Deconstructionist’: Adaptation As Writerly Praxis

JAFP 7 (1) pp. 65–82 Intellect Limited 2014

Vartan Messier City University of New York

Desire and the ‘Deconstructionist’: Adaptation as writerly praxis

Abstract Keywords Directed by Spike Jonze and written by Charlie Kaufmann, Adaptation is a semi- Adaptation (2002) fictitious narrative of Kaufman’s effort to adapt Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief Spike Jonze (1998) for the screen. Interrelating Barthes critiques of authorship/authority and Charlie Kaufman the readerly/writerly with adaptation theory, this article demonstrates how the film Susan Orlean performs an immanent critique of the process of adaptation by laying bare its practi- The Orchid Thief cal, theoretical, and political implications. I argue that whereas the screenwriter is a Roland Barthes traditionally absent figure in adaptation criticism, his self-reflexive presence in the film hijacks both interpretation and critique by deconstructing the filmic adaptation process through writerly praxis. The critical exploration of the binaries of text and adaptation, reader and writer, fact and fiction, work and theory is made possible by the figuration of Kaufmann who, as a Barthesian reader in the throes of the reading and writing processes, writes himself into the story and projects his desires onto the screen, thereby undermining all authoritative claims on the original text and its interpretation.

Seul la lecture aime l’œuvre, entretient avec elle un rapport de désir. Lire, c’est désirer l’œuvre. … (Barthes 1966: 78)

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1. Both the screenplay You can’t have a protagonist without desire. It doesn’t make sense! and the film were nominated for the (McKee in Jonze 2002) Oscars and the Césars, Kaufman’s In ‘The death of the author’ (1967) Roland Barthes demythologizes the screenplay won the British BAFTA award concept of an ‘Author-God’ by dismissing the endeavour to confine a text and the Independent within a single ‘theological’ interpretation that can be traced back to an Spirit Awards amongst authorial intention. For Barthes, a text ought to be liberated from any singular others. source or origin such as the author, as it imposes limits on its possible inter- 2. In exchange for artistic pretations. Barthes argues that the text ‘is a space of many dimensions, in freedom, Jonze and Kaufman accepted which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is a more limited original: the text is a tissue of citations, resulting from the thousand sources budget than if they had allowed for the of culture’ (1967). This ‘multiple writing’, as Barthes calls it, also discredits the production company, notion that the critic is capable of deciphering a text from a privileged herme- Sony, to intervene neutic position. Drawing on Nietzsche, Barthes further explains that the aim in the making of the movie. See Kaufman’s of interpretation is not to ascribe a meaning to a text but rather to reveal its interview, (2005) plurality (Barthes 2002c: 123), a multiplicity that intersects with the plural- in Reverse Shot. ity of the reader (Barthes 2002c: 126). By severing authority from authorship, Regardless of the budget, the film was Barthes privileges multiplicity over singularity and configures reading as a will- nominated for the to-power that affirms ‘a difference of which each text is the return’ (Barthes Academy Awards and like their previous 2002c: 121, emphasis added). Through her desire for the work (oeuvre) as contribution, both well as the labor invested in her reading, the reader does not consume the Jonze and Kaufman text passively, but is actively involved in the becoming of its (re)writing as a won a number of prizes at international film ‘producer of the text’ (Barthes 2002c: 121–22). festivals. In this article, I examine how Adaptation (Jonze, 2002) provides a lavish platform from which to address the decentring ethos of Barthes’ proposi- tion. Written by Charlie Kaufman (and, according to the credits, Donald Kaufman, his fictional twin brother who also appears in the film as a character foil) Adaptation is a semi-fictitious narrative about his effort to adapt Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief (1998) for the screen. The film is reportedly based on a true story; following the critical success of Being John Malkovich,1 Kaufman was hired to adapt Orlean’s book. However, he soon realized that because the text lacked narrative structure, it could not be adapted in the form of a traditional story. After numerous failed attempts, he turned the gaze of the camera on himself and wrote a script on his struggle to write a screenplay about a book he perceived could not be adapted into a film. Under increas- ing pressure from his agent and the studio executives who had hired him, Kaufman delivered his self-reflexive script, thinking that it would have a nega- tive impact on his career as a screenwriter. Ironically, it had the adverse effect; the producers abandoned the original project and decided to follow through with Kaufman’s screenplay instead.2 The end result is a film constructed as a series of fragmentary scenes that interweaves the arch-narrative of Kaufman’s struggle with repeated visualizations of his various screenplays attempts, self- reflexive snapshots revealing his own insecurities as a writer and an individual, and meta-commentaries on the writing process as a tool for critique and interpretation. Frank P. Tomasulo aptly observes that the title of the film refers to, at one level, the cinematic adaptation process, and at another, the ways in which a person or a species matures and adapts to his environment (2008: 169). Because of this double emphasis, Adaptation recalibrates how we perceive the role of the screenplay and the screenwriter in the adaptation process. On the one hand, as Jack Boozer notes, the screenplay plays a central role in the process; even if it undergoes multiple revisions and rewrites as exemplified in

