Journal articles on the topic 'Jonze, Spike'

A partir de um diálogo entre as teorias do dispositivo cinematográfico e a psicanálise, propomos pensar as antinomias corpo/voz; visível/invisível; homem/máquina no filme Her (Ela, 2013), de Spike Jonze. Buscaremos investigar a correspondência entre corpo e voz na obra, ao problematizarmos a presença da voz e a ausência do corpo de Samantha no campo filmado. Uma nova dialética entre o visível e o invisível se estabelece em Her, fazendo com que imagem e voz funcionem sob outra economia. Interessa-nos, enfim, considerar a oposição homem/máquina no filme de Jonze, cujas fronteiras se indeterminam e se confundem, uma vez que amar deixa de ser uma capacidade exclusivamente humana.

A discussão do filme <em>Her</em>, de Spike Jonze (2013) constitui uma propedêutica para se pensar o possível advento da inteligência artificial e quais parâmetros lógico-semióticos são, em princípio, necessários para que essa inteligência seja de fato inteligente ou, pelo menos, alcance algo que seja contíguo ou análogo à humanidade.

In Being John Malkovich, Craig Schwartz discovers a portal that allows him to "be" John Malkovich for 15 minutes, thus opening a "metaphysical can of worms." The worms discussed in this articles include identity issues raised by the characters' abilities to change bodies, the film's play on the contrast between person and public persona, and director Spike Jonze's "first person" representation of the experience of entering Malkovich. Jonze and writer Charlie Kaufman also raise questions about the role of gender identity and the differences between humans and animals and animals and puppets.

There is an interesting tendency in the cinema of the 21st century first decade. We see the appearance of films based on the modification of the "film about film" theme which can be tentatively defined as "a film as an unfinished scriptn. The film's subject is the process of its creation. There are five particularly obvious examples: "Adaptation" (Spike Jonze, 2002), "A Movie about the Movies" (V. Rubinchik, 2002), "Reconstruction" (Chrisofler Вое, 2003), "Waiter" (Alex van Warmerdam, 2006) and "Stranger than Fiction" (M. Forster, 2006). The article investigates the peculiarities of these films' composition, the principles of the plot and attempts to understand the sources of this phenomenon in the cinema of the recent years.

O artigo propõe-se a refletir sobre a solidão da era virtual, o aprisionamento hedonista proporcionado pela tecnologia e os conflitos de uma relação afetiva entre um ser humano e uma máquina. Para tanto, o trabalho analisa o filme “Her”, do diretor americano Spike Jonze. O drama, que é uma obra de ficção científica, trata da história de um homem que se apaixona por um sistema operacional, revelando certos conflitos, sobretudo, a partir do impacto das tecnologias nas relações e afetos humanos. A narrativa é conduzida a partir de um diálogo filosófico, para tratar do refúgio virtual, da monologização da vida, do advento da técnica e de uma nova abertura para a existencialidade humana.

This article explores interactions with difference, highlighting what I call the “generosity paradox,” a term that refers to how we suspend disbelief and certainty in favor of a constructed potentiality not limited by preexistent knowledge or categories of authenticity and legitimacy. Touching on overlapping concepts from rhetoric, philosophy, gender studies, disability studies, and queer theory, the discussion explicates fictional encounters with radical alterity in the film Her (Spike Jonze, 2013) to show that attempted respite from frustrating, confusing, and frightening interactions limits our voice, undermines difference, and favors a unifying persuasive intent, which more likely than not involves an attempt to change Others rather than allowing our mutual differences to generatively remain.

This article considers a cinematic subgenre of "longing to connect" narratives that explore the theme of romantic connection in the internet age. The release and success of Her (Spike Jonze) and Noah(Patrick Cederberg and Walter Woodman) contemporaneously in 2013, which both romance disembodiment, suggest a tipping point in the circulation of works that index attitudes about the complex affective structures of digital sociality. Pairing Lauren Berlant's notion of "cruel optimism" with Eva Ilouz's discussion of "emotional capitalism," this essay offers a comparative reading of Her and Noah alongside two earlier works, You've Got Mail and I Love Alaska, to interrogate cinema's potential, and potentially unique capability, to intervene in fantasies of computer-mediated love.

Resumo O artigo, tomando como objeto o filme Ela (Her, Spike Jonze; 2013, EUA), trata da interface homem/máquina e dos desdobramentos concernentes às relações entre o elemento humano e o advento da técnica. O intuito principal é refletir sobre a abordagem conceitual do termo “técnica” e sua interpretação em práticas culturais da contemporaneidade, considerando questões atinentes a afetos e sociabilidades. O direcionamento teórico-analítico orienta-se a partir de conceitos da sociossemiótica e de estudos e reflexões de Martin Heidegger, filósofo alemão que se debruça sobre a problemática da técnica moderna, no momento em que a sociedade assiste à redução das distâncias e aos efeitos de presença daí decorrentes, fenômeno que tende a ser vivenciado de forma ambígua, misturando sensações de receio e de encantamento.

As antecipações para o futuro da cidade de Los Angeles são bastante antitéticas se considerarmos as previsões feitas por Hollywood. Se por um lado o filme ‘Her’ (2013), de Spike Jonze, apresenta uma atmosfera mais promissora e amigável, por outro lado, tanto o filme Blade Runner (1982), quanto o livro de Philip K. Dick, ‘Androides Sonham com Ovelhas Elétricas?’, no qual Ridley Scott se baseou para fazer seu filme, retratam uma cidade mais apocalíptica e caótica. Este artigo propõe-se a fazer, portanto, uma análise destas duas Los Angeles tão distintas, entre o futuro estetizado de ‘Her’ e o caótico de ‘Androides Sonham com Ovelhas Elétricas?’, fazendo assim uma breve comparação das semelhanças e diferenças, e refletindo sobre a função da tecnologia e do design nas obras.

Since data mining uses notions from areas such as cybernetics and artificial intelligence, it is worth evoking here ages-old fears elicited by the idea of automatons created to help humans, but which eventually turned against their creators. Examples might range from the Jewish myth of the Golem to the more famous Frankenstein, Hal from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and the more recent Her, by Spike Jonze (2013). In this discussion we pay special attention to the fact that in the 21st-century it seems to be less a matter of creating an individual cybernetic creature, than of the rise of social networks, which are alluded by many as collective intelligence. Such collective intelligence might involve, for instance, the responsive ability of IBM’s Watson.

O presente trabalho busca reflexões a respeito dos processos e práticas comunicacionais representados nos filmes Denise está Chamando (Denise Calls Up, Hal Salwen, 1995), Medianeras: Buenos Aires na Era do Amor Virtual (Medianeras, Gustavo Taretto, 2011) e Ela (Her, Spike Jonze, 2013). Procura-se analisar à moda de André Lemos, como as modificações nas práticas comunicacionais reconfiguram a arquitetura externa e interna das cidades, afetando o modo como o sujeito olha e é olhado pelo espaço habitado (Didi-Huberman; 2010). Percebe-se que as janelas da arquitetura da cidade-ciborgue (Lemos; 2007) podem privilegiar a clausura do sujeito, em uma estética da distância, segurança e invisibilidade (Bauman; 2009) ou compor um hibrido entre o público e o privado (Canevacci; 2009).

AbstractThis article considers three science fiction films, released in 2013–14, featuring Scarlett Johansson:Her(dir. Spike Jonze),Lucy(dir. Luc Besson), andUnder the Skin(dir. Jonathan Glazer). It suggests that to engage with the phenomenon of voice in imaginative and productive ways it is necessary to slide over a disciplinary divide and address more explicitly the musicality of speech. In my main example,Her, Johansson provides the voice of an operating system with which the film's protagonist falls in love. Central to their intimate connection is the establishment of what I call the ‘haptic voice’, which conveys a sense of physical proximity. A similar blurring of the boundaries between voice and body occur in the presentation of the alien characters Johansson plays in the other films.

O autor discorre a respeito de dois possíveis destinos da identificação projetiva excessiva: aquele cujo desfecho é a perda do self original e o mergulho em um estado regressivo de fantasias psicóticas, e outro que culmina com a elaboração das posições esquizoparanóide e depressiva e a reintegração das partes projetadas do self. O autor ilustra o primeiro destino com o filme Quero ser John Malkovich, dirigido por Spike Jonze, no qual o protagonista Craig encontra um portal que dá acesso à mente do ator. O segundo destino da identificação projetiva excessiva é ilustrado com o romance Se eu fosse você, utilizado por Klein em Sobre a identificação, de 1955, e com a análise que a autora faz do pacto com o diabo que permite que o protagonista, Fabian, invada corpos e mentes de outras pessoas.

O meu artigo propõe um exercício de arqueofonia – ou arqueologia da voz – que incide, nesta oportunidade, sobre a possibilidade de estabelecer a complexa figura e imaginação do ‘avatar’ como comparandum da noção e representação do cyborg. As valências da comparação permitem pensar diferentes objectos, como sejam a ‘voz do avatar’, a ‘voz como avatar’ e, finalmente, o arquivo das representações da voz, ‘avatares da voz’. Em jeito de crítica aplicada, são sucintamente comentados o filme Her, de Spike Jonze; fragmentos do Livro do Desassossego, de Bernardo Soares/Fernando Pessoa; e, por último, a simulação digital da voz de John Donne acessível em linha, corolário do Virtual Paul’s Cross Project: A Digital Re-Creation of John Donne’s Gunpowder Day Sermon, sediado na North Carolina State University. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14195/2182-8830_3-1_1

A partir de la identificación de los elementos de la puesta en escena y la integración de las características de los espacios representados en la película Her (Spike Jonze, 2013), se analizan las funciones que cumplen los paisajes cinematográficos de dicho filme y se explica su espacialidad, o conjunto de significados expresados a través de los espacios en los que se lleva a cabo la acción dramática. Se concluye que la mayoría de los espacios analizados funcionan, en mayor o menor grado, como metáforas de las emociones experimentadas por los personajes que, en ocasiones, no se atreven a expresar. Así mismo, destaca la representación del espacio urbano abierto como una utopía insatisfactoria y, en contraste, la de algunos espacios cerrados y la del espacio virtual que funcionan como heterotopías o contraemplazamientos de otros espacios significativos, reales o ficticios.

O trabalho elabora questionamentos sobre os processos de tradução intersemiótica e adaptação fílmica presentes no longa-metragem Adaptation (2002). Interessa-nos discutir como a problemática da tradução reverbera na escrita da narrativa fílmica, buscando pensar os processos tradutores, nos quais situamos a adaptação, como poética sincrônica, que borra as fronteiras entre regimes estéticos distintos, notadamente entre sistemas de signos verbais e visuais. O filme, dirigido por Spike Jonze e roteirizado por Charlie Kaufman, é uma adaptação do livro-reportagem O Ladrão de Orquídeas (The Book Thief, 1998) da jornalista norte-americana Susan Orlean. O longa acompanha o personagem Charlie Kaufman (homônimo ao roteirista) na tarefa de adaptar o livro para o cinema, trabalho que leva o protagonista a defrontar-se com o problema da intraduzibilidade, evocada no filme pela noção de luto e pela aparição da figura do duplo.

Með þróun gervigreindar undanfarna áratugi hafa dúkkur, vélmenni og forrit færst sífellt nær því að leysa manneskjur af hólmi í persónulegum samskiptum. Ljóst er að ýmiss konar tækni – allt frá stefnumótaforritum til ástarvélmenna – setur nú þegar svip sinn á ástarsambönd í nútímasamfélögum og er jafnvel farin að hafa áhrif á það hvernig við hugsum um ást. Í greininni eru kenningar Sigmunds Freuds um ást skoðaðar í samhengi við gervigreind eins og hún birtist í vísindaskáldskaparmynd Spike Jonze, Hún (Her, 2013). Leitast er við að stofna til eins konar samræðna milli kvikmyndarinnar og hugmynda Freuds, með það að markmiði að varpa ljósi á hvort tveggja. Sjónum er sérstaklega beint að hvatahagkerfinu sem Freud taldi einkenna ástarsambönd og þeim áhrifum sem gervigreint ástarviðfang, sem er ekki sömu takmörkunum háð og manneskjan, kann að hafa á upplifun mannsins sem elskar það.

Este estudo tem como objetivo analisar o impacto da intervenção digital, tendo como corpus imagens de três filmes com construções criativas, de persuasão e sedução, criando ilusões virtuais: SimOne (Andrew Niccol, 2002),The App (Elisa Fukasa, 2019) e Her (Spike Jonze, 2013). O protagonista de The App é induzido a acreditar que está falando com alguém intrigante; o de Her, apesar de aceitar a virtualidade, deve admitir o fim de sua experiência digital. Em SimOne, a invenção da imagem da atriz convence espectadores, mas por tempo limitado. Apresento como relevantes os conceitos de Peter Weibel (2005) de “post-media computer possibilities”, que Lev Manovich (2001) denomina de “post-media aesthetics”, mas sugiro outra possibilidade, ao aplicar o conceito de “estética da hipervenção”, “hiper” embasado na hiper-realidade de Baudrillard e “venção” como invenção/intervenção digital. A metodologia de base adotada para a análise é a dialética de Hans-Georg Gadamer.Palavras-chave:Estética da Hipervenção. Hiper-realidade. Imagens Virtuais. Pós-mídia. Tecnologias Digitais

Out of the abundance of recent science fiction works, there is an inherent connection between the films Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017), Her (Spike Jonze, 2013), and Ex Machina (Alex Garland, 2014). They all have female non-human characters in the lead roles, who have to endure spatial restrictions. All three films star lonely men who find their emotional and romantic needs fulfilled in a relationship with these female AI, which they purchased and had programmed especially for them. This aspect of ownership points to an imbalanced power dynamic from the start of the relationship. I will explore why this has become a trend in late capitalist, dystopian, and science fiction genres, drawing parallels to current discussions about the abhorrent treatment many women endure and pointing to the over-sexualization of women in the media as a distributing factor to such treatment. I will utilize a variety of theories including the works of Laura Mulvey, Judith Butler, and Donna Haraway.

Adaptação (2002), de Spike Jonze, inicia-se com uma sequência curiosa. Estamos num set, numa típica cena de metalinguagem que aos poucos revela facetas mais inusitadas. Além do diretor, dos atores, dos demais técnicos de fotografia e som também surge uma figura um tanto espalhafatosa: Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) é o roteirista – autor e personagem – que que dar alguns palpites nas cenas. Suas sugestões, no entanto, são desastradas e causam mais problemas de filmagem do que soluções técnicas. Com o script nas mãos, Kaufman emerge como um onírico e complicado sujeito imerso no mundo das letras e completamente à parte diante cotidiano pragmático do set. Aos poucos, enquanto os créditos do filme ainda sobem, os técnicos, a produção e o diretor tomam uma decisão. Não há ali, e naquele contexto, espaço para Kaufman. Eles pedem para Kaufman retrirar-se. Fecha-se a porta do estúdio. Findos os créditos, inicia-se o filme.

