Charlie Kaufman's first film, "Synecdoche, New York," is likely to polarize audiences for years to come. Some critics, such as Roger Ebert, called it the best film of the new millennium while others complained that it was totally incomprehensible. I have to admit that the film is one of the most challenging that I have ever seen. It has taken me more than a few viewings to get an idea of the film's symbolism and meaning. I think there is a legitimate debate as to whether movies should be this difficult to decipher. "Synecdoche, New York" is at many times frustrating, even challenging to watch because of its hermetical nature. Still, the philosophy behind the film, which Kaufman has been working toward in all of his previous filmography, is very fascinating. While the moviegoing experience is atypical, the process of finding meaning in the film's seemingly impenetrable shell is both satisfying and edifying.
I think it is worth a moment to reflect back on Kaufman's other films to see the artistic progression toward "Synecdoche, New York." Although he was the screenwriter of the following films rather than the director, they are unmistakably Kaufman films and it is clear that the directors were inspired by his vision. "Being John Malkovich" is a film that explores the philosophical implications of a simple thought experiment: what if you could inhabit someone else's life? Are you still you? Is the vector still an individual? Why do human beings have a desire to live vicariously through others and even control them? In "Adaptation," Kaufman wrote about the difficulties of writing a screenplay and the limits put upon him by both Hollywood and the mass audience. Just as lifeforms must adapt to survive in the natural environment, Kaufman argued that his story had to adapt and become palatable in order for it to be made. Finally, "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" provided yet another thought experiment: if you could erase all the painful memories from your life, would you? The film demonstrates the connection between identity and experience as well as the ultimate inability to control relationships and the direction and growth of others. In total, Kaufman's films reflect on failed desires and the limitations of our own perspective and perception.
The plot of the film serves as a springboard for many of the philosophical questions noted above. Caden Cotard, played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, is a depressed playwright who is currently directing a production of "Death of a Salesman" at a local theater. After growing apart, his wife, Adele, now a famous painter, moves to Berlin with his daughter, Olive. Caden takes the separation badly and vacillates in an on again, off again relationship with a friend named Hazel. Caden is awarded a MacArthur Fellowship to produce a theatrical production "of great truth." He tries to realize a massive project which essentially creates an alternative version of his life in which he has total control.
One of the key elements of "Synecdoche, New York" is Caden's individual perception of time and his obsession with it fading away. In the beginning of the film, Caden hears a radio report telling him that it is September 22. He then looks at a newspaper and the date changes to October 17. If you watch closely, the date on the newspaper speeds ahead as the family talks. In addition, Caden remarks that a quart of milk in the refrigerator has expired----the date on the label is October 20. Notice the continuous changing of dates in short succession. The movie appears to be shot in real time but calendars, appointments and dialogue alert us to the passage of days and months rather than shorter increments. Caden's sense of time is relative to everyone else. His experience of days and weeks turns out to be months and years to others. As the dates move forward quickly in the background, Caden continues to be obsessed with his own perceived illnesses, bodily functions, injuries and the feeling that he is moving towards his end. In the background, the television flashes animations about viruses and natural disasters around the world.
This obsession with loss of time and opportunity is mirrored in Caden's current theatrical production of "Death of Salesman," in which he casts young actors to play the jaded, hopeless characters beaten down by the world in Arthur Miller's work. He instructs an actor by saying "Try to keep in mind that a young person playing Willie Loman thinks he's only pretending to be at the end of a life full of despair. But the tragedy is that we know that you, the young actor, will end up in this very place of desolation." Caden's overarching view on life and his obsession with worldly issues out of his control adds to his relative fast experience of time. Time is slipping away because the present is filled with distractions. His relationship with his family deteriorates because of his inward obsessions and dark lens through which he views the world. Note: The main character's name is Caden Cotard. A psychiatric disease was identified in 1880 called Cotard's Disease, which described jaded people who believed that they were already dead.
Caden's perception of time becomes horrific after his wife, a burgeoning artist, and their young daughter move to Berlin. While he ages in loneliness, the lives of his family continue without him. From Caden's perspective, his daughter is frozen in time as an eight year old. Although years have passed, Caden still hears his daughter's young voice when reading her diary or correspondence. He often tries to send his daughter gifts, most of which are meant for a little girl and not a teenager or adult. Likewise, in addition to lost time with his family, his inamorata in the movie, Hazel, moves on to other relationships and even gets married after Caden quells her advances. Near the end of the film, when Caden and hazel finally reunite, Caden expresses his sadness over his lost time with Hazel, remarking "I wish I had this when we were young."