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Adaptation, it ‘remains the essential and creative bible of the film’s construc- 3. For an informative overview, I refer the tion’ (2008: 4). On the other, whereas the screenwriter is a traditionally reader to Elliott’s overlooked figure in adaptation criticism, this article demonstrates how his Rethinking the Novel/ figurative, intertextual presence as a reader and writer of texts enacts an Film Debate (2003), Brian McFarlane’s immanent critique of the poetics and politics of adaptation. Echoing Barthes’ Novel to Film: An approach to reading, Adaptation reveals the ways in which the pluralities of Introduction to the both text and reader are actualized through the process of adapting a written Theory of Adaptation (1996), the introductory text into a cinematic narrative. essays by Dudley Andrew, James Naremore, and Robert Ray in Film Adaptation The lover’s infidelity: Adaptation as assemblage (2000), the impressive Writing in the early 1960s, André Bazin famously claimed, ‘the film-maker three consecutive collections of essays has everything to gain from fidelity’ (2004: 65) and that consequently, ‘a good edited by Robert adaptation should result in a restoration of the essence of the letter and the Stam and Alessandra spirit’ (Bazin 2004: 67). Conversely, more recent scholarship on film adapta- Raengo, Literature and Film (2004), Literature 3 tion has argued that approaching adaptations from this unilateral perspec- through Film (2005), tive of fidelity inevitably leads to an impasse; it essentializes both literature and The Companion to Literature and and film by relying heavily on pre-paradigmatic, hermeneutic approaches Film (2004), and based on authority and authorial intention and overlooks the complex and Imelda Whelehan’s multifaceted character of both mediums. Barthes and other poststructuralists Adaptations: from Text to Screen, Screen to have aimed to decentralize such fixed and stable concepts by demonstrating Text (1999). that through cultural dissemination, texts are subjected to a shifting herme- 4. In Anti-Oedipus (1983), neutic as their perceived meanings vary according to the contexts in which Deleuze and Guattari they are received and their respective audiences. Accordingly, Dudley Andrew vehemently criticize configures cinematic adaptations as a variation of Barthesian écriture, which the Oedipal model of subjectivity based on affirms difference rather than similarity. In step with the idea of difference the configuration of and multiplicity underlined earlier, Barthes concept of the writerly text is that desire as ‘lack’; rather, they argue that desire which accounts for the active role of the reader in the production and plural- is a productive force, ity of meanings (2002c: 122). Consequently, the view of cinematic adaptation capable of producing as a process of differentiation highlights the ways in which reading becomes its own conditions of reality. a writerly process, wherein the film director and/or screenwriter effectively rewrites the text. Because the parameter of fidelity relies on values of same-ness or similarity that are fixed and unchanging, it is unproductive and degenerative. In the amorous discourse favoured by Barthes, fidelity is sterile: it is incapable of satiating the Lover’s desire for the Other (the text) who embodies a perpetual difference (2002a). By approaching adaptation as an intertextual and interme- dial process, the shortsightedness of an essentialist, centric approach bound to fidelity can be swept away. For adaptation to be a creative, generative process, Barthes’ reader needs to be an unfaithful Lover. For the Lover, adaptation thus presents itself as a paradox: if the Lover is faithful to her desire, she must be unfaithful to her beloved. Moreover, not only does Adaptation subvert the paradigm of fidelity and undermine the privileged hermeneutic position of the author of the source text to the benefit of the reader/screenwriter, but it also realizes the desire of Barthes’ Lover in the ways in which it reproduces difference in a multiple, fragmentary series of visual flows as a form of Deleuzean desiring-production.4 In reenacting its own creation, the film connects various lines of flight, resulting in what Deleuze and Guattari would dub an ‘assemblage’, which ‘establishes connections between certain multiplicities … so that a book has no sequel nor the world as its object nor one or several authors as its subject’ (1987: 22–23). As an assemblage of intertextual, self-reflexive multiplicities,

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Adaptation narrativizes the screenwriter’s repeated attempts to adapt the source material, wherein Kaufman’s/Charlie’s story acts as a connective tissue through which the protagonist communicates his reading (and writing) experience to the viewer. The juxtaposition of Charlie’s projections and digressions showing various writers/characters (e.g. Charlie and Donald Kaufman, Susan Orlean, and Charles Darwin) engrossed in writerly activities, as well as the intertextual flash-forward and flash-backs between the actual screenplay and its own genesis, position the film as a self-reflexive narrative and meta-commentary. Similar to certain parasitic plants and orchids mentioned in both the film and the book, both narrative and commentary feed off the other to exist; in so doing, they reveal the plurality of The Orchid Thief (1998) as the products of Charlie’s successive reading experiences. As the title of this article evokes, Adaptation not only incarnates the writerly production of meanings, but the double gesture of Derridean deconstruction as well. First, the film overturns the hierarchies between text and adaptation, source and copy, author/auteur and reader/viewer. Second, as the film also becomes the vehicle through which these classical oppositions are articulated, their displacement is made possible by the screenwriter who, as both reader and writer, under- mines all authoritative claims on the interpretation of the original text by writing himself and his desires onto the screenplay before eventually vanishing himself in the film’s final scene. At one level, this patchwork of narrative and commentary revolv- ing around Charlie’s repeated endeavours to adapt the book is interwoven on-screen by his own attempts to adapt to the psycho-pathological realities of his everyday existence. Drawing from the work of Charles Darwin and Jean Piaget, in Adaptation Studies and Learning: New Frontiers (2013), Laurence Raw aims to study adaptation from a perspective that considers the ways in which individuals actively engage with the determining environmental and internal factors that affect their daily lives. Darwin’s idea of ‘a struggle for existence’ posits that the organisms that have the best adapted to the continuous changes in their respective environment will thrive and survive (Darwin 2008 quoted in Raw 2013: 2). Inspired by Darwin’s biological insights, Piaget developed a theory of cognitive development as a twofold process of adaptation: assimila- tion and accommodation, wherein the former is the process through which we learn to incorporate new experiences into existing schemata or mental structures, and the latter as the process through which we create or modify new conceptual categories if these new experiences do not fit into existing schemata (Piaget 1952: 3–6). Raw considers that the work of the screenwriter is particularly well suited to illustrate how the adaptive process assists us in meeting new and changing contextual conditions: ‘all screenwriters have to adapt their work according to the opinions of actors, directors, producers, and other creative artists … shaping and reshaping narratives according to specific social, cultural, and cinematic circumstances’ (2013: 4). While these environmental circumstances have undoubtedly shaped the evolution of Kaufman’s screenplay, at the internal level, Adaptation also bears witness to the occasion where, as Barthes puts it, ‘the “literary” text (the Book) transmigrates into our lives, when another writing (the Other’s writing) succeeds in writing fragments of our own daily lives, in brief when there is co-existence’ (Barthes 2002d: 704, emphasis added). While the author (of the source text) may very well be dead, Boozer warns us that the screewriter’s intent should not be easily overlooked by critically over-emphasizing the influ- ence of wide-ranging cultural forces on the adaptation process (2008: 22); as he

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Figures 1–2: A waitress spots Charlie reading The Orchid Thief (1998) and tells him she loves orchids. Soon thereafter, he fantasizes about taking her to an orchid convention and making love to her in the woods.