Pretendemos analisar o filme Her, de Spike Jonze seguindo os fundamentos da psicanálise e alguns apontamentos da linguística da enunciação. Trata-se de uma história futurista, cujo protagonista, Theodore, está imerso em um vazio que ele procura preencher com jogos e relações virtuais, numa tentativa vã de não se haver com a castração, que é estrutural. O título, um pronome oblíquo (her), já indicia a impossibilidade, visto que her não pode ser sujeito nem entrar na troca característica da intersubjetividade. Funda-se, assim, um impossível de ser sujeito que Samantha tenta contornar colocando-se como sujeito universal absoluto. Samantha é uma voz sem corpo. Mas seria da ordem do possível um sujeito sem corpo biológico, como é o caso de Samantha? Consideramos que o corpo, além de seus aspectos simbólico e imaginário, é constituído por matéria, ou seja, sua biologia é determinante. O sistema é um objeto programado para responder à demanda de seu usuário, e falha, porque para o desejo não há objeto, e quando algo é colocado no lugar, a angústia emerge. Quando a voz de Samantha deixa de ressoar no ouvido de Theodore, este se dá conta de que não há Outro do Outro que possa garantir a completude e é nessa falta que o sujeito surge. A estrutura do Outro constitui um vazio - o vazio da falta - que possibilita a Theodore autorizar-se a legitimar a própria voz.

The subject of this paper are such surrealistic films as Conspirators of Pleasure (Czech: Spiklenci slasti, by Jan Švankmajer, 1996) and Being John Malkovich (by Spike Jonze, 1999), in which John Paul II is featured in the form of a montage, and theatre also plays an important role, as either one of the leading topics or else as an artistic convention. The author questions the sense of these references and what can they possibly communicate. In both of the films analysed, the interpolations of John Paul II usually break out of the normal order of things; they are additions to the represented world, elements of another reality, and thus constitute a perfect component of surrealist art, which aims – among other things – to increase confusion by the intentional incongruity of the elements presented. In these montages, John Paul II becomes an icon of seriousness, gravitas and the most important events in the world, but also a sort of “star,” a celebrity, a media person. The clash between this gravitas and the grotesque world of the movie characters often elicits dissonance and confusion, as both movies are concerned with yielding to various, sometimes completely absurd, passions. In Conspirators of Pleasure this means – above all – erotic and sexual desires; in Being John Malkovich – a desire for success and fame (apart from various configurations of sensual lust). Additionally, there is the clearly emphasised dream of being somebody else, as well as dreams of earthly immortality. John Paul II did not share such dreams, believing that the most important things are conforming to God’s will, one’s self-esteem in the light of the evangelical truth about Transcendence and Christ’s love towards men, and the “return to oneself” – playing one’s own role, not somebody else’s. The Pope exemplified with his own life how to go beyond one’s own habits, how to worship God above everything else, how to respond to other people, defeat egoism and resign from comfort, and how to live a real life in a real space, not an illusory one, unlike the characters in the above-mentioned movies.

Pyschology and cinema are fields that benefit each other in order to explain human behavior. Many researchers have been noted that cinema is important tool in order to understand psychological structures. In light of related literature the main aim of the present study is to analyze the Her movie directed by Spike Jonez through Erikson’s intimacy versus isolation stage, Hazan and Shaver’s attachment styles and finally Sternberg’s love types. The sub-question was investigated in addition to the main aim is whether intimacy, attachment and love can be between operating system and human. Document analysis that one of the qualitative research method was used in the present study. An overall evaluation, it can be said thanks to Theodor’s relation with Samantha, Theodor experienced intimacy that Erikson was defined, he attached with secure attachment style that Hazan and Shaver defined to Samantha and finally according to Stenberg’s love types romantic love was experienced between couple. When we look answer of sub-question of the present study Her movie indicates that human can be intimate with operating system, experience attachment and fall in love. ÖzetPsikoloji ve sinema insan davranışlarını açıklamak amacıyla birbirinden yararlanan iki alandır. Sinemanın psikolojik yapıları anlamak açısından önemli bir araç olduğu pek çok araştırmacı tarafından belirtilmiştir. İlgili literatür ışığında bu çalışmanın temel amacı yönetmenliği Spike Jonze’un yaptığı Aşk (Her) filminin Erikson’un yakınlığa karşı yalıtılmışlık evresi, Hazan ve Shaver’in bağlanma stilleri ve son olarak da Sternberg’in aşk türleri temelinde analiz edilmesidir. Bu temel amaca ek olarak incelen bir alt soru da sesten ibaret olan bir işletim sistemiyle bir insanın arasında yakınlık, bağlanma ve aşk olup olamayacağıdır. Çalışmada nitel araştırma yöntemlerinden biri olan döküman incelemesi kullanılmıştır. Genel olarak değerlendirildiğinde Theodor’un Samantha ile ilişkisi sayesinde Erikson’un tanımladığı yakınlığı deneyimlediği, bağlanma stilleri açısından ise Theodor’un Samantha’ya Hazan ve Shaver’ın tanımladığı güvenli bağlanma örüntüsüyle bağlandığı ve son olarak da Sternberg’in aşk türleri açısından ikilinin arasında romantik aşkın yaşandığı söylenebilir. Çalışmanın alt sorusunun yanıtına baktığımızda Aşk filmi insanın işletim sistemiyle yakın olabileceğini, ona bağlanabileceğini ve aşık olabileceğini göstermektedir.

Background: Multiple myeloma is a blood cancer that develops in the bone marrow, which is soft, spongy tissue found in the center of many bones where blood cells are produced. In myeloma, plasma cells, which are normal antibody-producing cells, transform into cancerous myeloma cells. The objectives of this study was the prevalence and complications of multiple myeloma.Methods: A cross sectional study was conducted in a tertiary hospital at Calicut. Semi structured questionnaire was used to study the prevalence and associated complications of multiple myeloma. History taking, physical examinations and investigations like hemoglobin estimation, peripheral smear, electrophoresis, renal function test, calcium estimation, X-ray of thoracic, lumbar spine, humerus, hip region was done. There was also an attempt to find co-morbidities hypertension, diabetes mellitus and neurological abnormalities. The variables was entered into excel and data were expressed in tables. Results: The prevalence of multiple myeloma in Calicut was found to be 77.90% of the bone marrow results were consistent with multiple myeloma. Urine Bence jone protein was positive for 22.9% of cases. Electrophoresis was done and M Band was seen positive for 78.6%. Serum blood urea value was more for 25.7% patients and 22.95% had elevated serum creatinine value. Spine compression was found among 41.4% and osteoporosis was seen in 21.4% patients. Hypertension was seen among 90% cases and Diabetes Mellitus in 4.7% of males.10 % of the patient has valvular heart disease.Conclusion: The study was able to find out the prevalence and project complications of multiple myeloma at Calicut. As there are cases in the district, present medicos who are the future doctors should be trained appropriately to diagnose and treat the disease.

Background:The level of quality of life in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is often overlooked. These patients suffer from an often-precarious quality of life resulting in pain, joint destruction and fatigue.Objectives:The main objective of this study was to compare the level of quality of life in patients with RA receiving treatment with disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDs): monotherapy (biological only) versus combination therapy with methotrexate.Methods:We performed a descriptive study of 56 patients with RA meeting the criteria of the ACR 2010. The SPSS.20 software was used for statistical analyses.Results:These were 56 patients: 93% women and 7% men, mean age 46.74 years with an average duration of the disease of 14.74 years. 28 patients were on rituximab, 19 patients on tocilizumab and 9 patients on TNFi. The mean HAQ was 1.11. 52.38% of patients were on biological alone as monotherapy. The Compliance Questionnaire Rheumatology score (CQR19) was 55.15 / 100, the RAID (Rheumatoid Arthritis Impact of Disease) score was 3.08 / 10, the SF36 of 56.01 / 100, the AIMS score of 2.10 / 10 for social activity, 2.44 / 10 for pain, 3.32 / 10 for depression and 4.06 for physical activity.The comparison between the 2 groups (Combination therapy vs monotherapy) did not find any significant difference in terms of quality of life parameters: An SF-36 score> 55 was found in 56% in patients on combination therapy vs. 44% on monotherapy, the RAID score was 3.02 vs. 3.12, AIMS social activity 2.08 vs 2.13, AIMS pain 2.33 vs 2.59, AIMS activity physics of 4 vs 4.11.Conclusion:Our study did not demonstrate any superiority of the combination with methotrexate in improving quality of life. The use of biotherapy in patients with RA has been shown to be an important pharmacological strategy for the overall management of the disease.References:[1]Lavielle.M and Dougados.M. Targeted therapies in rheumatoid arthritis: Combination with conventional synthetic disease modifying antirheumatic drugs or monotherapy? Jone Bone Spine 2018; 85:3-9.Disclosure of Interests:None declared

Background:The persistence with methotrexate (MTX) at 1 year or 5 years in rheumatoid arthritis (RA) is very variable and intolerance remains the main cause of discontinuation of treatment. Changes in treatment with the strategy of adding “add-on” to a targeted therapy when the conventional DMARD becomes insufficient to optimally control the disease may decrease the maintenance MTX therapy rates, particularly for biologics with a Marketing Authorization as monotherapy.Objectives:The main objective of this study was to determine the rate of maintenance at 1 year of the combination therapy with different biologics, to compare the evaluation scores in patients receiving treatment as monotherapy (biological only) versus combination therapy with methotrexate and to analyze predictive factors for MTX maintenance therapy.Methods:We performed a descriptive study of 56 patients with RA meeting the criteria of the ACR 2010. Statistical analysis SPSS.20 Software.Results:These were 56 patients: 93% women and 7% men, mean age 46.74 years with an average duration of the disease of 14.74 years. 71.42% of patients were under corticosteroids taken for a period of 13 years with an average dose of 5.04 mg / day. BMI was highin 23.80% of patients, 30.95% had at least one associated comorbidity. The RF was positive in 61.90% and ACPA positive in 78.57% of cases. 47.62% were under MTX taken for 6.55 years with a dose of 13.03 mg / week on average: 68.75% by oral intake and 31.25% by subcutaneous intake with an average duration of setting before the switch of 8 years. 28 patients were on rituximab, 19 patients on tocilizumab and 9 patients on TNFi. 88.09% did not havenot received from bDMARD before. The mean ESR was 36.57 mm H1 and CRP was 8.56 mg / L. DAS28 at baseline was 6.81 and the current DAS 28 was 2.95 and the HAQ was 1.11. The rate of MTX maintenance therapy at 1 year was 36.84%, with rituximab, 64.28% with tocilizumab and 88% with TNFi. The comparison between the combination therapy with MTX and monotherapy groups showed a significant difference for the number of tender joints NTJ (3.5 vs 2.61), however, no significant difference concerning DAS28 value (2.98 vs 3.06), number of swollen joints NSJ (0.29 vs 0.22) and HAQ (1.09 vs 1.15). Regarding predictive factors of MTX maintenance therapy: Significant correlation was found with a high DAS 28 at baseline, however no correlation concerning the positivity of ACPA, duration of the disease, NTJ, NSJ, ESR, HAQ and the high dose of MTX. Reduction in persistence has found a significant correlation with non-naive RA of ≥ 1 bDMARD, disease activity score, type of biotherapy (antiTNF / rituximab vs Tocilizumab), young age, however no influence was found with a high BMI, HAQ, the presence of comorbidities or the withdrawal of corticosteroids. The increase in the persistence of combination therapy was associated with male gender and RF seropositivity only.Conclusion:Drug persistence is an important aspect of treatment effectiveness. For rheumatologists, knowledge of the factors that predict whether to maintain the combination therapy with methotrexate, increase or reduce the persistence is of great interest when choosing a new treatment to initiate in patients with RA.References:[1]Lavielle.M and Dougados.M. Targeted therapies in rheumatoid arthritis: Combination with conventional synthetic disease modifying antirheumatic drugs or monotherapy? Jone Bone Spine 2018;85:3-9.Disclosure of Interests:None declared

O presente artigo tem por objetivo analisar o filme Her, dirigido e roteirizado pelo realizador estadunidense Spike Jonze em 2013, com vistas a explorar as relações entre sociedade e tecnologia propostas pela obra cinematográfica. Neste sentido, destacam-se no filme a problemática da solidão do indivíduo e os conflitos relativos à alteridade potencializados e mediados pela relação do homem com a tecnologia, temas caros à sociedade contemporânea.

Aproveitando-se da atmosfera de encanto própria do romantismo e do cinema, pretende-se aproximar as ideias de amor romântico e espectatorialidade através da análise do filme Ela (Her, Spike Jonze, EUA, 2013), em que um homem e seu sistema operacional se apaixonam. O filme se destaca pelas opções distintas na representação do amor e da intimidade: a mulher, sem corpo nem face, é construída apenas pelo sua voz. Os entrelaçamentos passam também por uma discussão sobre a tecnologia, tanto na história, quanto no nosso envolvimento enquanto espectadores de cinema.

O presente artigo objetiva analisar o filme Quero ser John Malkovich (Being John Malkovich, 1999), dirigido por Spike Jonze e escrito por Charlie Kaufman, focando nas questões sobre a identidade, o duplo (Doppelgänger) e a multiplicidade de personalidades e como o jogo identitário distorce o entendimento do eu nos personagens Craig Schwartz, interpretado por John Cusack, e John Malkovich, interpretando a si mesmo, os quais se entrecruzam por meio de um portal que leva à mente do último, portal este que não só é usado por Schwartz, mas por vários outros, inclusive pelo próprio Malkovich, esfacelando a ilusória ordem do “eu uno” ou a dualidade do “eu e o outro” e mergulhando num abismo legionário de Malkoviches.

O foco do ensaio recai sobre a relação entre corpo e sociedade, levando em conta os processos sociais contemporâneos de subjetivação mediados pelo universo virtual. Para desenvolver nosso raciocínio, tomaremos como ponto de partida algumas passagens do filme de ficção-científica Ela (no original Her), lançado em 2013, pelo diretor Spike Jonze, o qual evidencia a relação entre humano e máquina. Discorreremos acerca das representações de corpo, amor, comunicação e subjetividade presentes na estrutura social da narrativa, tecendo uma reflexão acerca do substrato material das relações. No curso do texto, questionamos: os processos da vida social podem ser pensados sem a referência do corpo? A partir da análise do ciberespaço, de onde emergem instigantes fenômenos sociais, o artigo busca repensar modelos sociológicos que ainda se apresentam como obstáculos epistemológicos para a disciplina.

