Josh Rohrmayer was enduring a powerful, multi-day, disruption (i.e. full stop cessation) of the ability to sleep when he called himself on the phone. He was under an assault of rapidly forming ideas about things to write about. One trail of mental associations led to something he could write about the screenplay of one of his favorite films{1} of all time. He thought about the idea of Charlie Kaufman being one of his heroes. He fell into a tangential reverie about his heroes more generally… Since he was driving and not thinking clearly enough to pull over and jot down some of these ideas on paper, he had an immediately-acknowledged-as-hilarious-/-ridiculous idea to leave an audible note-to-self on his voicemail. He wasn’t even sure if this was possible but he dialed his own cell phone number anyway and exactly nothing happened. He then checked his voicemail and discovered a function which would allow him to create a message and then send it to the voicemail of whichever number he entered thereafter. This could work.
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{1} It's a "film" when taken "seriously" and a "movie" when not. This is the reflexive speech pattern of the wrinkled high brow. The rarely spoken code of the arthouse set.
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He immediately chuckled at the situation at the outset of recording the message. He commented on the weirdness of it. He spoke slowly, in detached monotone that degraded each word and rough idea being formed in his mouth and barely drooled out toward the intended goal post of his future ear. The idea of describing this bizarre event within the review of a film that may just be the most meta-fied, self-referential thing ever committed to celluloid struck him suddenly then as an obvious adding of even more egregious layers of meta-referentiality, especially considering that within the film are scenes of the screenwriter of the film listening to his own self-denigrating and manically scatterbrained ideas played back to him as aural notes-to-self, scenes which Josh had just instinctively quoted verbatim to his voicemail/future self as things to remember to mention in his review as being brilliant and hilarious aspects of the most densely meta-layered thing in the whole cotton pickin' postmodern world, all of which then, of course, would be commented upon further in the way he's doing...right...now. The strata of self-reference and meta-metaness bludgeoned his sleepless brain into a submission that put the whole thing on hold, especially because several other potentially not-awful ideas for book reviews and short fictions were hovering in an intra-copulating swarm that threatened to congeal into one big ol' paralytic monster of indistinguishable ideas—dumbly hulking above, terrifyingly useless. Basically, he needed some shut eye in a real bad way.

I adore the films of Charlie Kaufman. All of them. Intensely. There are so many great things to say about each one, and Adaptation stands out as probably the finest, most fully realized one of all. If I may (and I may) insert an inevitable, can’t-be-helped, DFW reference: this film bears some important similarity to the epic, struggle-with-the-self-and-against-postmodernism, 140 page grand finale of a story in the Girl with Curious Hair collection called "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way" in the sense that they both ratchet up the so-called postmodern techniques in a seriously self-critical manner, a fun-to-poke-at-the-self kind of way, and in a way that shows affection and appreciation for those techniques but only when they are used to reach the emotionally gratifying ends that art has functioned to meet probably since the first cave painting or fireside drum circle. They both pile on the techniques of meta-narratives and the like as both an indictment of and tribute to them.

One gets the sense that Kaufman really did go through a lot of what is portrayed by Nic Cage (in his greatest role/s to date). It would make perfect sense really. He’s trying to escape being pigeon-holed as the wacky, off-beat, pomo surrealist du jour of Hollywood after the much deserved success of Being John Malkovich. He's attempting to write a straightforward story that he simply summarizes throughout the film—after exhaling what sounds like air-as-frustration—as simply being "about flowers." This proves to be a difficult task for him. He tries to insert the entire history of life on Earth into the script at one point{2}, only to quickly find himself slumped over, defeated and depressed, listening to his previously recorded self ferally shouting at his present self though the handheld tape recorder about single cell organisms and "worker monkeys" and "simple monkeys", etc.
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{2} Which, of course, is actually done in a beautiful time-lapse montage sequence early on in the film.
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Then he breaks the, I dunno, the 800th wall or so and initiates an infinite regress into the self, by writing himself into the malformed and barely begun script as the struggling screenwriter who's writing himself into his malformed and barely begun script—all of which he's later shown to be listening to the recorded audio-notes of, and then consequently once again slumped in defeat, sweat-sheened, and disgusted with himself.

KAUFMAN
I'm insane. I'm Ourobouros.

DONALD
I don't know what that word means.

KAUFMAN
I've written myself into my screenplay.
It's eating itself. I'm eating myself.

DONALD
Oh. That's kinda weird, huh?