notes ‘a critical approach to adaptation that recognizes authorial desire through 5. Having mostly opposed the script intertext as well as the film can reveal … the significant stages of the paradigm of fidelity in the 1990s smaller decisions that finally add up to the whole’ (Boozer 2008: 24). The frag- and early 2000s, some mentary and digressive narrative pattern of the film is one that affirms differ- critics have since then reconsidered the ence and repetition as it responds to the flux of Charlie/Kaufman’s desire. As value of similitude in Kaufman’s authorial desire is transfigured into Charlie’s amorous desire, the adaptations studies. narrative arc of the film wanders in and out of smaller, differentiated scenes See, in particular, Dudley Andrew’s What and sequences triggered by Charlie’s desire to adapt Orlean’s piece and the is Cinema? (2010). imaginary, fantasy space in which he projects himself as Lover – of both books and women. Following a variety of creative ideas and aspirations, each visu- alized attempt is interwoven with the character’s own fantasies in a series of fragmentary episodes. In one instance, a waitress at a diner tells Charlie she loves orchids after she spots him reading The Orchid Thief (1998). The scene fades into a daydream, where Charlie fantasizes about going to an Orchid convention with the waitress and ends up making love to her (Figures 1 and 2). When the segment fades out, we find Charlie in bed at night, masturbating. Later, eager to turn fantasy into reality, he is back at the diner to ask her if she would like to travel to the convention with him, only to be coldly rebuked. These repeated, interconnected series of projected fantasies highlight the role of desire as desiring-production, effectively positioning the protagonist/reader as producer of the text.

Narrative errancy and the errancy of fidelity In one of the opening scenes of the movie, Charlie meets with Valerie, the studio executive who commissions the book’s adaptation, and he states that his intention is to remain ‘true’ to the book, declaring that he wants it to ‘exist’ rather than be ‘artificially plot-driven’. Charlie’s comment brings forth two central and interrelated issues related to the cinematic adaptation process: fidelity and narrativity. On the one hand, the issue of fidelity has traditionally been an oft- debated paradigm in both the production and reception of cinematic adaptation.5 On the other, the arrangement of events in narrative form has dominated both literature and film and their intersections to the extent that the preferred subject of adaptations have predominantly been nineteenth century works of realist fiction that relied heavily on plot structure (Whelehan 1999: 10). Charlie’s desire to remain ‘true’ to the book is his first error; an error that is not only constitutive of the story as it turns Charlie’s ensuing struggle of

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adapting The Orchid Thief (1998) into the film’s subject, but also acts as its premise. However, his stated intention also points to the ways in which many of us, as readers of books and viewers of their film adaptations, approach such works. As Robert Stam observes, the issue of fidelity relates to the ways in which we feel the director has usurped or hijacked the phantasmatic possibilities associated with readership:

We read a novel through our introjected desires, hopes, and utopias, and as we read we fashion our own imaginary mise-en-scène of the novel on the private stages of ours minds. When we are confronted with someone else’s phantasy, as Christian Metz pointed out long ago, we feel the loss of our own phantasmatic relation to the novel … (2000: 54–55)

Similarly, Whelehan points out that some case studies obsessed with fidelity have been guided by distinct hostility towards the adaptation because it supposedly ‘betrays’ the original (1999: 7). But betrayal can also be considered as the constitutive, yet paradoxical, gesture of the work of art. In ‘The Gaze of Orpheus’ (1981) Blanchot explains that Orpheus’ ‘betrayal’ is constitutive of the oeuvre. If Orpheus had not gazed at Eurydice, if he had not betrayed his own purpose of bringing Eurydice back to the light of the living, he would have been unfaithful to his own desire to behold Eurydice, without which there would be no myth. Emphasizing fidelity and the tyranny of desire, Blanchot’s reading of the myth aligns itself with the Barthesian lover and the adaptation process as mentioned earlier, who remains faithful to his desire at the expense of her beloved (the source text), which she ultimately betrays. Charlie is faced with a similar dilemma; he claims he wants to remain ‘true’ to the Orchid Thief (1998) and preserve Orlean’s intended meaning, whereas in fact, he not only projects what he believes is the book’s meaning based on his own interpretation, but also wants to preserve the phantasmatic rela- tionship he created with the text. Accordingly, the film’s narrative questions Charlie’s stated purpose. In one scene, Charlie runs into Valerie at a restaurant where she is having lunch with Susan. She urges him to have a seat so that he can meet her, but he refuses, explaining to the perplexed Valerie that ‘once you meet somebody that you’ve already been writing about it becomes very hard to separate’. On the one hand, his reluctance to meet Orlean could be easily traced back to his pathetic timidity. But on the other, a more compelling interpretation as evidenced in Charlie’s excuse is that he wants to preserve his own ‘phantasmic relation’ to the novel, which is metaphorized visually in the preceding scene wherein he fantasizes having sex with the author. The concept of cinematic fidelity does not account for the individuation of desire; it is precisely because we experience texts from our own affective disposi- tions that our individual reading and viewing experiences do not – and cannot – entirely conflate with one another or with that of someone else. This being said, certain earlier scenes of the movie bear witness to the fact that Charlie has remained faithful to some extent to what he perceives to be the ‘essence’ – or ‘spirit’ to adopt Bazin’s term – of the book. ‘It’s about flowers’, he says on numerous occasions, telling Valerie, the studio-exec, that ‘Orlean makes orchids so fascinating’. In fact, the film devotes considerable screen time to depicting orchids beautifully in series of close-ups, dissolves, and fades, reproducing the ways in which Charlie sees them in reading Orlean’s book (Figure 3). However, rather than being faithful to the spirit of The Orchid Thief (1998), Charlie is being

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6. My use of the term ‘errancy’ is derived from my reading of Maurice Blanchot’s ‘The Gaze of Orpheus’, in which he interconnects desire with error and the French ‘errance’, to wander. Herein, ‘errancy’ is used alternatively to either signify to err or to wander.

