Hacker Cinema
Adaptation.
2002 · Film · 115 min
Directed by Spike Jonze
Charlie Kaufman is a confused L.A. screenwriter overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy, sexual frustration, self-loathing, and by the screenwriting ambitions of his freeloading twin brother Donald. While struggling to adapt "The Orchid Thief," by Susan Orlean, Kaufman's life spins from pathetic to bizarre. The lives of Kaufman and Orlean's book become strangely intertwined as each one's search for passion collides with the other's.
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26 comments on Hacker News
There's still a selection problem in adaptation.... Directors are not interchangeable, and that's ok! It means there can be a broader range of styles and flavors in the world.
For example, what if the Coen brothers had directed, say, 'Adaptation'? It would have been a completely different film. Would we ever want to see Christopher Nolan adapt Stefan Zweig? Hardly.
This disgusts me, because I want to think about meaning, and the statement strikes me as a hand-wavy excuse for distracting oneself, as well as an attack on my values. But then, the point raised by the article is that distraction is somewhat similar to meaningful purpose, and the line is a fine one because we adapt to new problem situations. Watching myself go through such adaptation is always somewhat creepy, and the moments of choice before embarking on a momentous project are difficult, not merely for reasons of cost/benefit analysis but because "cost" and "benefit" are liable to redefined by embarking, which is just confusing. Charlie Kaufman wrote a film called "Adaptation" which I thought was about this maybe.
>Movies have a self referential quality that makes them more intellectually engaging than mere novels.
This was written by someone who hasn't seriously engaged in reading novels lol
Novels have been doing this sort of thing on a pretty deep level since basically their inception, and in more modern contexts no movie could replicate something like Pale Fire or Gravity's Rainbow for example. Self-referentiality is also a pretty boring trick after awhile, self-awareness and referentiality are very juvenile creative traits that often (not always) are seeking some sort of pat on the back for the mere act of referentiality itself.
These things should be starting points, not the focus of an entire work unless there's a broader point to be made. Fredric Jameson has written a great deal about this sort of thing, it's basically the default position of culture in a lot of ways now, there's nothing inherently exciting about it.
This isn't to say one medium is superior to the other or anything, I just find it to be a very weird critique of "mere" novels when self-referentiality goes way deeper there, the only things I can really think of that come close are 8 1/2 or maybe some of Charlie Kaufman's work like Adaptation.
Sadly The 3 never got made into a (fake) movie. (Adaptation (2002))
I appreciate Adaptation for being well written and clever but it doesn't really astound me because it relies too heavily on its gimmick. The classic meta "you see this movie you are watching? I am self referencing it! I am breaking the fourth wall! And now I'm breaking the fourth wall about breaking the fourth wall". The entire thing is just neurotic obsessive self examination without a point. It just repeatedly goes for the obvious joke by laying out the subtext without much subtlety.
"Adaptation" is absolutely amazing of a movie. Kaufman's works are all amazing but I think this one takes the cake. It's so smart and so well executed. I know Nic Cage is a very controversial actor, and I don't doubt he acted terribly before, but this movie is a good demonstration of how incredibly good he really is if he decides to play well, which really strengthens his other works because you always question "did he really mean to do that just now?" like a Schoenbergian "did he really mean to put a minor second at every measure?"
Adaptation is the film I didn't know I wanted to write. It's perfect.
Adaptation is one of the gems of Postmodern cinema. I really like what that film did to my brain the first time I watched it. It's hilarious.
It's a keen insight into the process and emotional rollercoaster of creative work.
The layered hilarity to it all is that it's based on the real experience of Kaufman trying to adapt The Orchid Thief.
Adaptation is a great movie but I wouldn't really say it resists being understood - it tells a fairly straightforward narrative (the only catch, I guess, is the question of how much of the climax and denouement is "real" and how much of it is "cinema"). Even Charlie Kaufman's most recent film, "I'm Thinking of Ending Things", fits that bill an awful lot more I think.
I tried reading it years ago and gave up after a few pages. I might try again one day, but I don't like being actively confused when I'm trying to consume content via reading. It just frustrates me. Movies I can handle, like Adaptation is one of my favorite films of all time, and it "actively resists being understood" to quote another commenter here. Yet that approach translates much better to film than to literature IMO.
Thanks for that deep dive. I too thought the article fell apart at that point.
For a minute I wondered if the piece was about to become self-referential; gradually slipping into complete bullshit in order to illustrate how it’s done. (Much like the film “Adaptation” changed toward the end as the protagonist changed his writing.)
Alas, it was just sloppy thinking and poor writing.
This is on my list now. Sounds similar to one of my favs, Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation, a movie about himself and his alter ego struggling to write an adaptation of a book.
I would reject faithfulness as a measure of success. I'd much rather have "That's not Foundation!"
I already have Foundation. I can read it whenever I make the time. It's kind of cool to see a book translated to the screen... but if it doesn't really survive the translation? That's ok too! It can just be a movie with a ton of similarities to an existing story.
Blade Runner, The Shining, Starship Troopers, or hell, Adaptation. They all have varying relationships to the source material. None are especially faithful, but they're all still good movies.
The movie Adaptation., based on The Orchid Thief, is probably my all-time favourite movie. Did you see it, did you like it? Thanks, I will check out the book.
Fun fact: that dancer in front at the beginning of this video-striped shirt, mustache, glasses-is Spike Jonez.
