Is Adaptation really just a satire of Hollywood?

I love all Charlie Kauffman movies, SNY is my favorite movie and I felt like I got most of what that movie was trying to say, but I just didn’t get this b/c Kauffman normally explores really profound/philisophical issues but this movie just seemed to be another movie about the faults of Hollywood that we have seen a million times.

Are there some themes I am missing besides the themes of art/Hollywood ect. I keep thinking he must be saying something more profound then that.

""a million times"" really?

I don’t think Adaptation is too profound. It’s about the creation of art and postmodern self-reference with occasional jibes at the studio system, but it doesn’t reveal much about any of the three. Writers seem to be able to relate well to the film though.

Well not a million, but recentley i’ve seen like, 3 movies about this subject on IFC I don’t know what there names were but…

So what was the point of the parrallel stories?

I do like Adaptation and to me it is one of the greatest films about the creative process, the doubts, the temptation to sell out (The other you without a back bone, in this case represented by a twin brother) and all the emotions and questions that the process creates. The process of living does that too. At the same time its a film about a moment of genious, a moment that you see in the making with that awesome looping effect.

-Kauffman normally explores really profound/philisophical issues-

He does?

Matt,
I think he does. Synecdoche New York surprises me in what it says about how much artificiality must be overcomed before we can catch a little glimpse into something real.

I have not seen Synecdoche New York, but any film with a pertinent search for absolute truth that ends with success would strike me as false.

-

“—Kauffman normally explores really profound/philisophical issues—

He does?"

yes.

But I would really like to know what the parrallel stories were trying to show in Adaptation.

With Susan Orlean And Laroche.

gosh Law… I didn’t like SNY at first, it really frustrated me, I thought it was a bad film but it just stuck with me and worked its magic. It doesn’t search for anything like you say, and I woud even say that some of its ambitions fail. But in the end it is the film that gets closer to what Kauffman tries to do in Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Adaptation

The film is such an amazing perplexity. Just think about it like this-

He was of course satirizing himself more than anything.

Natham,
:) nice way to put it.
“He was of course satirizing himself more than anything”
And how agonizing that was!!!

I agree with Berj’s take on it, and since I’m a writer I naturally adhered to the film. I love it. I love that it becomes what it abhors (Jonze satirizing himself).

Adaptation is one of the most entertaining movies I’ve watched. I had so much fun watching it.

That picture is what adaptation is all about. Ouroboros.

No.

Read Philip K. Dick’s VALIS which just must be a major influence on ADAPTATION (Kaufman’s an admitted Dick fan, I think, or if not, he’d better start getting worried since he pays “homage” to Dick an awful lot). Then read Julian Jaynes’ THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL MIND to get a sense about the antagonistic internal dialogue going on between the two hemispheres of Kaufman’s and Dick’s brains. In their worlds, nothing will/can ever be clear-cut, especially the culturally fabricated sense/concept of “self” or a fixed/permanent identity that many people take for granted.

With this in mind, the movie is first and foremost about surviving with chronic anxiety or OCD in the modern world, the only era that has begun to be able to contextualize just how very different each of our individual subjective experiences is via a burgeoning awareness of neurodiversity amidst our evolving cultural consciousness. Yup. No joke.

Too bad he sells out in the significantly less amusing/thought-provoking final 40 minutes….though, granted, it’s ABOUT selling-out. But, still, not nearly as fucking absolutely fucking perfect as the first twothirds of the movie. So, Peter, The movie is NOT in fact ABOUT Hollywood…the matrix/machine/system of Hollywood’s professional expectations (itself an incredibly historically and generically rich network of perceived requirements) just serves as a convenient—and, coincidentally in this case for Kaufman, autobiographical—allegory for the inevitable process of distress that his mind’s arbitrary yet undeniably unfortunate distribution of chemicals causes him to undergo a hundred times a day when confronted with stressors that most people can navigate with ease, without excessive conscious over-thinking, on auto-pilot, essentially, relying on the confidence they’ve gained from undergoing similar or analogous experiences a million times throughout the course of their lives.

Check out Linklater’s adaptation of Dick’s A SCANNER DARKLY too. The two best Dick “adaptations” out there, even if BLADE RUNNER is ultimately a million times cooler looking/sounding/feeling.

EDIT: ….and even if TOTAL RECALL just all-around rules (maybe I will even watch it NOW even though it’s 3:30 in the morning…tempting).

I had to look up “ouroboros” which I’ve never heard the term for, though I’m familiar with the concept and image….T’onda is right on.
And Nathan with the Escher image.
Dick describes it as a “chinese finger trap” in the mind.
But, for the sake of seniority, read up on ouroboros as an approach to the concept that seems to have stuck around for a while. Anyways, ADAPTATION (keep in mind the evolutionary double-meaning of the title…again, it’s NOT just about Hollywood) has some pretty historically significant cultural precedents.

Yes, self-reflexivity has been around a very long time.

There’s also an attempt in Adaptation to wrestle with some of the issues of apperception—the process by which new experience is assimilated to and transformed by the residuum of past experience of an individual to form a new whole."

“With this in mind, the movie is first and foremost about surviving with chronic anxiety or OCD in the modern world, the only era that has begun to be able to contextualize just how very different each of our individual subjective experiences is via a burgeoning awareness of neurodiversity amidst our evolving cultural consciousness. Yup. No joke.”

You should watch Cassavetes!

Problem is that despite all his flaws, Kaufman’s character is so damn likable. We identify and root for him every step of the way, and while the characters in the film have to deal with others who are “neurodiverse” from them, this is all nicely filtered to the audience so that we’re always sure of how we’re meant to feel. We intellectually understand the way his mind is going, but we never actually have to deal with it.