Figure 3: Beautiful close-up shots of various orchids illustrate how Charlie visualizes them as he reads Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief (1998), claiming, ‘Orlean makes orchids so fascinating’.

faithful to his own interpretation, his own desire, as these visualizations are an imprint of Charlie’s own projections. In fact, Charlie’s interpretation of The Orchid Thief (1998) as a book ‘about flowers’ is not unanimous. For example, in her review of the book on Salon.com, Sally Eckhoff reads it as a look at ‘orchid nuts’, and Ted Conover in The New York Times Book Review concludes that ‘the book’s true subject is the monomania of collectors’. These differences in interpretation attest to the plurality of the text, wherein each reader and each reading produces different meanings. As it turns out, both The Orchid Thief (1998) and Adaptation are as much about flowers as they are about love and desire, obsession and fascination, and ultimately, deception. Charlie‘s stated goal to remain faithful to what he perceives as the spirit of Orlean’s book conflicts with his own ‘introjected desires, hopes, and utopias’, and his repeated failed attempts to adapt the text are precisely a sign of this conflict. This being said, Charlie’s failures can be traced back to his err in believ- ing that the book has an ‘essence’, i.e. a singular, transcendental meaning or interpretation, whereas in fact, this essence is ab initio the product of his own subjective interpretation as guided by his own desire and affective disposition. Charlie’s perception that The Orchid Thief (1998) is about flowers is merely one amongst many, plural meanings contained in the book. Under the reading situations (whether real or fictitious) presented in Adaptation, it appears impossible to remain faithful to only one meaning or interpretation for it would necessitate curtailing the creative potential of desire, and by implication, to not read. In ‘Introduction to the structural analysis of narratives’, Barthes reminds us that narrative has always played an essential role in our understanding of the world and the transmission of the human experience. Likewise, Raw claims that narrative construction plays a primordial role in adapting to new situations and experiences (2013: 9). Correspondingly, the disjunctive and fragmentary narrative structure of the film is a direct result of Charlie’s experience: his perceived incapacity to faithfully reproduce the book due to his flawed initial approach. In other words, the narrative errancy that characterizes the different semiotic flows of the movie are inherently linked to the errancy of fidelity.6

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In another exemplary scene, Charlie meets with Marty, his agent, to explain why he has not been able to write the screenplay and asks him if he cannot find him a way out of the deal. To illustrate his point, Charlie pulls out a newspaper and reads out loud:

‘There’s not nearly enough of him to fill a book,’ so Orlean ‘digresses in long passages.’ Blah, blah, blah. ‘No narrative unites these passages.’ New York Times Book Review. I can’t structure this. It’s that sprawling New Yorker shit.

Charlie explains, ‘The book has no story. There’s no story’. To this, the agent tells him to ‘make one up’, but Charlie insists on being faithful by declaring that it is someone else’s material; he has a ‘responsibility to Susan’, he tells Marty, wondering why he cannot ‘show people how amazing flowers are’, as Orlean does. For Charlie, the journalistic style of Orlean’s writing, which is an assortment of digressions, stories, personal insights and descriptive passages, lacks the type of narrative structure characteristic of traditional cinema. Consequently, he finds himself at an impasse because what he perceives to be his ‘responsibility’ conflicts with his opinion that the non-narrative structure of the book cannot be adapted visually. Yet, Charlie’s responsibility might be slightly misguided because in aiming for fidelity, he remains at first impervious to other creative possibilities. Charlie finds himself in a paradoxical situation of his own making. On the one hand, he wants to remain faithful to the book’s perceived subject, i.e. ‘it’s about flowers’, and its non-narrative structure by wanting to ‘let the movie exist rather than be artificially plot-driven’ (original emphasis), but on the other, manifested by his frustration in his agent’s office, he is under the impression that a movie requires narrative structure to be adapted and is thus unable to deviate from the type of plot-driven story he wants to avoid at all costs. The ways in which Adaptation cuts between scenes can be interpreted as the way in which Charlie is capable of adapting the loose narrative structure of Orlean’s book. The film wanders among various fragmentary sequences: Charlie’s existential crisis and the dramatization of his struggle to adapt the book, his visual projections of sections from Orlean’s book accompanied by her voice-over narration, and his fantasies about sleeping with different female characters. At a given point, however, the logic of narrative imposes itself. The transition is so obvious though, that it draws attention, divulg- ing the political and economic factors embedded in the cinematic industry’s tendency towards narrativization. Finding his own presence in the script to be both narcissistic and self-indulgent, Charlie travels to New York to meet with Orlean, determined to overcome his self-avowed pathetic timidity. His shyness fails him once more: when she enters the elevator in the New Yorker office building, he is incapable of approaching her (Figure 4). Confronted by yet another failure and inspired by Bob McKee’s reference to twin brothers Julius and Philip Epstein’s Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942) as the ‘finest screenplay ever written’. Charlie calls his twin-brother Donald to help him. As Charlie’s alter-ego, Donald is a stand in for the more traditional plot-driven narratives of mainstream Hollywood (evidenced by his script about a schizophrenic serial killer that employs every cliché in the screenwriter source book); as Tomasulo notes, ‘plot is an ironic and self-conscious construct within the diegesis of both the script and the film’, further explaining that Charlie and Donald are

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Figure 4: Charlie is too shy to meet with Orlean when she enters the elevator of the offices of The New Yorker. But his apparent shyness may also be symbolic of his reluctance to shatter the phantasmagoric space he created around the book and its author while reading it.

‘internal doppelgangers’, the two poles of one psyche embodying the twin sides – the artistic and the commercial – of American independent cinema in the twenty-first century (Tomasulo 2008: 166–67). Donald’s character not only serves as a foil to Charlie to actualize his misdirected passions and vibrancy, but also to represent visually his deep ambivalence about narrative require- ments in modern film-making. Following Donald’s arrival, the narrative and the structure of the film begin to mutate: from the self-reflexive assemblage of non-linear, fragmentary and somewhat schizoid episodes that illustrate Charlie’s physical realities and phantasmagorical projections to the straightforward, Oedipal narrative that blends sex, drugs, and violence – the type of Hollywood formula endorsed by Donald which Charlie was determined to avoid when he first spoke with Valerie at the beginning of the film. This mutation is expressly reinforced in the sequence when LaRoche, the flower-poacher, has a conversation with Orlean on the phone while she is high off the Ghost Orchid pollen he sent her, and he tells her ‘If I waited long enough someone would come and you know… understand me. Like my mom. Except someone else’, and the shot cuts to the two of them making love in his van.