AbstractMy aim in this paper is to sketch a picture of how we currently visualize human vs. artificial intelligence. I am going to analyze images depicting the transcendence of the human in recent movies, which I take to be significant for the contemporary conditio humana. I will examine how movies like Her (USA 2013, Spike Jonze) or Transcendence (USA 2014, Wally Pfister) invent and use images of human and artificial life. I will then analyze the images themselves, how they are connected and what underlying ontological assumptions can be found. My main focus will be on the concept of the body and figures of disembodied intelligence. I will argue that disembodied intelligence has become a central topos in contemporary cinema. I will show how these ideas relate to the presentation of technology as a highly complex and dynamic net-structure, comparable to the characteristics of the human brain.

The elements of cinematographic language can be used in many ways to portray a story. It appears that, over the years, many conventions have been established in different areas of cinematographic making. In this article, we aim to highlight the conventions of the science fiction genre, with a focus on the art direction of movies that portray the future. For this, films such as Ex_Machina (Alex Garland, 2014), Equals (Drake Doremus, 2015) and Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017) are analyzed. Also noteworthy, is the feature film Her (Spike Jonze, 2013) as a work that goes against the others, which presents an approach to the future that stands out among so many other movies with scenarios and costumes similar to each other. As a basis for the research, the study of conventions by sociologist Howard Becker is used, in addition to the work by theorists David Bordwell, Rick Altman, Stephen Neale, Marcel Martin, Vincent Lobrutto, among others. Directors and their artistic departments use colors, shapes, materials, textures, and elements that have become conventions in science fiction films and few are those who dare to produce something aesthetically different.

To use the overworked metaphor of the movie reviewers, Adaptation (2002)—directed by Spike Jonze and written by Charlie Kaufman—is that rare Hollywood flower, a “literary” film that succeeds both with the critics and at the box office. But Kaufman’s literary colleagues, his fellow screenwriters whose opinions are rarely noticed by movie reviewers or the public, express their support in more interesting terms. Robert McKee, the real-life screenwriter and teacher played by Brian Cox in the movie, writes about Kaufman as one of the few to “step out of screenwriting anonymity to gain national recognition as an artist—without becoming a director” (131). And the screenwriter Stephen Schiff (Lolita [Adrian Lyne, 1997], The Deep End of the Ocean [Ulu Grosbard, 1999]) embraces the film as a manifesto, claiming that Kaufman’s work offers “redemption” to him and his fellow screenwriters who are “struggling to adapt to the world’s dismissive view of adaptation.” The comments by Kaufman’s colleagues suggest that new respect for the work of adaptation, and the role of the screenwriter go hand in hand. The director—whom auteur theory, the New Wave, and film schools helped to establish as the primary creative agent behind a film—has long overshadowed the screenwriter, but Kaufman’s acclaim as a screenwriter reflects a new sensibility. This was illustrated by the controversy among Academy Award voters in 2002. They found that year’s nominees, including Adaptation, unsettled the Academy’s traditional distinction between “original screenplay” and “adapted screenplay”, debating whether a nominee for best original screenplay, such as My Big Fat Greek Wedding (Joel Zwik, 2002), was more like an adaptation, while Adaptation, a nominee for best adapted screenplay, was more like an original screenplay. The Academy’s confusion on this score is not without precedents; nonetheless, as Rick Lyman of The New York Times reports, it led some to wonder, “in an age of narrative deconstruction and ‘reality television’,” whether the distinction between original and adaptation was still valid. If, as the famed critic Alexandre Astruc claimed, the director should be seen as someone who uses the camera as a pen to “write” the movie, then the screenwriter, in Ben Stoltzfus’s words, is increasingly seen as someone who uses the pen to “shoot” the movie. While this appreciation of the screenwriter as an “adaptor” who directs the movie opens new possibilities within Hollywood filmmaking, it also occurs in a Hollywood where TV shows, video games, and rides at Disneyland are adapted to film as readily as literary works once were. Granted, some stand to gain, but who or what is lost in this new hyper-adaptive environment? While there is much to be said for Kaufman’s movie, I suggest its optimistic account of adaptation—both as an existential principle and cinematic practice—is one-sided. Part of the dramatic impact of the movie’s one word title is the way it shoves the act of adaptation out from the wings and places it front and center in the filmmaking process. An amusing depiction of the screenwriter’s marginalisation occurs at the movie’s beginning, immediately following Charlie’s (Nicholas Cage) opening monologue delivered against a black screen. It is presented as a flashback to the making of Being John Malkovich (Spike Jonze, 1999), the movie for which Kaufman wrote his first screenplay, making him “a name” in Hollywood. Although scripted, the scene is shot with a hand-held video camera and looks as though it is occurring in real time. The central character is John Malkovich in costume as a woman who shouts orders at everyone on the set—deftly illustrating how the star’s power in the new Hollywood enables him or her to become “the director” of the movie. His directions are then followed by ones from the first assistant director and the cinematographer. Meanwhile, Charlie stands silently and awkwardly off to the side, until he is chased away by the first assistant director—not even the director or the cinematographer—who tells him, “You. You’re in the eyeline. Can you please get off the stage?” (Kaufman and Kaufman, 3). There are other references that make the movie’s one-word title evocative. It forces one to think about the biological and literary senses of the word—evolution as a narrative process and narrative as an evolutionary process—lifting the word’s more colloquial meaning of “getting along” to the level of an existential principle. Or, as Laroche (Chris Cooper) explains to Orlean (Meryl Streep), “Adaptation’s a profound process. It means you figure out how to thrive in the world” (Kaufman and Kaufman, 35). But Laroche’s definition of adaptation, which the movie endorses and dramatises, is only half the story. In fact evolutionary science shows that nature’s “losers” vastly outnumber nature’s “winners.” As Peter Bowler expresses it in his historical account of the theory of natural selection, “Evolution becomes a process of trial and error based on massive wastage and the death of vast numbers of unfit creatures”(6). Turning the “profound process” of adaptation into a story about the tiny fraction who “figure out how to thrive in the world” has been done before. It manifested itself in Herbert Spencer’s late-nineteenth-century philosophical “adaptation” of Charles Darwin’s work on natural selection, coining the phrase, “survival of the fittest.” Both the scientist Darwin and the philosopher Spencer, as Bowler points out, would have been horrified at how their work was used to justify the rapacious capitalism and harsh social policies of American industry (301). Nonetheless, although by now largely discredited in the academy, the ideology of social Darwinism persists within the broader culture in various watered-down or subterranean forms. Perhaps in the movie’s violent climax when Laroche is killed by an alligator—a creature that represents one of the more impressive examples of adaptation in the natural world—Kaufman is suggesting the darker side to the story of natural selection in which adaptation is not only a story about the mutable and agile orchid that “figure[s] out how to thrive in the world.” There are no guarantees for the tiny fraction of species that do survive, whether they are as perfectly adapted to their environment as orchids and alligators or, for that matter, individuals like Laroche with his uncanny ability to adapt to whatever life throws at him. But after the movie’s violent eruption, which does away not only with Laroche but also Donald (Nicholas Cage) and in effect Orlean, Charlie emerges as the sole survivor, reassuring the viewer that the story of adaptation is about nature’s winners. The darker side to the story of natural selection is subsumed within the movie’s layers of meta-commentary, which make the violence at the movie’s end an ironic device within Charlie’s personal and artistic evolution—a way for him to maintain a critical distance on the Hollywood conventions he has resisted while simultaneously incorporating them into his art. A cinematically effective montage dramatically represents the process of evolution. However, as with the movie’s one-sided account of adaptation, as a story about those who “figure out how to thrive in the world,” this depiction of evolution is framed, both figuratively and literally, by Charlie’s personal growth—as though the logical and inevitable endpoint of the evolutionary process is the human individual. The montage is instigated by Charlie’s questions to himself, “Why am I here? How did I get here?” and concludes with a close-up on the bawling face of a newborn baby, whom the viewer assumes is Charlie (Kaufman and Kaufman, 3). This assumption is reinforced by the next scene, which begins with a close-up on the face of the adult Charlie who is sweating profusely as he struggles to survive a business luncheon with the attractive studio executive Valerie (Tilda Swinton). Although Orlean’s novel doesn’t provide a feminist reading of Darwin, she does alert her readers to the fact that he was a Victorian man and, as such, his science might reflect the prejudices of his day. In discussing Darwin’s particular fondness for his “‘beloved Orchids’” (47), she recounts his experiments to determine how they release their pollen: “He experimented by poking them with needles, camel-hair brushes, bristles, pencils, and his fingers. He discovered that parts were so sensitive that they released pollen upon the slightest touch, but that ‘moderate degrees of violence’ on the less sensitive parts had no effect ….” (48). In contrast to this humorous view of Darwin as the historically situated man of science, the movie depicts Darwin (Bob Yerkes) as the stereotypical Man of Science. Kaufman does incorporate some of Orlean’s discussion of Darwin’s study of orchids, but the portion he uses advances the screenplay’s sexualisation/romanticisation of Orlean’s relationship with Laroche. At an orchid show, Laroche lectures to Orlean about Darwin’s theory that a particular orchid, Angraecum sesquipedale, is pollinated by a moth with a twelve-inch proboscis. When Orlean takes exception to Laroche for telling her that proboscis means “nose,” he chides her, “Hey, let’s not get off the subject. This isn’t a pissing contest” (23). After this scene bristling with phallic imagery—and with his female pupil sufficiently chastised—Laroche proceeds to wax poetic about pollination as a “little dance” (24) between flower and insect. “[The] only barometer you have is your heart …” (24) he tells Orlean, who is clearly impressed by the depth of his soliloquy. On the literary and social level, a one-sided reading of adaptation as a positive process may be more justified, although here too one may question what the movie slights or ignores. What about the human ability to adapt to murderous and dehumanising social systems: slavery, fascism, colonialism, and so on? Or, more immediately, even if one acknowledges the writer’s “maturity,” as T.S. Eliot famously phrased it, in “stealing” from his or her source, what about the element of compromise implicit in the concept of adaptation? Several critics question whether the film’s ending, despite the movie’s self-referential ironies, ultimately reinforces the Hollywood formulas it sets out to critique. But only Stuart Klawans of The Nation connects it to the movie’s optimistic, one-sided view of adaptation. “Still,” he concludes, “I’m disappointed by that crashing final act. I wonder about the environmental pressure that must bear down on today’s filmmakers as they struggle to adapt, even when they’re as prodigious as Charlie Kaufman.” Oddly, for a self-reflexive movie about the creative process, it has little to say about the “environmental pressure” of the studio system and its toll on the artist. There are incisive character sketches of studio types, such as the attractive and painfully earnest executive, Valerie, who hires Charlie to write the screenplay for Orlean’s book, or Charlie’s sophomoric agent, Marty (Ron Livingston), who daydreams about anal sex with the women in his office while talking to his client. And, of course, a central plot line of the movie is the competition, at least as one of them sees it, between Charlie and his twin brother Donald. Charlie, the self-conscious Hollywood screenwriter who is stymied by his success and notions of artistic integrity, suffers defeat after humiliating defeat as Donald, the screenwriting neophyte who will stoop to any cliché or cheap device to advance his screenplay, receives a six-figure contract for his first effort: a formulaic and absurd serial-killer movie, The Three, that their mother admires as a cross between Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991). Because of the emotional arc of the brothers’ personal relationship, however, any qualms about Donald selling out look churlish at best. When Donald excitedly tells his brother about his good fortune, Charlie responds approvingly, rather than with one of the snide putdowns the viewer has grown to expect from him, signaling not only Charlie’s acceptance of his brother but the new awareness that will enable him to overcome his writer’s block. While there is a good deal of satire directed at the filmmaking process—as distinct from the studio system—it is ultimately a cherishing sort of satire. It certainly doesn’t reach the level of indictment found in Robert Altman’s The Player (1992) or Joel and Ethan Cohen’s Barton Fink (1991) for example. But the movie most frequently compared to Adaptation is Frederico Fellini’s masterpiece of auteurist self-reflexivity, 8 ½ (1963). This is high praise indeed, although the enthusiastic endorsements of some film critics do not stop there. Writing for the Observer, Philip French cites such New Wave movies as Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mepris (1963), Francois Truffaut’s La Nuit Americaine (1973), and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Trans-Europ-Express (1966). However, in passing, he qualifies the comparison by pointing out that, unlike the French auteurs, “Kaufman and Jonze are concerned with turning someone else’s idea into a piece of commercial cinema.” Some would argue the filmmakers’ ability to playfully adapt Orlean’s artistry to the commercial environment of Hollywood is what saves Adaptation’s meta-commentary from the didactic and elitist seriousness of many of its literary and cinematic precursors (Miller). This is a valid preference, but it slights the “environmental pressure” of the new studio system and how it sets the terms for success and failure. While Fellini and the New Wave auteurs were not entirely free of commercial cinema, they could claim an opposition to it that Kaufman, even if he wanted to, cannot. Film scholar Timothy Corrigan argues that the convergence of the new media, in particular television and film, radically alters the meaning and function of “independent” cinema: a more flexible and varied distribution network has responded to contemporary audiences, who now have the need and the power to pick and choose among the glut of images in contemporary television and film culture. Within this climate and under these conditions, the different, the more peculiar, the controversial enter the marketplace not as an opposition but as a revision and invasion of an audience market defined as too large and diverse by the dominant blockbusters. (25-6) Corrigan’s argument explains the qualitative differences between the sense of adaptation employed by the older auteurs and the new sense of adaptation required by contemporary auteurs fully incorporated within the new studio system and its new distribution technologies. Not everyone is disturbed by this state of affairs. A. O. Scott, writing for the New York Times, notes a similar “two-tier system” in Hollywood—with studios producing lavish “critic- and audience-proof franchise pictures” on the one hand and “art” or “independent” movies on the other—which strikes him as “a pretty good arrangement.” Based on what Adaptation does and does not say about the studio system, one imagines that Kaufman would, ultimately, concur. In contrast, however, a comment by Michel Gondry, the director Kaufman worked with on Human Nature (2001), gives a better indication of the costs incurred by adapting to the current system when he expresses his frustration with the delayed release of the picture by New Line Cinema: ‘First they were, like, “O.K. if Rush Hour 2 [Brett Ratner, 2001] does good business, then we’re in a good position,”’ Mr. Gondry said. ‘You fight to do something original and then you depend on Rush Hour 2 for the success of your movie? It’s like you are the last little thing on the bottom of the scale and you’re looking up watching the planets colliding. It’s been so frustrating.’ (Rochlin) No doubt, when Fellini and Godard thought about doing “something original” they also had considerable obstacles to face. But at least the success of 8 ½ or Le Mepris wasn’t dependent upon the success of films like Rush Hour 2. Given this sort of environmental pressure, as Klawans and Corrigan remind us, we need to keep in mind what might be lost as the present system’s winners adapt to what is generally understood as “a pretty good arrangement.” Another indication of the environmental pressure on artists in Hollywood’s present arrangement comes from Adaptation’s own story of adaptation—not the one told by Kaufman or his movie, but the one found in Susan Orlean’s account of how she and her novel were “adapted” by the filmmakers. Although Orlean is an enthusiastic supporter of the movie, when she first read the screenplay, she thought, “the whole thing ‘seemed completely nuts’” and wondered whether she wanted “that much visibility” (Boxer). She decided to give her consent on the condition they not use her name. This solution, however, wouldn’t work because she didn’t want her book “in a movie with someone else’s name on it” (Boxer). Forced to choose between an uncomfortable visibility and the loss of authorship, she chose the former. Of course, her predicament is not Kaufman’s fault; nonetheless, it is important to stress that the process of adaptation did not enforce a similar “choice” upon him. Her situation, like that of Gondry, indicates that successful adaptation to any system is a story of losing as well as winning. References Astruc, Alexandre. “The Birth of a New Avant-Garde: Le Camera-Stylo.” Film and Literature: An Introduction and Reader. Ed. Timothy Corrigan. Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1999, 158-62. Bowler, Peter J. Evolution: The History of an Idea. 3rd ed. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2003. Boxer, Sarah. “New Yorker Writer Turns Gun-Toting Floozy? That’s Showbiz.” The New York Times 9 Dec. 2002, sec. E. Corrigan, Timothy. A Cinema without Walls. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 1991. Eliot, T.S. “Philip Massinger.” The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism. 1922. http://www.bartleby.com/> French, Philip. “The Towering Twins.” The Observer 2 Mar. 2003. Guardian Unlimited. 12 Feb. 2007. http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review>. Kaufman, Charlie and Donald Kaufman. Adaptation: The Shooting Script. New York: Newmarket Press, 2002. Klawans, Stuart. “Adeptations.” The Nation 23 Dec. 2002. 12 Febr. 2007. http://www.thenation.com/doc/20021223/klawans>. Lyman, Rick. “A Jumble of Categories for Screenwriter Awards.” The New York Times 21 Feb. 2003. McKee, Robert. “Critical Commentary.” Adaptation: The Shooting Script. New York: Newmarket Press, 2002. 131-5. Miller, Laura. “This Is the Way We Live Now.” The New York Times Magazine 17 Nov. 2002. Orlean, Susan. The Orchid Thief. New York: Ballantine Books, 1998. Rochlin, Margy. “From an Untamed Mind Springs an Ape Man.” The New York Times 7 Apr. 2002. Schiff, Stephen. “All Right, You Try: Adaptation Isn’t Easy.” The New York Times 1 Dec. 2002. Scott, A. O. “As Requested My Thoughts on the Oscars.” The New York Times 9 Feb. 2003. Stoltzfus, Ben. “Shooting with the Pen.” Writing in a Film Age. Ed. Keith Cohen. Niwot, CO: UP of Colorado, 1991. 246-63. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Rizzo, Sergio. "Adaptation and the Art of Survival." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/02-rizzo.php>. APA Style Rizzo, S. (May 2007) "Adaptation and the Art of Survival," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/02-rizzo.php>.

