“I can’t sleep. I’m losing my hair. I’m fat and repulsive”: Crises of Masculinity and Artistry in Spike Jonze’s Adaptation

Abstract

This chapter explores how Adaptation borrows, repurposes and subverts some of the concerns of the male melodrama. Nina Baym’s notion of “melodramas of beset manhood” is applied as a framework to describe Adaptation and its relation to a spate of comedies across the past twenty years that present beset manhood in comic form. Levinson works through the ways in which Adaptation’s particular perspective on midlife masculinity gets realized through – and, perhaps, finds an analogue in – its fractured narrative structure.