The glass of the window: Towards a cinematics of modernity In his reading of Mallarmé’s ‘Les Fenêtres’, Laurent Jenny suggests that artistic modernity was triggered when the distinction between interior and exterior was no longer significant and the glass of the window, the medium itself, became the subject of art (2002: 79–84). While modernism (and postmodernism) has fostered linguistic and structural experimentation in literature, film has for the most part relied on the narrative modes of the nineteenth century realist novel. Stam calls this ‘a pre-modernist aesthetic’ and, amongst others, he laments that although film is undeniably a modern medium and particularly apt in juggling

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7. Stam indicates that the with multiple spatialities and temporalities, it remains engrained in conventional attempts to adapt the 7 experimental aesthetic structures of narrativity : ‘we find a kind of ideologically driven failure of nerve of modernist novels to deal with the aesthetic implications of novelistic modernism’ (2000: 75). such as Ulysses (Joyce The scene between Charlie and his agent cited earlier not only underlines 1922) and Mrs Dalloway (Woolf 1925) into the propensity towards narrativization in both literature and film, it also hints traditional narratives at issues related to the ways in which alternate formal arrangements are not have been for the most part very disappointing easily translated from one medium to the other. Departing from Giddings et (2005: 15). In a slightly al.’s observation on the narrative emphasis in both classical film and ninteenth different context, Stam century realist fiction (which, coincidentally, is also the privileged source mate- refers to the self- reflexive and aesthetic rial for adaptations), Whelehan compares the ways in which narrative strategies qualities of novels such from one medium are transferred to the other. Citing Brian McFarlane’s Novel as Tom Jones (Jones to Film (1996), Whelehan retraces Barthes’ approach to narratives and suggests, 1749), Lolita (Nabokov 1955), and Madame ‘a narratological approach to the problem [of adaptation] is a recognition that Bovary (Flaubert 1857) the differing conditions within which fiction and film narrative are situated to discuss the area of comparative stylistics, upon the necessity of “violating” the originary text’ (Whelehan 1999: 10). This asking the question, ‘violation’, or ‘betrayal’ as I dubbed it earlier, is also indicative of how change ‘to what extent are is an inherent part of the process of adaptation per se, whether cinematic or the source novel and the film adaptation developmental. This is why the screenwriting process, with its multiple drafts innovative in aesthetic and revisions, is an exemplar of these necessary transformations. terms, and if they are In Jonze’s film, the screenwriter writes himself into the screenplay and innovative, are they innovative in the same turns the camera onto himself; the subject of the film is the genesis of its own way?’ Stam claims creation. Through one of its many twists, the movie also hints at the indeter- that these questions become especially minacy of the medium of film to definitely mark the transition into modernity. crucial with regards to Although The Orchid Thief (1998) can hardly be considered an experimental Madame Bovary under literary work of high modernism, it does borrow some of its tropes, most the consideration that it has been regarded notably, the disjunctive, digressive style that combines ‘stream of conscious- as ‘protocinematic’ ness’ passages such as Orlean’s philosophical musings on orchids and the vari- (2000: 74). Even though ous personal insights scattered throughout. These tropes do not comply with he argues that the concept of ‘cinematic the conventions of narrative structure; Charlie’s challenge is understandable, novel’ has been which in turn explains why he feels he is failing to rise to the test. It is undeni- somewhat abused it is nonetheless applicable able that certain pragmatic, economic, and political choices have established to Flaubert’s novel traditional narratives as the dominant cinematic genre, but as the likes of Ray and his discussion and Stam have argued, because adaptation addresses two mediums simulta- of the various film adaptations of neously, it could promote experimental and alternative forms of film-making. Madame Bovary lead In light of this, even though the cathartic ending might suggest that narrative him to conclude that conventions are unavoidable in mainstream cinema, the montage of Charlie’s ‘mainstreaming’ has unfortunately given various attempts is a transconfiguration of Orlean’s digressive and disjunc- root to a form of tive text. The juxtaposition of his own narrative, fantasies, and self-reflections, ‘aesthetic censorship’ (Stam 2000: 75), ostensibly as that which potentially mimics Orlean’s style, could be read as an especially with regards indication of the ways in which adaptation can act as a springboard to inves- to modernist novels. tigate alternatives to traditional narrativization. As Tomasulo concurs, ‘screenwriter Charlie Kaufman has turned the source volume into an authentic vehicle of self-expression, a new statement. After all, to adapt (in both the cinematic and biological senses of the term) is to change’ (Tomasulo 2008: 175). Conceptually, Adaptation not only criticizes the concept of authorship by illustrating the notion of ‘multiple writing’ (Orlean, Charlie, and his twin brother Donald have all contributed to producing the text) it also deline- ates the new conditions under which alternatives to linear story telling can emerge. It would not be far-fetched to consider Charlie’s brother, Donald, as a fabrication, an alter-ego or ego-ideal who, in many ways, acts and thinks as Charlie wishes he could (he is confident, extroverted, and is shamelessly writing a ‘typical’ Hollywood script about a psychotic killer with a multiple

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Figure 5: Charlie and Donald discuss their respective scripts. The former is quite prompt in denigrating his brother’s use of formulaic clichés, thus interweaving an ongoing meta-commentary on the politics of screenwriting and film production within the film’s diegesis.

personality disorder). The ongoing dialogue between the two brothers, as well as their respective script ideas illustrate many of the issues related to the politics and mechanics of scriptwriting (Figure 5). Donald’s script, titled The 3, about a protagonist who has multiple personalities disorder is of course no coincidence. In fact, Adaptation borrows extensively from that script, especially if we consider the life-narratives of Orlean and Laroche are the product of Charlie’s own projections. By implementing various mise en abymes, Adaptation reproduces the multiple points-of-view of its three main protagonists’ life-narratives: Charlie, Orlean, and Laroche. The screen alter- nates between Charlie’s visualizations of Orlean’s life in New Work as she is writing the book, Orlean’s recollections of her time in Florida with the flower-poacher, and Laroche recounting certain events of his own life, until the narrative comes back full circle to Charlie imagining all of this.

