‘A movie about flowers?’ Notes on the ecological turn in adaptation studies

Abstract This article takes up and responds to the recent ecological turn in adaptation studies, exploring the discipline’s widespread interest in the overlap between the notion of adaptation in evolutionary biology and the notion of adaptation in literature, film, and media studies. It argues that in order to develop a historically and ecocritically alert approach to adaptation studies, it is necessary to unpack what is at stake in using biological terms and paradigms to study adaptation in art. Firstly, it offers a survey of several studies that have explored the overlap between adaptation in nature and adaptation in culture, arguing that these have been overly influenced by the notions of neo-Darwinism that were popularized by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976). Secondly, it offers a rereading of the film that has become a primary case study among theorists who have reached for biological metaphors to explain cultural change: Adaptation (2002). It argues that whereas scholars have often tended to use Adaptation as a springboard from which to launch an exploration of the purported homology between adaptation in nature and adaptation in art, in fact, the film’s evolutionary themes are clearly historicizable, tied to a set of values coordinated around ideas of heteronormative reproductivity, dissemination, and growth. Examining those values helps to demonstrate how the film’s evolutionary themes are deployed as part of its representational strategies, thereby challenging the idea that they might be unproblematically used to describe the overlap between adaptation in biology and adaptation in art.