Passion and Fear

No matter who we are in the world, or what social class we are in, each of us has our own desires to do something, to become something, or to have something. When the desire is big enough that we would fight for it, it becomes passion; it is something we are passionate about and also something that makes us the way we are. Both the main characters from two movies Adaptation by Spike Jonze (2003) and Fight Club by David Fincher (1999) have their owns desires and something that they fear. By analyzing these two movies, we can see how each individual character has their own way of pursuing their desires along with fighting the fears that drive them, which leads them to different paths.
In Adaptation, we have John Laroche – a guy who is fascinated by orchids. Like everyone else, he has more than one thing that he once loved; he once loved fish, but he said: “one day, I said fuck fish” – “I’m done with fish.” The only thing that remains are orchids. He has never stopped nurturing the passion that he has for orchids; in other words, orchids are his passion. He loves them and knows a lot about them, as we can see when he tells the details of each type of orchid to Susan when they were at the Orchid show. Like any other orchids hunter, he traveled mile after mile, went through many dangerous places just to get an orchid that he loves. It is not only the orchids itself that fascinates him but also the journey it takes in order to have the orchid that makes it so special to him. In the movie, he says: “when you pot your flower, you can’t let anything get in your way.” This statement shows us that the nursery that he had and every plan that was planted in it are what he loves and also what he is about. When the hurricane comes and destroys the nursery, it destroys him because “you are what you love,” and when his love was taken away, it means that he will become no one. Like a mom losing her own child, losing his nursery and all of the orchids that he had been collecting for years, desperately breaks his heart. After the tragedy, he is afraid of recreating a new one because the pain of possibly seeing it to be taken away again would kill him. Eventually, he gives up his dream of owning a nursery even though he still loves orchids. He decides to pursue a career that does “not [deal with] a living thing that’s gonna leave or die or something…” – porn photography. We can see that the change actually comes from his great desire for orchids at the beginning and then later becomes his fear that stops him from chasing his dream. He assumes the change might be the thing that can make him happy. However, if he knew he was going die at the end of the movie as a porn photographer, and leaves all his whole-life-passions behind, would he regret it? No one knows…
Susan Orlean is the author of The Orchid Thief in the movie Adaptation. “I suppose I do have one an embarrassing passion. I want to know what it feels like to care about something passionately,” Susan Orlean said in the movie. She appears to be a charming and intellectual woman, who surprisingly doesn’t know exactly what is her passion until she meets Laroche. Obviously, she makes more money than Laroche makes, and her social status and her education is higher than his, but she is jealousy of Laroche’s passion for orchids, because she doesn’t have any desire; she just does what a writer is supposed to do. There are many times in the movie when she questions why people are fascinated about orchids or whether Orchids are just really fascinating flowers. In the movie, she says: “ I want to want something as much as people want these plans.” The more she reads about Orchid and sees how people get crazy for it, the more she wants to know why it is so tempting to everyone, and without noticing, she makes it her desire to see the Ghost Orchid – “if it is it a real flower, I want to see it…what I really wanted is to see this thing that people were drawn into in such a