I have to credit my partner, who pointed out all of this after last night’s rewatch), the Charlie-Donald split mirrors the multiple-personality split that’s a key part of Donald’s script. And the fact that Donald is a real character within the film mirrors all the plot-related difficulties Charlie points with regard to Donald’s script.

So in the meta-narrative of the film, Charlie and Donald really are two possibilities for, or two aspects of, Charlie Kaufman. And in this light, the killing of Donald represents the re-incorporation of that aspect of the personality into Charlie Kaufman. And so also in this way, Donald’s side of the personality lives on in the finished film. Also, now my head hurts. Thanks for reading.

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Tasha responds:

I think you're absolutely right about the third act of Adaptation turning to melodrama, sex, violence, emotion, and outward drama (instead of Charlie Kaufman's inward-looking castigation, confusion, and self-absorption as the primary drama) representing a switch from Charlie's writing tactics to Donald's, especially after Charlie sees Donald's successes and starts reluctantly trying to emulate him. And I think you're on the money about Donald's death representing his reabsorption into Charlie's mentality.

I'd go a little further in all of this, though, and suggest that the reason Donald is a separate entity in this film in the first place — and the reason Charlie holds him in such disdain and is so endlessly frustrated with him — is because The Real Charlie Kaufman Who Is Writing This Movie has rejected a lot of these aspects of his personality and his writing style, so in this film, he packs them all into one persona and depicts the two versions of himself as perpetually at odds. So once he embraces the Donald side of himself by giving Adaptation a "populist" ending full of gunfire and car chases, he doesn't need to symbolically "reject" Donald anymore by making him a separate person, and he can eliminate the character.

Still feels a bit weird within the fiction of the film, where he only briefly seems particularly broken up by his brother's death — it's likely because Donald was always more a symbol than a man (in part reflected by the fact that he doesn't have his own face or voice, he's just another Charlie, played by the same actor), but it still lands a bit oddly for me.

As to whether Adaptation is a functional adaptation, I've got two questions for you that are maybe also questions for Scott and for the readership here. First, why is it fine for other things to just be inspiration for art rather than sources for adaptation, but it wouldn't be right here for The Orchid Thief? I see what you're saying about how Real Writer Charlie Kaufman set out to adapt the book, so if he didn't, he would have failed, but to me, the entirety of Adaptation is about that failure, about how he turned it into a story about himself and his anxieties and inventiveness, instead of the story Orlean wrote. To me, Adaptation is  a pretty wonderful story about the creation of art and how we all bring our idiosyncrasies into it, just as we bring them to interpreting art.

But even though the film features John Laroche and his schemes and court case, and some true information about orchids, I just can't get on board with the idea that this is a real grappling with the book's ideas — in large part because it ends up dodging the book's very central thoughts on ownership of and exploitation of rare plants, and hares off into entirely fictional versions of Laroche, Orlean, and especially their relationship, which was not sexual, destructive, or fatal. I just don't think that reflects on Adaptation as art!

In the end, I think Adaptation prompts some fascinating questions about what it means to adapt a work "successfully," but everybody's going to have to decide for themselves what defines that, just as if they read Orchid Thief, they'll be asked to define for themselves whether Laroche is a con man or a conservationist, an opportunist or a horticulturalist. I think the movie and book are asking tremendously different questions, but I think they're all interesting questions to contemplate, together or separately.