The Different Personas in Our Everyday Lives in the Film, Adaptation and Novel, Fight Club

People deal with personas every day. They are the masks strapped so tightly on the faces of colleagues and the self that offer a different surface-level interpretation of character. Whether these personas are put on to impress or to hide the truth, people are prone to pursue an idyllic model of excellence when they put on a front. In literature, the metaphor of identity can be stretched even further when authors present the readers with another entity entirely, a persona made sentient who speaks and interacts with the characters. Consumers of media often recognize the trope of “angel/devil on the shoulder,” a mental manifestation of an inner conflict where the good and the bad present their points to a character. Though small, the influential hallucinations do project the character’s desires to a larger audience, effectively showing what the character wants or needs, and how much turmoil they face on the inside. With novels like Fight Club and films like Adaptation, viewers learn that there is a common theme in the characters’ interactions with their personas: both the Narrator (and his persona Tyler Durden) in Fight Club as well screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage [with the persona of Donald Kaufman]) in Adaptation craft a self-reflecting and aspirational figure in their imaginary counterparts. Using their imaginations, both the Narrator and Charlie Kaufman envision the strengths they wish they had in their personas, and their interactions with these figures are key to interpreting what their creators want most.

Throughout the course of Fight Club, the Narrator begins to slowly piece together that a mysterious and charismatic figure in his life, Tyler Durden, may not be who he thinks he is. The Narrator lives a life so mundane and boring, he feels that his surroundings came straight out of an Ikea catalog. He becomes a self-proclaimed “slave to my nesting instinct” (Palahniuk 43.) Even his job, an actuary for an auto company, involves a numbing combination of hearing stories of people perishing and relegating the fatalities to company expenditures. Low on energy and even lower on sleep, the anonymous Narrator (a name assigned to his character in discussion of the book) is looking for some meaning in his life. Enter Tyler Durden, a charming and paradoxical man’s man with an idea for an empire for people who don’t want to be subjects. Tyler’s tribalistic and anarchic view of the world shows up in his idea in order to free the people from their materialistic trappings. The premise is simple, “fight until one of you can’t fight anymore” (Palahniuk 51.) From this point onward, Tyler becomes a cult leader of sorts for squalls of men looking to fight their troubles away, including the Narrator, whose life seems to be moving in the correct direction now that he’s taken Tyler’s advice and given up pretending to be someone he’s obviously not. The system begins to crumble, however, when the Narrator becomes faced with an identity crisis. For some reason, people keep thinking he is Tyler Durden. The more he resists, the more evidence surfaces to prove this cause. The Narrator slowly descends into madness, but soon finds that he’s been Tyler Durden all along. What did Tyler have that he didn’t? Tyler “worked” in making and selling soap to obtain funds to keep Fight Club running, so work was out of the question. Tyler managed to make off with Marla Singer, making relationships irrelevant. What Tyler had that the Narrator envied was freedom. As Tyler frequently states, “this is freedom. Losing hope is freedom,” (Palahniuk 22.) Tyler’s lackadaisical attitude to the empire he’s created is caused in part by not putting much hope in his revolution. He has a confidence that his men will come through, not a hope. This confidence in the direction of his life is a voyeuristic pleasure that gives the Narrator’s strife meaning. This is why the persona of Tyler Durden is vital to the understanding of what the Narrator lacks: the confidence to separate from the drones in societies. Tyler’s iconoclastic view is something that the Narrator thinks will create a liberated identity, one that will make him stand out of the crowd.

Opposed to standing out of the crowd, Adaptation’s featured character Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage) has an issue with being far too polar to a general audience that he hopes his counterpart Donald Kaufman (also played by Nicolas Cage) can resolve. Some explanation is owed, however, to the existence of Donald Kaufman. Despite what the Golden Globes and the Academy for Performing Arts may think, Donald Kaufman is not screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s actual brother. His credit in the film is an inside joke from actual screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. The purpose of his existence is as a persona. Even though he is not a dissociative hallucination like Tyler Durden is, he is, in fact, a product of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s mind represented by Nicolas Cage through the magic of video editing. In this sense, we establish that Donald is a manifestation of what screenwriter Charlie Kaufman wants, but the film treats him like he is a real person with separate conflicts and desires. In Adaptation, Charlie Kaufman struggles to understand how to interpret the book The Orchid Thief and translate the piece into a film adaptation (hence the title.) In a blog post I wrote, I spoke about a key scene during a screenwriter’s workshop with writing guru Robert McKee (played by Brian Cox.) The scene pits Charlie, the struggling filmmaker, going at it alone after shutting out the production advice from his brother. Donald suggests a high-octane “action porn” movie with chase scenes and romances aplenty. Charlie, on the other hand, feels that the story represents a poetic nonchalantness that is reflected in the real world, where not much happens and the little things make life exciting. Stuck in a mire of writer’s block, he seeks advice from McKee to answer his burning question. McKee, however, is taken aback at Charlie’s proposition. In fact, he’s furious! McKee calls Charlie out on his inability to look past his internalized and insular point of view to realize just how much is going on in the world. McKee names several examples of the ongoings outside the front door just to reduce Charlie’s position on a movie where “people don’t change and nothing is resolved.” This is the turning point of Charlie’s movie idea, where he turns to his brother’s ideas and asks where to start. Donald is the persona Charlie turns to because of Donald’s incredible perspective and his ability to understand what the audience wants. Charlie turns to Donald to dissolve the antisocial and simplistic attitude that Charlie harbors inside, and in doing so we see what he desires: the drive to be relatable. Charlie wants to make something relatable, and he feels that his interpretation of The Orchid Thief is shared by his viewership. However, he realizes that his movie’s view is just as alienating as his world view. His aim to produce a great film is to create one that satisfies himself, rather than the audience. Donald, however, seems to understand what the people want, which is why he has a persona that Charlie secretly envies.

The contrast between the characters desires, the dynamic difference between standing out and fitting in, respectively, is small when compared with the overarching point: they both want to change who they are. In Fight Club, the Narrator wants to escape this self-made prison of the routine and the mundane to find a purpose in his Groundhog Day of a life. He finds his asylum in Tyler Durden, who is the salvation from the delusion of, “being perfect and complete” (Palahniuk 46.) Inversely, Charlie Kaufman’s character in Adaptation dreams of being recognizable and less polar, and he finds this power from Donald, who understands what constitutes a blockbuster and what sells to the public eye. As McKee spits at Charlie, “if you can’t find these kinds of things in life, then you, my friend, don’t know crap about life…” Charlie takes McKee’s advice in two waves: a statement about his work and his life. Donald’s advice churns out results from both the film idea and Charlie’s life. The idea that these imaginary (either literally or subtly) characters are the reflections of what the real protagonists lack proves the self-reflexive nature of the stories. It’s interesting then that the paragon of strength or popularity is created by the minds of these lesser beings, mundane and unpopular. The motivation to improve begins with creating the person they want to be and pursuing it. Quite like life, sometimes they find that the strength they chase often is within them all along.

Link to my blog:

https://paperware.wordpress.com/2015/03/16/the-kaufman-approach-to-neurotic-living/

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