The Philosophy of Popular Culture

David LaRocca

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780813139876
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

From the Academy Award-winning Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and Academy Award-nominated Adaptation (2002) to the cult classic Being John Malkovich (1999), screenwriter Charlie Kaufman is widely admired for his innovative, philosophically resonant films. Although he also began directing with Synecdoche, New York in 2008, most fans and critics refer to "Kaufman films" the way they would otherwise discuss works by directors such as Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, or the Coen brothers. In this respect, not only has Kaufman transformed our sense of what can take place in a film, he has also made a significant impact on our understanding of the role of the screenwriter.

The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman, edited by David LaRocca, is the first collection of essays devoted to a rigorous philosophical exploration of Kaufman's work by a team of capable and critical scholars from a wide range of disciplines. From political theorists to philosophers, classicists to theologians, professors of literature to practicing filmmakers, the contributing authors delve into the heart of Kaufman's innovative screenplays and films, offering not only original philosophical analyses but also extended reflections on the nature of film and film criticism. The paperback edition appears with a new preface by the editor.

Part 1

ON BEING AND NOT BEING ONE’S SELF

CHARLIE KAUFMAN, SCREENWRITER

K. L. EVANS

Does the film Adaptation, written by Charlie Kaufman and featuring a protagonist named Charlie Kaufman, chronicle Charlie Kaufman’s actual experience? Is it memoir? Undoubtedly the predicament that so overtaxes the character Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage), his great effort to fashion meditative journalism into a feature film, is analogous to the difficult, unpleasant, and embarrassing situation the real Charlie Kaufman finds himself in. Before it becomes the stuff of his fiction, Kaufman has in fact been hired to adapt for the screen Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, and in his imaginative rendering of this event a writer’s false starts, his confusion about the nature of his project, are truthfully depicted. In evidence, too, is something of Kaufman’s own mortification about his professional position or standing—chagrin deeper than that occasioned by obligation, by his having accepted an advance for work he said he could do.¹ For Kaufman, taking on the orchid script means confronting a problem bigger than the task at hand. If he is going to continue to exist as a Hollywood screenwriter, if he’s going to survive or remain relevant in the economically driven moviemaking “industry,” he must show why imaginative writing (even—or especially—in films, where the temptation to think otherwise is great) doesn’t merely reflect or transcribe Reality—why a writer is someone who keeps his audience in the affecting atmosphere of an event whose reference is not fixed.² Kaufman is charged, or feels charged, with making viewers formally aware of the puzzling character of fiction.

For these reasons we must learn to say that nothing in this film is referential. Even the name “Charlie Kaufman” is used to reveal the difference between works of the imagination and everything that can or has happened in real life. We can’t say that the Charlie Kaufman who, in Adaptation, agrees to turn The Orchid Thief into a screenplay is the Charlie Kaufman who, in his independent life as a screenwriter, agrees to the same, just as we can’t say that the character Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep) is Susan Orlean, staff writer for The New Yorker, or that Robert McKee (Brian Cox) is screenwriting guru Robert McKee.³ The difference is everywhere apparent. The difference is made obvious by the fact that the names are identical; if Kaufman had based his characters on these actual people and given them different names it would be easier to suggest a correspondence between the story and real life. As it is, the film’s audience needs no reporter to inform us, as industry analyst Rob Feld does, that Kaufman is “slight and with a full head of wild hair—nothing like the overweight and balding Nicholas Cage in Adaptation.”⁴ We already know that Nicholas Cage as Charlie Kaufman is not Charlie Kaufman; and by the time this stale news arrives, we have enjoyed from inside the joke about who should “play” whom in a Hollywood production. When, for instance, avant-garde orchid poacher John Laroche (Chris Cooper) charms Orlean by asking, “Who’s gonna play me?” in the movie about his life, then shrewdly suggests: “I think I should play me.”⁵

If it’s not going to remain an academic distinction, the contest, or contrast, between imaginative writing and reflective journalism should have a kind of life in the film itself. It ought to be part of the action—or, more accurately, power the action: Kaufman’s preoccupation with the difference between making (poesis, the feat of giving form and pressure to an imagined reality) and imitating (mimesis, the business of reproducing or representing preexisting reality) must be what gives the film its tense, gripping quality. That is the reason Kaufman has included in the film’s story line the same conditions that affect his life and are beyond his control. In Adaptation, both Orlean and Orlean’s nonfiction account of Florida’s flower-selling subculture, the widely celebrated piece of reporting titled The Orchid Thief, have actual existence. And yet Charlie Kaufman’s adaptation of this material, the commissioned screenplay, must also exist, and on its own terms, which for Charlie means figuring out how to dramatize Orlean’s prose without tapping into the “artificially plot-driven” master-patterns from which most movies are cut.

“I wanted to present it simply,” Charlie tells Robert McKee, after he’s begun to lose faith in his ability. “I wanted to show flowers as God’s miracles. I wanted to show that Orlean never saw the blooming ghost orchid. It was about disappointment.”

“That’s not a movie,” counters McKee. “You gotta go back, put in the drama.”⁶ According to McKee, a story’s drama is ignited when characters’ emotional or intellectual change brings about a big ending. (“Wow them in the end and you’ve got a hit. You can have flaws, problems, but wow them in the end and you’ve got a hit.”) But the spectacle that ends Adaptation can’t be emotionally involving because, in an early scene, Charlie has already itemized these routine methods of animating scripts, and so highlighted their absurdity: “I just don’t want to ruin it by making it a Hollywood thing,” he tells Valerie, the literary agent (Tilda Swinton).⁷ “Like an orchid heist movie or something, or, y’know, changing the orchids into poppies and turning it into a movie about drug running, you know?” Charlie is sweating and twitching but sincere, and his observations are deeply insightful: “It’s like, I don’t want to cram in sex or guns or car chases. You know? Or characters learning profound life lessons. Or growing, or coming to like each other, or overcoming obstacles to succeed in the end.” The essential idea he tries to convey is nearly incomprehensible to Valerie, but not to the film’s viewers, who begin to chafe, like Charlie, at the restrictions limiting a writer’s freedom to think and work spontaneously.