Fragments of a mirror: Hollywood, the screenwriter, and the dialogics of desire While the climactic third-act blend of sex, drugs, and violence might bear witness to the overwhelming cultural logic of narrative structure, it could also be argued that Charlie/Kaufman in fact opted to ‘trump’ The Orchid Thief (1998). As Elliott (2003) explains, ‘trumping’ inverts the common direction of adaptation criticism by considering not what is presumably ‘wrong’ with the adaptation, but rather what could be wrong with the original, thus requiring the adaptation to ‘trump’ it, literally. Implicit within this approach is the idea that the film medium can better represent the signifier: ‘[u]nder the trumping concept of adaptation, the novel’s sign loses representational authority in the name of a signified that the novel “meant to” or “tried to” or “should have” represented’ (Elliott 2003: 174). From this perspective, an adaptation contributes to the critical discourses on cultural production, performing a novel and distinctive approach to reading the original text. By drawing and

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8. McKee is a real world referring to the New York Times Book Review critique of The Orchid Thief (1998), screenplay coach. For an informative Charlie enters a discursive space that mediates his critical disposition towards comparison between the book. And so, the final product, which combines an assemblage of multiple the real McKee and the point-of-views and digressions as well as a more linear and climactic ending, character played by Brian Cox, see ‘McKee can be interpreted as an adaptation that has trumped the original in order and Me’ a conversation to palliate its perceived flaws. Confronted with the eventual conflict between between Henry Bean his ideal for total fidelity and the realities of narrative screenwriting, Charlie and the actor (2003: 21). weaves a web of dialogic intertextuality around the source text that spreads in multiple directions simultaneously. To that purpose, Raw explains insight- fully, ‘through adaptation, we learn to make connections between ourselves and the people around us, analyzing problems and their causes and finding solutions while engaging critically with various texts in different walks of life’ (2013: 1). The end product is an affirmation that adaptation, in both its creative and cognitive guises, is a process that eludes fidelity by requiring differentiation; for the Reader/Lover, ‘betrayal’ is necessary, as it is the product of the ways in which she is subjected to the fluctuations of her own desires to adapt to new circumstances. As a discursive commentary, Adaptation illustrates the type of decisions that guide the screenwriting process, but it also reveals the conditions under which conventions prevail by laying bare the movie-making apparatus and the ideologies that guide cinematic adaptations. In contrast to how a work of prose fiction is created, Boozer observes that ‘the composition of an adapted screenplay takes place not only under the shadow of myriad narrative expectations but in a complex environment of business, industrial, and artistic consid- erations’ (2008: 5). More than incarnating the debate on fidelity, Charlie’s struggle is also indicative of the inherent difficulty in finding an ideological compromise with an intertextual genre that has historically been subservient to the doxa, the narrative form of classic cinema canonized by Hollywood. In the opening scene where Charlie discusses his plan for the adaptation with Valerie, he insists on attempting to undermine the Hollywood genre and write the screenplay in a manner that would render the movie more lifelike. In the subsequent dialogues with Donald, Charlie feels very strongly about a certain work ethic that should guide screenwriters to strive for originality rather than resort systematically to the most pervasive clichés of the ‘industry’. When Donald announces he is going to one of Bob McKee’s screenwriting seminars,8 Charlie claims that people like McKee are ‘dangerous if you try to do something new’, adding, ‘a writer should always have that goal. Writing is a journey into the unknown’. There is undoubtedly some irony in Charlie’s claim; for isn’t his assertion a cliché as well? Are not ‘originality’ and ‘journey’ as much part of the terminology used by the marketers of the industry Charlie so loudly despises? The irony is perhaps part of the point as it highlights Charlie’s mistaken ideal of combining fidelity and originality, and overlooking the idea that every text, and especially a cinematic adaptation, is already an intertext drawing from what Barthes has dubbed a ‘thousand points of culture’, which eludes both of Charlie’s ideals. While Charlie embarks upon his journey to find a suitable and original approach to his adaptation project, he systematically and contemptuously snarls at Donald’s pitch about a character that has a multiple personality disorder, arguing that on the one hand, it is the ‘most overused’ ideas in cop thrillers, and that on the other, such a narrative device is visually unrealizable. As indicated above, Charlie’s response is actually directed towards himself, for Donald’s script, The 3, is an implicit reference to Charlie’s project of writing

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himself in his script and incorporating Orlean’s and Laroche’s narrative perspectives. But additionally, Charlie’s claim that ‘there’s no way to write this’, which is further reinforced by Charlie’s inability to explain this impos- sibility to Marty, also indicates that a screenwriter needs to be aware of the mechanics and economics of movie-making; because of the image/text/sound interface, screenwriters are confronted with a different set of parameters in relation to the medium than novel writers are. The awareness of the material and economic conditions of film-making might very well be what drives most screenwriters to resort to conventions, i.e. what Donald calls McKee’s ‘princi- ples’, rather than to strive for originality. While Charlie’s struggle triggers his idea of writing about it, the narrative of the screenwriting process becomes the meta-narrative that guides the film, or as he puts it, works to ‘tie all of history together’, or, tie all of his stories together. Whether the self-reflexive narrative is as original as Charlie might think it is, or want it to be, is relative, yet it certainly serves the purpose of highlighting certain particular aspects of the movie-making process. If cinematic adaptation ought to be approached through a shifting hermeneutic and a dialogic process of intertextuality as some critics have observed, then Adaptation aptly retraces this ‘journey’, as Charlie calls it, to some extent. This is one way to contest the existing hegemonic conventions of screenwriting and, ostensibly, the some- times tyrannical expectations of the movie-going audiences. Stam explains that artistic reflexivity ‘refers to the process by which texts, whether literary or filmic, foreground their own production, their authorship, their textual procedures, their intertextual influences, or their reception’ (2005: 12). He points out that it is an important ideological consideration in adaptation theory for ‘reflexive texts subvert the assumption that art can be a transparent medium of communication, a window on the world, a mirror promenading down a highway’ (Stam 2005: 12). In one episode, Charlie becomes confident about the originality of his self-reflexive script – which is portrayed visually in an accelerated sequence where Charlie, excited, describes some of the movie’s scenes on his tape recorder and then listens to them while writing on his type- writer – Donald interrupts by announcing that he has finished his script and asks Charlie to show it to his agent. Donald tells him that he changed Charlie’s earlier suggestion of having the ‘Deconstructionist’, the college professor psychotic killer, oblige his victim to eat chunks of their own body parts. Inspired by one of his girlfriend’s tattoo’s depicting a snake that is eating its own tail, Donald explains that since victim and killer are one and the same in his script, the former is really eating himself to death. At that moment, Charlie realizes that he is that character: he is ‘Ourobouros’, the self-consuming snake that inspired Donald and symbolizes self-reflexivity. This realization casts a shadow on Charlie’s confidence. He thinks that including himself in the movie is ‘self-indulgent, narcissistic, solipsistic, and pathetic’, a result of his inability to function in the real world and get over his timidity to meet Orlean. In turn, this could also indicate that his struggle to adapt the book and write the script allegorizes his own inability to communicate with the women he desires. But this shortcoming is also what allows the fantasy, and the movie, to exist, in the very same way he intended it in the opening scene with Valerie. One could interpret the self-reflexive aspect of the movie not only as a gesture that connects with Orlean’s writing style where the reader feels, as Charlie has, the subjective presence of the person behind the words, but also the lack of a divide between interiority and exteriority as everything situates itself on the same plane, in that infinite cycle that Ourobouros symbolizes.

