"Context is key. From that comes the understanding of everything." - Kenneth Noland
Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York" can be loosely divided into three sections. In the first we're introduced to Caden Cotard, a theatre director who is busy preparing a production of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman". Cotard is obsessed with death, the perishability of flesh, diseases, old age and psychological disorders. The name Cotard is itself a reference to "Cotard's syndrome", a mental disorder in which the subject believes that he is already dead.
So Cotard is a gloomy depressive, part Woody Allen and part an amalgamation of every neurotic character Kaufman's ever written. Played by Philip Hoffman, Caden is a tired man rendered perpetually gloomy by his sheer hyper-sensitivity. As Sharon Lind states in "Overexcitability and The Gifted", people with emotional excitability, often artists, manic-depressives or philosophers, "are acutely aware of their own feelings and of how they are growing and changing, often carrying out inner dialogues and practising self-judgement." In other words, the truly creative mind is no more than a creature born or pushed towards an abnormal hyper-sensitivity. This deep "attunment" then becomes either a blessing or a curse, and is often either channelled into creative endeavours, or numbed via drugs, sex, technology, art, alcohol etc, all of which serve as a means of numbing stimulus.
The choice of having Caden stage a production of "Salesman" is significant. Miller's play was about a businessman obsessed with attaining greatness, despite the fact that he was wholly untalented. In "Synecdoche", however, we have Caden Cotard become a stand in for writer Charlie Kaufman, both artists trying to overcome their respective existential problems by attaining greatness through art. IE - they're both intimately aware of their own mortality (and inconsequentiality) and so seeking to achieve immortality (and fame) through "great art".
So the first section of "Synecdoche" is simply a gloomy rehash of everything directors like Antonioni, Bergman, Wenders and Allen have done before (turn to literature, and such meta-fictional, postmodern crises are even more common - see David Wallace, Chris Ware et al - but of course nobody reads anymore). Kaufman may think he's latched on to some profound human truth, but his paean to suffering will seem limp to anyone who has read a little Satre, Camus, Dostoyevsky or Heidegger. For a film which begins with the line "I think I'm dying" and ends with the whisper "Die", the picture says surprisingly little about life and death, Kaufman content to simply wallow in despair.
A compressed version of Wenders' "Parix, Texas", the second section of the film is no better. Caden separates from his wife, has a series of sexual affairs, and attempts to track down his missing daughter. We watch as he buries his pain is sex and vices, but Kaufman never really explores these escapes. Everything is handled with a quirky, very snide tone. Compare this to Solondz's "Storytelling" and "Happiness" or Tamara Jenkins' "The Savages", the later two being better films in which Philip Hoffman essentially plays the same character undergoing the same problems. But it's all outdated existentialism (ie bourgeois nihilism). The kind of white middle-class malaise that Sam Mendes churns out, without much regard for any wider real-life, socio-economic context (ie cause).
Luckily the third section of the film deals exclusively with context. This is where Kaufman's playful genius kicks in. Cotard receives a Macarthur Genius Grant and is given funding to create a "revolutionary theatre experience" which is brutal in its honesty. "I won't settle for anything less than the brutal truth!" he exclaims.
And so Caden begins his magnum opus, constructing a vast theatre experience inside a disused warehouse. His play's story is nothing less than a reconstruction of his entire life, and consists of thousands of actors, doppelgangers, huge sets and hundreds of subplots. Gradually the production mutates and overwhelms the source material. Scenes from the play and scenes from life become interchangeable. Actors are hired to play the actors who are hired to play the actors who are hired to play the actors. The play expands, gradually becoming an ever-expanding world, the narrative morphing into a more literate version of Lynch's "Inland Empire".
Really, what Caden is attempting to create here is a work of art in which every action, every choice, every character, is subject to an unbreakable chain of dramatised causes and effects. "There are nearly thirteen million people in the world," he says, "None of these people are an extra! They have to be given their due!" And so Caden wishes to map everything. He wishes to put every gesture, every human being, in proper context, a desire which is of course wholly impossible, as you'd need a work of art that stretched back to the beginning of time and extended far beyond your own death.
In contrast, Caden's wife is an artist who focuses on the minute. She is a painter whose paintings gradually become smaller and smaller, focusing on single, seemingly inconsequential details. Significantly, she is happy and successful. Ignorance is bliss, after all, and existential misery stems precisely from the super-awareness of one's place in the universe (ie context).
The film ends on a powerful note, Caden's "ego dying" such that he "let's go" directorial control of his own "stage-play" (ie to cease being the ordering force in his life and move on). But what the film does best is show how decision making is timeless. Consider one scene in which a character's decision to buy a house also includes her decision to marry a certain man and die in that same house. She is made wholly accountable for her actions, including those she could not possible foresee in the real world. Kauffman's point: context is truth, but truth is suffering.
7.9/10 – Though its existential musings are trite, the film's third section is genius. Worth two viewings.
