Synecdoche
****O HAI SPOILER WARNING!****
Synecdoche. It's a literary device utilized by referring to something by naming only one part of it... i.e., let's say John Doe is a businessman who wears a generic suit and maroon tie ensemble and has three moles on one cheek and a titanium ring in one ear. Any of those details would be substituted for the character's name in the narrative, for example: The titanium ring approached the doorway and prepared to knock. Raising his hand and pausing to take a calming breath, he hoped he remembered the password correctly...
That is a synecdoche.
It's also the name of a movie I watched with Kyle on Friday.
The best way I can describe this movie is to ask you to recall the following films, if you would:
Inception
The Truman Show
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
Fight Club
Imagine that those four movies got together in a drunken orgy and managed to somehow cross-pollinate, spawning a being with four genetic contributors. Then imagine that the ensuing offspring was not hugged enough as a child and therefor grew up to suffer from crippling paranoia, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and a host of other neuroses, including the Cotard Delusion, i.e., the sincere belief that he/she is a zombie. Now imagine that said zombie was also a Time Lord. And could read minds. And was on fire.
That is Synecdoche, New York.
This is a movie that does not just M. Night Shyamalan your ass with a twist ending to the whole film. This is a movie that M. Night Shyamalans your ass as a necessary element of almost every single fucking scene. This film may or may not feature the apocalypse as a historic event used to determine exactly when the fuck certain parts of the movie take place. This film may or may not even have more than one character in it who actually fucking exists.
And that character may or may not be a schizophrenic genderqueer lesbian who may or may not technically appear onscreen until the last 15 or 20 minutes of the movie.
Are you with me so far? Good, because here's where it starts to get weird...
Said character may or may not have had a wife who ran away to Berlin and shack up with some lesbian named Maria to raise their hypothetical daughter who may or may not have become a renowned tattooed erotic dancer and may or may not have had some kind of quasi-incestuous love triangle with Maria before dying of Plot Convenience Syndrome in a dramatic scene in which she accuses the main character of having abandoned her and her mother for a gay lover named Eric* who has never before been mentioned and appears only once thereafter...
*(A lot of stress is given to the "gay" part. The girl clearly has suffered a lifetime of pain and regret struggling to accept her estranged parent's sexual awakening with a character who has not existed until this point and extended that struggle into her own awareness of her homosexuality... homosexuality being a condition which she refuses to forgive her parent [herself?] for. This Eric person appears only one other time, much later in the movie, in a scene that adds and explains so much with so little actual action or content, I don't feel right trying to explain or even describe it in a footnote.
I'm getting ahead of myself, I feel.
So, to begin, the tone of the film is uncompromisingly bleak in a way that often tip-toes along the edges of fantastical beauty, but mostly, for the first 2/3 or so of the film, primarily just scared the shit out of me in a way horror movies don't but existentialist realism DOES. In fact, the main character, Caden Cotard, is given such a creepy and off-putting performance by the magnificent Philip Seymour Hoffman, and suffers from so many vague and not crippling but still completely terrifying physical maladies, that there were actually one or two points when I gave brief thought to asking Kyle to turn it off so we could just watch something else. While there are a handful of shots graphic enough to set you on edge if you're particularly sensitive to that sort of thing, they only last a few seconds at most. Being a repressed hypochondriac myself, the actual horror in this movie comes from the way all of these symptoms are played by the actor, and in the way he deals with having really freaky undiagnosable shit by pretty much just losing it and isolating himself in some place he proceeds to meticulously scrub down inch by inch with a toothbrush and presumably about an Olympic swimming pool's worth of bleach. No, he doesn't do this just once. If I recall correctly, he does this at least three times which implies to me that this is a regular thing for him, it just usually happens offscreen.
An artist character with a wife and daughter who abandon him to a hermetic life riddled with gradual, painful debilitation... Yeah, this scares the fuck out of me. Because I can see myself becoming this character. It's not likely, but it's possible enough that it's terrifying and it plays to just about every single one of my personal insecurities and phobias.
