Life reflecting art, or Art reflecting life.

I want to do an analysis of a scene. It’s one of my favorite scenes in the movies from one of my favorite movies. The movie is called Adaptation (2002) and it stars Nicholas Cage as Charlie Kaufman. What makes this movie stand alone is that Charlie Kaufman is actually a real guy. He is the screenwriter for the movie. Cage plays Charlie, and the story is about how real-life Charlie came to finally write the screenplay for the movie Adaptation.



There are some artistic licensees. Cage also plays Charlie’s twin brother Donald. There is no real-life counterpart for Donald. But he does represent the polar opposite of Charlie’s personality. Whereas Charlie is introverted, anxious, humorously insecure, pessimistic, and socially awkward, Donald is an outgoing social butterfly, the life of the party, and a bit shallow on the intellectual side. To watch these personalities clash and rub each other is one of the highlights of the movie.

But I want to focus on Charlie. The main thing Charlie is trying to do is adapt a non-fiction book about Orchids to the silver screen. The book was written by Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep), and it follows the passionate exploits of John Larouche who is obsessed with the exotic beauty of the orchid. Larouche looks like a redneck but if you pay close attention to what he says and how he says it, he’s actually a very bright, articulate, and passionate man. That is what Orlean is attracted to. We find out that she wants to know what it feels like to care about something passionately.



Charlie, however, has writer’s block. He can’t come to write a draft of the screenplay. The book is almost unadaptable. The most important thing to Charlie is originality and independence from a formula. Hollywood studios thrive on a formula because that’s what makes the money. But Charlie cares more for the ‘art for art’s sake’ motto. Throughout the movie, he tries and tries to get past his writer’s block. As a last-ditch effort, he visits a seminar for writing screenplays with guest speaker Robert McKee. He despises himself for doing this because he thinks McKee relies on the formula. He raises his hand to ask a question. His question betrays the misery in his own life. All the things he thinks are cliches in the movies don’t happen in the real world. He wants his movie to reflect the real world, where there are no resolutions, nothing of interest really happens. Here it is:



This speech moves me very deeply. Everything comes to a head here. Charlie is so caught up with making the script a reflection of the world (which is just his lonely perception of it) that he is blind to what actually goes on in that same world. The orchid becomes a symbol for that unattainable something we strive for our entire lives. We are all trying to write that eccentric adaptation of our lives, and to no avail. We all have a Charlie and a Donald in us. The movies with the cliches only show us that life is cliched and that cliches aren’t necessarily a bad thing. Does art reflect life or does life reflect art? This movie picks the former. This speech is just a pathos-filled reminder that life is filled with heartbreaking and sublime activity. We only neglect the eyes to see it. Once we see it, we can finally be in that position to appreciate what it means to be redeemed from it. McKee becomes a 21st century conduit for ‘the whirlwind’ in the book of Job.

There are so many layers to this movie, but I’ll stop here.