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9. This is the opinion In the popular perception of movie production, the position of the screen- of the real Kaufman (2005). writer is usually overshadowed by the primacy attributed to the director and actors in genre, auteur and star studies. Certain scenes in Adaptiation point to the idea that once the script is delivered the screenwriter’s presence is almost parasitic,9 such as the scene that depicts the shooting of Being John Malkovich (Jonze, 1999): Charlie not only remains unnoticed by the actors (John Cusack, Catherine Keener), he is ultimately asked to leave the set by one of the operatives because he is ‘in the eyeline’ – ‘Nobody knows my name’, Charlie laments. In ‘Self made heroes’ (2003), Harry Bean compares Adaptation to Paris – When It Sizzles (Quine, 1964), arguing that although the main characters are perfect opposites, the two films are similar conceptually; by focusing on the screenwriter and turning him into the main character of the movie, they are both about the process of screenwriting and its difficulties. Yet Bean contends that whereas Paris – When It Sizzles is rather conventional, Adaptation is more daring: ‘It is the revenge of the writer’. From this perspective, Adaptation aims to alter the common perception that privileges the director as laying exclusive artistic claims to the final product. But at another level, the film also proposes that the screenwriter as a reader is as much an auteur or author as the director or writer – in addition to being more obvi- ously the star of the film. In highlighting the multiple writing that informs its own genesis, Adaptation decentralizes the concept of authorship, and invites us to reconsider the medium of film as a work of art that mirrors the political and socio-economic realities of cinematic production.

Cutting into adaptation: Adaptation as ‘The Deconstructionist’ If the ideological purpose of Adaptation is to criticize the practical and economic logic that requires screenwriters to conform to the formulaic clichés of narrative conventions, why does the self-reflexive narrative suddenly turn into what it so self-consciously attempts to undermine? Why does the schizo turn into Oedipus? What possible interpretation can this gesture signify? Amidst the obvious irony in such a radical twist, is not this conventional ending an ultimate cop-out? The reviews of the film are divided on this topic, and while some critics claim that the ending is more ‘calculated’ than speculative, others argue that by offering a cathartic ending that ultimately disappoints, Adaptation clearly lays bare the limitations of the Hollywood formula. For example, Jared Rapfogel argues that:

The disappointing thing about Adaptation, for all its promise and intelligence, is that despite its self-consciousness and inventiveness it seems to share with so many pedestrian films a determination to answer questions rather than simply raise them, to choose some kind of concrete ending rather than a radical openness. (2003)

He compares Adaptation with Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up (1990), arguing that the former lacks the latter’s sense of urgency, which makes it appear ‘calculated’ rather than truly speculative. He concludes pessimistically by claiming that this is ‘a sign of the lack of a truly healthy alternative cinema that someone as creative and apparently adventurous as Charlie Kaufman ultimately plays by the rules; bend them though he may’ (Rapfogel 2003).

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There is undoubtedly some truth in Rapfogel’s critique. But his opinion is certainly not universal. Adding to his interpretation that the aim of Adaptation is to emphasize the importance of the screenwriter in the film-making process, Harry Bean argues that whereas Paris – When It Sizzles implies there are no alternatives to repeating the clichéd and overused Hollywood conventions of movie making, ‘Adaptation knows there are alternatives. It is one’ (Bean 2003: 21). He claims that in the vein of commercial films that ‘adopt unex- pected formal devices’ such as Se7en (Fincher, 1995) and The Usual Suspects (Singer, 1995), Adaptation is more ‘radical’ because it points out that even the Hollywood formula can fail as the cathartic ending itself proves to be disappointing. In the book, Orlean never gets to see the coveted Ghost Orchid and so, when Charlie is asked by McKee what the book is about, he answers, ‘about disappointment’. Interestingly, this later interpretation has shifted from his previous one, but more importantly, depending on how one experiences the film, one is potentially also disappointed, as was Rapfogel. Consequently, Bean adds that ‘[Charlie] can finish his script only by copping to his obsession and making it about himself’, turning his failure into his triumph, which ‘gives us hope’ (2003: 21). As sample reviews, the difference in appraisal between Bean and Rapfogel only reinforces the ways in which the critical reception of a given text is informed by specific ideologies that are themselves influenced by the dialogic nature of critical discourses. This is manifest in these two reviews as they are both prone to eventually evaluate a film through comparison. Stam argues that even though fidelity has been surpassed, judgment has not entirely been dismissed: ‘we can still speak of successful or unsuccessful adaptations, but this time oriented not by inchoate notions of “fidelity” but rather by attention to specific discursive responses, to “readings” and “critiques” and “interpre- tations” and “rewritings” of source novels’ (2005: 5). Yet, I would argue that remaining entrenched in a position that ultimately seeks to judge the film is somewhat shortsighted, especially when we approach it in terms of how well it corresponds to our expectations and political ideals. Although, I concur with Bean’s view, disappointment might very well be part of watching Adaptation, but the disappointment is more related to the restrictive possibilities of the formulaic cathartic ending that the movie parodies, than with the movie itself. By taking a closer look at the meta-discursive dimension of Adaptation, we can approach the film as both a symptom and syndrome of the Hollywood film industry. Within the genre of cinematic adaptations, the push towards creative originality is quickly subverted by the politics and economies of adaptation that rely on narrative conventions, but that at the same time, it is this reliance that ultimately disappoints. By narrativizing and thus prioritizing the struggles of Charlie Kaufman rather than Orlean’s book, Adaptation lays bare the apparatus imbedded in film production as it pertains to screenwriting in the adaptation processes. Simultaneously, the film also produces a meta-commentary on the broader context of film production and screenwriting by incarnating in the figures of Charlie Kaufman and his fictitious brother, Donald, the ideological conflict between art-cinema and Hollywood blockbuster. But as stated above, the film is also a critique of narrative structure and a narrative commentary on the differences between fact and fiction (or lack thereof). Interestingly, the connective tissue that digests the multiple spatial and temporal digressions of the various individual life-stories of its characters is supposedly inspired by the ‘real-life’ struggle to adapt a non-fiction,

