I’m not convinced. On the level of comprehension, act three is exactly what Donald and McKee stand for. While a swamp ape would have been the deuxs ex machina abhorred by the character and real McKee, the alligator is not so bad. They are in a swamp, and the alligators have been seen there before. I see the third act as only sarcastic in retrospect (see my last blog post for more on this argument). Imagine if Transformers began with the main character telling his little brother how he hates movies about aliens from space. The rest of the movie would then seem to be a sarcastic reflection on this statement. Nothing in the form or content of the third act of Adaptation is disingenuous. Only by reflecting on the bulk of the film do we find it so.
On another note, I didn’t realize it until our conversation about Susan as implied author, but the sequence in which Susan reveals her last trip to Florida in detail and admits to her book being an unreliable source makes a great argument for her inclusion as an implied author. The three just might be real, god help us all.