My first brush with Meta narrative was a novel by John Fowles, The French Lieutenant's Woman, which was adapted into a film starring Meryl Streep. It was also my first pet literary theory; the first time I realised that a work of art exists within a form and is shaped by its form: a novel is not a poem, and the same story told as a play is a different work of art. I know it's not rocket science, but I'm a slow learner.
What is most frustrating about any art form is what makes it a form: its accrued conventions and the limits these impose upon its ability to address truths whose structures may not fit into those conventions. Western narrative tradition demands an identifiable progress through a set of patterns and Hollywood cinema has refined and codified these until it is possible to predict the emotional arc of most of its product from a one minute trailer. This is over refinement, and is thus open to challenges from artists prepared to attack its forms: avant garde artists, if you will.
Bear with me: I'm getting there.
John Fowles put himself into his novel to allow himself the freedom to comment upon his story from outside its framework. In The French Lieutenant's Woman and The Magus, he was, in my view, successful; in the autobiographical Daniel Martin, less so. Charlie Kaufman, I think, is trying something a little bigger. Films, particularly Hollywood films, demand stories, but In Adaptation, he tries to make a film about something that is not a story; the perfection of life, the extraordinary truth of natural selection, and in the process he comes unstuck, and so tells the story of trying to create that film.
Briefly, Kaufman (as a character) sets about adapting Susan Orlean's non-fiction account of a horticulturist's passion for natural order. This character, John Laroche, is an obsessive collector and a vivid and engaging didact but Kaufman wants to write the film as a representation of what it is he is passionate about, rather than telling a conventional, character driven Hollywood plot. Kaufman's character spends much of the film fuming at the restrictions of unambitious narrative writing, characterised by the fictional Donald twin and his seminar holding mentor Robert Mckee. However, these two characters eventually guide him towards compromises (ie adaptation) with both his artistic and personal crises; Mckee by reminding him that stories are rooted in human truths and Donald by showing him that love is a condition of the soul, not an unobtainable ideal.
Kaufman's anxious characterisation of the unease of a conscientious mind is rooted in a far deeper context in Adaptation than it was in Being John Malkovich. The central philosophical assertion of this film is shown in a few short minutes in the bold graphical expositions of Darwin's great observation: the foundation of the modern rational mind. Chris Cooper's exquisite soliloquy on asexual pollination reinforces the theme but the idea is actually explained in Spike Jonzes'visual montages: this is bold writing, brilliantly visualised.
The central personal struggle, the narrative hook, is a grappling with the implications of Darwinism's effect on a culture used to describing the world in morality tales, rather than in close, dispassionate observation. It is a story about adapting to the moral consequences of understanding adaptation. On a great many levels this is a brilliantly made work of art.
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