Duplicated and duplicitous self-configurings in Kaufman’s Adaptation (2002)

Abstract

Our first glimpse of the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) in Adaptation (dir. Spike Jonze, 2002) captures our subject unawares. Through the lens of an unseen video camera, Charlie peers nervously from the sidelines on the set of Being John Malkovich (dir. Spike Jonze, 1999), the real Kaufman’s first filmed Hollywood script. His obvious unease at the peripheries of this set sits oddly with his designation as the primary character of the film we are watching, a role established by his anxious voiceover monologue just seconds before. He has been formally identified as ‘Charlie Kaufman, Screenwriter’ across the bottom of the screen and the camera’s interest in him as a subject is evident. But despite these privileging gestures in the narrative set-up, the first assistant director’s sharply dismissive; ‘You. You’re in the eye-line. Can you please get off the stage?’¹ is sufficient to confirm Charlie’s sense of his own interloper status. In the face of such confident demonstrations of on-set authority, Charlie, the production’s writer, is scared from the set. As the scene demonstrates, Cage’s Charlie already has sweat-inducing issues with his function as screenwriter, author and, more acutely yet, as a human being. As a fictional version of the ‘real’ Charlie Kaufman in a semi-fictional cinematic space created by Kaufman,² the character Charlie is constantly overwritten by the real Kaufman’s anxieties about authorship, screenwriting and artistic sincerity. Yet, importantly, Charlie’s search for a meaningful adaptation of another person’s work suggests that in a twenty-first-century world simultaneously fascinated by true feeling and cracked apart by its deteriorating belief in ‘reality’,³ Adaptation’s bold, postmodern wrapping can scarcely conceal an emphatically modernist search for an honest, and singular, truth.