Synechdoche, New York Review

Disclaimer: contrary to what seems to be common form, this article contains no exigesis about the use of the word “synecdoche” in the film’s title (or my use of the word “exigesis”). Although that’s what everyone wants to talk about (just like, say, Clinton’s bombing of Monica Lewinski's dress rather than his bombing of various prefectly good countries) it’s just an unusual word, the dictionary’s full of them, so y’know…deal with it.

I assume that, if you’re reading this, you’re somewhat into Charlie Kaufman AKA: the Radiohead of film AKA: that one virtuosically unique thing you rest your laurels of taste on. Chances are he’s your favorite screenwriter, but tell me this: who’s your second favorite screenwriter? Ha! Of course, I take my accusations no further since it can only be good that Kaufman has aroused an appreciation for the raw creative energy behind the concept of a film, which for him, somehow glimmers through mechanized steps one-through-god-knows-how-

many of the filmmaking process, never allowing us to forget about the ecstatic guru scribe channeling cinematic gospel before even one laid brick of the mise en scene. This time Kaufman is there, trowel and mortar, for every stage of the giant sensory cathedral that is Synecdoche, New York and after a couple decades of succumbing to the legislative committee of someone else’s camera he, frankly, blows his creative wad like an early pubescent finally penetrating the panty-barrier. But, goodness, what a wad, showering the cavacious grey where often creeps my complacency as a viewer. “Fuck me,” I thought, “this movie’s alive.” Albeit agonizingly so, opened up on the operating table, writhing unanaesthetized. An assault of exposed nerves carefully wired by a master pyrotechnician of the telencephalon. Neurons are lit up on both sides of the screen with Kaufman pulling switches at atomically-timed moments, the weaver of big and terrifying thoughts.

But my statements towards his genius remain proactive: he’s a genius if he tops himself post-this-thing, this total existential finale of a movie. Has Kaufman finally reached a saturation point, everything henceforth seeming dialed back, trifling? He’s a genius if he knows he can top this. He’s cool if he doesn’t care. Of course, neither are likely the case since he’s the most notoriously “where-do-I-go-from-here?”-prone writers of our generation (i.e. his characters suffer from it in like every other one of his fucking movies). Knowing full well the ramifications of this total self-evacuation that is Synechdoche, it’s either a monolithic creative risk or a necessary bowel-cleansing whence he’ll retire from all this hyper-reflexive meta-narrative shit. Sorry, but I root for the latter because, honestly, I get it Charlie…you’re clever.

My first expectation of Synecdoche was that in yet another tortured stupor of writer’s block he once again said: “fuck it, I’ll just do another film about the fluidity of self. Cuz what theme is easier to twist into a labyrinth that’ll make the kids go ‘whoa’ than identity?” But it’s not all tight conceptual braids and narrative parlor tricks. Synecdoche’s unflinchingly all over the place. And like pathagonist Caden Cotard’s own impossibly fertile pool of resources (how much IS a MacArthur grant worth nowadays?), one needs their own constant hail of reinforcements in the general upper cerebral area to keep up with Kaufman’s blistering rate of stakes-raising. I’m talking hyper-Masonic stages of enlightenment here, ruthlessly exploding the [insert maddening philosophical angle here] problems of the narrate/live/repeat loops of artistic life.

This all gets a little hard to follow over the sound of heads audibly bursting in the theatre (note: scientifically indistinguishable from the sound of incredulous laughter). There were also real emotive sounds, which suggest Synecdoche is equally funny and soulful enough to keep it from atomizing into meta-to-the-power-of-infinity-times-a-thousand tedium. Cotard’s loss of self remains genuine and moving even (I should say, especially) as he gets increasingly absorbed into the folds of an ur-world where every outrageous creative suggestion is embraced. But only a Kaufman identity-spiral could leave a character wandering the post-apocalyptic streets of his own mise-en-universe monstrosity receiving life commands via headset by someone playing him-as-director, telling him how to feel, how to dream, the deepest human yearnings piped in like source code (just watch the film).

It’s easy to call this whole to-do surreal, but don’t stop there. Yes some of the film’s un-reality is contorted by only the basest anxious spitfires of his psyche (fear of death, sexuality, homosexuality…). But the subterranean animal parts of the mind are just one ride at the Kaufman carnival. Just as Cotard’s New-York-filled warehouse becomes just a building “prop” in a grander New-York-filled warehouse, the surreal aspects are just the center of a magically real Babushka doll. It’s the Kaufman house of mirrors, telescoping from surrealism to the magical realism and then back again. Loops of reflexivity, hilariously dizzying. The “big” themes, the ones that all of the Daliesque anxieties are really just a foil for, are the province of magical realism: using the “impossible” (rather than just the surrealist “uncanny”) to explore the dimensions of the possible. Everything spins so far off the axis of actual lived life (even cinematic life, which is already plastic enough), that the film once again teeters on the possibility of becoming a game of seeing how virtuosically a virtuoso of narrative can play with form.

One of Kaufman’s many writerly talents is his ability to satirize, well, anything. Getting outside of it, twisting it around until it perforates itself with wounds just like his fleet of masochistic characters. A death in Cotard’s family happens, but does it weigh sincerely on the film’s thrust or is it just fuel for a schadenfreudal laugh (i.e. the “saddest deathbed speech the doctors ever heard”…just watch the film), a scarcely-seismic dramatic murmur meant more to feed his own self-indulgent obsession with the polychromatic spectrum of tragedy (disease, dissolution of families, shattered romance, regret, disappointing loved ones, death in general)? Does it all mean something? Thus bubbles up the thesis of Cotard’s creative drive: is all of this suffering just irrational, impossible to understand? After all, nothing bad seems to happen to him for any tangible reason (starting with his wife leaving him…just cuz), casting him into a creative furnace, fueled by the needlessly unfortunate nebula of life stuff that surrounds him every single day.

Although Cotard’s endless means of exploration are “magical,” his approach is shrewdly verite. The metaphysical, the enigmatic, the phenomenal, things that loosen the jaw in wonder, all must be contained in quotidian life-stagings, MRI-ed through an endlessly prying lens of realism. Each one of his actors get a premise and the discrete mathematics of reality are left to rut in futile hope of revealing their extraterrestrial formulas. Small wonder is Cotard’s fascination with Death of a Salesman. Its moral is classic, eternal, timeless: Americans make bad decisions, deliberately trampling on a “good life”…and no one knows why for fuck sake!

Ultimately, my opinion of Synecdoche remains a dialectical one. I thought it was brilliant and masturbatory, but also brilliantly masturbatory. Was it everything I wanted or nothing really at all, just a wayward stab at some celestial truth? And perhaps that’s why it’s great: it took me dancing on the heads of small, organically-realized approaches to cinema (i.e. The Visitor, which is a great film), dancing in all the chaos between worlds. Skillfully, Synecdoche begins small, almost maddeningly so, only to blow things to meteoric dust, animating a world no thought they needed to know about. They do. The dialectics, AKA: the conceptual collision, of the very big to the very small is a violent Who’s-Afraid-of-Virginia-Woolf-esque domestic storm. A marriage made only to supernova. Everyday, creatively or not, this battle rages in all of us. And in an age where no level of artistic provocation can really startle, Charlie Kaufman ambushes the viewer with a wholly unexpected angle of cinematic progressiveness: getting away with being cerebral.