THE JOINT JOURNEY OF DIRECTOR SPIKE JONZE AND SCREENWRITER CHARLIE KAUFMAN INTO ORCHIDS, THE HUMAN MIND AND DARWIN explores the question of human identity, the nature of reality and, concomitantly, purity, that is, whether to sell out or not. All mixed together it makes for a crazy flower arrangement of fact, fiction and extreme fantasy that outdoes the duo's previous outing with Being John Malkovich.
Fat, balding and neurotic screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Nicholas Cage), consummate self-obsessed head-tripper consumed with inner considering, is to write a film adaptation of The New Yorker writer Susan Orlean's (Meryl Streep) best-selling book The Orchid Thief, an account of 36-year-old botanist and autodidact John Laroche's (Chris Connor) arrest for poaching "ghost orchids" from the Fakahatchee Strand, a state-owned nature preserve deep in the heart of the Florida Everglades. Kaufman's problem is that the book doesn't have much of a story. There's the trial, but Orlean's first-person book gives it short shrift. Instead, it's simply a peg around which she centers her own quest for passion, the meaning of meaning, the history of Florida land speculation and the obsessive nature of orchid collecting—"orchidelirium."
So what's a screenwriter to do? Kaufman, given his screenplays for Being John Malkovich, The Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Human Nature, has a penchant for probing the plumbing of the mind. The artist in him wants to stay faithful to the book. That is, write a non-Hollywood script, one that reflects most people's experience of life, that is, no big changes, no epiphanies, no guns, violence. Pretty boring. Except for those who liked Andy Warhol's films, not a crowd pleaser.
No wonder then that Charlie, a contemporary model of Thoreau's idea that "most people live lives of quiet desperation," drives himself nuts trying to bring real life to the screen. Up to this point in the film it's all fact. There is a Charlie Kaufman who is a screenwriter and who has been assigned to write a screenplay of Susan Orlean's book about orchids and a renegade South Florida botanist.
But now enter Donald (also played by Nicolas Cage), Charlie's brother. Two strange peas from the same pod. Where Charlie is obsessed with ideas, Donald has no ideas. Where Charlie is hyper about people, Donald is oblivious, accepting others only as appendages of his own ego-world. Where Charlie agonizes over artistic purity, Donald's eye is riveted to becoming a big success. Where Charlie, after 13 weeks of sweating still doesn't have a screenplay that jells, brother Donald, fresh from a screenwriting course taught by a screenwriting guru, has written The 3, a conventional action thriller about a serial killer with a multiple personality disorder. And worse, brother Donald has sold his screenplay for six figures.
Charlie's sweaty head and Donald's greasy palms are contrasted with flashbacks to Susan Orlean's research visits to the Florida swamps to sound out her book's protagonist, the raving, megalomaniac collector John Laroche who trades one obsessive passion for another—first fossils, then tropical fish, then turtles, now orchids. In the book, Orlean asks a park ranger why so many people find orchids seductive. "Oh, mystery, beauty, unknowability, I suppose," he says. "Besides, I think the real reason is that life has no meaning. I mean, no obvious meaning. You wake up, you go to work, you do stuff. I think everybody's always looking for something a little unusual that can preoccupy them and help pass the time." Too bad Charlie couldn't have worked that into the script.
The film begins shifting gears when Charlie's Hollywood agent begins hounding him for the script, warning that a non-script might be the ruination of his career. Faced with reality instead of his thoughts about reality, Charlie's fear enables him to fly to New York to meet Orlean in order to break his writer's block. Susan Orlean in the flesh is no match for the imagined one. The shock gives Charlie the oomph to break through his buffers about attending a screenwriting seminar. There, he's told what everyone has been telling him all along—to adapt. To adapt the screenplay he must adapt. Echoing Darwin, he says, "To survive you have to adapt." You can't write a film where nothing happens, no one changes, everything stays pretty much the same. It may or may not be life but it ain't film.
So Charlie adapts, with gusto. His brother and he, who are always talking over or through one another, never really listening—as Charlie says, "We only share the same DNA"—now work on the script together. Suddenly, the proven attention-getters (takers) of drugs, sex, car crashes and death jerk the script, now the film, into Hollywood reality. There's even an epiphany where the dying Donald (Cage 2) whispers to Charlie (Cage 1) that "It's who you love, not who loves you" that counts. With that—the two sides of himself again speaking to each other—and Charlie (3) (remember, as just one of the many refractions, the $600K script, The 3?), the guy in whose head all this has been imagined, script-wise, kills off his 'brother,' completes the script and drives off into life, if not a new man, at least one with hope and a bit more confidence. For in finishing the script he has united, at least for a time, the two sides of himself, the sweaty guy focused on purity and the greasy success-at-any-cost guy.
That the film has all happened within Charlie's head, that it's not real, is that a turnoff? For the literal-minded it will be. But where else does it all happen but in the mind? The screenwriter may take an omniscient point of view and see into all his characters' minds, or he may tell the story from one person's mind, that is, that person's point of view, or that of several people—but it is still happening within his mind. We can't get out of it, no matter how we contrive to put ourselves "out of it." Where else, as the idealist philosopher Bishop Berkeley (1685–1753) pointed out, does it happen? Is there an "out there" different from what's "in here." Is there an objective reality that can be known? Kant says yes but limits our knowledge of it to physical reality. Gurdjieff says the only thing missing from Kantss philosophy was the concept of levels (the Ray of Creation).
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