“Why can’t there be a movie simply about flowers?” Charlie repeatedly asks, and the refrain becomes a way to describe the kind of film he wants to make, the kind nobody has ever seen before.

“I wanted to do something simple,” Charlie tells his vulgar agent, Marty (Ron Livingston). “I wanted to show people how amazing flowers are.”⁸

“Are they amazing?” Marty asks skeptically, fairly representing mainstream movie audiences’ aversion to work that departs from traditional forms.

“I don’t know,” Charlie replies. “I think they are.” Then, as the hopelessness of his task presses down upon him: “I need you to get me out of this.”

Creatio Ex Nihilo

“Writing is a journey into the unknown. It’s not . . . building one of your model airplanes!”⁹ Charlie tells his twin brother, Donald, a “writer” who is happy to imitate earlier works, who tries in various ways to convince Charlie that good writing requires learning a set of rules or guidelines, and who, as Charlie’s script orbits ever wider from some ideal Hollywood template, becomes the means of reintroducing commerce with the real world—the world with which Charlie, surrounded by reams of his own writing, appears to have lost touch—the world in which Susan Orlean might really be a lesbian or porn-star junkie, in which people really do die, or fall in and out of love, or say wise things to each other. Forgotten, of course, as Donald coaches his brother in the truth of cliché, is Charlie’s early warning that these kinds of “teachers are dangerous if your goal is to try to do something new. And a writer should always have that goal.”¹⁰

If Charlie is going to turn the orchid book into the kind of singular, inventive script he admires, if he is earnest about his desire to “grow as a writer,” he must discover how it is possible to fulfill his obligation to what he calls “Susan’s material,”¹¹ her compelling, personal observations on real-life events—what in his early stages of writing Charlie calls “that wonderful, sprawling, New Yorker stuff” and later, as he feels himself mired in it, “that sprawling New Yorker shit”—and simultaneously create something that has a life of its own, the imagined world of a feature film. He must bring images to life. Or, rather than imitate life, he must make something out of nothing.

This does not mean that in Adaptation Kaufman has taken for himself the role of God. True, at the film’s close, Charlie puts the last touches on the world he’s made, an orderly world wrought from an original chaos, by narrating his withdrawal from it. And in the darkness of the film’s beginning it is Charlie’s voice that brings about the fact of existence by constructing an account of it—an expression of remorse that, offered as a kind of apology for his existence, also formally justifies it. But as day follows darkness (for this is a Jewish story) and a handheld video camera captures Charlie, standing awkwardly by himself, on the set of Being John Malkovich, the depiction of “Charlie Kaufman, Screenwriter” that the film offers is of a man struggling for the preservation of his status as a man, with all the anxiety about authority that that implies: “What am I doing here?” Charlie wonders in voice-over narration. “Why did I bother to come here today? Nobody even seems to know my name. I’ve been on this planet for forty years, and I’m no closer to understanding a single thing. Why am I here? How did I get here?”¹² Though these unanswerable doubts only intensify Charlie’s loneliness and indecision, they confirm Kaufman’s identification with the fallible human material from which God eventually chooses one man to bless with redemptive purpose.¹³

Whatever gets cooked up in Adaptation will be man-made, but—and here is where it gets interesting—assembled in a way that suggests supernatural, rather than natural, agency. That is the reason why the film feels internally generated, much like great works of literature. In these works of the imagination something is engendered, as celebrated literary critic Geoffrey Hartman writes, “from what is barely seen or grasped . . . [the] air, as in omens, thickens, becomes concrete, theriomorphic, auguring; and to air there corresponds the airy womb of the imagination,”¹⁴ which likewise thickens into a projection, a formation, a protuberance, like the one named Charlie Kaufman, for instance.

If we think of Adaptation as a story of creation (and the extent to which it resembles the book of Genesis encourages this view), it is the kind of story in which man is able to imagine people, things, and events—to bring them into existence—without needing to ground his imagination in a prior reality, and without having his imaginative powers held against him, as evidence, say, of his inability to perceive the world objectively. In the film, the second freedom is secured by the fact that Charlie’s incapacity to perceive the world without predisposition or prejudice is, from the beginning, the means of establishing his existence, and so can’t be understood as a disadvantage or weakness. And the first freedom, founded on the disjunction between imagination and reality (the reason, for instance, that the name “Charlie Kaufman” does not have a direct connection to the incontestably real man who goes by that name), is licensed by an initial establishing shot of original darkness, suggesting that the world before the world established by the space of agency was “tohu and bohu,” without form and void. Nothing exists or happens before this story, that is; nothing authorizes it but the telling.

Genesis

Needless to say, beginning such a story is difficult, because it is hard to begin with this kind of beginning and not try to go further back. Charlie’s numerous false starts, his trouble meeting his deadline, have to do with his realization that in order “to write about a flower, to dramatize a flower,” he has to “show the flower’s arc. And the flower’s arc stretches back to the beginning of life.”¹⁵ Given that “probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth,” as Darwin hypothesized, “have descended from some one primordial form into which life was first breathed,” the orchid’s arc includes the entirety of life. If Charlie wants to understand the flower’s evolution (“How did this fl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part 1. On Being and Not Being One’s Self
• Part 2. Being, or Trying to Be, with Others
• Part 3. Being in the World, Partially
• Filmography
• List of Contributors
• Index