Some thoughts about one of the most important and complex pieces of Cinema created by one of its most brilliant minds, Charlie Kaufman. This piece is called “Synecdoche, New York”, made it to screens in 2008, and it has not been the most famous amongst his other works (eternal sunshine of the spotless mind, Anomalisa, Being John Malkovich, Adaptation), perhaps because it stood on the edge of the forgivable of the provocative. Yet it’s level of courage in the cinematic depiction of humanity’s eternal struggle for depth and meaning is an undoubtedly a rare gem.
This picture follows the life of a theater director (Caden Cotard) and its slow disintegration out from and into itself while going through an endless quest to regain control, in a world that viciously continues to strip the sense from his mind, soul, and body. It quickly starts with a brief introduction into an insane world, one full of disasters, affecting many layers, the outside world, his small family, and his own body. Calamities are everywhere, artists dying before their time, earthquakes killing tens of thousands, political destruction of a fragile society while being eaten by the unmerciful capitalism of America. This is the outside, the surrounding, the baseline of life. This eternal unfair chaos projects itself into his smaller world, his family’s. His wife is slipping away in a self-struggle to maintain the façade of love that she had for him, feeling the shattering disappointment that she describes as an inevitability after “you get to know someone really well”. She is an aspiring artist that longs for freedom from the attachments of her world, the boundaries of modern America, the walls of her house, and the ever-known human “family” structure. They have a daughter; she is erratic and spontaneous. She also has the same bug of deconstruction of the self, as her parent’s, portrayed from the very first scenes when she got obsessively worried of having a “green Poo” which was unusual and unnatural and served as a starting point of constant doubt of her own body and how it functions, thoughts that her parent’s quickly dismissed and ignored. The last layer of this mania is Cotard’s body; it starts showing several symptoms of an unknown undiagnosed illness that seems to be deadly; its symptoms are physical and apparent on his skin and in his joints and in his nerves and his blood in a medically random and incomprehensible fashion. This chaotic manifestation of these lives is aided by fast and unusual style of editing that denies the viewer the chance to breath, constantly challenging any efforts to grasp the story and its characters. This style introduces the surreal and forces you to succumb to its sheer force of the non-logical and the insane; it’s simply saying “I won’t let you understand, as these characters are lost, as these lives are denied of meaning, you will be too”.
The family is destroyed, the mother and the daughter leave, and our poor Cotard is left alone. His body continues to fail in a very gruesome manner. Then we get deeper into a dissection of society; now the medicine trying to understand this disintegration of his body but fails miserably, both because of the dysfunctional medical system (one of apathetic approach that makes an endless loop of referrals that robes time and efforts mercilessly and towards nothing!, in a surreal criticism of modern America’s healthcare system) and the enigma of his body being a projection of the enigma of his soul.
Throughout Cotard’s moral and physical battles, he fails to seize many opportunities of true passion and love. There is a secretary that finds him physically appealing; She admires his talent in theater and finds his tormented soul soothing to hers. She is wild and alive, frequently flirting with him, seducing him into surrendering his meaningless devotion to his miserably failing marriage. He is lonely, she knows that, she understands that, and she also suffers from that and wants to save herself and him, but the idiot is weak, lacks the power for adventure, and powerless to break free from his loneliness. The years pass by in a weird chronology that shines more light on the psychotic state that drowned him, and he continues to have a passive-aggressive vain dance with his admirer around their lust for passion and true happiness, but not actually reaching any. He continuously tries to connect with his abandoning family, failing every time, and each time he would lose more of himself by their constant ignorance and rejection, which later throughout the movie appeared to have changed him into a masochistic pathologic small man, one who got addicted to the worthless and the contemptible.
