"Spike Jonze and the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman concoct an intricate, scrambled parallel universe populated by anxious, itchy people, some appearing really to exist. The hero is Mr. Kaufman himself (Cage), a screenwriter struggling to adapt THE ORCHID THIEF, Susan Orlean's nonfiction meditation on flowers, obsession and Darwinian theory. He is tormented by writer's block and by his twin brother, Donald (also Mr. Cage)… This is a remarkable, impossible movie — about itself but also about its own nonexistence — and one of the most formally audacious, intellectually charged American movies in quite some time." - A.O. Scott, The New York Times"I didn’t expect to be as taken as I was. [Michael] Fried’s books are sometimes obsessively focused on quite esoteric propositions about a specific painting or photograph, but perhaps because of that are often spellbinding. I never thought I’d sit through 45 minutes of silent footage of Zidane running across a soccer field and come away enthralled, or find myself standing in front of a wall for hours thinking about the direction a figure is facing in a seventeenth-century painting or a 21st-century photograph. Fried can get carried away: once you see the absorption-theatricality distinction, it becomes tempting to see it everywhere. But even if it is not everywhere, it is in a lot of places. And once I started rereading Houellebecq, it was there too.
Fried’s basic insight is as follows: If you look at the tradition of high European art painting (he then expands to photography and novels), you will notice that many paintings seek to show figures as if they were not aware of being looked at by an audience. This could come through absorption in work, such as artisanal craftsmanship, or immersion in sociality with others. But in any case, the figures are oriented away from the audience, and pulled into the distinct world of the painting. This “pulling in” is crucial, since it sets up the painting as somehow standing outside and beyond our own wishes, with its own inner solidity. Because it pulls them away from us and into it, the figures and their world become objects that we look at and learn from, not mere projections of our desires.
And yet, they are inescapably there to be looked at by us. This fact means that in one way or another the painting must acknowledge that its scenes were created to be part of a scene, and therefore the figures are never fully independent of some kind of performance for their imagined audience. The independence they gain through being pulled into the inner world of the painting is taken back through being drawn back to their dependence for their existence on the desires of their audience. In Fried’s interpretation, this dependence shows up in subtle indications, such as a playing card turned outward toward the viewer, or one figure who breaks the spell of the absorbing scene to look out of the painting’s scene into the eye of the beholder.
What makes this relationship between theatricality and absorption especially potent is that it is not only descriptive but dynamic. It is an engine that drives artistic creativity, and much of Fried’s criticism is devoted to examining escalating attempts to deal with it. The most important dynamic involves various efforts to defeat the threat of theatricality and mannerism. This can happen in many ways, and no doubt many more will be discovered. One variant involves representations of figures caught up in war and violence: What could be more absorbing than that? There is no time to look away in the midst of battle. This is Fried’s interpretation of Jacques-Louis David, for example. Another variant is depictions of simple peasants, lost in everyday activities such as picking crops, oblivious to anything else but the task at hand. This is Fried’s interpretation of Millet’s The Gleaners.
But that very escalating depiction of violence or simplicity is unstable, in Fried’s reading. They inevitably become cliché and overdone, oscillating between shock for shock’s sake as the demands for the intensity of violence become greater on the one hand, and the brutalization and oversimplification of uneducated lower classes or nonintellectuals becomes too overt to ignore. In this and similar cases, the artist’s independence is the one threatened by theatricality. The peasants or soldiers may be absorbed in their work in the fields or bloody battles, but only an attention-seeking artist would put them in large-format canvases in front of crowds of the bourgeois public as a surefire way to gain their applause.
The dialectic begins anew, and artists begin finding ways to defeat the impression that they are painting in order to be seen painting but are themselves absorbed in the world of the painting as it unfolds, as if on its own, beyond their will. Fried takes this thought very far and in many directions, but his book on Courbet develops it directly. Courbet, in his view, hits on a very potent technique, which involves dispersing his own artistic consciousness throughout the painting, creating an impression that he is everywhere in it, and therefore somehow has merged with each and every aspect of it. In that way, the audience sees the painting and the painter immersed in it all at once.
