Charlie Kaufman’s screenplay/Spike Jonze’s film Adaptation uses Synecdoche as the basis for the films plot/theme:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HtZ2M4e_AM
As mentioned in class, Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York is one big visual synecdoche, yet his second major motion picture screenplay, Adaptation, he does the same thing in another manner. Adaptation is a metafictional film about a man’s desperate attempts to adapt a non-fiction memoir about orchids (The Orchid Thief) into a screenplay adaptation. Synecdoche is when some part of something comes to represent the whole of whatever it is a part of. In Adaptation, Kaufman’s impossible endeavor to adapt a meditation on flowers into a feature length screenplay is only part of the movie at first, yet as the film progresses, we see that this endeavor—this small part of the film—comes to represent the whole film, hence the films title. Using synecdoche, the smaller part—Kaufman’s attempt to adapt the impossible—becomes the larger part—the movie Adaptation. This creates an intricate display of an endeavor that morphs into its own solution–the part becomes the whole.
20th Century Literature 