In Charlie Kaufman’s Oscar-winning screenplay for the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, there is a scene that was later deleted from the final cut where a character recites the story of “Velveteen Rabbit”. The story describes a moment when the Skin Horse tells the Rabbit about what it means to be real. According to the Horse, nobody can become truly “Real” until most of their hair becomes “loved off”, their eyes roll out, and their joints loosen. “But these things don’t matter,” informs the Horse, “because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” (Kaufman 26) This seemingly insignificant line actually encapsulates the entire psychology of the characters in Charlie Kaufman’s screenplays. Whether they’re erasing painful memories from their brains in Eternal Sunshine, or literally becoming entirely different people in Being John Malkovich (1999), Kaufman’s characters are always striving to achieve their own personal self-actualization (or in other words, become their “Real” self). Perhaps his most fascinating film was Adaptation, which was directed by Spike Jonze in 2002. Only after seeing the film through the eyes of psychoanalyst Abraham Maslow, can the philosophy of Kaufman, and its effect on his screenplay, be seen in its full glory.
The conception of Adaptation is nearly as complex as the film itself. After writing his first Hollywood script, entitled Being John Malkovich, Charlie Kaufman was hired by Sony Pictures to write a screenplay based on Susan Orlean’s bestselling book The Orchid Thief. Once Kaufman discovered just how difficult this adaptation was going to be, considering that the book was mostly a densely detailed report on orchid hunting without a story, he decided to write a film that was actually about his own difficulty in adapting the book. The film places Kaufman’s real-life struggles, and Orlean’s actual text (as well as her encounters with orchid hunter John Laroche) into an entirely fictional story that includes a twin brother for Charlie named Donald (who, despite the fact that he’s made up, was given co-screenwriting credit for the film). The two storylines (one about the Kaufman twins, the other about Susan and John) intertwine and intersect until they finally collide in an outrageous climax that will be explained later in the paper. What holds these four characters together is each of their personal journeys in which they attempt to self-actualize. By studying each of these characters with Abraham Maslow’s various characteristics of self-actualizers, the fragments of Charlie Kaufman’s own psychology will come together almost like a puzzle.
At the forefront of this film is Charlie Kaufman himself (portrayed by Nicholas Cage), who spends the film struggling with what Maslow would call his “Five Levels of Need Hierarchy”. From the film’s opening monologue, it is apparent that Charlie is deeply unhappy with who he is. He worries constantly about how he looks to others, and repeatedly reprimands himself for being fat, bald, lazy, etc. He fails Maslow’s first self-actualizing characteristic of having an “efficient and accurate perception of reality” because he feels constantly clueless about any meaning in the universe. “There are no rules,” Charlie states at one point, while going on to explain that anyone who says they have ‘all the answers’ is only trying to attract desperate people. As Maslow once observed, parents will either encourage growth or safety for their children, and there is little doubt what Charlie’s parents encouraged since he is given countless opportunities to grow in the film, and instead falls back into his pattern of safety. There are numerous moments where Charlie has the chance to declare his devotion to his girlfriend, or finally be able to meet Orchid Thief author Susan Orlean, and he nearly always ends up avoiding them. He never truly fulfills his “becoming need” to self-actualize because he is usually lacking in one of his four “deficiency needs” (pertaining to safety, love, esteem, and physical well-being) that must be satisfied before he can ever succeed in fulfilling the fifth and final need of Maslow’s hierarchy.
Yet Charlie does possess the important self-actualizing characteristic of resistance to enculturation, which means that he repeatedly refuses to adapt to the rules of society. He sees screenwriting as a “journey into the unknown”, and avoids the use of clichés (such as sex, guns, drugs, car chases, profound life lessons, happy endings, etc.) like the plague. His need for working in solitude is also a positive characteristic, according to Maslow, yet his lack of confidence leads him to being unproductive in his work. After he repeatedly fails to write his Orchid Thief adaptation, he begins to develop what Maslow calls the Jonah Complex, which is the self-defeating feeling that one can’t contribute to society. This leads Charlie to attend a screenwriting seminar taught by real-life script guru Robert McKee (played by Brian Cox), where he discovers that perhaps the only way to succeed in Hollywood is to adapt to the conforming structure of clichés. This opens the film’s last act, which includes sex, guns, drugs, car chases, and all the fake plot machinery Charlie had previously despised. Although he indeed succeeds in adapting to his environment, and even gains the courage to reveal his true feelings to his girlfriend (after learning a “profound life lesson” from Donald), he ultimately fails at finding a way to fulfill his highest potential, or in other words, self-actualize.
Donald Kaufman, however, represents everything that Charlie is not, and one could argue that he is merely a physical representation of Charlie’s less tormented, more socially functional half of his personality. Throughout the film, Donald (also played by Cage) shows far more of Maslow’s self-actualizing characteristics than Charlie does, such as a sense of humor, almost childlike spontaneity, and the ability to take care of problems outside his head (thus, he is problem-centered, as opposed to self-centered). Maslow also underlined the importance of believing that “the end result is more important than the means”, and Donald displays a certain ruthlessness in helping his brother research for the film, even if it means posing as Charlie, spying on people like Susan Orlean, and even stalking them. What Donald ultimately lacks is Maslow’s mandatory characteristic of creativity, since he uses any and every overused cliché he encounters to write his scripts. Yet, unlike Charlie, he actually finishes his film script, which goes on to receive rave reviews from the studio. While Charlie argues that “there are no rules” in life, Donald says that there are “principles” that you can rely on to work. Therefore, Donald’s perception of realty is ultimately more efficient than Charlie’s, in that it allows him to thrive more in the world, if not to his most creative potential.
