Speaking of writing...

I went yesterday to see Adaptation, the widely-praised house-of-mirrors movie about the perils of various kinds of writing. Daring to use the most sophomoric trick in a college freshman's book -- to write through the difficulty of completing an impossible assignment by writing about how difficult it is -- the movie depicts a neurotic screenwriter who, when awarded a contract to adapt a nonfiction book about orchid cultivation to the screen, freezes. He tries everything to get out of his writer's block, all the while being tormented by his twin brother, who decides to try his hand at this screenwriting thing and through beginner's luck and the use of every cliche in the book manages to write a million-dollar thriller in half the time.

Although it's highly entertaining, not the least because of its roller-coaster plot and its satire of the movie business -- every movie about the movie business is entertaining, for some reason -- I found the movie ultimately depressing, because I identified so deeply with the schlub. A classic self-defeating neurotic, he makes Woody Allen's familiar nebbish characters look positively actualized. It wasn't the writer's block I identified with -- that hasn't troubled me much lately, knock on wood -- it was the constant self-loathing, as expressed in voice-overs that perfectly capture the shy person's dilemma: I am nervous in this situation; I'm afraid everyone can tell how nervous I am; everyone must think I'm an imposter, and any minute now they will attack me; I get even more nervous. These thoughts, expressed in voice-over, sometimes literally drown out the real voices of other characters.

Man, I can identify. At the end of the story, a cathartic encounter with the other main characters resolves these problems for the protagonist. Maybe it's a sign that this isn't done well enough that I found the character's neuroses more believable than the moments where he grows out of them. Or maybe the filmmaker made this resolution deliberately weak, since the protagonist -- ostensibly the writer of the very film you're watching -- screams at one point that he doesn't want a film where there's character growth and resolution. In any case, I found the whole experience ultimately depressing.