Also, both of the main character's (hypothetical) parents die during the movie -- one after suffering a long and excruciating battle with cancer that went undiagnosed until his last few days of life, and another in a robbery that resulted in murder. The latter was the main character's mother. Said main character proceeds to bring some girl back to the house where the murder took place and fuck her right across the hallway from the scene of the crime before the blood is even dry on the carpet.
This movie is a little bit messed up.
Anyway, getting back to the point... where I ALMOST asked Kyle to turn the damn thing off a couple of times? Because this movie takes a lot of my own issues, hyperbolizes them, and punches me in the gut with them? Well, there's a reason this was ultimately tolerable to me. Every so often, something happens that is so bizarre, so random, so completely reality-breaking that it pulls you straight out of your awareness of "reality" in the film's universe's terms and leaves you sitting there going "Wait... did.... did that just fucking happen? I seriously didn't imagine what I just saw here? WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT??"
I shall use as an example the very first instance of this occurring. About... oh... 20 minutes in maybe.... a bit more... so far, a deeply depressing movie about a guy who doesn't look like he has a real good chance of surviving until intermission, he's lost his family and stuff, and the movie cuts to a scene of this girl who has a thing for him... she's talking to a real estate agent, taking a tour of a house that is... um... well, it's on fire.
Hazel: I like it. I do! I'm - I'm just really concerned about dying in the fire.
Burning House Realtor: It's a big decision - how one prefers to die.
From this point on, every time a scene takes place in this character's place of residence, even after she's moved once or twice, THE SCENERY IS ARBITRARILY FUCKING ON FIRE. And aside from this line with the real estate agent, which I'm pretty sure is supposed to be funny (because it is... it really is HILARIOUS after nearly half an hour of this guy and his depressing fucking life)... this is never brought up again. Ever. No one else ever seems troubled by the fact that this chick's digs are in a state of perpetual conflagration. I think it may get another mention once, possibly twice, only to establish the fact that yes, within the confines of this movie's universe, her home is intended to LITERALLY be on fire and other characters DO notice it, it's not just in her mind or anything... and for SOME REASON everyone else is just okay with this.
Watching this movie can be compared to reading a really serious, well-written, deep, introspective, moving novel... wherein every 10 pages or so, for absolutely no reason, the author inserts the word "bananaphone" in the middle of a sentence, like a google search that got typed into the wrong window and never edited out.
And that's another thing... this movie does constantly go out of its way to show that any time some seriously weird shit is happening, the movie wants to fuck with you by making sure you understand that other characters can see this, too. It's not just one wacko like in fucking The Sixth Sense where this asshole only ever interacts with one dumbass kid and somehow doesn't know he's dead despite not talking to any other human being for months. Noooo, in this movie, you can't tell the difference between what may be hallucinations, delusions, or actors rehearsing their roles in a life-sized replica of New York inside another life-sized replica of New York inside an impossibly immense abandoned warehouse...
...oh yeah, that's another thing. That exists. As far as you know.
The movie's plot doesn't actually hinge entirely on the fact that this guy has some very obvious mental problems. Pretty early on in the film, Caden gets a letter saying he's been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship -- an award of $500,000 paid out over 5 years to artists who receive it just for being geniuses -- which he somehow uses to fund a massive ongoing construction project and pay a cast of what may be hundreds or even conceivably THOUSANDS of actors who do nothing but continually rehearse an unscripted, untitled experiment in realistic theatre that continues to grow in scale exponentially for WELL OVER 20 FUCKING YEARS. Well... the only reference we're ever given comes at a point where an actor whines about how they've been rehearsing for 17 years and when are they going to get an audience in here? And a lot of time may or may not pass after that so it could well be a project that is simply continuously maintained for 40, maybe 50 years.
The concept of linear time tends to like to divorce itself from this movie every so often so it's kind of hard to tell. It's equally possible that everything in the movie might REALLY happen within the space of less than 10 years, or less than 5, or less than 1, and almost all of it really is just the result of the entire story being told from the point of view of a character who is insane on so many levels he-or-she-or-zie makes the entire Medici family history look like an extended episode of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood.
