Fashionistas you have arrived 3-25-03 - 10-3-03

[greatwhitenorthchick]

Apparently the masturbation scenes in Adaptation are the key to the whole movie. I can't really figure out why, but this is my best guess:

Nobody and nothing in the movie really "exists" except in Charlie's mind. His twin is just another aspect of his personality. The movie is just about two ways of doing the same adaptation of the novel - the first half is Charlie attempting to write and be true to himself and the second half is him saying fuck it and writing the screenplay the way he thinks it will work because he has no real understanding of the world. So Charlie is split in two - (the Donald half takes over in the second half) and the movie is split. And it's about him trying to adapt the book and trying to adapt to the world at the same time. And the book is about an orchid, which is a flower that constantly has to learn to adapt. And the Seminoles have to adapt, and Meryl Streep can't adapt to New York because she's in love with the toothless guy blah blah blah.

And the movie has all kinds of echoes of this split. "The only thing more clichéd than a serial murderer is split personality" etc. Donald's kidnapper and kidnappee are the same person, Susan has two separate lives etc. And when Donald dies at the end, it means that Charlie is learning to adapt to the world so he no longer needs this other personality.

So does the masturbation explain the whole movie because when you masturbate instead of having another actual real person there to have sex with, you just conjure one up and it's actually two people having sex but both of them are you? And the movie is a whole exercise in masturbation because it's just a huge exercise in Charlie's self-indulgence - why do we care about what is going on in his head?

There are unusual parallels between Adaptation and the movie "the Ladies Man" - that you all may not have noticed - i.e. the masturbation scenes, the disturbing duality between Will Ferrell and the Ladies Man, the orchid drug and the Courvoisier, the car accident/the boat accident etc.
It's uncanny.