Adaptation in Adaptation

Or the Significance of Failure

Abstract

Within the theoretical framework as formulated by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx, Spike Jonze's and Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation. can be interpreted as a generic account of what is happening when a novel is adapted to the screen. The film shows how this process is structured around the fidelity criterion on the one hand and the demand of originality on the other. In focusing on these two themes and tracing the ways in which they interconnect and ultimately seem to cancel each other out, the film proposes to consider failure to be essential to the process of adaptation.