Adaptation

Koko: Let me start at the beginning. Three hours ago a bloated and delightfully balding Nicolas Cage sat staring at his typewriter; that was the last part of this movie I understood. Either Spike Jonze has created the literary equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction, obliterating all Hollywood conventions in a single, desperate act of creative self-parody, or he's indulged in a feverish, funny, clever but altogether crappy mess of tiresome self-reflection and aesthetic cannibalism. I really don't know which. If the movie's final thirty minutes do actually exist, I have confirmation of yellow cake. The tentative recursions that open the film so brilliantly and elegantly fold and unfold, loop, buckle, and, yes, adapt, that we can't help but share in the experiment. The sheer goofiness draws us in, and the promise of a plot dependent upon its main character drafting an adequate plot, which happens to be the same plot represented in the movie itself so that the plot about a plot and the search for a plot not only mirror each other--that would be gay, really--but also compete, each stalling, stealing from, and, again, yes, adapting to the other's narrative gain--well, that just rocks. The effect, which is a bit like having helium in your veins or jousting in zero gravity, spins the story around, suspending it, evacuating it, assigning it to the sterile museum where Charlie Kaufman stores all his weirdo ideas, including the movie about Charlie Kaufman writing a movie about himself writing a movie about flowers. (God, to work at the cafeteria there!) Disorienting and breathless, the film hurries on toward its own beginning, circling itself in endless self-destruction and completion--a hallucinating Ouroboros. ("It's called an Ouroboros.") At about an hour and fifteen minutes, when the snake chomps through half its own tail, it gags, spits it up, and lies there, flat and linear, looking like a movie after all.

Enter the final thirty minutes, without which all we have is a pleasant and witty but, you know, modish discourse on irony, chronotope, and other oversampled bits of postmodern cuteness. After the second half, we have Blow-Up 2: Antonioni Bologna. From the moment Charlie Kaufman goes to the seminar in New York, the one that teaches him how to write, nothing works; the experiment evaporates. Only inertia and a vague desire to die carry it through, until the final, hyperexposed image begins to quicken and pulse, proving that all visible life and order abdicated half an hour ago, leaving only a corroded, empty, derivative thing to end the movie. What concludes the movie--what allows it to die--is the very fact that it is a movie. Having sunk into the morass of expectation and delivery, it capitulates, blossoming into everything it spent seventy-five transcendent minutes mocking.

Because the film's surrender to formulaic storytelling coincides precisely with its main character's appeal to workshop guru methodology, I can make a good case for Jonze being a supercynical smartass rather than a hacky hack-hack. In fact, I'll just say so. I think the final thirty minutes perform but do not endorse or even accept the inevitable triumph of convention over creation. The movie begins as organically and strangely as any I can think of and it ends as stupidly as Alf. Locked into a death struggle with its own invention, how could it not? I think it was a masterful touch, his writing the movie into its own mistake. Why not travesty the inevitable? By doing so, he guarantees that the work's last, lonely image remains outside the failure, playing with it, laughing at it, making it ironic. Maybe that's the most ambitious move of all: by making irony ironic, Jonze returns us to a world of consequences, where by algebraic equilibrium the page is empty, your brother is dead, meaning is literal. Dialogic narratives are no longer necessary. Flowers really are beautiful.

"Isn't that fucked up?"

Slothrop: Slothrop has two wonderful flowers named Slothrop and Wystan. Three years now they've offered him fuzziness and encouragement. Soon they will teach him to understand this movie. Though if it's true what Koko says above, that it's about the beauty of flowers, well then sheeeeiit, Slothrop's all up on it.