I recently re-watched the movie “Adaptation.” This movie has become one of my favorites and it is one that, like all of Kaufman’s films, rewards multiple viewings. This time around the scene that stuck out to me the most was the one where the character of Charlie Kaufman attends the screenwriting seminar run by Robert Mckee (a real guy, by the way). This is not a spoiler, the scene in question was used heavily in the main trailer for the film.

Up until this point in the film, Charlie is painstakingly trying to craft a screenplay without the normal “cop-out’s” of a Hollywood film: action, love story, profound life lessons. He has hit a wall, and cannot figure out how to finish the screenplay. In a moment of profound defeat, Charlie attends Mckee’s seminar. The moment of clarity comes when Charlie sheepishly stands up at the seminar and asks Robert Mckee what he would do in Charlie’s situation.

“What if a writer is attempting to create a story where nothing much happens, where people don’t change…they don’t have any epiphanies…they struggle, are frustrated, and nothing is resolved…more of a reflection of the real world.”

This conclusion about reflecting the real world is one that, I believe, a lot of artists can relate to. Inside our own bubble it seems that to craft a true reflection of our world would be one that would often portray the boring lack of action in everyday life. What Mckee says in response is, in so many words, that this perspective is straight up wrong.

WARNING: F-BOMBS!!!!!

“…nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind!? People are murdered every day…there’s genocide, war, corruption. Every fucking day somewhere in the world somebody sacrifices his life to save somebody elses. Every fucking day someone, somewhere, takes a conscious decision to destroy someone else! People find love, people lose it… For christ’s sake, a child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church! Someone goes hungry…somebody betrays his best friend for a woman! If you can’t find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don’t know crap about life! [now shouting] And why the fuck are you wasting my two precious hours with your movie!?? I don’t have any use for it! I don’t have any bloody use for it.”

This hit me as an attack on any art made out of cynicism, any art made out of a self-absorption. What Mckee proves is that there is definitive reason to care about things in the world. If you deny that…then you’re simply wrong. “You don’t know crap about life,” in Mckee’s words.

Art is not about your feelings about your life. Art should be a reflection of the world at large…from your perspective. This doesn’t mean that all art should be about everything, but it does mean that an artist should be aware that their life is not everything.

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