As Earth heats up and water vapourises, “Adapt” is a word that is frequently invoked right now, in a world seething with change and challenge. Its Oxford English Dictionary definitions—“to fit, to make suitable; to alter so as to fit for a new use”—give little hint of the strangely divergent moral values associated with its use. There is, of course, the word’s unavoidable Darwinian connotations which, in spite of creationist controversy, communicate a cluster of positive values linked with progress. By contrast, the literary use of adapt is frequently linked with negative moral values. Even in our current “hyper-adaptive environment” (Rizzo)—in which a novel can become a theme park ride can become a film can become a computer game can become a novelisation—an adaptation is seen as a debasement of an original, inauthentic, inferior, parasitic (Hutcheon, 2-3). A starting point from which to explore the word’s “positive”—that is, evolutionary—use is the recently released Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change, which argues the necessity of adapting in order to survive. Indeed, an entire section is titled “Policy responses for adaptation,” outlining—among other things—“an economic framework for adaptation”; “barriers and constraints to adaptation”; and “how developing countries can adapt to climate change” (403). Although evolution is not directly mentioned, it is evoked through the review’s analysis of a dire situation which compels humans to change in response to their changing environment. Yet the mere existence of the review, and its enumeration of problems and solutions, suggests that human adaptive abilities are up to the task, drawing on positive traits such as resilience, flexibility, agility, innovation, creativity, progressiveness, appropriateness, and so on. These values, and their connection to the evolutionary use of “adapt”, infuse 21st-century life. “Adapt,” “evolution”, and that cluster of values are entwined so closely that recalling effort is required to remind oneself that “adapt” existed before evolutionary theory. And whether or not one accepts the premise of evolution—or even understands it beyond the level of reductive popular science—it provides an irresistible metaphor that underlies areas as diverse as education, business, organisational culture, politics, and law. For example, Judith Robinson’s article “Education as the Foundation of the New Economy” quotes Canada’s former deputy prime minister John Manley: “The future holds nothing but change. … Charles Darwin said, ‘It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the most responsive to change.’” Robinson adds: “Education is how we equip our people with the ability to adapt to change.” Further examples show “adapt” as a positive metaphor for government. A study into towns in rural Queensland discovered that while some towns “have reinvented themselves and are thriving,” others “that are not innovative or adaptable” are in decline (Plowman, Ashkanasy, Gardner and Letts, 8). The Queensland Government’s Smart State Strategy also refers to the desirability of adapting: “The pace of change in the world is now so rapid—and sometimes so unpredictable—that our best prospects for maintaining our lead lie in our agility, flexibility and adaptability.” The Australian Government Department of Education, Science and Training, in setting national research priorities, identifies “An Environmentally Sustainable Australia” and in that context specifically mentions the need to adapt: “there needs to be an increased understanding of the contributions of human behaviour to environmental and climate change, and on [sic] appropriate adaptive responses and strategies.” In the corporate world, the Darwinian allusion is explicit in book titles such as Geoffrey Moore’s 2005 Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of their Evolution: “Moore’s theme is innovation, which he sees as being necessary to the survival of business as a plant or animal adapting to changes in habitat” (Johnson). Within organisations, the metaphor is also useful, for instance in D. Keith Denton’s article, “What Darwin Can Teach Us about Success:” “In order to understand how to create and manage adaptability, we need to look first at how nature uses it. … Species that fail to adapt have only one option left.” That option is extinction, which is the fate of “over 99% of all species that have ever existed.” However, any understanding of “adapt” as wholly positive and forward-moving is too simplistic. It ignores, for example, aspects of adaptation that are dangerous to people (such as the way the avian influenza virus or simian AIDS can adapt so that humans can become their hosts). Bacteria rapidly adapt to antibiotics; insects rapidly adapt to pesticides. Furthermore, an organism that is exquisitely adapted to a specific niche becomes vulnerable with even a small disturbance in its environment. The high attrition rate of species is breathtakingly “wasteful” and points to the limitations of the evolutionary metaphor. Although corporations and education have embraced the image, it is unthinkable that any corporation or educational system would countenance either evolution’s tiny adaptive adjustments over a long period of time, or the high “failure” rate. Furthermore, evolution can only be considered “progress” if there is an ultimate goal towards which evolution is progressing: the anthropocentric viewpoint that holds that “the logical and inevitable endpoint of the evolutionary process is the human individual,” as Rizzo puts it. This suggests that the “positive” values connected with this notion of “adapt” are a form of self-congratulation among those who consider themselves the “survivors”. A hierarchy of evolution-thought places “agile,” “flexible” “adaptors” at the top, while at the bottom of the hierarchy are “stagnant,” “atrophied” “non-adaptors”. The “positive” values then form the basis for exclusionary prejudices directed at those human and non-human beings seen as being “lower” on the evolutionary scale. Here we have arrived at Social Darwinism, the Great-Chain-of-Being perspective, Manifest Destiny—all of which still justify many kinds of unjust treatment of humans, animals, and ecosystems. Literary or artistic meanings of “adapt”—although similarly based on hierarchical thinking (Shiloh)—are, as mentioned earlier, frequently laden with negative moral values. Directly contrasting with the evolutionary adaptation we have just discussed, value in literary adaptation is attached to “being first” rather than to the success of successors. Invidious dichotomies that actually reverse the moral polarity of Darwinian adaptation come into play: “authentic” versus “fake”, “original” versus “copy”, “strong” versus “weak”, “superior” versus “inferior”. But, as the authors collected in this issue demonstrate, the assignment of a moral value to evolutionary “adapt”, and another to literary “adapt”, is too simplistic. The film Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002)—discussed in three articles in this issue—deals with both these uses of the word, and provides the impetus to these authors’ explorations of possible connections and contrasts between them. Evidence of the pervasiveness of the concept is seen in the work of other writers, who explore the same issues in a range of cultural phenomena, such as graffiti, music sampling, a range of activities in and around the film industry, and several forms of identity formation. A common theme is the utter inadequacy of a single moral value being assigned to “adapt”. For example, McMerrin quotes Ghandi in her paper: “Adaptability is not imitation. It means power of resistance and assimilation.” Shiloh argues: “If all texts quote or embed fragments of earlier texts, the notion of an authoritative literary source, which the cinematic version should faithfully reproduce, is no longer valid.” Furnica, citing Rudolf Arnheim, points out that an adaptation “increases our understanding of the adapted work.” All of which suggests that the application of “adapt” to circumstances of culture and nature suggests an “infinite onion” both of adaptations and of the “core samples of difference” that are the inevitable corollary of this issue’s theme. To drill down into the products of culture, to peel back the “facts” of nature, is only ever to encounter additional and increasingly minute variations of the activity of “adapt”. One never hits the bottom of difference and adaptation. Still, why would you want to, when the stakes of “adapt” might be little different from the stakes of life itself? At least, this is the insight that the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze—in all its rhizomatic variations—seems constantly to be leading us towards: “Life” (capitalised) is a continual germination that feeds on a thousand tiny adaptations of open-ended desire and of a ceaselessly productive mode of difference. Besides everything else that they do, all of the articles in this issue participate—in one way or another—in this notion of “adapt” as a constant impetus towards new configurations of culture and of nature. They are the proof (if such proof were to be requested or required) that the “infinite onion” of adaptation and difference, while certainly a mise en abyme, is much more a positive “placing into infinity” than a negative “placing into the abyss.” Adaptation is nothing to be feared; stasis alone spells death. What this suggests, furthermore, is that a contemporary ethics of difference and alterity might not go far wrong if it were to adopt “adapt” as its signature experience. To be ever more sensitive to the subtle nuances, to the evanescences on the cusp of nothingness … of adaptation … is perhaps to place oneself at the leading edge of cultural activity, where the boundaries of self and other have, arguably, never been more fraught. Again, all of the contributors to this issue dive—“Alice-like”—down their own particular rabbit holes, in order to bring back to the surface something previously unthought or unrecognised. However, two recent trends in the sciences and humanities—or rather at the complex intersection of these disciplines—might serve as useful, generalised frameworks for the work on “adapt” that this issue pursues. The first of these is the upwelling of interest (contra Darwinism) in the theories of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829). For Lamarck, adaptation takes a deviation from the Darwinian view of Natural Selection. Lamarckism holds, in distinction from Darwin, that the characteristics acquired by individuals in the course of their (culturally produced) lifetimes can be transmitted down the generations. If your bandy-legged great-grandfather learnt to bend it like Beckham, for example, then Manchester United would do well to sign you up in the cradle. Lamarck’s ideas are an encouragement to gather up, for cultural purposes, ever more refined understandings of “adapt”. What this pro-Lamarckian movement also implies is a new “crossing-over point” of the natural/biological with the cultural/acquired. The second trend to be highlighted here, however, does more than merely imply such a refreshed configuration of nature and culture. Elizabeth Grosz’s recent work directly calls the bluff of the traditional Darwinian (not to mention Freudian) understanding of “biology as destiny”. In outline form, we propose that she does this by running together notions of biological difference (the male/female split) with the “ungrounded” difference of Deleuzean thinking and its derivatives. Adaptation thus shakes free, on Grosz’s reading, from the (Darwinian and Freudian) vestiges of biological determinism and becomes, rather, a productive mode of (cultural) difference. Grosz makes the further move of transporting such a “shaken and stirred” version of biological difference into the domains of artistic “excess”, on the basis that “excessive” display (as in the courting rituals of the male peacock) is fundamentally crucial to those Darwinian axioms centred on the survival of the species. By a long route, therefore, we are returned, through Grosz, to the interest in art and adaptation that has, for better or for worse, tended to dominate studies of “adapt”, and which this issue also touches upon. But Grosz returns us to art very differently, which points the way, perhaps, to as yet barely recognised new directions in the field of adaptation studies. We ask, then, where to from here? Responding to this question, we—the editors of this issue—are keen to build upon the groundswell of interest in 21st-century adaptation studies with an international conference, entitled “Adaptation & Application”, to be held on the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia in early 2009. The “Application” part of this title reflects, among other things, the fact that our conference will be, perhaps uniquely, itself an example of “adapt”, to the extent that it will have two parallel but also interlocking strands: adaptation; application. Forward-thinking architects Arakawa and Gins have expressed an interest in being part of this event. (We also observe, in passing, that “application”, or “apply”, may be an excellent theme for a future issue of M/C Journal…) Those interested in knowing more about the “Adaptation and Application” conference may contact either of us on the email addresses given in our biographical notes. There are several groups and individuals that deserve public acknowledgement here. Of course, we thank the authors of these fourteen articles for their stimulating and reflective contributions to the various debates around “adapt”. We would also like to acknowledge the hugely supportive efforts of our hard-pressed referees. Equally, our gratitude goes out to those respondents to our call for papers whose submissions could not be fitted into this already overflowing issue. What they sent us kept the standard high, and many of the articles rejected for publication on this occasion will, we feel sure, soon find a wider audience in another venue (the excellent advice provided by our referees has an influence, in this way, beyond the life of this issue). We also wish to offer a very special note of thanks to Linda Hutcheon, who took time out from her exceptionally busy schedule to contribute the feature article for this issue. Her recent monograph A Theory of Adaptation is essential reading for all serious scholars of “adapt”, as is her contribution here. We are honoured to have Professor Hutcheon’s input into our project. Special thanks are also due to Gold-Coast based visual artist Judy Anderson for her “adaptation of adaptation” into a visual motif for our cover image. This inspiring piece is entitled “Between Two” (2005; digital image on cotton paper). Accessing experiences perhaps not accessible through words alone, Anderson’s image nevertheless “speaks adaptation”, as her Artist’s Statement suggests: The surface for me is a sensual encounter; an event, shifting form. As an eroticised site, it evokes memories of touch. … Body, object, place are woven together with memory; forgetting and remembering. The tactility and materiality of touching the surface is offered back to the viewer. These images are transitions themselves. As places of slippage and adaptation, they embody intervals on many levels; between the material and the immaterial, the familiar and the strange. Their source remains obscure so that they might represent spaces in-between—overlooked places that open up unexpectedly. If we have learned just one thing from the experience of editing the M/C Journal ‘adapt’ issue, it is that our theme richly rewards the sort of intellectual and creative activity demonstrated by our contributors. Much has been done here; much remains to be done. Some of this work will take place, no doubt, at the “Adaptation and Application” conference, and we hope to see many of you on the Gold Coast in 2009. But for now, it’s over to you, to engage with what you might encounter here, and to work new “adaptations” upon it. References Australian Government Department of Education, Science and Training. Environmentally Sustainable Australia. 2005. 28 Apr. 2007 http://www.dest.gov.au/sectors/research_sector/policies_issues_reviews /key_issues/national_research_priorities/priority_goals /environmentally_sustainable_australia.htm>. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaux. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Denton, D Keith. “What Darwin Can Teach Us about Success.” Development and Learning in Organizations 20.1 (2006): 7ff. Furnica, Ioana. “Subverting the ‘Good, Old Tune’: Carlos Saura’s Carmen Adaptation.” M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). 28 Apr. 2007 . Grosz, Elizabeth. In the Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004. Grosz, Elizabeth. “Sensation”. Plenary III Session. 9th Annual Comparative Literature Conference. Gilles Deleuze: Texts and Images: An International Conference. University of South Carolina, Columbia. 7 April 2007. Grosz, Elizabeth. Time Travels: Feminism, Nature, Power. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. Johnson, Cecil. “Darwinian Notions of Corporate Innovation,” Boston Globe, 15 Jan. 2006: L.2. McMerrin, Michelle. “Agency in Adaptation.” M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). 28 Apr. 2007 http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/03 mcmerrin.php mcmerrin.php>. Neimanis, Astrida. “A Feminist Deleuzian Politics? It’s About Time.” TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies 16 (2006): 154-8. Plowman, Ian, Neal M. Ashkanasy, John Gardner, and Malcolm Letts. Innovation in Rural Queensland: Why Some Towns Thrive while Others Languish: Main Report. University of Queensland/Department of Primary Industries. Queensland, Dec. 2003. 28 Apr. 2007 http://www2.dpi.qld.gov.au/business/14778.html>. Queensland Government. Smart State Strategy 2005-2015 Timeframe. 2007. 28 Apr. 2007 http://www.smartstate.qld.gov.au/strategy/strategy05_15/timeframes.shtm>. Rizzo, Sergio. “Adaptation and the Art of Survival.” M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). 28 Apr. 2007 http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/02-rizzo.php>. Shiloh, Ilana. “Adaptation, Intertextuality, and the Endless Deferral of Meaning: Memento.” M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). 28 Apr. 2007 http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/08-shiloh.php>. Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change. 2006. 28 Apr. 2007 http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/stern_review_ economics_climate_change/stern_review_report.cfm>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Delamoir, Jeannette, and Patrick West. "Editorial." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/00-editorial.php>. APA Style Delamoir, J., and P. West. (May 2007) "Editorial," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/00-editorial.php>.