Charlie Kaufman's "Synecdoche, New York" can be loosely divided into three sections. In the first we're introduced to Caden Cotard, a theatre director who is busy preparing a production of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman". Cotard is obsessed with death, the perishability of flesh, diseases, old age and psychological disorders. The name Cotard is itself a reference to "Cotard's syndrome", a mental disorder in which the subject believes that he is already dead.
So Cotard is a gloomy depressive, part Woody Allen and part an amalgamation of every neurotic character Kaufman's ever written. Played by Philip Hoffman, Caden is a tired man rendered perpetually gloomy by his sheer hyper-sensitivity. As Sharon Lind states in "Overexcitability and The Gifted", people with emotional excitability, often artists, manic-depressives or philosophers, "are acutely aware of their own feelings and of how they are growing and changing, often carrying out inner dialogues and practising self-judgement." In other words, the truly creative mind is no more than a creature born or pushed towards an abnormal hyper-sensitivity. This deep "attunment" then becomes either a blessing or a curse, and is often either channelled into creative endeavours, or numbed via drugs, sex, technology, art, alcohol etc, all of which serve as a means of numbing stimulus.
The choice of having Caden stage a production of "Salesman" is significant. Miller's play was about a businessman obsessed with attaining greatness, despite the fact that he was wholly untalented. In "Synecdoche", however, we have Caden Cotard become a stand in for writer Charlie Kaufman, both artists trying to overcome their respective existential problems by attaining greatness through art. IE - they're both intimately aware of their own mortality (and inconsequentiality) and so seeking to achieve immortality (and fame) through "great art".
So the first section of "Synecdoche" is simply a gloomy rehash of everything directors like Antonioni, Bergman, Wenders and Allen have done before (turn to literature, and such meta-fictional, postmodern crises are even more common - see David Wallace, Chris Ware et al - but of course nobody reads anymore). Kaufman may think he's latched on to some profound human truth, but his paean to suffering will seem limp to anyone who has read a little Satre, Camus, Dostoyevsky or Heidegger. For a film which begins with the line "I think I'm dying" and ends with the whisper "Die", the picture says surprisingly little about life and death, Kaufman content to simply wallow in despair.
A compressed version of Wenders' "Parix, Texas", the second section of the film is no better. Caden separates from his wife, has a series of sexual affairs, and attempts to track down his missing daughter. We watch as he buries his pain is sex and vices, but Kaufman never really explores these escapes. Everything is handled with a quirky, very snide tone. Compare this to Solondz's "Storytelling" and "Happiness" or Tamara Jenkins' "The Savages", the later two being better films in which Philip Hoffman essentially plays the same character undergoing the same problems. But it's all outdated existentialism (ie bourgeois nihilism). The kind of white middle-class malaise that Sam Mendes churns out, without much regard for any wider real-life, socio-economic context (ie cause).
Luckily the third section of the film deals exclusively with context. This is where Kaufman's playful genius kicks in. Cotard receives a Macarthur Genius Grant and is given funding to create a "revolutionary theatre experience" which is brutal in its honesty. "I won't settle for anything less than the brutal truth!" he exclaims.
And so Caden begins his magnum opus, constructing a vast theatre experience inside a disused warehouse. His play's story is nothing less than a reconstruction of his entire life, and consists of thousands of actors, doppelgangers, huge sets and hundreds of subplots. Gradually the production mutates and overwhelms the source material. Scenes from the play and scenes from life become interchangeable. Actors are hired to play the actors who are hired to play the actors who are hired to play the actors. The play expands, gradually becoming an ever-expanding world, the narrative morphing into a more literate version of Lynch's "Inland Empire".
Really, what Caden is attempting to create here is a work of art in which every action, every choice, every character, is subject to an unbreakable chain of dramatised causes and effects. "There are nearly thirteen million people in the world," he says, "None of these people are an extra! They have to be given their due!" And so Caden wishes to map everything. He wishes to put every gesture, every human being, in proper context, a desire which is of course wholly impossible, as you'd need a work of art that stretched back to the beginning of time and extended far beyond your own death.
In contrast, Caden's wife is an artist who focuses on the minute. She is a painter whose paintings gradually become smaller and smaller, focusing on single, seemingly inconsequential details. Significantly, she is happy and successful. Ignorance is bliss, after all, and existential misery stems precisely from the super-awareness of one's place in the universe (ie context).
The film ends on a powerful note, Caden's "ego dying" such that he "let's go" directorial control of his own "stage-play" (ie to cease being the ordering force in his life and move on). But what the film does best is show how decision making is timeless. Consider one scene in which a character's decision to buy a house also includes her decision to marry a certain man and die in that same house. She is made wholly accountable for her actions, including those she could not possible foresee in the real world. Kauffman's point: context is truth, but truth is suffering.
7.9/10 – Though its existential musings are trite, the film's third section is genius. Worth two viewings.