While the film ruminates over lost time and opportunities, it also stirs up issues about fate and its connection to the choices one makes. Kaufman seems to espouse a predestined fate by consent. In one surreal scene, Hazel decides to purchase a burning house. As we find out later, Hazel dies of smoke inhalation during a fire in that very house. While there is not necessarily a god guiding her way, Hazel's free choice has consequences far into the future. Before the sale, the realtor even comments when Hazel expresses fear that she'll die in the house that "it's an important decision how one chooses to die." Likewise, Caden's decisions early in his life to avoid intimacy, particularly with Hazel, directly leads to debilitating loneliness in his old age. In fact, Caden essentially becomes one of the young actors in his production of "Death of Salesman," one who is cognizant of an impending life of misery. As Hazel says later, "The end is built into the beginning."
In "Synecdoche, New York," loneliness is forever tied to one's limited perspective and unattained expectations, particularly when it comes to personal relationships and art. A beautiful song called "Little Person" permeates the entire movie, giving heed to the fact that we are all alone in the universe because we live in our own minds. We desperately search for connection with others, even if it is for fleeting moments:
I'm just a little person
One person in a sea
Of many little people
Who are not aware of me
I do my little job
And live my little life
Eat my little meals
Miss my little kid and wife
And somewhere, maybe someday
Maybe somewhere far away
I'll find a second little person
Who will look at me and say
"I know you
You're the one I've waited for
Let's have some fun."
Life is precious every minute
And more precious with you in it
So let's have some fun
We'll take a road trip way out west
You're the one I like the best
I'm glad I've found you
Like hangin' 'round you
You're the one I like the best
Somewhere, maybe someday
Maybe somewhere far away
Somewhere, maybe someday
Maybe somewhere far away
Somewhere, maybe someday
Maybe somewhere far away
I'll meet a second little person
And we'll go out and play
After Caden gets his Macarthur fellowship, he embarks on a massive theatrical undertaking that will encompass all of his life. In effect, he will create a duplicate universe in a warehouse and direct this alternative life as he envisions it. For starters, this idea is destined to fail because of its magnitude. Caden quickly discovers the production requires an alternate world with subsequent never-ending alternative worlds. In other words, Caden has to build a warehouse within a warehouse within a warehouse, etc to totally capture the full reality of this world. Echoing the themes in "Adaptation," Caden is unable to capture something so large, intricate and wondrous as life. Caden's macro view of artistic expression can be contrasted to his wife's artwork, which consists of tiny miniature portraits depicting single moments. Recall that she is wildly successful compared to Caden. She is celebrated as a genius in Europe and appears in magazines while he vacillates for 17+ years in creating one work. While the macro view of expression is admirable, the micro view is what can be realized in the short term. Finally, much like Kaufman's experience in "Adaptation," Cotard learns that his therapist, a woman who seems more a hack than an innovator, has figured out a way to market herself with a collection of lackluster books. Again, by aiming lower and taking a micro view, yet another artist succeeds in place of Caden.
The most important theme in "Synecdoche, New York" is that all human beings are prisoners of perspective. This fact leads to perpetual loneliness and disappointment at other's inability to adequately fulfill the roles we assign to them in our lives. Besides the overwhelming size of the concept, Caden's play ultimately fails because others will not follow his direction. In an ironic moment of optimism, Caden explains that he has figured out how to realize his concept: "There are nearly thirteen million people in the world. None of those people is an extra. They're all the leads of their own stories. They have to be given their due." Caden's failure is built right into that optimism. If people are leads and decision makers in their own stories, how can they always follow Caden's direction? This question is Kaufman's allegory of limited perspective in life. We are all in control of our lives. We make sense of the world by categorizing people into roles with expectations. We want a person to act this way, to perform these tasks, to love us in this particular way. Bitter feelings of loneliness and frustration ensue when people fail to follow our expectations. Someone does not do what they are told. We are not loved how we want to be loved. In a way, Caden wrestles with accepting people in the film as they are versus who he wants them to be.
These failures happen frequently in Caden's theatrical production and in his own life. He begins by assigning his roles: "Each day I'll hand you a paper, it'll tell you what happened to you that day. You felt a lump in your breast. You looked at your wife and saw a stranger, et cetera.....All right, I'm not excusing myself from this either....I will have someone play me, to delve into the murky, cowardly depths of my lonely, fucked-up being. And he'll get notes too, and those notes will correspond to the notes I truly receive every day from my god! Get to work!" The most dramatic example of a failed role is Sammy, an actor who tells Caden: "I've been following you for twenty years. So I knew about this audition because I follow you. And I've learned everything about you by following you. So hire me. And you'll see who you truly are." Sammy presents himself as the perfect actor to portray Caden; he proclaims that he knows Caden better than Caden knows himself. Philosophical questions stemming from "Being John Malkovich" immediately come to mind. Can Sammy really inhabit Caden? Can any of the other actors really inhabit their roles? If a man is hired to play a janitor in Caden's vision, is he considered an actor or a janitor? What designates both roles?