Biology teaches us that organisms adapt—or don’t; sociology claims that people adapt—or don’t. We know that ideas can adapt; sometimes even institutions can adapt. Or not. Various papers in this issue attest in exciting ways to precisely such adaptations and maladaptations. (See, for example, the articles in this issue by Lelia Green, Leesa Bonniface, and Tami McMahon, by Lexey A. Bartlett, and by Debra Ferreday.) Adaptation is a part of nature and culture, but it’s the latter alone that interests me here. (However, see the article by Hutcheon and Bortolotti for a discussion of nature and culture together.) It’s no news to anyone that not only adaptations, but all art is bred of other art, though sometimes artists seem to get carried away. My favourite example of excess of association or attribution can be found in the acknowledgements page to a verse drama called Beatrice Chancy by the self-defined “maximalist” (not minimalist) poet, novelist, librettist, and critic, George Elliot Clarke. His selected list of the incarnations of the story of Beatrice Cenci, a sixteenth-century Italian noblewoman put to death for the murder of her father, includes dramas, romances, chronicles, screenplays, parodies, sculptures, photographs, and operas: dramas by Vincenzo Pieracci (1816), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819), Juliusz Slowacki (1843), Waldter Landor (1851), Antonin Artaud (1935) and Alberto Moravia (1958); the romances by Francesco Guerrazi (1854), Henri Pierangeli (1933), Philip Lindsay (1940), Frederic Prokosch (1955) and Susanne Kircher (1976); the chronicles by Stendhal (1839), Mary Shelley (1839), Alexandre Dumas, père (1939-40), Robert Browning (1864), Charles Swinburne (1883), Corrado Ricci (1923), Sir Lionel Cust (1929), Kurt Pfister (1946) and Irene Mitchell (1991); the film/screenplay by Bertrand Tavernier and Colo O’Hagan (1988); the parody by Kathy Acker (1993); the sculpture by Harriet Hosmer (1857); the photograph by Julia Ward Cameron (1866); and the operas by Guido Pannain (1942), Berthold Goldschmidt (1951, 1995) and Havergal Brian (1962). (Beatrice Chancy, 152) He concludes the list with: “These creators have dallied with Beatrice Cenci, but I have committed indiscretions” (152). An “intertextual feast”, by Clarke’s own admission, this rewriting of Beatrice’s story—especially Percy Bysshe Shelley’s own verse play, The Cenci—illustrates brilliantly what Northrop Frye offered as the first principle of the production of literature: “literature can only derive its form from itself” (15). But in the last several decades, what has come to be called intertextuality theory has shifted thinking away from looking at this phenomenon from the point of view of authorial influences on the writing of literature (and works like Harold Bloom’s famous study of the Anxiety of Influence) and toward considering our readerly associations with literature, the connections we (not the author) make—as we read. We, the readers, have become “empowered”, as we say, and we’ve become the object of academic study in our own right. Among the many associations we inevitably make, as readers, is with adaptations of the literature we read, be it of Jane Austin novels or Beowulf. Some of us may have seen the 2006 rock opera of Beowulf done by the Irish Repertory Theatre; others await the new Neil Gaiman animated film. Some may have played the Beowulf videogame. I personally plan to miss the upcoming updated version that makes Beowulf into the son of an African explorer. But I did see Sturla Gunnarsson’s Beowulf and Grendel film, and yearned to see the comic opera at the Lincoln Centre Festival in 2006 called Grendel, the Transcendence of the Great Big Bad. I am not really interested in whether these adaptations—all in the last year or so—signify Hollywood’s need for a new “monster of the week” or are just the sign of a desire to cash in on the success of The Lord of the Rings. For all I know they might well act as an ethical reminder of the human in the alien in a time of global strife (see McGee, A4). What interests me is the impact these multiple adaptations can have on the reader of literature as well as on the production of literature. Literature, like painting, is usually thought of as what Nelson Goodman (114) calls a one-stage art form: what we read (like what we see on a canvas) is what is put there by the originating artist. Several major consequences follow from this view. First, the implication is that the work is thus an original and new creation by that artist. However, even the most original of novelists—like Salman Rushdie—are the first to tell you that stories get told and retold over and over. Indeed his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, takes this as a major theme. Works like the Thousand and One Nights are crucial references in all of his work. As he writes in Haroun and the Sea of Stories: “no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born of old” (86). But illusion of originality is only one of the implications of seeing literature as a one-stage art form. Another is the assumption that what the writer put on paper is what we read. But entire doctoral programs in literary production and book history have been set up to study how this is not the case, in fact. Editors influence, even change, what authors want to write. Designers control how we literally see the work of literature. Beatrice Chancy’s bookend maps of historical Acadia literally frame how we read the historical story of the title’s mixed-race offspring of an African slave and a white slave owner in colonial Nova Scotia in 1801. Media interest or fashion or academic ideological focus may provoke a publisher to foreground in the physical presentation different elements of a text like this—its stress on race, or gender, or sexuality. The fact that its author won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for poetry might mean that the fact that this is a verse play is emphasised. If the book goes into a second edition, will a new preface get added, changing the framework for the reader once again? As Katherine Larson has convincingly shown, the paratextual elements that surround a work of literature like this one become a major site of meaning generation. What if literature were not a one-stage an art form at all? What if it were, rather, what Goodman calls “two-stage” (114)? What if we accept that other artists, other creators, are needed to bring it to life—editors, publishers, and indeed readers? In a very real and literal sense, from our (audience) point of view, there may be no such thing as a one-stage art work. Just as the experience of literature is made possible for readers by the writer, in conjunction with a team of professional and creative people, so, arguably all art needs its audience to be art; the un-interpreted, un-experienced art work is not worth calling art. Goodman resists this move to considering literature a two-stage art, not at all sure that readings are end products the way that performance works are (114). Plays, films, television shows, or operas would be his prime examples of two-stage arts. In each of these, a text (a playtext, a screenplay, a score, a libretto) is moved from page to stage or screen and given life, by an entire team of creative individuals: directors, actors, designers, musicians, and so on. Literary adaptations to the screen or stage are usually considered as yet another form of this kind of transcription or transposition of a written text to a performance medium. But the verbal move from the “book” to the diminutive “libretto” (in Italian, little book or booklet) is indicative of a view that sees adaptation as a step downward, a move away from a primary literary “source”. In fact, an entire negative rhetoric of “infidelity” has developed in both journalistic reviewing and academic discourse about adaptations, and it is a morally loaded rhetoric that I find surprising in its intensity. Here is the wonderfully critical description of that rhetoric by the king of film adaptation critics, Robert Stam: Terms like “infidelity,” “betrayal,” “deformation,” “violation,” “bastardisation,” “vulgarisation,” and “desecration” proliferate in adaptation discourse, each word carrying its specific charge of opprobrium. “Infidelity” carries overtones of Victorian prudishness; “betrayal” evokes ethical perfidy; “bastardisation” connotes illegitimacy; “deformation” implies aesthetic disgust and monstrosity; “violation” calls to mind sexual violence; “vulgarisation” conjures up class degradation; and “desecration” intimates religious sacrilege and blasphemy. (3) I join many others today, like Stam, in challenging the persistence of this fidelity discourse in adaptation studies, thereby providing yet another example of what, in his article here called “The Persistence of Fidelity: Adaptation Theory Today,” John Connor has called the “fidelity reflex”—the call to end an obsession with fidelity as the sole criterion for judging the success of an adaptation. But here I want to come at this same issue of the relation of adaptation to the adapted text from another angle. When considering an adaptation of a literary work, there are other reasons why the literary “source” text might be privileged. Literature has historical priority as an art form, Stam claims, and so in some people’s eyes will always be superior to other forms. But does it actually have priority? What about even earlier performative forms like ritual and song? Or to look forward, instead of back, as Tim Barker urges us to do in his article here, what about the new media’s additions to our repertoire with the advent of electronic technology? How can we retain this hierarchy of artistic forms—with literature inevitably on top—in a world like ours today? How can both the Romantic ideology of original genius and the capitalist notion of individual authorship hold up in the face of the complex reality of the production of literature today (as well as in the past)? (In “Amen to That: Sampling and Adapting the Past”, Steve Collins shows how digital technology has changed the possibilities of musical creativity in adapting/sampling.) Like many other ages before our own, adaptation is rampant today, as director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman clearly realised in creating Adaptation, their meta-cinematic illustration-as-send-up film about adaptation. But rarely has a culture denigrated the adapter as a secondary and derivative creator as much as we do the screenwriter today—as Jonze explores with great irony. Michelle McMerrin and Sergio Rizzo helpfully explain in their pieces here that one of the reasons for this is the strength of auteur theory in film criticism. But we live in a world in which works of literature have been turned into more than films. We now have literary adaptations in the forms of interactive new media works and videogames; we have theme parks; and of course, we have the more common television series, radio and stage plays, musicals, dance works, and operas. And, of course, we now have novelisations of films—and they are not given the respect that originary novels are given: it is the adaptation as adaptation that is denigrated, as Deborah Allison shows in “Film/Print: Novelisations and Capricorn One”. Adaptations across media are inevitably fraught, and for complex and multiple reasons. The financing and distribution issues of these widely different media alone inevitably challenge older capitalist models. The need or desire to appeal to a global market has consequences for adaptations of literature, especially with regard to its regional and historical specificities. These particularities are what usually get adapted or “indigenised” for new audiences—be they the particularities of the Spanish gypsy Carmen (see Ioana Furnica, “Subverting the ‘Good, Old Tune’”), those of the Japanese samurai genre (see Kevin P. Eubanks, “Becoming-Samurai: Samurai [Films], Kung-Fu [Flicks] and Hip-Hop [Soundtracks]”), of American hip hop graffiti (see Kara-Jane Lombard, “‘To Us Writers, the Differences Are Obvious’: The Adaptation of Hip Hop Graffiti to an Australian Context”) or of Jane Austen’s fiction (see Suchitra Mathur, “From British ‘Pride’ to Indian ‘Bride’: Mapping the Contours of a Globalised (Post?)Colonialism”). What happens to the literary text that is being adapted, often multiple times? Rather than being displaced by the adaptation (as is often feared), it most frequently gets a new life: new editions of the book appear, with stills from the movie adaptation on its cover. But if I buy and read the book after seeing the movie, I read it differently than I would have before I had seen the film: in effect, the book, not the adaptation, has become the second and even secondary text for me. And as I read, I can only “see” characters as imagined by the director of the film; the cinematic version has taken over, has even colonised, my reader’s imagination. The literary “source” text, in my readerly, experiential terms, becomes the secondary work. It exists on an experiential continuum, in other words, with its adaptations. It may have been created before, but I only came to know it after. What if I have read the literary work first, and then see the movie? In my imagination, I have already cast the characters: I know what Gabriel and Gretta Conroy of James Joyce’s story, “The Dead,” look and sound like—in my imagination, at least. Then along comes John Huston’s lush period piece cinematic adaptation and the director superimposes his vision upon mine; his forcibly replaces mine. But, in this particular case, Huston still arguably needs my imagination, or at least my memory—though he may not have realised it fully in making the film. When, in a central scene in the narrative, Gabriel watches his wife listening, moved, to the singing of the Irish song, “The Lass of Aughrim,” what we see on screen is a concerned, intrigued, but in the end rather blank face: Gabriel doesn’t alter his expression as he listens and watches. His expression may not change—but I know exactly what he is thinking. Huston does not tell us; indeed, without the use of voice-over, he cannot. And since the song itself is important, voice-over is impossible. But I know exactly what he is thinking: I’ve read the book. I fill in the blank, so to speak. Gabriel looks at Gretta and thinks: There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. … Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter. (210) A few pages later the narrator will tell us: At last she turned towards them and Gabriel saw that there was colour on her cheeks and that her eyes were shining. A sudden tide of joy went leaping out of his heart. (212) This joy, of course, puts him in a very different—disastrously different—state of mind than his wife, who (we later learn) is remembering a young man who sang that song to her when she was a girl—and who died, for love of her. I know this—because I’ve read the book. Watching the movie, I interpret Gabriel’s blank expression in this knowledge. Just as the director’s vision can colonise my visual and aural imagination, so too can I, as reader, supplement the film’s silence with the literary text’s inner knowledge. The question, of course, is: should I have to do so? Because I have read the book, I will. But what if I haven’t read the book? Will I substitute my own ideas, from what I’ve seen in the rest of the film, or from what I’ve experienced in my own life? Filmmakers always have to deal with this problem, of course, since the camera is resolutely externalising, and actors must reveal their inner worlds through bodily gesture or facial expression for the camera to record and for the spectator to witness and comprehend. But film is not only a visual medium: it uses music and sound, and it also uses words—spoken words within the dramatic situation, words overheard on the street, on television, but also voice-over words, spoken by a narrating figure. Stephen Dedalus escapes from Ireland at the end of Joseph Strick’s 1978 adaptation of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with the same words as he does in the novel, where they appear as Stephen’s diary entry: Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. … Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead. (253) The words from the novel also belong to the film as film, with its very different story, less about an artist than about a young Irishman finally able to escape his family, his religion and his country. What’s deliberately NOT in the movie is the irony of Joyce’s final, benign-looking textual signal to his reader: Dublin, 1904 Trieste, 1914 The first date is the time of Stephen’s leaving Dublin—and the time of his return, as we know from the novel Ulysses, the sequel, if you like, to this novel. The escape was short-lived! Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has an ironic structure that has primed its readers to expect not escape and triumph but something else. Each chapter of the novel has ended on this kind of personal triumphant high; the next has ironically opened with Stephen mired in the mundane and in failure. Stephen’s final words in both film and novel remind us that he really is an Icarus figure, following his “Old father, old artificer”, his namesake, Daedalus. And Icarus, we recall, takes a tumble. In the novel version, we are reminded that this is the portrait of the artist “as a young man”—later, in 1914, from the distance of Trieste (to which he has escaped) Joyce, writing this story, could take some ironic distance from his earlier persona. There is no such distance in the film version. However, it stands alone, on its own; Joyce’s irony is not appropriate in Strick’s vision. His is a different work, with its own message and its own, considerably more romantic and less ironic power. Literary adaptations are their own things—inspired by, based on an adapted text but something different, something other. I want to argue that these works adapted from literature are now part of our readerly experience of that literature, and for that reason deserve the same attention we give to the literary, and not only the same attention, but also the same respect. I am a literarily trained person. People like me who love words, already love plays, but shouldn’t we also love films—and operas, and musicals, and even videogames? There is no need to denigrate words that are heard (and visualised) in order to privilege words that are read. Works of literature can have afterlives in their adaptations and translations, just as they have pre-lives, in terms of influences and models, as George Eliot Clarke openly allows in those acknowledgements to Beatrice Chancy. I want to return to that Canadian work, because it raises for me many of the issues about adaptation and language that I see at the core of our literary distrust of the move away from the written, printed text. I ended my recent book on adaptation with a brief examination of this work, but I didn’t deal with this particular issue of language. So I want to return to it, as to unfinished business. Clarke is, by the way, clear in the verse drama as well as in articles and interviews that among the many intertexts to Beatrice Chancy, the most important are slave narratives, especially one called Celia, a Slave, and Shelley’s play, The Cenci. Both are stories of mistreated and subordinated women who fight back. Since Clarke himself has written at length about the slave narratives, I’m going to concentrate here on Shelley’s The Cenci. The distance from Shelley’s verse play to Clarke’s verse play is a temporal one, but it is also geographic and ideological one: from the old to the new world, and from a European to what Clarke calls an “Africadian” (African Canadian/African Acadian) perspective. Yet both poets were writing political protest plays against unjust authority and despotic power. And they have both become plays that are more read than performed—a sad fate, according to Clarke, for two works that are so concerned with voice. We know that Shelley sought to calibrate the stylistic registers of his work with various dramatic characters and effects to create a modern “mixed” style that was both a return to the ancients and offered a new drama of great range and flexibility where the expression fits what is being expressed (see Bruhn). His polemic against eighteenth-century European dramatic conventions has been seen as leading the way for realist drama later in the nineteenth century, with what has been called its “mixed style mimesis” (Bruhn) Clarke’s adaptation does not aim for Shelley’s perfect linguistic decorum. It mixes the elevated and the biblical with the idiomatic and the sensual—even the vulgar—the lushly poetic with the coarsely powerful. But perhaps Shelley’s idea of appropriate language fits, after all: Beatrice Chancy is a woman of mixed blood—the child of a slave woman and her slave owner; she has been educated by her white father in a convent school. Sometimes that educated, elevated discourse is heard; at other times, she uses the variety of discourses operative within slave society—from religious to colloquial. But all the time, words count—as in all printed and oral literature. Clarke’s verse drama was given a staged reading in Toronto in 1997, but the story’s, if not the book’s, real second life came when it was used as the basis for an opera libretto. Actually the libretto commission came first (from Queen of Puddings Theatre in Toronto), and Clarke started writing what was to be his first of many opera texts. Constantly frustrated by the art form’s demands for concision, he found himself writing two texts at once—a short libretto and a longer, five-act tragic verse play to be published separately. Since it takes considerably longer to sing than to speak (or read) a line of text, the composer James Rolfe keep asking for cuts—in the name of economy (too many singers), because of clarity of action for audience comprehension, or because of sheer length. Opera audiences have to sit in a theatre for a fixed length of time, unlike readers who can put a book down and return to it later. However, what was never sacrificed to length or to the demands of the music was the language. In fact, the double impact of the powerful mixed language and the equally potent music, increases the impact of the literary text when performed in its operatic adaptation. Here is the verse play version of the scene after Beatrice’s rape by her own father, Francis Chancey: I was black but comely. Don’t glance Upon me. This flesh is crumbling Like proved lies. I’m perfumed, ruddied Carrion. Assassinated. Screams of mucking juncos scrawled Over the chapel and my nerves, A stickiness, as when he finished Maculating my thighs and dress. My eyes seep pus; I can’t walk: the floors Are tizzy, dented by stout mauling. Suddenly I would like poison. The flesh limps from my spine. My inlets crimp. Vultures flutter, ghastly, without meaning. I can see lice swarming the air. … His scythe went shick shick shick and slashed My flowers; they lay, murdered, in heaps. (90) The biblical and the violent meet in the texture of the language. And none of that power gets lost in the opera adaptation, despite cuts and alterations for easier aural comprehension. I was black but comely. Don’t look Upon me: this flesh is dying. I’m perfumed, bleeding carrion, My eyes weep pus, my womb’s sopping With tears; I can hardly walk: the floors Are tizzy, the sick walls tumbling, Crumbling like proved lies. His scythe went shick shick shick and cut My flowers; they lay in heaps, murdered. (95) Clarke has said that he feels the libretto is less “literary” in his words than the verse play, for it removes the lines of French, Latin, Spanish and Italian that pepper the play as part of the author’s critique of the highly educated planter class in Nova Scotia: their education did not guarantee ethical behaviour (“Adaptation” 14). I have not concentrated on the music of the opera, because I wanted to keep the focus on the language. But I should say that the Rolfe’s score is as historically grounded as Clarke’s libretto: it is rooted in African Canadian music (from ring shouts to spirituals to blues) and in Scottish fiddle music and local reels of the time, not to mention bel canto Italian opera. However, the music consciously links black and white traditions in a way that Clarke’s words and story refuse: they remain stubbornly separate, set in deliberate tension with the music’s resolution. Beatrice will murder her father, and, at the very moment that Nova Scotia slaves are liberated, she and her co-conspirators will be hanged for that murder. Unlike the printed verse drama, the shorter opera libretto functions like a screenplay, if you will. It is not so much an autonomous work unto itself, but it points toward a potential enactment or embodiment in performance. Yet, even there, Clarke cannot resist the lure of words—even though they are words that no audience will ever hear. The stage directions for Act 3, scene 2 of the opera read: “The garden. Slaves, sunflowers, stars, sparks” (98). The printed verse play is full of these poetic associative stage directions, suggesting that despite his protestations to the contrary, Clarke may have thought of that version as one meant to be read by the eye. After Beatrice’s rape, the stage directions read: “A violin mopes. Invisible shovelsful of dirt thud upon the scene—as if those present were being buried alive—like ourselves” (91). Our imaginations—and emotions—go to work, assisted by the poet’s associations. There are many such textual helpers—epigraphs, photographs, notes—that we do not have when we watch and listen to the opera. We do have the music, the staged drama, the colours and sounds as well as the words of the text. As Clarke puts the difference: “as a chamber opera, Beatrice Chancy has ascended to television broadcast. But as a closet drama, it play only within the reader’s head” (“Adaptation” 14). Clarke’s work of literature, his verse drama, is a “situated utterance, produced in one medium and in one historical and social context,” to use Robert Stam’s terms. In the opera version, it was transformed into another “equally situated utterance, produced in a different context and relayed through a different medium” (45-6). I want to argue that both are worthy of study and respect by wordsmiths, by people like me. I realise I’ve loaded the dice: here neither the verse play nor the libretto is primary; neither is really the “source” text, for they were written at the same time and by the same person. But for readers and audiences (my focus and interest here), they exist on a continuum—depending on which we happen to experience first. As Ilana Shiloh explores here, the same is true about the short story and film of Memento. I am not alone in wanting to mount a defence of adaptations. Julie Sanders ends her new book called Adaptation and Appropriation with these words: “Adaptation and appropriation … are, endlessly and wonderfully, about seeing things come back to us in as many forms as possible” (160). The storytelling imagination is an adaptive mechanism—whether manifesting itself in print or on stage or on screen. The study of the production of literature should, I would like to argue, include those other forms taken by that storytelling drive. If I can be forgiven a move to the amusing—but still serious—in concluding, Terry Pratchett puts it beautifully in his fantasy story, Witches Abroad: “Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling.” In biology as in culture, adaptations reign. References Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Bruhn, Mark J. “’Prodigious Mixtures and Confusions Strange’: The Self-Subverting Mixed Style of The Cenci.” Poetics Today 22.4 (2001). Clarke, George Elliott. “Beatrice Chancy: A Libretto in Four Acts.” Canadian Theatre Review 96 (1998): 62-79. ———. Beatrice Chancy. Victoria, BC: Polestar, 1999. ———. “Adaptation: Love or Cannibalism? Some Personal Observations”, unpublished manuscript of article. Frye, Northrop. The Educated Imagination. Toronto: CBC, 1963. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. Hutcheon, Linda, and Gary R. Bortolotti. “On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and “Success”—Biologically.” New Literary History. Forthcoming. Joyce, James. Dubliners. 1916. New York: Viking, 1967. ———. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1960. Larson, Katherine. “Resistance from the Margins in George Elliott Clarke’s Beatrice Chancy.” Canadian Literature 189 (2006): 103-118. McGee, Celia. “Beowulf on Demand.” New York Times, Arts and Leisure. 30 April 2006. A4. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. New York: Viking, 1988. ———. Haroun and the Sea of Stories. London: Granta/Penguin, 1990. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York: Routledge, 160. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Cenci. Ed. George Edward Woodberry. Boston and London: Heath, 1909. Stam, Robert. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 1-52. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hutcheon, Linda. "In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/01-hutcheon.php>. APA Style Hutcheon, L. (May 2007) "In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/01-hutcheon.php>.