KAUFMAN
It's self-indulgent. It's narcissistic.
It's solipsistic. It's pathetic. I'm
pathetic. I'm fat and pathetic.

Theses are the scenes that flashed into Josh's mind during that idea-assault on his morning drive home from work. He'd been thinking about how he really, really wanted to avoid the somewhat alluring and repulsive trap of writing too autobiographically in the short fiction collection that he'd been putting together as a portfolio for graduate school applications. The line "I have no understanding of anything outside of my own panic and self-loathing and pathetic little existence. It's like the only thing I'm actually qualified to write about is myself and my own self..." popped into his head and kicked off the whole previously mentioned "trail of mental associations" leading to the accidentally and perfectly meta-fying phone call to the self.

One of my favorite scenes in the film is when Charlie's defiant will has been ground down and he's attending a screenwriting seminar that his twin brother Donald{3} has been cultishly touting throughout the film, which heretofore had only resulted in Donald being chastised by the high art renegade, King Shit of Pomo Fuck Mountain (i.e. Charlie), because such seminars are deemed to be plebeian, creatively suffocating, shallow, commercially objectified and determined, etc.
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{3} Donald does not exist outside of the logic of this film, however, "he" received actual screen writing credit on the Adaptation script, which went on to be nominated for a Academy Award and as such I recall getting a real kick out of seeing both Charlie's and Donald's names being announced as nominees during the big, televised, Hollywood ceremony.
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In the lecture hall at the seminar, McKee, the charismatic leader of these seminars, is speaking in the background behind Kaufman’s voiceover narration of his massively self-loathing thoughts which gut him as a pathetic sellout for attending the seminar, and just as he’s about to exit the hall in a huff of self-chastisement, McKee’s voice breaks through to the foreground, stopping both the neurotic voiceover and Kaufman’s attempted exit in their tracks with a booming "AND GOD HELP YOU IF YOU USE VOICEOVER IN YOUR WORK, MY FRIENDS. GOD HELP YOU. THAT’S FLACCID, SLOPPY WRITING. ANY IDIOT CAN WRITE A VOICEOVER NARRATION TO EXPLAIN THE THOUGHTS OF A CHARACTER." It’s a hilarious moment among many that then segues into the following exchange between Kaufman and McKee when Kaufman decides to ask a question:

KAUFMAN
Sir, what if a writer is attempting to create a story where nothing much happens, where people don't change, they don't have any epiphanies. They struggle and are frustrated and nothing is resolved. More a reflection of the real world —

MCKEE
The real world?

KAUFMAN
Yes, sir.

MCKEE
The real fucking world? First of all, you write a screenplay without Conflict or Crisis, you'll bore your audience to tears. Secondly: nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day! There's genocide, war, corruption! Every fucking day somewhere in the world somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else! Every fucking day someone somewhere makes a conscious decision to destroy someone else! People find love! People lose it! For Christ's sake! A child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church! Someone goes hungry! Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman! If you can't find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don't know CRAP about life! And WHY THE FUCK are you wasting my two precious hours with your movie? I don't have any use for it! I don't have any bloody use for it!

KAUFMAN
Okay, thanks.

Early in the film there’s a scene where Kaufman is meeting with a film executive to talk about adapting the book "about flowers" in which Kaufman, in a nervously sweating fashion, begins to stutter off all the Hollywood clichés he wants to avoid putting into the script, and each and every one will eventually come to pass as this excellent, must-watch, three minute condensed version of the film shows perfectly.

By the latter end of the film it seems that Donald Kaufman has basically taken the reins on the script as McKee’s demanded "Crisis" and "Conflict" begin to erupt all over the screen. Yes, the dreaded Hollywood clichés that Kaufman disparages early on begin to crop up, but this is the truly brilliant and redemptive thing about the film: they work and work very well, both as they are supposed to traditionally, as entertaining and emotionally effective turns of the screenplay and camera, and as hilariously self-aware insertions, with a wink and nod to the audience and to itself, all brilliantly wrangled together and structured with technical prowess. Team Donald and Team Charlie are reconciled both symbolically as screenwriting techniques and overarching philosophies about art, and within the narrative of the film itself as the twins begin to fight less and even share moments of brotherly love.

