Adaptation

Chapter to chapter, the reader reads a brief story in a book that they find that ends abruptly.

This sort of self-reflexive structure has appeared in a few other books too, like Lost in the Funhouse by John Barth, which often calls attention to its own storytelling and the writing of the book itself.

In part two of Don Quixote by Cervantes, the characters in the story have read part one.

Part one exists as a book in the story itself.

Parentheses inside parentheses.

Douglas Hofstadter goes deep on recursion in his terrific book, Gödel, Escher, Bach, as well as I Am a Strange Loop.

I would highly recommend these books to anyone interested in anything I've said in this video so far.

He also developed Hofstadter's law.

He was nominated twice.

He was nominated for Adaptation, and he won for Leaving Las Vegas.

So

that's two.

My next one is going to be, uh, Spike Jonze again.

We're gonna go to Adaptation.

Ooh, nice.

And I don't know what else to say except that it is Spike Jonze, and, uh-

[laughs]

... it's Adaptation, and this is one of the best films of its given year as well.

Um, and obvi- like, this isn't...

Like, the Malkovich part of it is not nearly as significant as some of these others.

You know what? This game sucks.

Adaptation.

Adaptation.

No. It's a great performance in adaptation.

I'm giving you I'm giving you your rock.

Passionate enough to go deep, detached enough to eventually leave, such a figure shows the possibility of being intensely invested in various ways of knowing, doing, and making, but never content to let a sense of self form too firmly around them.

In a memorable scene from the Spike Jonze film Adaptation, 2002, the journalist Susan Orlean, Samaril Streep, who is writing a book about the orchid thief John LaRoche, Chris Cooper, is at once intrigued by his hunt for a rare hallucinogenic ghost orchid and baffled to learn that it is only the latest in a lifetime of obsessions, turtles, prehistoric fossils, 19th century Dutch mirrors, etc., How can he detach so abruptly from something in which he's invested so much? He can only offer an anecdote.

A profound and consuming love for tropical fish ended suddenly with the realization that the passion had simply run its course.

"'Fuck fish,' he tells her, disrupting her assumption that loving something means sticking with it forever." The difference is that, unlike Kierkegaard's Aesthetes, the dilettante doesn't rotate crops out of despair.

It is absolutely one of the worst I've seen, one of the worst I've heard.

I love him in what a fun Nick Cage movie that is kind of meta, but Adaptation.

I'm so glad I had a buddy recommend the movie

Adaptation.

It is this really, really loopy, insidery movie that is about a book.

Now, the biopic that I do want to see, and I actually had friends of mine talk me into it, the Rocky one.