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

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.

Circle-Squarers

Chapter 3, “Circle-Squarers: Tennyson’s and Browning’s Form-Things,” looks at Tennyson’s Idylls of the King and Browning’s The Ring and the Book, two poems that worry about circling the square: creating lyric unity out of rectilinear narrative. Both tell of marriage and adultery, combining fractured narrative form with violent plots. And despite a historical remoteness at odds with the verse-novel’s modernity, they show the pervasive influence of the genre. The chapter considers how Tennyson and Browning embed into their poems two types of gem, diamond and pearl, that can be termed form-things: objects through which to express and explore generic affiliation. Finally, it moves from circular forms back to square books, to Browning’s The Inn Album, a verse-novel that consciously modernizes The Ring and the Book even as it embraces its own marginal generic status in an effort to sidestep the intractable geometry of circled squares.