This too ultimately proves unstable, in ways I will not get into now, eventually leading to the undoing from within of this line of painting in Manet. The last point I do want to emphasize is that while Fried often highlights painterly concerns around how to represent absorbed figures and defeat the impression of mannerism, this concern has roots in a conviction that the desire for some kind of absorption is present in the culture. Here too he has a point. Think of Charlie Kaufman films, such as Adaptation. These are animated by the sense that “we” have lost the ability to have intense, unmediated direct experience, that we are always somehow, even in the most seemingly intimate moments, acting with a view to how it will look to somebody else: how it will play on your feed, in the article you might write, in the story you might tell at a party.
Taken far enough, this thought leads to a kind of lament with language itself and a corresponding desire for prelinguistic immersion in instincts. But we don’t have to go so far to get the point. Just think of moments when you have felt like the line between you and the world disappeared: running down a hill so fast you can’t think but just must react; working on an essay and looking up two hours later as if it were no time at all; laughing with family and friends as each says exactly the right next thing that everybody understands without having to make any inferences; escaping or inflicting violence; and, yes, orgasm. The larger point behind Fried’s project is twofold: that painters try to depict absorption because this is how to absorb audiences who crave that very absorption, but that this very act creates the self-reinforcing oscillation between victories for theatricality and momentary reclamations of absorption." - Dan Silver
Adaptation (USA: Spike Jonze, 2002: 114 mins)
Bean, Henry. "Self Made Heroes: Adaptation puts the self-obsession of the screenwriter centre stage." Sight and Sound (March 2003)
D., Margo and Margo P. "The Orchid Thief vs. Adaptation." Book vs Movie (June 30, 2017) ["The Margos are back and taking on their most interesting episode yet with a compare and contrast of the Susan Orlean novel The Orchid Thief (which began as a New Yorker article) and the hit Charlie Kaufman/Spike Jones movie Adaptation. If there has ever been a reason for this podcast to exist --this material is the one to tackle!So many differences between the book and movie here, we are not quite sure where to begin but let us give it a try."]
Edwards, Gile. "Adaptation (2002)." 366 Weird Movies (January 13, 2016)
Evans, Kim. "Charlie Kauffman, Screenwriter." To the Best of Our Knowledge (November 10, 2013)
Kozak, Oktay Ege, Erik McClanahan and Ryan Oliver. "Lost in Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind & Adaptation." Over/Under Movies (June 20, 2016)
Koski, Genevieve, et al. "Cage Match, Pt. 1 — Adaptation." The Next Picture Show (April 26, 2022) ["We’re offering four Nicolas Cages for the price of two with this week’s pairing, inspired by Cage’s latest, THE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF MASSIVE TALENT, which finds the actor playing two connected versions of himself. But before entering that hall of mirrors, we’re heading back to 2002’s ADAPTATION for a different strain of meta exercise centered on another set of Nicolas Cages, this one playing the film’s screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman, as well as his twin brother/personification of his own self-loathing, Donald. The exact nature of Donald’s character and how it shapes the film’s third act is a big point of discussion this week, as is how literally we are meant to take the film’s title when it comes to its literary source material."]
---. "Cage Match, Pt. 2 — The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent." The Next Picture Show (May 3, 2022) ["The new THE UNBEARABLE WEIGHT OF MASSIVE TALENT contains a lot of the same DNA as ADAPTATION, but instead of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, the film’s meta energy is focused on star Nicolas Cage, once again playing two competing sides of the same tortured talent. This week we get into how the confluence of actor, persona, and screenplay works differently in each film, but first we process UNBEARABLE WEIGHT’s lighthearted excavation of its central talent, and consider whether we may have already moved past the stage of Cage’s career that the film is commenting on."]
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