Contemporary approaches to agency and film authorship, such as performativity and “techniques of the self,” (Staiger, 2003) provide an explanation for the expression of agency within the always-already-existing structure of the text, yet fail to account for, firstly, how the individual determines which agential choices to make and, then, interacts with society with causality and efficacy (Staiger, 2003). Critical Realism, in particular Archer’s 2003 theory of the internal conversation (Structure), provides an alternative theoretical framework to postmodernism by acknowledging both the existence of orders of reality that impact upon the individual’s choices, and the effects of cultural and societal structures. I would suggest that postmodernism has restricted our understanding of human agency and how individual choice is determined within the highly structured creative industries. Although interplay between agency and structure applies to all creative collaborators, in this essay I will focus on the agency of the screenwriter as author (an overlooked aspect of film authorship), as Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002) provides an excellent illustration of the function of the internal conversation in the development of a screenplay. Adaptation, written by highly regarded contemporary screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, also presents an interesting comment on the role of the screenwriter within the Hollywood film industry, and foregrounds the notion of creative film authorship. The film can be considered a postmodern film, in its intertextuality, deconstruction of both the subject and the filmic structure, the parodic theme and the oppositional characterisation. Charlie Kaufman even becomes his own textual creation represented in the film, and many of the other characters in the film are based on actual people. However, the film also contains representations of reality, conflicting accounts of authorial intent, and a positioning of the subject and object that realises reflexive deliberation and human agency. Thematically, the film expresses a philosophical concern with individual human identity, and societal interaction and development. I would suggest that, although the film is usually considered a fine example of the postmodern film, from a Critical Realist perspective, it can be read as providing a critique of the “postmodern condition”, in particular the repetitive, formulaic mainstream Hollywood film. Archer argues that there must of necessity be both a separation of the individual from society or culture and an acknowledged mingling of self and society. Agency is dependent upon engagement with social and cultural structures, but this could not happen unless there were other (non-social) identifiable aspects to the individual (Structure, 7). According to Archer, natural reality consists of three orders: nature, which concerns physical well-being; practice, where performative achievement is necessary for work; and the social, where the individual’s main concern is in the achievement of self-worth (Structure, 138). The sense of self, or continuity of consciousness, constitutes the natural human and is universal. Therefore the individual, although a part of society, does not exist because of society, but because of reality. Without this continuing sense of self, an individual would not be able to “appropriate social expectations and … recognise what is expected of them” (“Realism”, 13). For society to function effectively, people must have a continuity of consciousness that transcends society. Human agency “originates in people themselves, from their own concerns, forged in the space between the self and reality as a whole” (“Realism”, 12). This is a liminal space—that is, an unstructured area of imagination—in which a screenwriter who wishes to create original acts of authoring operates. The internal conversation takes the form of a dialogue conducted with oneself, not with society, but about society. The individual conducts a conversation between their subjective self, which asks a question, and their objective self, which provides the answer. The person is speaking to themselves, but occupying transitory positions in order to process information, thoughts, and possible courses of action. It is a method for arriving at self-knowledge and decisions through the process of “discernment, deliberation and dedication” (Archer, Structure, 138). Through this internal process, individuals prioritise their concerns, and how they will accommodate those other necessary aspects of reality that may impinge on what they care about most. This process develops and changes as individuals mature, and as they are affected by all aspects of reality. The internal conversation provides a conciliatory approach to the interplay between the filmic culture industry and the individual screenwriter. The screenwriter as author can be seen to negotiate personal projects within the structural constraints and enablements of the film production process, and to enact agency through personal reflexive deliberation, choice and thematic style. How socially efficacious the resulting screenplay is depends upon the screenwriter’s authorship skills, the story’s cultural resonance, societal relevance, and the freedoms and impositions encountered within the filmic industry structure. Adaptation can be read as illustrative of this process. The film opens with an inner dialogue. “Kaufman” (the character, as opposed to Charlie Kaufman, the writer) is questioning, and answering, himself regarding his concerns. He considers his current situation, and his ability as a screenwriter, then deliberates on possible strategies for improving himself. This inner conversation continues throughout the film, both as voiceover, and as a dual characterisation, that of “Kaufman” in relation to his identical twin brother, Donald. Immediately we are given an insight into “Kaufman’s” mind. He is concerned with his health, his work practices and his self-worth. The three orders of reality are then presented as themes in the film. Nature is addressed through the subject of the book: orchids and their adaptability, and how this relates to human beings and their mutability. Practice is seen in “Kaufman’s” and Donald’s opposite approaches to writing a screenplay, the effects of the accepted industry format and expectations, and the eventual resolution of the film. Finally, society itself is questioned through the contrasting self-worth of the characters. “Kaufman” compares himself to: Orlean, as a competent writer; Laroche, as possessor of self-esteem and passion; and Donald, as carefree and socially adept. That the film encompasses all orders of reality reinforces Archer’s point that individuals must conceive of projects that “establish … satisfactory practices in the three orders … [as this process is] the inescapable condition for human beings to survive or thrive” (Structure, 138). “Kaufman” entertains the project of adapting a book into a screenplay when he meets with Valerie, an attractive executive producer. However, once he has entered into the project, he must negotiate the limitations and possibilities of the cultural structures of both the film industry and the book. “Kaufman” is considered for the adaptation because of his reputation as an unusual screenwriter. However, when he states that he wants to let the movie exist, and not turn it into a typical Hollywood product with car chases, turning the orchids into poppies, cramming in sex and guns, and characters learning profound life lessons, Valerie suggests that Orlean and Laroche could fall in love. Immediately “Kaufman’s” ideas are constrained. He is subjected to the hierarchical structure of the Hollywood film industry where the producer holds power. The screenwriter is an employee, contracted to do a job: that is, write a screenplay that can be made into a high-grossing film. As well, “Kaufman” has read the book and wishes to stay true to Orlean’s story. This poses another limitation, especially given that The Orchid Thief is a non-fiction book, a factual account of a rather unique individual (John Laroche) who came to Orlean’s attention when Laroche was charged with orchid poaching from a Florida state preserve. The book has no narrative structure, but digresses among Laroche’s story, Orlean’s personal reflections, the passion orchids inspire in enthusiasts, and the history of orchids and orchid hunters. However, once “Kaufman” has accepted the project, he must begin his process of deliberation and creation, and negotiate his strategy for completing the screenplay. If we take the fictional identical twin brother Donald to be “Kaufman’s” alter-ego, the two characters can be seen as separate facets of “Kaufman’s” negotiation of The Orchid Thief project, and their conversation reflects an internal dialogue of deliberation. By juxtaposing Donald and “Kaufman” as both the subjective (or speaking) self, and the objective (or answering) self, we can follow the internal dialogue that “Kaufman” conducts during the film. This highlights “Kaufman’s” concerns and possible choices regarding the project he has undertaken. He questions the task ahead of him and weighs the options available. The easy way forward would simply be to write a repetitive generic Hollywood film, and still get paid a lot of money. But “Kaufman” has ideals, and values his writing as a craft: as creating a literary work. In contrast, Donald finds it easy to write a screenplay by following the accepted cultural order, whereas “Kaufman” has personal (authorial) concerns that he wishes to express. “Kaufman’s” specific interests take precedence in his work and can be seen as other orders of reality impinging upon the social order. In order to understand the book he is adapting (and also to fulfill his own personal concerns as agential author) “Kaufman” must attempt to encompass the natural-order theme of the book, and the social-order expectations of the film industry. He has to decide which is more important. Initially, “Kaufman’s” preference is for the reality of the book, the actuality of how the world is, and this is where his interests as both a writer and an individual lie. This focus can be seen through the themes of Charlie Kaufman’s other screenplays. In his films, his main thematic concern—as he himself states—is “issues of self and why I’m me and not that other person” (cited in Kennedy). Charlie Kaufman delves deep into the notion of subjectivity, agency and human consciousness. However “Kaufman” (and, the implication is, in real life Charlie) is constrained by the cultural order of Hollywood which, although he tries to evade it, continually imposes limitations upon the completion of this screenplay. Donald is that side of “Kaufman” which keeps reminding him that, although he has freedom as a respected screenwriter, there are some aspects of writing for film that cannot be discounted. “Kaufman” and Donald are two sides of the same coin. They represent “Kaufman’s” inner dialogue and his internal conflict. The twin screenwriting characters personify his struggle to produce a screenplay that satisfies his ultimate personal convictions as a unique and creative writer (to remain true to the thematic concerns of the book) and the need to conform to the accepted Hollywood ideal of a high-budget feature film. The film can also be read as the actual writing of the screenplay unfolding on the screen. As “Kaufman” writes it, this is what we see visually. For the first two acts of the film, “Kaufman” succeeds in portraying his thematic concerns with the progress of life, and the necessity of change, and his involvement in the process of screenwriting. In this he stays true to Orlean’s book, even including digressive “chapters” where he not only introduces the real characters (that is, the story of the book), but also investigates the history of orchids and the concept of adaptability. “Kaufman” balances these thematic interests against each other through his own process of writing the screenplay. He also addresses issues that are of concern to him personally. He deliberates on these through the juxtaposition of his character “Kaufman” with those of Orlean and Laroche. He regards Orlean as the consummate writer, shown comfortably working in her office, in contrast to “Kaufman” hunched over an old typewriter perched on a chair. Laroche is a passionate individual who becomes engrossed in projects, but can then abandon them completely. “Kaufman” finds this difficult, as he is a screenwriter who, although passionate about his craft, cannot distance himself from his project. These oppositions are further reinforced through the character of Donald, who adopts a formulaic approach to writing his own film, to finishing his thriller-screenplay, while “Kaufman” is still struggling with his own adaptation. Once Donald has completed his film, he divests himself of all interest in it except for how much money he will receive. Donald also shows passion, not for his craft, but for women, whereas “Kaufman” finds it difficult to maintain a continuing relationship and resorts to fantasy and masturbation. “Kaufman” becomes so involved in the writing of the screenplay that Orlean becomes a part of his sexual fantasies, yet he cannot bring himself to meet her face to face. The opposition and comparison of these three characters, “Kaufman”-and-Donald (as one composite character), Orlean, and Laroche, is also reflected in Donald’s screenplay, The Three. Donald’s screenplay is about a cop, trying to find a serial killer’s latest victim; she becomes his Holy Grail. However, Donald’s three characters are, in fact, all the one character, who is suffering from multiple personality disorder. In Adaptation, “Kaufman” is questioning himself about aspects of his personality and providing the answers to those queries through other characters. As the search for perfection is Laroche’s Holy Grail, and passion is Orlean’s, for “Kaufman” it is the completion of the screenplay with integrity and aplomb. What “Kaufman” questions about the filmic reality of, and complications with, Donald’s screenplay are in fact included in “Kaufman’s” own screenplay that we see unfolding on the screen. The two screenplays are questioning and answering each other, and represent an internal conversation. Through these characterisations (and in particular the dialogic interactions with Donald), “Kaufman” is diagnosing his circumstances. By the end of the second act, “Kaufman” is coming to a realisation that it would have been much easier to write something else, anything else (including The Three), than attempting to complete the project he has started, and maintain his stance regarding the truth of the book, and the reality of life. In the third act, “Kaufman” accepts that he cannot complete his project and admits he needs help. However, he cannot simply cease working, as this would reflect on his other concerns: those of his own well-being and his work ethic, as well as his social standing as a Hollywood screenwriter. He is dedicated to completing the screenplay, but has to reassess his methods, and his options. His deliberations become more conventional, in keeping with the need to accommodate the constraints of the Hollywood cultural structure, and it is here that “Kaufman” must abandon his idealistic approach and allow Donald to take over. “Kaufman” cannot sustain his original concern of staying true to Orlean’s book and also maintaining the screenplay structure. He has to negotiate the limitations and consider new possibilities. According to Archer, “Once an agential project has activated a constraint or enablement, there is no single answer about what is to be done, and therefore no one predictable outcome” (Structure, 131). This is illustrated in the film, through the variant scenic possibilities “Kaufman” imagines and attempts to coalesce into his screenplay. However, he cannot bring the screenplay to an acceptable (and therefore, satisfactory) climax and resolution. “Kaufman” becomes like the serial killer in Donald’s script, who, because he is forcing his victim to eat herself, is also eating himself to death. In the same way, the film begins to consume and kill the characters one by one. “Kaufman” has a problem that he must overcome. He achieves this by making the third act a fiction of reality, and the characters into caricatures. The third act, “Kaufman’s” Japanese paper ball which, when dropped into water turns into a flower, is a metaphor, where the film turns back on itself. Instead of showing the reality of the book, the book becomes a fiction of the film. Donald takes over, and the climax of the film provides all the conventions of a typical Hollywood film: much more like Donald’s generic thriller than “Kaufman’s” initial premise. All “Kaufman’s” detested conventions are included: Orlean and Laroche fall in love, the Ghost Orchid is a potent psychedelic, there are guns, car chases, and death. “Kaufman” as protagonist learns a profound life lesson, and the deus ex machina is included, not once, but twice. An unsuspecting Ranger causes an horrific car accident and Laroche gets attacked by an alligator. Orobouros has been let loose. The characters have turned on themselves and are being deconstructed to death. Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay both encompasses the postmodern and rejects it. Through his writing skill, his unique plot conventions and his character development, he lays bare the contemporary conceptions of reality, filmic reality, and the influence of Hollywood production on both the audience and the screenwriter. He addresses the oppositional: the creative voice and the clichéd utterance; reality and fiction; disappointment and fulfillment; entrapment and freedom; and creates a new totality, a unique film that provides an alternative to the tired screenwriting paradigm. That he has managed to adapt a non-fiction book, insert real people as characters within the film, and write a critically acclaimed screenplay, shows both his skill and craft as a screenwriter and his efficacious agency. He has posited that there is an alternative to the conventional Hollywood film and that film can pose the “big” questions, about life, about what it means to be human and why things don’t change. Charlie Kaufman has taken the postmodern film, turned it inside out, and managed to not only expose the fiction, but embrace the reality. Adaptation provides a visual example of both the interplay between individual agency and socio-cultural structure and the screenwriter as author. For most of the film, “Kaufman” occupies a liminal space that—although existing in reality—is separate from society and the natural world. This, it could be said, is the “in-between space” of the practice of the screenwriter. It is a creative area of communitas (in the case of the screenwriter, as singular, rather than as a group); an unstructured equality that exists between boundaries, and where meaning is found in the imagination of a writer. In this liminal space, the author lives in a world of images and words, of personal concerns and the desire to share stories, but is always mindful of the restricted, accepted, mainstream film structure. The screenwriter’s liminal space is both expressively free and creatively constricted. Yet, because of this, the screenwriter provides an excellent example of the role of the internal conversation in the mediation of agency within cultural and societal structures. A discussion of agency and authorship is not simply a matter of repetitive cultural discourses, or existing social structures, but an incorporation of all orders of reality. It is through the formulation of specific projects that agents interact with social and structural power. Adaptation presents the Critical Realist concept that human beings and society are continually changing and developing, and neither agents, nor structure, can restrict the other completely. The creative agent absorbs current shifts in culture and society, reflects topical concerns, and envisages and expresses alternative ideas, even those opposed to postmodernism. Authorial agency, and indeed all individual human agency, is an ongoing process of adapting, however, as Mahatma Ghandi stated, “Adaptability is not imitation. It means power of resistance and assimilation”. References Archer, Margaret S. “Realism and the Problem of Agency.” Journal of Critical Realism 5.1 (2002). 28 Aug. 2005 http://journalofcriticalrealism.org/archive/JCRv5n1_archer11.pdf>. ———. Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Kaufman, Charlie and Kaufman, Donald. Adaptation 2000. 14 May 2005 http://www.beingcharliekaufman.com/adaptationnov2000.pdf>. Kennedy, L. “Charlie Kaufman: Confessions of an Original ‘Mind’”. Denver Post 26 Mar. 2004. Staiger, Janet. “Authorship Approaches.” In Authorship and Film. Eds David Gerstner and Janet Staiger. New York: Routledge, 2003. 27-59. Citation reference for this article MLA Style McMerrin, Michelle. "Agency in Adaptation." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/03-mcmerrin.php>. APA Style McMerrin, M. (May 2007) "Agency in Adaptation," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/03-mcmerrin.php>.

