Synecdoche, New York: Some Loose Impressions
Charlie Kaufman Aims to Embrace All Life in his Newest Mindbender
Feb 26, 2009
In the spirit of free-association that distinguishes Charlie Kaufman’s latest headtrip Synecdoche, New York, this writer offers a few loosely connected thoughts:
What is a "Synecdoche"?
Webster’s New World College Dictionary defines “synecdoche” as “a figure of speech by which a part is used for a whole, an individual for a class, a material for a thing, or the reverse of any of these.” How does this describe Kaufman’s film? One fairly obvious way: Its main character, theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), dabbles in the creation of a theatrical masterwork that attempts to embrace all of life itself by focusing on recreating his own. Synecdoche, likewise, could be said to be Kaufman’s own attempt to encompass a lifetime’s worth of human experience in the life and deep-seated fears of this one man.
Perhaps “synecdoche” is an appropriate word to describe the film’s seemingly haphazard narrative structure. Some scenes feel like they begin and end at random, and the scene after doesn’t always feel connected to the scene before. However, many of those scenes by themselves do have a purpose, sometimes standing in for a whole series of events. A particularly tense marriage-counseling session, for instance, suggests years of pain between Caden and his wife, Adele (Catherine Keener), in a matter of a couple minutes of screen time. Instead of a coherent plot, Kaufman gives us shifting memories, reflections and impressions.
What is Synecdoche, New York Really About?
Synecdoche is only ostensibly about a death-obsessed theater director who, after his wife and daughter abandon him, decides, with the help of a MacArthur grant, to make meaningful art with a massive theater piece that he insists will show “the brutal truth” about life and death. But that brief plot summary barely scratches the surface of the intellectual and emotional can of worms Kaufman opens up here.
It’s easy to assume that Caden Cotard is meant to be a stand-in for Kaufman himself; Synecdoche, if anything, seems like the writer-auteur’s usual neuroses about love, success and failure—previously glimpsed in Kaufman scripts like Being John Malkovich, Adaptation., and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind—amped up to 11. Look a little deeper, however, and it is not quite as simple as that. Caden may be obsessed with death and dying—for goodness’ sake, he goes straight to the obituaries every morning when he picks up the Schenectady daily paper—but Kaufman maintains a certain distance from such a rigorously fatalistic way of living. Some of the richness of Synecdoche comes from Kaufman’s willingness to lay bare his protagonist’s flaws, to question his navel-gazing. The film may sometimes feel like a maze of miserabilism, but that doesn’t necessarily make Kaufman a miserabilist.
As Caden treads deeper and more uncertainly into his theatrical piece, Synecdoche becomes even more surrealistic. Caden seems to think one can arrive at artistic truth merely by restaging real-life events, but he is constantly proven wrong: the actors he hires to play himself and people around him start acting “out of character,” and none of his efforts to control them and the whole production bring about the kind of catharsis he seeks. For an artist, the search for truth in art is quite possibly a never-ending one; that itself is a truth that Caden may not even realize, at least until it’s too late in his life to do anything about it.
Synecdoche, New York isn’t just about the intersection between life and art, however. In many ways, it is about all our human lives. Who hasn’t been gripped in mortal terror by the fear of death at least for a split second? Who hasn’t felt the pressure to make one’s life mean something lest death come upon you and snatch you too soon? Kaufman has taken universal fears and grappled with them in his own distinctively idiosyncratic way, and either one gets onto its wavelength and follow him to wherever his mind takes him, or one rejects it altogether as overly self-indulgent and narcissistic. Either way, Synecdoche is impossible to wholly dismiss; indeed, it inspires—nay, demands—contemplation and even some soul-searching. Easy emotional responses just won’t cut it in Charlie Kaufman’s world.
 |
