Adaptation: Kaufman and the Myth of Sisyphus

Absurdist films walk a dangerous tightrope. Below them, there is the mile-long chasm of insincerity and reliance on cutting humour that even the deftest writer can fall victim to. Above them, the sun blazes seductively – like Icarus, directors like Paul Thomas Anderson were overambitious and went soaring into it, then falling, falling, until they fell into the same chasm that claimed countless of his counterparts.

It is hard to imagine Kaufman unconscious of this when choosing to write himself into his 2002 Adaptation, a film initially intended as a faithful screenplay of a book about flowers.

“To see the world through a grain of sand and heaven through a wildflower”, as William Blake said, is something Kaufman – both within the film as its protagonist, Charlie, and without – seeks to write in advocacy of beauty in nothing but finds nothing beautiful. Sweat beads off his balding forehead as he pours it like a boiling faucet over scraps of a screenplay that, it is clear, he cannot bring to fruition.

Like Camus’ absurd Sisyphus, Charlie for most of the film is pushing a boulder uphill, only for it to roll back down for him to courier it again to an unreachable destination. Lovelorn loneliness pervades him, and screenplay success evades him likewise. 

And then there’s Donald.

“You and I share the same DNA. Is there anything as lonely as that?”

Despite being his twin, Donald’s Norwood progression and pot belly are the only characteristics he and his brother share. Donald never yields his confidence to the world or himself; he is likeable, friendly and whimsical to Charlie’s jealous frustration. 

If Sisyphus was doomed by Zeus for scorning him, he must have had a twin brother. But, if there were heaven to be seen through a wildflower, Donald would find it. The absurdity of their relation by the same end as their diametrical opposition can only be chanced upon by Kaufman’s own sense of twin-mindedness. 

One is the brilliant but impotent writer; the other, potent and simpleminded in the most brilliant of senses.

Adaptation’s plot of a struggling writer finding heaven in his screenplay is a MacGuffin, a misnomer. What this struggling writer finds is beauty in his brother; he finds heaven in what was nothing more than a blood relative prior. Frustration of inertia gives way to tranquil satisfaction with what the inertia was composed of. 

Charlie finds a story from where he thought there was none, finds heaven within himself, and places that heaven as the centrepiece of his screenplay that walks the absurd tightrope as if Camus was its godfather.

What Kaufman bares to the audience at the end of his run in this metafictional circus are two brothers who share the same flesh, yet their souls lie entirely separately in the mind of their writer. Charlie is Sisyphus at the beginning of the film, and so is Donald, but only one can imagine himself happy. The journey towards both finding it is the journey of Kaufman as he had written them.