ABSTRACT
Amongst the many pleasures afforded the screenwriting theorist by Charlie Kaufman’s deliriously reflexive Adaptation (2002), pride of place must surely go to the celebrated scene in which screenwriter anti-hero ‘Charlie Kaufman’, despairing of his prospects of delivering his contracted adaptation of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, attends one of screenwriting guru Robert McKee’s legendary story seminars. McKee – characterized as a preening if hard-working blowhard, a selfconfessed ‘opinionated arrogant asshole’ (vividly impersonated by Brian Cox in Spike Jonze’s film1) – delivers himself of a series of truisms and soundbites on the art of the screenplay; cumulatively these strike the initially sceptical but desperate modernist Kaufman with the force of an Exocet. McKee harnesses writing for the screen unapologetically and inextricably to narrative: (86)2
With Aristotle’s dictum that stories must have a beginning, a middle and an end as his inevitable point of departure, McKee rolls out the familiar dogmas and doctrines of Hollywood screenwriting: drama is conflict, actions not words, character arcs, act breaks. All of this is underpinned by an unstated but unchallenged and unnoticed metaphysics of presence in which the ‘trivial’ and inherently inauthentic written word threatens the compelling force of the gesture or visual symbol (‘God help you if you use voiceover in your work, my friends’, warns McKee (87)) and must be corralled by vivid action. Kaufman (the writer, not the character) adds to his hall of mirrors by permitting McKee an extended credo whose own inclusion in Adaptation defines this as a script that challenges the very precepts McKee here expounds: (88)
Kaufman’s script, and its realization in Jonze’s film, have been extensively examined in critical literature. In fact, with its artful reflexive recursions, its consciously undertaken performative contradictions (most notably, the way in which the absurd action climax epitomizes the commercial principles abjured by the factitious ‘Charlie Kaufman’, but embraced by his – wholly fictitious – brother ‘Donald’), and the high degree of critical capability it assumes and requires from its audience. Adaptation, like both ‘high’ modernist (Joyce’s Ulysses) and playfully post-modern (Martin Amis’s Money) texts, actively solicits critical exegesis as an integral part of producing its meaning(s).3 This in itself places Adaptation at odds with normative approaches to screenwriting – as embodied in Kaufman’s screenplay by McKee – which stress the transparency and the self-explanatory qualities of the ideal commercial screenplay, and accordingly render ‘excessive’ critical interrogation redundant. Indeed, the requirement for such interrogation would by McKee’s standards constitute prima facie evidence of the script’s inability or, worse, cussed refusal to engage its audience on their own (assumed) terms.
