Spike Jonze’s Adaptation (2002) presents numerous overlapping narratives, which converge in the film’s action-packed finale.  Essentially, the film explores screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s difficulty in adapting Susan Orlean’s novel The Orchid Thief for the big screen, adding fanciful and heightened elements to Kaufman’s real-life writer’s block, including Kaufman’s fictional brother, Donald, as a means of satirising Hollywood’s reductionism of source material to formulaic three-act fare.  While Adaptation is certainly not the first metafilm (a film which draws attention to its own production), it does represent a superlative example, in the way that it cleverly weaves the viewer through multiple levels of fiction and reality.

In the main, Adaptation presents two intertwining stories: Charlie Kaufman’s immense difficulty in adapting The Orchid Thief and the depiction of parts of Orlean’s original novel, including the theft of rare orchids by John LaRoche.

Adaptation contains all of the elements that Levi Manovich regards as being essential components for a story.  Charlie Kaufman fulfils the role of author and narrator, both of the script and in his fictionalised form on screen.  Susan Orlean is another author of – and in – Adaptation, whose source material is depicted in stylised flurries between the main story of Charlie’s writer’s block and who is credited accordingly (despite the fact that little of the original novel features in the film).  A third author in Adaptation is Charlie’s brother, Donald, whose high-octane genre filmmaking tropes takeover the film’s final third, despite Charlie’s disdain for such cliches.

Interestingly, the film’s script is credited to Charlie and Donald (who is Charlie’s alter-ego, although this wouldn’t have been known by many unsuspecting audience members when viewing the film for the first time).  In doing so, the filmmaker’s draw attention to the veracity of the events we have just witnessed unfolding on-screen: have we just seen a genuine dramatised ‘making of’?  Did Charlie and Donald really get hunted down by Orlean and LaRoche after discovering their pursuit of rare orchids had to do with the psychoactive chemicals it contained?  Did Orlean and LaRoche really commence a drug-addled affair?  Without prior knowledge, the audience is letting wondering what is real and what is not.

Another interesting element of the film is the portrayal of story guru Robert McKee and how Kaufman uses McKee’s ‘story commandments’ to parody himself in the film.  Despite Kaufman’s disdain towards what he sees as McKee’s formulaic instructions, Kaufman elicits help from his action-writer brother Donald to help him finish his adaption of Orlean’s work, and indeed Adaptation itself ends with a high stakes final act and the protagonist who is left changed by what he has just experienced (for the better).

Remix is also an important part of Adaptation, largely through this self-parodying, its action-packed final act (the most pedestrian part of the film) as well the script which Donald sells called ‘The 3’, which is a humorous play and satirising of high-concept Hollywood thrillers and specifically, split personality thrillers.