One such moment is a prime example of the power of this dual-leveled reconciliation in which the brothers are hiding for their very lives in a Floridian swamp from the murderous intentions of John Laroche, the new orchid-poaching secret-paramour of the New Yorker columnist, Susan Orlean, who is also the author of the very book "about flowers" that is supposed to have been adapted throughout the film this entire time. Susan has insisted that they must be killed because they've discovered things about her that she can’t allow to see the light of day. The Kaufman twins are hunkered down there and they have a teary-eyed, sentimentality-fest that peaks when Donald sagely says "You're not what you love, but what loves you", which, to be honest, I’m still not sure I even really understand, but the moment—as it is simultaneously funny, and cleverly, self-referentially connected to Charlie's anti-Hollywood rant early on in the film—with the soundtrack swelling and the display of brotherly love within the crumbling edifice of their cynical rivalry—has actually brought real tears out of my eyes. More than once.

Or when Susan Orlean wails melodramatically about wanting to be a baby again, wanting to start her life over ("before it got all fucked up!") and to be carried out differently. Or when she waxes philosophical about the importance of being fascinated by the world or being able to narrow one's focus in order to find passion and eschew existential malaise—these moments all hit me in a direct and serious way through all of the the sly winking and nudging. This also happens as John Laroche's many horrible, real life tragedies are revealed throughout the film, or when he hits upon genuinely wise notions about life within his goofy flurries of egomaniacal eccentricity. And there are many more gemlike moments of real human joy and sorrow nestled throughout the meta-tastic hall of mirrors of the screenplay upon book upon screenplay embedded within a screenplay competing with a fictional screenplay, etc, all reflecting both real life figures (McKee, Orlean, Laroche, Charlie Kaufman) and symbolic fictional figures (both Donald and, to some weird, self-parodic extent, "Charlie Kaufman"), and all bending in upon itself and back out again at a rapid, fluctuating clip, brilliant and heartfelt all the way through.

LAROCHE
You know why I like plants?

ORLEAN
Nuh uh.

LAROCHE
Because they're so mutable.
Adaptation is a profound process.
Means you figure out how to thrive
in the world.

ORLEAN
[pause] Yeah but it's easier for plants.
I mean they have no memory. They just move on
to whatever's next. With a person though,
adapting almost shameful. It's like running away.

This film, like other great works of meta-art, does a heroically wonderful job of using the potentially trapping and self-defeating tools of The Pomo Bag o' Tricks in order to lead the way out of these trappings and pitfalls. The film houses many deeply sincere moments of the kind of real human drama that McKee passionately bellows about, roaring it into the bones of the neurotic, high brow screenwriter who afterwords tells the traditionalist McKee, while now begging him for screenplay advice, that "what you said this morning shook me to the bone. What you said was bigger than my screenwriting choices. It's about my choices as a human being." Some of these sincere and "Hollywood-style" moments I think are clearly meant to be attributed to "Donald Kaufman" but the thing is that there is no Donald Kaufman to pin them on out of fear of being seen as a sap and/or a hack writer. He's a representation of a part of Charlie (as is the very Nic Cage-as-Charlie representation itself) that wrestles within a single mind (both within the film and always hovering over it from outside, hunched over the keyboard), the part that intuitively understands the deeper purposes of art: to connect with people, to communicate important ideas and emotions as well as to simply entertain. And Charlie is still right to understand that art is also there to dazzle with intricate structures and Big Ideas, but as McKee says to him during their version of a heart-to-heart at a bar after the day's lectures have wound down, "You must go back and put in the drama." Charlie Kaufman reconciles these competing artistic drives, both from within and from outside of the film itself, while simultaneously exploring them in a truly amazing way that both fucks the mind right proper while never forgetting to sincerely and compassionately tug at the heart.
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Postscript: This is an increasingly well-worn theme of mine in my book reviews and in my general explanations about what I’m drawn to and bowled over by in artistic and intellectual endeavors, which can be cut down to size as: head 'n' heart are equally important. As it gets repeated more and more my gut-reaction is to yawn a vicious, dismissive, self-aware yawn at it, but then I regroup and convince myself that it's an important theme to keep alive and to keep continuously refining and proliferating it in a world that, in many cultural sectors, is increasingly inward-turning, self-referencing, meta-this-and-that-ing, and saturated with multiple mutating subspecies of irony, from the well-crafted and virtuous to the cheaply and easily inherited and detached and self-subsuming. The latter forms are often encouraged by the powerful twin-spectres of corporatism and consumer culture, which utilize the "we don't really mean what we say" aspect of irony in order to hawk goods and services by ironically poking fun at them while still ultimately endorsing them and carrying out the very ills they've just self-awarely pretended to deflate. We've really got to stay on our toes when so many cynical reflexes of detachment are more and more available to common disposal.