it's about flowers: Essay
Charlie Kaufman is a screenwriter known for being experimental, such as in his films Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Adaptation. In Adaptation he shows this by being self-reflexive and including himself in the script, blurring the lines between fact and fiction. The character of Charlie Kaufman then struggles with the challenge of writing a movie about flowers. He says, “I’d want to let the art exist, rather than be artificially plot driven… I don’t want to cram in sex or guns or car chases… Or characters learning profound life lessons. Or growing, or coming to like each other, or overcoming obstacles to succeed in the end. I mean, the book isn’t like that, and life isn’t like that. It just isn’t. I feel very strongly about this” (5-6). By the end of the film, the things that he did not want to include make their appearances, though. “it’s about flowers”, an adaptation of Adaptation into a series of concrete poems, mainly consists of Kaufman’s words and removes the sex, guns, car chases and so forth, showing that, in a way, Kaufman really did write about flowers. These poems are an attempt at the avant-garde, to use space and another artist’s words to create something new.
The avant-garde “pushes the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm within definitions of art/culture/reality” (Wikipedia). It is experimentation, and in a sense it is adaptation: without the avant-garde “art itself would stagnate and become dormant and merely craft, repeating the same style over and over” (Wikipedia). Thus the avant-garde keeps art in a state of change and growth. “it’s about flowers” pushes boundaries in terms of its form. By being concrete poems, many of the poems question conventions about the way poetry is read. Rather than being read left-to-right and top-to-bottom like traditional poetry, some of the poems are organised in such ways that words or sentences are upside-down, or need not be read in any particular order, or jump from one place to another so that it is up to the reader to figure out how the text should be read. Where possible, I used shapes to aid the reader: for example, in the fourth poem, the shape of infinity symbol was used to lead the reader from one petal to the other. Though the text may be more difficult to read as traditional poetry, and therefore not as successful in terms of communication, it makes the aesthetic of the piece much more successful.
Concrete poetry is also an example of how artists make the empty space just as important as the words. Without the use of black Bristol board and careful organisation of the words on top of the blank space, the seed, root, flower and leaf shapes of the poems would not have been possible, and it is the shapes that have proven to be the real challenge and art in this piece. The black background is also another way of connecting “it’s about flowers” to Adaptation, as orchids are displayed on a black backdrop during one of the scenes of the film.
Throughout the film, the character of Kaufman insists that he wants to write something new, that he wants to write about flowers, and that he wants to stay true to Susan Orlean’s work. In the same sense, “it’s about flowers” tries to stay true to Kaufman’s work, by using many of his own words and ideas. Had the poem not consisted of so much of Kaufman’s writing, it would not be as successful: it would be impossible to show how he really did write about flowers and about adaptation, and how a work of art could come out of that without adding a plot. These poems also add to the recent dialogue in the creative world of what is original and what is art. Much like the art made from pastiche, collage and montage, “it’s about flowers” is not about creating something new from scratch, but about making something new from something that already exists.