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anti-narrative book into a dramatic narrative. Traditionally absent from film adaptation criticism, in Adaptation, the (fictional?) personal narrative of the screenwriter hijacks both interpretation and critique. The oppositional binaries of literature and film, source and copy, author and auteur, fact and fiction, Hollywood blockbuster and art film, linear and disjunctive narrative act as the film’s ‘blind spots’, structures of discourse that are necessary to help the progression of the movie but whose dialectical resolution remains suspended. Amidst the abrupt tonal shifts between the non-linear collage of self- reflexive scenes and the supposedly climactic ending of the third act, and the failure of the deus ex machina to provide catharsis, Charlie’s voice is still heard in the concluding sequence – in voice-over – sounding content with the state of the screenplay and the realities of his existence. But in the very final scene of the movie, Charlie drives away and the camera slowly pans on a bed of flowers in the foreground. The stationary shot brings the flowers in sharp focus as it blurs the background, and time is sped forward through several days’ cycles, the flowers closing and blossoming in accordance to the light of day through time-lapse photography. ‘It’s about flowers’ after all: in that brilliant moment where words and the gaze converge, the camera substi- tutes for the voice and Charlie erases himself as ‘Ourobouros’, the serpent symbolizing self-reflexivity that eats itself to death. The film is, quite literally, ‘The Deconstructionist’, the same character that Charlie names in the movie’s diegesis, for Adaptation incarnates deconstructive theory through writerly praxis. By performing its own self-reflexive critique, the film turns the gaze onto itself and digests itself. In other words, it ‘cuts off little chunks from his victims’ bodies until they die’, as Charlie tells Donald, only to find out that he is both victim and executioner.

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Conover, Ted (1999), ‘Flower power’, The New York Times, 3 January, http://www. nytimes.com/ 1999/01/03/books/flower-power.html. Accessed 21 January 2010. Curtiz, Michael (1942), Casablanca, Los Angeles: Warner Bros. Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix (1983), Anti-Oedipus (trans. Robert Hurley et al.), Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. —— (1987), A Thousand Plateaus (trans. Brian Massumi), Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Eckhoff, Sally (1999), ‘Review of The Orchid Thief’, 15 January, http://www.salon. com/ books/review/1999/01/13/sneaks/index.html. Accessed 21 January 2010. Elliott, Kamilla (2003), Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fincher, David (1995), Se7en, Los Angeles: New Line Cinema. Jenny, Laurent (2002), La Fin de l’intériorité: théorie de l’expression et inven- tion esthétique dans les avant-gardes françaises (1885–1935), Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Jonze, Spike (2002), Adaptation, Los Angeles: Columbia Pictures. —— (1999), Being John Malkovich, Los Angeles: Propaganda Films. Kaufman, Charlie (2005), ‘Why Charlie Kaufman doesn’t watch movies anymore’, Reverse Shot, http://www.reverseshot.com/legacy/spring05/ kaufman.html. Accessed 21 January 2010. Kiarostami, Abbas (1990), Close-up, Tehran: IIDCYA. McFarlane, Brian (1996), Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Naremore, James (2000), ‘Introduction: Film and the reign of adaptiation’, in James Naremore (ed.), Film Adaptation, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 1–16. Orlean, Susan (1998), The Orchid Thief, New York: Random House. Piaget, Jean (1952), The Origins of Intelligence (trans. Margaret Cook), New York: International Universities Press. Quine, Richard (1964), Paris – When it Sizzles, Los Angeles: Charleston Enterprises and Richard Quine Productions. Rapfogel, Jared (2003), ‘Adaptation: How to stop worrying and love to compromise’, Sense of Cinema, 17 January, http://sensesofcinema.com/2003/featu- re-articles/adaptation/. Accessed 21 January 2010. Raw, Laurence (2013), ‘Chapter one: Learning adaptation’, in Lawrence Raw and Anthony Gurr (eds.), Adaptation Studies and Learning: New Frontiers, Plymouth, UK: Scarecrow Press, pp. 1–12. Ray, Robert B (2000), ‘The field of “Literature and Film”’, in James Naremore (ed.), Film Adaptation, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 38–53. Singer, Bryan (1995), The Usual Suspects, Los Angeles. Stam, Robert (2000), ‘Beyond film: The dialogics of adaptation’, in James Naremore (ed.), Film Adaptation, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 54–76. —— (2005), ‘Introduction’, in Robert Stam (ed.), Literature through Film: Realism, Magic, and the Art of Adaptation, Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 1–21. Tomasulo, Frank P. (2008), ‘Adaptation as adaptation’, in Jack Boozer (ed.), Authorship in Film Adaptation, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, pp. 161–78. Whelehan, Imelda (1999), ‘Adaptations: The contemporary dilemmas’, in Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan (eds), Adaptations: From Text to Screen, Screen to Text, London: Routledge, pp. 3–19.

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Suggested citation Messier, V. (2014), ‘Desire and the ‘Deconstructionist’: Adaptation as writerly praxis’, Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance 7: 1, pp. 65–82, doi: 10.1386/jafp.7.1.65_1

Contributor details Vartan Messier is an assistant professor at the City University of New York (CUNY) and specializes in contemporary fiction, popular culture, media and cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and continental philosophy. His work examines interdisciplinary discourses pertaining to the formation of cultural and gender subjectivities through transnational networks of global intercon- nectivity. Engaging with theories of intertextuality and intermediality, his publications have focused on investigating the aesthetics and politics of media interaction and consumption across texts and contexts. E-mail: [email protected]

Vartan Messier has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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