Many theories address the material adaptations that organisms—including humans—make to their environments, and many address the adaptation of art to different forms. The film Adaptation (Spike Jonze, 2002) by Charlie Kaufman, ostensibly an adaptation of Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, addresses both kinds of adaptation, but also suggests how humans might psychically adapt to their emotional and mental environments, namely by doubling or multiplying their identities to create companions and helpmates who can help them cope with emotional and mental stresses. To expose some of Kaufman’s adaptive moves, I will draw on Wolfgang Iser’s literary anthropology, aimed at exploring “what literature may tell us about our anthropological makeup,” particularly “the human need for make-believe even when it is known to be what it is” (vii). Iser’s theory considers the use of imagination, particularly in the realm of fiction, as a way to “meet certain anthropological needs,” as a tool for human adaptation to social or cultural needs (264). Because of Iser’s emphasis on the importance of both the writer’s and reader’s roles, both may use performances of reading and writing to remake themselves in ways that allow them to function more effectively. Kaufman certainly does in his role as adapter: a type of reader who also writes. Kaufman uses imagination to adapt to his situation, just as humans have always needed their imaginations to adapt to their environments, a need as strong as biological adaptation, considering their psychic needs. Kaufman’s script addresses the major difficulty of how to match a book like The Orchid Thief with expectations for a Hollywood film, including a plot, dynamic characters, and a hook that drives the story. His film persona laments the lack of an overarching, coherent narrative, the relatively small portion of the book where the fascinating title character John LaRoche appears, and, in his conversation with the writing guru Robert McKee, the lack of any change in the people in the book, mainly Orlean and LaRoche. Seemingly promising parts of the book, like the court case, end in a few anti-climactic paragraphs about dropped charges and no-contest pleas, as LaRoche’s grand plan is judicially out-maneuvered. Interspersed with these lamentations are all the false starts and dead ends of Charlie’s composition, represented here in two ways: through watching Charlie type or speak his ideas, and through glimpses of these ideas actualized in film. These abortive attempts set up our expectations for his eventual solution, while showing us the films that never were and capturing some of The Orchid Thief’s non-narrative brilliance. Kaufman manages this, however, by creating the metanarrative of the screenplay’s composition, into which he writes the story of Orlean’s composition of her book. In other words, Kaufman adapts to the problem of adapting the book to a screenplay by thematizing adaptation itself, a concept that fits well with the book’s discussion of adaptation in the biological world. The contrast between Kaufman’s feverish, agonized composition process and Orlean’s placid, cool work creates a dramatic tension in the story, and Kaufman takes revenge on this fantasy of Orlean’s unflappable persona by forcing that persona to unravel more and more as the script progresses. Of course, neither in her book nor in her real life, it should be pointed out, does Orlean suffer from unbearable loneliness, fall in love with LaRoche, use drugs, or turn homicidal. Kaufman, combining selections from the extratextual world, from Orlean’s text, and from his imagination, doubles the real world and the world of the screenplay, distorting them both in the process, but also creating something new. When a new text combines parts of other texts, this doubling multiplies because of the complexity of the relationships involved, since the contexts of all these texts shift when put in new relations to one another. Iser remarks on how the selection of texts and their resulting recontextualization operates on other texts through the reader’s performance, namely by triggering a multiplication of voices, when all of the texts come together and are affected by each other in the recipient’s consciousness (Iser, 237-8). This explanation yields insight into how the performativity of the fictionalizing act and the act of representation merge, through the author’s selection and the recipient’s imagination, when all these different texts are finally placed in a medium where they can interact. The selections and combinations of Kaufman’s script come to fruition in the viewer’s mind, creating a potential for new ideas, new meaning: in other words, intellectual evolution, an adaptation specific to human beings. Iser emphasizes that representation does not merely mirror the existing, but instead creates something new (236). This power of imagination means that we can use make-believe to imagine ourselves in different ways in order to live successfully. This imagining brings together the performances of readers and writers not only to create something new but to cope with the world. For Iser, the creating is the coping, and it tells us something about human nature and how it adapts. Adaptation and The Orchid Thief both refer to Darwin’s The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects and The Origin of Species, outlining his theories of evolution, based on species’ adaptation to their environments. The film invokes Darwin’s words, ideas, and likeness several times: the sequence of film showing the evolution of life, Charlie’s description of this scene for his screenplay, LaRoche and Orlean’s conversation about Darwin, a shot of Darwin’s writings on tape in LaRoche’s van, an imagined scene of Darwin writing the words we hear in narration, a shot of a book of Darwin’s writing in Charlie’s room, and numerous mentions of adaptation and mutation throughout the film in dialogue. The selection of this particular idea, magnified in the film through all of these references, provides a framework for the viewer to understand Kaufman’s choices and the rationalization behind them. Not only do orchids evolve—through mutation—to adapt to their environments, but so do people and ideas, just like the character Charlie Kaufman and his fictional screenplay, as well as the real Charlie Kaufman and his real screenplay. When the elements selected from these extratextual sources are brought together in the text, they “mutually inscribe themselves into one another. Every word becomes dialogic, and every semantic field is doubled by another” (Iser, 238). When combined like this, each element is present in every other one, even if it is literally absent. Sometimes the awareness of what is not present is greater than at others; sometimes, “the present serv[es] only to spotlight the absent” (Iser, 238). Combination doubles meaning by creating an absence for every presence, so that everything said is twofold, the said and the not-said. This doubling is compounded by the text’s self-disclosed fictionality so that what is missing from the text is always already present there as well (Iser, 239). Charlie’s script brings together the elements of writing and Hollywood with the text of Orlean’s book, and his inclusion of these elements creates additional possibilities for the film, many of which are realized through elements that are absent from the book but made present in the film. For example, the romance in the film, which is not present and is even denied in Orlean’s text, only actualizes possibilities already extant in potential in the reader’s mind: for example, Orlean’s rebuttal of any attraction between her and LaRoche (in an interview published in post-film versions of the book and incorporated in the screenplay) introduces the idea to the reader/viewer even if it had not already occurred spontaneously, and this denied possibility explodes in the movie’s latter half, irresistibly demanding exploration, if only because Hollywood films demand romance. In the film, what is absent, yet always present, is a true adaptation of Orlean’s book into a film. It is the subject of the film, and thus always present in one way, but what results is not really an adaptation of the book in the more usual sense. Fictionality enacts one other doubling through the “text’s disclosure of itself as fiction” (Iser, 238). This disclosure happens through two means: “The attitude to be imposed on the reader, and … what the text is meant to represent” (Iser, 238). Including a representation of the writing process—mind you, not the actual writing process—exposes the fictionalizing act, which imposes an attitude on the viewer of taking what is seen as play, as “make-believe”; this is not to say that the play is not purposeful, but it is difficult to lose sight of the film as staged due to the recursiveness of hearing something being composed that we have already seen staged on the screen. Other examples include references to other films, using musical scenes to break tension, and lore about Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) being partly written by twins. These pointers move the viewer to adopt different attitudes to the represented world, and as the tropes are warped here—a musical scene becomes a poignant connection between Charlie and Donald, rather than a beach-blanket, road-trip romp—the viewer gains a different perspective on movie-making. Thus, the viewer is mutated by Adaptation too, becoming, through the process of watching, the kind of audience Kaufman desires. Iser addresses the results of “self-disclosed fictionality” on the recipient of such a fictionalizing act (238-9). As applied to film, if viewers are freed from having to take the film as real, the different attitude to reality the film imposes can be more easily accepted. Thus, new attitudes can be accepted in play, learned through performances of reading or viewing. These attitudes may (although do not necessarily) remain with viewers beyond the represented world’s boundaries, marking a permanent evolution. This possibility of change is important to the disclosure of what the text is meant to represent, which is adaptation, in all its many senses. The writer can, through the fictionalizing act, produce a text; but the text’s recipient must complete the performance of representation through bringing what is represented to fruition through imagination, as Iser explains. Things are made present through imagination that have no reality outside of the text, are made to exist as if they are real in the reader’s imagination. Thus, through the whole process of representation, the fictionalizing act and the reader’s performance, what is not accessible in the extratextual world can be held in the mind, which is the making of make-believe (Iser, 243). Even then, the inaccessible may not be achieved, but only approached through these means: “Aesthetic semblance … neither transcends a given reality nor mediates between idea and manifestation; it is an indication that the inaccessible can only be approached by being staged” (Iser, 243). However, inaccessibility does not reduce the desire for what we cannot possess, as Orlean repeatedly witnesses; we can try to get what we desire, but ultimately it must be inaccessible because we cannot hold onto it at all. The staging of something inaccessible may not be the same as having it, but the manner of staging can also reveal something about what is sought—in this case, passion for Orlean, and perfect adaptation to one’s environment for Kaufman. The inaccessible is often figured as a blank in literature and film; solidifying it into form robs it of its power because the actual can never be the same as that pure potential—think of Orlean’s astonished and disappointed line in the film when she finally sees the ghost orchid: “It’s a flower.” Fear of disappointment prevents her from attempting to see the orchid in the real world, as she explains in her book; she would rather leave the possibility of any fulfillment she might receive in its perfect state of imagination. Even a pure reproduction is impossible, since representation ever creates something new. Film adaptation, of course, falls into this category; that Kaufman’s film does not equal Orlean’s book is obvious to anyone who has experienced both, but Kaufman’s script increases the audience’s awareness of this non-equation of film adaptations to their primary texts, as well as the possibility of the adaptation creating something new. Because of the performative quality of the reader’s role, actualizing the potential of a text, making it tangible through his or her imagination, we must cast Charlie Kaufman’s writing as a performance of reading as well. Iser posits a triadic relationship of the real, the fictional, and the imaginary, in place of the traditional dyad of the real and the fictional. The imaginary is the blank space and formless material made concrete through the fictionalizing act. In Orlean’s book, Florida is the imaginary; she writes, “Florida was to Americans what America had always been to the rest of the world—a fresh, free, unspoiled start. Florida is a wet, warm, tropical place, essentially featureless, and infinitely transformable. … Its essential character can be repeatedly reimagined” (123). For the character Kaufman, the screenplay is the imaginary; it is “infinitely transformable,” and can be “repeatedly reimagined”. Through the unformed potential of the screenplay that he imagines, he can do anything, access anything, even the inaccessible. He can use the screenplay to create fifty movies in one, to create a documentary and a Hollywood action film, a romance, a thriller. He can also use this space of infinite possibility to solve the problem of writing the real screenplay, by writing himself a new self and a partner in the form of a twin brother. Brian McHale explains that the dominant mode of postmodernist fiction is ontological. While McHale’s concern is primarily with questions about the modes of being of the worlds constructed by postmodernist fiction, the construction of new worlds often coincides with attempts by ontologically confused characters to understand themselves and their places in the world—sometimes they solve these problems by creating new worlds to suit (McHale, 9-10). Dick Higgins’s provocative question, quoted by McHale, “Which of my selves is to do [‘what is to be done’]?” highlights the quandary of characters in postmodernist fiction and, we might add, in postmodernist films (McHale, 10). The priority becomes determining the quality of one’s own being, or, given the problem of a certain kind of external reality, determining which self can best adapt to the new world. Kaufman creates multiple ontological layers to approach one of his problems, namely how to adapt a plotless book with no character development into a film. The film’s worlds multiply as he writes the screenplay before our eyes—often after an event that Charlie’s dictations echo—then erases, rewrites, and erases and rewrites, over and over again. I extend McHale’s thesis, however, in that, along with creating new worlds within the text to solve their ontological problems, characters create new selves to solve the problem of who to be in order to live meaningfully. To solve his multitude of problems, Kaufman creates not only a representation of himself in his screenplay (and one might argue, many representations), but also a twin brother who can help him do what he cannot. Kaufman creates at least two other selves to do what needs to be done in the real world and in the film’s world: that is, solving the intractable problem of making a movie out of this book, and for both himself and the character of Susan Orlean, connecting to other people. Kaufman does include a glimpse of the book that is true to its character, but he can’t make a movie out of just this, and a perfect reproduction of the book is impossible anyway—it is inaccessible, which is part of what causes Charlie such agonies. The theme of adaptation introduced by the subject of orchids ultimately provides a way to transform the book into a movie. Consequently, Charlie adapts to the problem in his environment, this unwritten screenplay, by multiplying himself. The character Robert McKee (a real name coincidentally significant in true Dickensian style) presents Charlie with the key to solving the twin problems of the screenplay and his own life; McKee tells Charlie that if characters don’t change there is no story; Charlie is skeptical, at first, at there being people in the world who actually do things, but McKee convinces him it is true. So Charlie, with Donald’s help, changes the characters from The Orchid Thief who do not change, or at least whom we don’t see change because of Orlean’s presentation of them. LaRoche as represented by Orlean does not change; the objects of his passion change, but not his relationship to them. Orlean herself refuses to change, to accept connections to other living things—she gives away the gifts of orchids from the orchid people she interviews. She articulates her lack of connection in an interview after the book’s publication. Kaufman includes this statement in the film, when Donald interviews her while pretending to be Charlie. This statement exposes her detachment, and we certainly do not wonder any more at her dispassionateness, although she says she wishes she had a passion. She claims her passion is for her subjects, but it is hard to believe that when we hear her comments about the relationships of reporters with their subjects. Ultimately, the book is disappointing because the one person present throughout never changes—refuses change, in fact, even when given the opportunity to connect with extraordinary people who might help her to change. For example, she reports, but does not explore, the implications of LaRoche’s change of passion from orchids to computers after his family tragedy; he says, and Kaufman emphasizes this in the film, that he loves computers because they can’t die, unlike the living things he cherished before. He has psychically adapted himself to this painful reality, and even if Orlean doesn’t learn from him, Kaufman does. Unlike Orlean, Charlie succeeds in breaking through his inability to connect with other people; he writes himself as a character who changes, who grows. Donald catalyzes this change, first by introducing Charlie to McKee’s ideas and holding onto them despite Charlie’s scoffing, so that he eventually sways Charlie with his conviction (and his success); and then, in the swamp, when he explains to Charlie that he owns his love and attachments to other people, and their judgments of him cannot make him let them go or spoil them for him. This revelation provides the final impetus for Charlie’s transformation, and he is able to connect to, and ultimately to integrate himself with, Donald, allowing him to continue after Donald is killed. Such integration commonly appears in stories of doubling, and the integrated double must then leave the story somehow. Donald’s effect on the screenplay, then, is the creation of a narrative arc and of characters who change, for better or for worse. Donald invents the relationship between Orlean and LaRoche and their illicit activities. Because of Donald, the movie also metamorphoses into the typical Hollywood film, with drugs, sex, violence, car chases, and a guy getting the girl in the end. But it is also through Donald that the action moves outside of Charlie’s head and that his solitude changes into action in the world involving other people. Thus, the process that brings the movie to that point makes it impossible for us to see it the same way as before, and it lends a significance to the ending that such a “Hollywood” copout wouldn’t otherwise have, just like the reprise of the musical number “Happy Together” in the swamp, this time a demonstration of Charlie’s affection for his brother. In order to excuse this “copout” and the complete departure from The Orchid Thief, Charlie must write himself into the screenplay, to picture his agonizing for us so we will sympathize with his choices, and he must write a double, Donald, who can make these changes, not a copout, but significant evolution. Kaufman changes himself psychically and emotionally in order to do what needs to be done: to create something that can survive through its novelty, to create a self that can survive through adaptation. References Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species. London: John Murray, 1859. ———. On the Various Contrivances by Which British and Foreign Orchids Are Fertilized by Insects, and on the Good Effects of Intercrossing. 2nd ed. London: John Murray, 1877. Iser, Wolfgang. Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1987. Orlean, Susan. The Orchid Thief. 1998. New York: Ballantine, 2000. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Bartlett, Lexey A. "Who Do I Turn (in)to for Help?: Multiple Identity as Adaptation in Adaptation." M/C Journal 10.1 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/04-bartlett.php>. APA Style Bartlett, L. (May 2007) "Who Do I Turn (in)to for Help?: Multiple Identity as Adaptation in Adaptation," M/C Journal, 10(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/04-bartlett.php>.