oɯısǝuɐɯn

movielove:

gregbrown:

On Wednesday night, I went to go see Synecdoche, New York and dragged my two best friends along. I walked away liking it, enjoying it more and more as I think about the film; they walked away reconsidering their friendship.

So, it should be said at the start that this is a polarizing film. Most reactions will fall into one of two camps:

1. Kaufman’s films have always rewarded multiple viewings, but this is the first to necessitate them. Granted, this is due to the larger goals he’s set for himself and the entirely novel conceit he uses to explore them. The extra effort is totally worth it in the end, because this is his most ambitious, sprawling, and applicable film yet.
2. Kaufman has gone completely around the bend. This is the first of his scripts that he’s directed by himself, and it shows in the lack of moderating influence. He’s written films about himself before (like 2002’s Adaptation), but this pushes it over the line. It’s either vaguely-meaningful nonsense or too esoteric for anyone but Kaufman to understand.

I fall in the former category, while I think my friends would fall into the latter. If either of them would start a blog, they could totally confirm or deny that guess (HINT HINT HINT ZOE AND MINDY). But since they aren’t around, all I can really do is talk about my own, and try to communicate what exactly I liked about it.

Synecdoche, New York is funny. Like, really funny. Some of it comes from just the right line here or there. There are quite a few memorable lines, like the plumber who refuses to exit the bathroom so that Caden can use it, instead murmuring “I’ve seen boy parts before.” But a lot of the humor is situational and WTF in nature, like the woman who buys a house that is on fire. And then lives in that house. On fire. For decades.

And that’s the biggest stumbling block to the film, I think. So much of it is just WTF-strange. Eternal Sunshine had its oddities, but they were within a clearly-dream frame. With Synecdoche, on the other hand, there’s no such easy out, except for maybe being skeptical of everything being hallucinations by Caden. For example, Caden sees himself in advertisements on both the TV and his local bus stop. One such advertisement is for the film adaptation of a book mentioned to him earlier by his psychiatrist, a book written by a four-year-old about a guy who has a gay hookup with a former nazi, I think. I could not make this shit up, and I swear to you that it is actually within the film.

Now that I’ve probably scared off everyone, I have to backtrack and reiterate that I think Synecdoche is a great film. It’s just that it’s so new/avant-garde/uncompromising that I gotta go back and see it to really understand everything that was up with the first hour. But here’s the thing: the film merits itself even on the fraction of stuff going on that I could understand.

Caden gets a MacArthur “genius grant” and decides to use the money to construct a re-enactment of his surroundings within a giant local warehouse, one that will near-perfectly document the world. He claims a larger purpose of exploring death and how each of us is doomed to it, but it doesn’t have an effect on his aim of perfect duplication. He is so meticulous about the simulation that it eventually includes an actor playing himself, who then goes about creating a meticulous simulation of the simulation. If this sounds confusing, just watch the video for Bjork’s song “Bachelorette”. Similar idea.

But not everyone’s on board with the simulation. People start to take it to be real, even more real than the original events. One of Caden’s former lovers starts to date the first fake-Caden, and the situation gets weird from there. Really, really weird.

Normally this would be an interesting what-if, but there’s a critical hook here: Caden’s process is giving flesh to the same things that we do in our minds, in a sense. We have an image of how the world is, and we react to that image, not the world. We have conversations with people, do things with them, and use those experiences to build up a picture in our heads of what they’re like. It’s at best a fraction of them, but we take it to be them. We can fall in love with that image, that fantasy, not realizing that the image isn’t the person.

We know this happens and we know that everyone else is doing it too, so we shape ourselves to show a certain fraction, make a certain image in everyone else’s heads. And this ricochets back and forth between the imaginary images of ourselves.

Well, I think that this would be cool, so I’ll do it. But I think that she thinks that this would not be cool, so I won’t do it. But I think that she thinks that I’m thinking all this, so she might see through my ploy and still take me to be uncool even if I fake being cool.

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, as if a snake eating its own tail. It’s like in The Princess Bride when Vizzini, a Sicilian, tries to deduce where Dread Pirate Roberts has placed the poison.

Ebert might put it better in his review (which is fantastic):

The subject of “Synecdoche, New York” is nothing less than human life and how it works. Using a neurotic theater director from upstate New York, it encompasses every life and how it copes and fails. Think about it a little and, my god, it’s about you. Whoever you are.

Here is how life is supposed to work. We come out of ourselves and unfold into the world. We try to realize our desires. We fold back into ourselves, and then we die. “Synecdoche, New York” follows a life that ages from about 40 to 80 on that scale. Caden Cotard is a theater director, with all of the hangups and self-pity, all the grandiosity and sniffles, all the arrogance and fear, typical of his job. In other words, he could be me. He could be you. He could be Joe the Plumber. The job, the name, the race, the gender, the environment, all change. The human remains pretty much the same.

Here is how it happens. We find something we want to do, if we are lucky, or something we need to do, if we are like most people. We use it as a way to obtain food, shelter, clothing, mates, comfort, a first folio of Shakespeare, model airplanes, American Girl dolls, a handful of rice, sex, solitude, a trip to Venice, Nikes, drinking water, plastic surgery, child care, dogs, medicine, education, cars, spiritual solace — whatever we think we need. To do this, we enact the role we call “me,” trying to brand ourselves as a person who can and should obtain these things.

In the process, we place the people in our lives into compartments and define how they should behave to our advantage. Because we cannot force them to follow our desires, we deal with projections of them created in our minds. But they will be contrary and have wills of their own. Eventually new projections of us are dealing with new projections of them. Sometimes versions of ourselves disagree. We succumb to temptation — but, oh, father, what else was I gonna do? I feel like hell. I repent. I’ll do it again.

It’s all that, and more. Synecdoche isn’t a fable, it’s a story. There are many other themes touches, many other stories told. But at the same time, it returns to this theme again and again and again, finding it a bottomless well from which to draw the stuff of human drama.

Borges, master of the metaphysical short story, wrote one called “On Exactitude in Science” that might be useful to quote here.

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.

The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters.

In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

At the end of Synecdoche, Caden is left with tatters. In building a life-sized map, he found it no longer worked as a map but instead a poor copy of his mind. His bid to escape death, to create a perpetual-motion version of his mind enacted out in the flesh, has failed. And with it, he has lost his own ability to decide for himself. Fin.

—————

Interesting resources you might want to read in sussing out the film’s meaning:

• Roger Ebert’s review and follow-up. He gets it.
• Map-territory relation
• Cotard delusion - as in the main character’s name, Caden Cotard.
• Capgras delusion - “CAPGRAS” is the owner of the apartment that Caden starts cleaning towards the end of the film; the camera shows it briefly at some point, and I only remember because I went “A-HA!” to myself maybe a bit too loudly.
• The Bjork “Bachelorette” video I mentioned above. It hints at a fraction of what this film could get across.
• The lyrics to “Little Person”, a song sung at a nightclub Caden visits one night. It was created specifically for the film, and co-written by the score composer and Charlie Kaufman (the writer/director).

p.s.: Remember that the film itself is fake, so that adds another layer to the many nesting Matryoshka dolls of the plot. This is not a documentary.