He directed this music video. And the excellent video for Weapon of Choice by the same artist (https://youtu.be/wCDIYvFmgW8), as well as Sabotage by The Beastie Boys, and the excellent mind-fuck movies Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Her (which he also wrote and won a Best Original Screenplay Oscar for).
It’s funny watching a contemporary creative genius just kinda goof around.
Mentioned on the article but worth an extra mention: the movie "Adaptation" written by Charlie Kaufman. It's about orchids, adaptation, writing a book about someone writing a book on orchids and also a crime story :)
I suppose it depends on what you're looking for in a film.
For example, I can't stand musicals, because I think characters breaking out into song and dance every 5 minutes destroys any attempt at immersiveness or believability. But lots of people love them, and don't find this incongruity problematic. So I don't think breaking from the flow of the main story necessarily breaks the story.
Did the structure of "Adaptation" detract from its 'immersiveness'? I'd say it's the wrong question to ask.
My purpose was not humor, but to pull back the curtain and show the absurdity inherent in all action movies, and the work involved. Satire can be humorous, but that's not really the goal. I'd still love watching Jackie Chan outtakes even if his movies weren't comedic.
I have no use for yet another (whitewashed) action movie. Then again, as I said, there's probably a reason I'm not a Hollywood filmmaker.
I specifically read "Story of Your Life" a few months back prior to watching Arrival, as some people here claimed they liked the movie Adaptation better. I have to say I agree. It was a fine short story, and had some very good conceptual elements, but I found his explanation of the phenomenon and it's consequences for people subject to it lacking (or perhaps I misunderstood a portion of it). The movie skirted actual explanations with respect to this, but thus wasn't subject to scrutiny that may have shown it to be less solid than was supposed.
Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation also addresses the strains and mutations involved in porting art to a different medium with different demands. The movie self-referentially concerns adapting the book The Orchid Thief into a very-different – but perhaps necessarily-different? – film.
This is by the author of The Orchid Thief, of which Charlie Kaufman's film Adaptation is supposedly an adaptation.
Edit: Jon Ronson on The Shaggs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhtDf82a3pM
Alternative viewpoint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHVqxD8PNq8
But, don't take the speech purely at face value -- Adaptation (the movie) leaves it ambiguous about whether this is wisdom, puffery, or accidentally true for the wrong reasons.
Also, it should be pointed out that Kurt Vonnegut had the kind of childhood that would probably leave anybody numb to the ups and downs of life, and also lived through the firebombing of a German city. Everything in his oeuvre is about how impotent human stories are, to prepare people for 20th-century scale horror. So take that as you will.
I want to shout it from the rooftops: Dear Internet, stop telling me to make stuff! Stop telling me to do things!
This whole "cog in the machine" notion is a myth. The world is fascinating, people are fascinating. Always has been, always will be.
I would counter this entire article with one of my favorite quotes, from the movie Adaptation:
"Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day. There's genocide, war, corruption. Every fucking day, somewhere in the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else. Every fucking day, someone, somewhere takes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People find love, people lose it. For Christ's sake, a child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church. Someone goes hungry. Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman. If you can't find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don't know crap about life!"
Wikipedia on Charlie Kaufman [1]. His film work includes Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Adaptation., Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Synecdoche, New York.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Kaufman
Seems like a circular question. Office Space is a movie about work because it specifically defines itself as a movie about work. But when I nominate (as I now will) Apocalypse Now as a great movie about the experience of being a soldier in Vietnam, everybody will look at me funny. As if soldiers weren't professionals being paid to go to work.
Of course, I might be wrong about Apocalypse Now, as I've never actually been an infantryman in the Vietnam War. I have been a science grad student, however, and I can say without hesitation that Real Genius is the Apocalypse Now of graduate school. Even the physically-impossible hacker tall tales in that movie are note-perfect.
EDIT: More examples. Adaptation is very much a movie about being a professional screenwriter. And there are dozens of movies about being a professional cop, musician, athlete, reporter, or artist.
there were some films too close to call but I wanted to see the result.. eg "lost in translation" vs "adaptation"
also would be good to have a filter eg "only show most controversial" or "only show scifi"
> Coupled with a bias towards an employee's best interest, I think saying "can't" is reasonable.
I was pointing out your bias, and now I will point out that even your expression "an employee's best interest" is likewise biased. Not that I feel differently, of course, however there are people who are fiercely loyal to companies for a variety of reasons that you or I may not embrace.
The OP, for example, wants to go back to work at Microsoft. Why is this wrong? He obviously identifies strongly with the company and obtains some emotional satisfaction from his association with them.
Let's compare and contrast to relationships. Many people fall into relatinships I would consider asymmetrical: One person is more fiercely loyal than the other. Many people feel this is a bad thing, and indeed some peopel are hurt in these affairs, especially if they secretly wish the other person to reciprocate in kind.
Yet there are people who are perfectly happy to be in these relationships where they are the expendable party. The movie "Adaptation" featured an example of this where one of the two Nicholas Cage characters describes having a High School crush on a girl that despised him. His "twin brother" felt differently, of course.
Please don't misunderstand, I fully agree with you that being an "expendable asset" is not financially advantageous, however I can't ignore the fact that may people out there seem to derive some satisfaction from such employment and I'm not sure they are ignorant of the potential consequences.
I conclude that there are people who are being perfectly realistic and rational about such employment choices, even if they are not the choices I would embrace.