Adaptation

So, last week I thought I had another commitment that would keep me from attending movie night, so I went ahead and rented Adaptation and watched it earlier in the week. As it turned out, I was able to make to class, so I ended up watching the film twice.

I'm glad I did.

This movie has so many different layers to it. I probably caught about fifty things on the second viewing that flew completely over my head the first time. For instance, the first time I watched it, the scene early on with Charlie at the restaurant with the producer had completely slipped my mind by halfway through the movie. The second time, knowing what happened later on, I realized that everything Charlie says he doesn't want to do in that conversation ends up happening later on in the second half of the film. Maybe I shouldn't say second half. It would probably be more appropriate to call it the post-workshop portion of the movie, since Charlie begins to write it differently after the writing workshop.

Yes, I just said the character was writing the movie. Adaptation blurs the line between reality and fiction as much as any movie I've seen. As I understand it, every one of the major characters, save for Donald, is actually a real person, but they are real people being played by actors and doing completely fictitious things. (I wonder how Susan Orleans felt about being portrayed as a drug addict and attempted murderer.) Nearly everything we see happen onscreen, we also see Charlie write, including the scenes of Charlie writing. In the post workshop portion, we don't actually see it being written, but we have seen the seeds planted for it in the writing workshop. Furthermore, Donald, an entirely fiction character, actually gets a writing credit in the opening titles. I had actually assumed he was a real person until Donna told us he wasn't.

The film seems to revel in pointing out that in movies reality is not always reality. Something that was brought up in class that I think nicely illustrates this point is the masturbation fantasy scenes. In the first one, with the waitress, there is no indication given at all that we are cutting from reality to fantasy. The restaurant scene just continues with no transition as we move from Charlie's real world interactions to his fantasy, and then it continues on as normal until Charlie wakes up. It's like the film is saying to us "Hey look, we can put anything we want up here and you won't know whether it's real or not." For the most part, we're always brought back to reality at some point, but at some point in the film, around the point Charlie asks Donald for help, I would say, we switch from 'reality' to 'fiction', and the story never snaps back.

But I've been writing like I think the film before that point actually portrays reality (and by reality I mean the reality of the world in the film, not our reality). I wouldn't actually say that's entirely true. The scenes with Charlie (prior to the point mentioned above) may actually be 'true' within the world of the film, but I would argue that the scenes with Susan are not. Every time we see Susan in the pre-workshop portion of the film, it's always bookended by scenes of Charlie either reading her book or talking about her or something she wrote. I think the indication we are supposed to get is that these scenes are Charlie's ideas of what Susan must be like, rather than what actually happened. But doesn't that contradict what I wrote in the last paragraph? Not really. We may not be given a clear, no-doubt-about-it sign that this isn't real, but I think the bookending of the scenes is meant to be an indication to us. Everything we need to know is there. We just have to see it.