It may forever remain ambiguous just how close the film’s depiction of Susan Orlean (played by Meryl Streep) is to the real Susan, yet the psychological characteristics of the film character are undeniable. Interspersed between the Charlie/Donald story are flashbacks that illustrate scenes from Orlean’s own book, as the film follows Susan as she finds herself becoming slowly mesmerized by the life of orchid hunter John Laroche. Susan is portrayed as a successful New Yorker journalist who rarely ever experiences the fantastic events she writes so effortlessly about. She can write eloquently about the self-actualization of others without ever truly experiencing it herself. One of the major Maslow characteristics she lacks is the ability to have a freshness of appreciation, or a sense of wonder and awe about life itself. What she repeatedly says she wants more than anything else is “to know what it feels like to care about something passionately”. She admired Laroche’s passionate pursuit of the ghost orchid, because it gave him something to care about that, in effect, “whittled [his] world down to a more manageable size”. This demonstrates that the hunt for a ghost orchid represents Maslow’s idea of a “peak experience”, which instills the person experiencing it with a sense of unity and meaningfulness in life. This mirrors Donald’s use of principles to make the process of screenwriting more manageable. Yet after Susan herself discovers that the orchid is “just a flower”, she comes to believe that life is full of ghost orchids; things that are wonderful to think about, yet are ultimately “fantastic, fleeting, and out of reach”. This, in effect, mirrors Charlie’s similar disappointment when he finds that his idea for an original adaptation is ultimately out of reach.
Finally, there is orchid hunter John Laroche (played in an Oscar-winning performance by Chris Cooper) who emerges as the one person in the film who seems most comfortable in his own skin. As he breaks into nature preserves to retrieve the flowers he obsesses over, he demonstrates most of Maslow’s self-actualizing traits, including the all-important “resolution of dichotomies”. This is to say that John is well aware of life’s imperfection and hardships, and he is determined to find a way to live happily regardless. After suffering sudden deaths in his family, divorce from his wife, and destruction of his business from a hurricane, John’s deficiency need of “safety” was basically obliterated. As Orlean observed, Laroche seemed to “love the difficulty and fatality of stealing orchids almost as much as he loved the orchids themselves.” And while he reserves his peak experiences for orchid hunting, Laroche values the process of adaptation, yet not in quite the same way Donald does. In one scene, he passionately lectures Susan on the importance of bees pollinating flowers, and how life goes on because the insects do exactly what they are designed to do, thus teaching mankind that the only barometer to follow is your heart. “Once you spot your flower,” replies John, “you can’t let anything get in your way.” Therefore, John proves that even society’s nonconformists can value the process of adaptation, thus demonstrating his self-actualizing characteristic of acquiring “ethics and values”, which don’t have to necessarily be of the conventional kind.
What the real Charlie Kaufman does so brilliantly in each of his four characters’ stories is analyze both what is gained and what is lost during the process of adaptation. This isn’t a film about straightforward answers and obvious messages; instead it invites viewers to think about it, discuss it, and develop their own interpretations about its multiple possible meanings. If Abraham Maslow had seen this film, he might have had mixed feelings about its different philosophies. Although Maslow stressed the importance of resistance to enculturation, he also valued characteristics such as acceptance, and the ability to have peak experiences, ethics and values, and an efficient perception of reality. He even encouraged religion, and openly valued a “sense of sacredness”. However, these characteristics sometimes can’t be acquired until one successfully adapts to his/her environment (like in the case of Charlie). Therein lies the bewildering paradox of the film. This paradox is so impenetrable that the characters eventually have to fall back on Laroche’s philosophy that “the only barometer to follow” in life is your heart. The “profound life lesson” Charlie learns from Donald late in the film underlines that same philosophy; “You are what you love, not what loves you.” The question then becomes not “To adapt or not to adapt?”, but “What feels right to you?” At the film’s end, the finished screenplay (clichés and all) certainly “feels right” to Charlie, and the film’s last image shows Charlie ceaselessly “following his flower”, even if it will ultimately leave him feeling as empty as Orlean did after her orchid encounter. In that moment, however, Charlie certainly feels happier now that he has compromised his own instinctual originality with his brother’s structural conformity, as the song “Happy Together” plays prophetically in the background.
That said, the exact philosophy of the real Charlie Kaufman remains an intriguing mystery, yet his philosophical influence on his films is undeniable. If his writing style is any indication, Kaufman unquestionably has the traits of someone Maslow might define as being on a journey to self-actualization. Unlike his onscreen counterpart of the same name, Charlie is able to write a screenplay of great audacity and originality, and get it made into a Hollywood film. He resists any type of cultural conformity, yet still finds a way to coexist within the cultural society. The cliché-ridden ending to Adaptation, which is in actuality a seriocomic parody of Hollywood cinema, proves that he has Maslow’s cherished characteristic of a “philosophical sense of humor that pokes fun at our shared human pretensions.” (Engler 364) More than anything else, Charlie Kaufman has certainly achieved a resolution of dichotomies. He accepts the fact that life is complicated and imperfect, and in a way, he challenges his audiences to do the same. As Maslow may have put it, “Only after you accept your surrounding reality can you finally come to terms with your true self.” This realization may not lead directly to self-actualization, yet it is definitely a step in the right direction. As Kaufman might put it, “In order to become Real in this world, you must adapt.”
References:
Engler, Barbara. Personality Theories: An Introduction; Sixth Edition. Boston,
Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin, 2003.
Kaufman, Charlie & Michel Gondry. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind: The
Shooting Script. New York, New York: Newmarket Press, 2004.
Orlean, Susan. The Orchid Thief. New York, New York: The Ballantine Publishing
Group, 1998.
Adaptation. Dir. Spike Jonze. Perf. Nicholas Cage, Meryl Streep, and Chris Cooper.
Columbia: 2002.
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