Despite all his defeats, he is truly a brilliant artist, and a play of his achieves major success quickly to be rewarded with the highest grant that can be given to a theater director. He now has a tool to construct something meaningful and true in his life; he has a mean to maybe gain back some control of his life. He starts building this vague play; he keeps repeating that he wants to portray something real, defining this “real” mainly by the idea of death, his firm belief of its inevitability, but at the same time, his refusal to concede to it as he wants to live and explore the spectrum of his moral paradoxes. This play doesn’t have a plot nor any well-defined characters, no unified structure, no script, and no clear dramatic objectives. He instructs his actors (or rather preaches them) about its intended qualities, but in reality -as had he intimately shared with another admiring actress- he doesn’t really know what he is doing. He starts the project in a spontaneous fashion, instructing actors to build the real, and with the lack of context, he unknowingly starts to shed parts of himself into the play. Step by step, throughout a bizarre and terrifyingly brutal and swift passage of time, he builds his own life in a colossal warehouse that replicates the same chaotic outside world (New York is used as an example, which is a perfect smaller scale of the American society in particular and the whole world in general) and the one of his own life. He chooses actors to play his friends, his co-workers, his lover, his estranged wife (the character being a piece of paper constantly instructing him to clean her house, with random phrases of “congratulations” and empty longings, that served as bread crumbs luring him into an addiction to masochism), and finally, an actor to play his own self.
These versions of the people and the environment of his life keep emerging, getting larger and larger with increasing complexity with more actors, more construction in the set, and more stories. He failed to control his own life, so he went into a quest of replicating his own world but now from the seat of the director in an attempt to assume the “god” of his life, he is searching for control, for meaning, for the lost opportunities of his youth, and the missed love from his existence. He wants to right his mistakes and re-live the failed opportunities. His theater piece -as his own devastation- became endless. He created one duplicated layer that quickly was duplicated again and again and again into further warehouses inside warehouses; actors instructing actors; himself instructing himself to choose another self, and such insanity. But now something fascinating started to appear before his own eyes, his subjects started to break free from the sorrowful storylines of his life. The opportunities of love that he had lost in his past started to be seized by the actors playing them, the stability of his replicated families had stronger chances, even an old failed suicide attempt was successful in a dramatic and hauntingly beautiful fashion (as how one's death is always wished to be). Not only that, but the actors assuming the roles of his old lost loved ones started to have real interactions with the real people of his real life; substituting him; bypassing him, they were not only defying his orders but also furthering his moral decline. The manifesto of god was being undermined, again and again, striking him many times back again to the loss of control and to the void that he so desperately was trying to escape.
This play takes decades in the making, clearly without any comprehensible finishing end in sight. Our director kept making different titles for it as he gets older -and perhaps wiser-. As these smaller versions of life continued to evolve, they started to disintegrate by falling into war and destruction, something that can be described as an embedded doom in the humanity’s genome, their tormented souls everlastingly jumping between the need for control and the need to destroy it. Kaufman is saying that after all, these enchanting dynamics are what keeps us alive, they might be lures of desire, qualities that are old and beasty, but they are the flams of our souls; ones of which are both created and destroyed by fire. This war continues to annihilate everyone and everything, leaving the director utterly alone. His last surrender was to a voice -a manifestation of his superego- explaining to him the deeper meanings of his life, informing him that all humans are alone, he is all the characters of his life, all the characters of his plays, “everyone is everyone, everything is everything”. He continues to wander in the apocalypse until he sits with one survivor actress, one whom played the mother of a dream of his, apologizing to her for the lost opportunity of an old promised picnic with her and her grandchildren he made in an old childhood dream, admitting love for her, which serves as an epiphany for what he believed to be the most complete and the purest of titles for his play, but as he started to name it, he was quickly abducted by death.
Synecdoche New York is a very complex and enchanting piece of art, one that is very hard to dissect. It must be viewed from two distinct perspectives. One that might try to look closely to understand the story, but not to be taken too seriously because it's incomprehensible and surreal, but rather to feel (and maybe understand) how the movie deals with identity, sexuality, and desires; the story of the origin of god and the instincts behind that; the glimpse at American capitalism and its resulting destruction of the passionate and the genuine. Also, the dissection of fatherhood, motherhood, and family; the criticism of toxic masculinity that Kaufman so very much adores dealing with in all his pictures. The other perspective, and the most approachable and important, is to see the bigger picture that integrates all these small aspects and its dazzling complexities; To see the laughable mockery of our grasp on life, our infinite quests for meaning in the wrong paths that imprison us into sorrow and loneliness that furthers and furthers, while we miss the most beautiful and what is truly worthy of life; sex, passion, courage, art, love, and the intimate human touch.
Kaufman’s Synecdoche New York is an unforgettable experience that almost redefines everything, one that is very personal to me, and will forever stay in my memory as well as my heart.