As much as we all try to meet the expectations of others, we will fail when that desire threatens our own life and needs. Sammy fails in his portrayal of Caden by falling in love with the wrong person (the actress who plays Hazel instead of Hazel) and by committing suicide when he can't realize his own happiness. As Caden explained after Sammy jumped to his death from a building, "I didn't jump, Sammy, I didn't jump!" Most people do not follow Caden's expectations in real life: his wife and daughter leave him; he and Claire, his second wife, fail to meet each other's needs, and, fittingly, Caden does not even meet his own expectations as a director.
To complicate things further, the roles that others chose for us or the roles we chose for ourselves may be falsehoods. Furthermore, sometimes we play roles for others without them knowing or condoning it. To remain close to his lost family, Caden anonymously takes on the role of a cleaning woman named Ellen Bascom. He plays the role of doting father and husband to his family, even though they are absent. Another powerful example of a false role involves the adult version of Caden's daughter, Olive. After he finds out that she's dying, Caden meets Olive in the hospital and discovers that his ex-wife's lesbian partner, Maria, has been slowly poisoning Olive against him, as depicted metaphorically by tattoos that cover her body, a decision that Caden had protested earlier in the film. Olive says that she could only have peace if Caden admits to the role that Maria had planted in Olive's mind: a closet homosexual who left his wife and daughter for a lover. Although this is a lie, Caden agrees to the false role in the hopes of receiving his daughter's forgiveness. As Olive dies, she gives him no reconciliation. So it goes.
Near the end of his life, Caden's life and theatrical production begin to fade. He metaphorically lives out his days in the apartment of his first family, trying desperately to make up for his failures. Caden finally comes to terms with two harsh facts about life. The first epiphany comes from a priest giving a sermon about choice and fate at Sammy's funeral:
"Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for twenty years. And you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it's what you create. And even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but it doesn't really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along. Something to make you feel connected, something to make you feel whole, something to make you feel loved. And the truth is I feel so angry, and the truth is I feel so fucking sad, and the truth is I've felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long I've been pretending I'm OK, just to get along, just for, I don't know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own. Well, fuck everybody. Amen."
Those semi-poetic memories of mistakes past meet with Caden's final realization that life is ultimately meaningless, a collection of choices and actions not amounting to much on a grand scale because most of it occurred in his head. His great masterwork begins to crumble into obscurity along with the artistic works of others in his life like those of his enterprising but vapid therapist. Caden finally relinquishes control of his life to Millicent Williams, who symbolizes fate or ultimate self-realization. As Caden dies, he receives his final instructions from a higher intelligence:
"What was once before you - an exciting, mysterious future - is now behind you. Lived; understood; disappointing. You realize you are not special. You have struggled into existence, and are now slipping silently out of it. This is everyone's experience. Every single one. The specifics hardly matter. Everyone's everyone. So you are Adele, Hazel, Claire, Olive. You are Ellen. All her meager sadnesses are yours; all her loneliness; the gray, straw-like hair; her red raw hands. It's yours. It is time for you to understand this.
Walk.
As the people who adore you stop adoring you; as they die; as they move on; as you shed them; as you shed your beauty; your youth; as the world forgets you; as you recognize your transience; as you begin to lose your characteristics one by one; as you learn there is no-one watching you, and there never was, you think only about driving - not coming from any place; not arriving any place. Just driving, counting off time. Now you are here, at 7:43. Now you are here, at 7:44. Now you are...Gone.
Die."
As I finished watching "Synecdoche, New York," I couldn't help but think of one of my favorite books, "Moby Dick," by Herman Melville. While the book makes for a long, often frustrating read about themes too broad to adequately explain, it is filled with philosophical symbols and themes that have inhabited my mind ever since: the meaning of existence, man vs. nature, the creation of myth and the illusion of control. The book may not be fun to read but the ideas have stayed with me for years. "Synecdoche, New York" is that kind of artistic work, one that is more fun to talk about than watch. How many movies have you seen that demand that type of attention and commitment? In the vein of Stanley Kubrick, Kaufman has elevated film to a high intellectual level of philosophical conversation, puzzles and thought experiments. For better or worse, "Synecdoche, New York" is an exercise of the mind.
