Wait... who is this a picture of? I thought I was blogging about the movie Adaptation. This doesn't look like anyone who was in that movie, does it? Maybe he was a minor character. No, I don't think that's it. Where have we seen him?
Actually, the answer is quite interesting. He was in the movie. He's the main character. -No, that was Nicolas Cage! Well yes, Nicolas Cage was the actor in the movie. But this is the guy he was portraying. Yeah, that's Charlie Kaufman. In the flesh.
To me, they hardly even look like the same person. Wasn't he self-described as fat and balding? The real Kaufman doesn't look that way, not to me. And we all know that he doesn't really have a twin brother--that was just a creation for the movie.
So my question is: how much of this movie is based on the real life of Charlie Kaufman, and how much is just made up?
There is an interview with Susan Orlean in which she says, "I did have real
concerns that people wouldn't understand what part if
this was real and what wasn't." She seems to suggest that most of it is real, but that at some point in the film, it turns fictitious. (You can watch the entire interview if you would like:)
This film actually reminds me a lot of Memento and the narrative ambiguity in it, except in this movie, it is more like veridical ambiguity. Where Memento leaves open the true events within the story of the movie, Adaptation leaves open where the fact from outside the movie coincides with fiction. What's interesting about this is that in Memento, one may never be able to know if s/he has the truth story figured out, and I believe that is done on purpose. Adaptation, however, since it borrows fact from outside the story, is open to being "figured out." One may be able to decipher fact from fiction.
So I guess we'll all have to go find Charlie Kaufman, befriend him, and figure out the truth! I know that I don't really have an answer. Sorry guys. :P
