Buckland-Warren-Puzzle-Films-Complex-Storytelling-Contemporary-Cinema

The Screenplays of Charlie Kaufman 111by Nicholas Cage in the film], adapting Susan Orlean’s book The OrchidThief into a screenplay) is the sheer audacity of the 10 temporal titles. 2 Thesecond title, for example, is to “four billion and forty years earlier” andoccurs only on page 3 of the script. Kaufman quite playfully, however, refusesto inform us through a title or other obvious marker in the script whenwe flash forward or back to the “present,” instead letting us rely on sometimessubtle contextual clues. These clues are left especially hazy in the screenplay.While jarring at times, this complexity is usually not an impedimentfor the meaning – even if we’re not completely sure of the exact presentwe inhabit at a particular moment.The resultant temporal and spatial hi-jinks do not upend our experienceof the story (or potential stories) perhaps because such entanglementsmirror the fragmented potential stories of each day in ordinary life. Afterall, time itself is arguably complex. In fact, one should speak of differenttimes as opposed to one universal time. Each “time” is relative from oneperson to the next: a person traveling in a spaceship near the speed of lightmight only experience the passing of one year, whereas back on Earth decadeswill elapse. Such temporal relativity occurs in daily life, too – there is atime dilation, however slight, when objects move at any speed (e.g., walkingup stairs). Passengers onboard a flight from Los Angeles to New Yorkwill have aged a few nanoseconds less than those on the ground. Time travelin a film, effected through moving at very fast speeds (e.g., Flight of theNavigator [1986], Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home [1986], Event Horizon[1997]) is not, therefore, all that far from the reality of things. Reading ascreenplay also makes time relative, in the sense that two people willexperience nearly the same amount of story/plot (fabula/syuzhet) 3 time butlikely will live wholly different reading (projection) times.A reader curled up with a script arguably embodies a complex system,which Paul Cilliers (1998) defines as that which “as a whole cannot be fullyunderstood simply by analyzing its components. Moreover, these relationshipsare not fixed, but shift and change, often as a result of self-organization”(pp. viii–ix). While the reader might do most of the “self-organizing,” wemay think about how the physical nature of the script also puts constraintson the “reader/script” system (we listen to iPods and don’t read scripts whilejogging, for instance). Also, the relationships shift and change, differentlythan while sitting in a movie theater. Script pages might be flipped faster,for example, if the reader is in suspense and free from distractions.Adaptation, with its focus on both evolutionary and literary adaptation,combats the seemingly ineluctable march toward disorder with a complex,