Also, the movie arranges for it to be suspiciously difficult to buy why Caden is even given this award in the first place, since all we ever see of his "genius" are a few shots of him directing a fairly mediocre production of Death of a Salesman. Naturally, this casts even MORE doubt on how much you can trust the reality of anything that happens to anyone in the movie, EVER.
Look, kids.... suspension of disbelief is an integral part of any good production, onstage or onscreen. This movie sets up a universe that makes it very easy to suspend your disbelief and get really invested in... at first. It then proceeds to give you every reason there is to second guess yourself, and once you think you've figured out more or less where to draw the line between in-world "reality" and "stuff the movie is doing just to fuck with you," they introduce yet ANOTHER level of meta that forces you to question not just which scenes are not occurring in which level of "reality," but also to retcon all previously established reality and wonder whether any or all of that was really taking place on a massive theatrical stage. And THEN... JUST TO MESS WITH YOUR ALREADY MESSED UP HEAD... the movie goes on to brilliantly both explain and NOT explain that the main character may or may not have actually been every other character in the movie and any other characters who may or may not have existed may or may not have had backstories in the REAL-REAL-REALITY that made them gay, genderqueer, transsexual, dead, imaginary, or people who the main character saw or met once and then cast them as people in an elaborate internal delusion where they were given names, histories, families, interacted with the main character and other delusions...
...oh yeah, and pretty much all of the reappearing named characters are assigned doppelgängers to play themselves in one of the sets, some of whom invest themselves so thoroughly in their roles that they assign OTHER doppelgängers to act out real-person fanfiction in yet another level of reality created by yet another cast of method actors in a life-size model. All of whom may or may not be playing themselves, regardless of what level they are cast in.
"Hey, Inception? This is Charlie Kaufman speaking. Go back to kindergarten and keep playing with your flea circus and LEGO sets. My shit is so far our of your league you can't even fucking smell it."
Synecdoche, New York is the kind of movie that both baffles and fascinates me on a level that I think is similar to the kind of fascination that, according to Kyle's review of Primer, has led internet people to spend way too damn much time trying to diagram how that movie fucking works. I would really love to watch this again with a list in my hand of all my crazy theories that developed later in the movie and retconned earlier scenes to see if they hold up. I would love to watch it several more times and try to assign every scene to one of what I believe to be FOUR separate coexisting realities defined by this movie's universe, and try to pin them all down along a timeline... and then use all of that to try to figure out whether it was all happening in the mind of a seriously mentally ill person from the beginning.
FINAL THOUGHTS: Synecdoche, New York is a mindfuck in the best way possible. Moments of total insanity interrupt all of this heavy, depressing shit often enough to prevent you from wanting to kill yourself or at least drink yourself unconscious, but those moments of insanity manage to be subtle enough to not COMPLETELY derail the movie into a silly, goofy mess. The acting from everyone in the cast is commendable, but it's worth watching ESPECIALLY for the performances given by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Dianne Wiest, both of whom deserve all the praise the world of art can give them for what they did with their roles here. This movie is like a sudoku puzzle in narrative form... on the surface, its logic seems to work on Alice in Wonderland principals, but it always feels as if there MUST be sense behind it, and if you can only watch closely enough and think hard enough, you might be able to crack its code and maybe learn something in the process.
This is an easy A+ movie, especially for artists and theatrical-type people, but if you have a whole lot of hypochondria-type phobias.... basically, if you can't handle House, MD... the intellectual stimulation this movie provides may not be worth the potential panic-triggers it contains.
Synecdoche. It's a literary device utilized by referring to something by naming only one part of it... i.e., let's say John Doe is a businessman who wears a generic suit and maroon tie ensemble and has three moles on one cheek and a titanium ring in one ear. Any of those details would be substituted for the character's name in the narrative, for example: The titanium ring approached the doorway and prepared to knock. Raising his hand and pausing to take a calming breath, he hoped he remembered the password correctly...
That is a synecdoche.
It's also the name of a movie I watched with Kyle on Friday.
The best way I can describe this movie is to ask you to recall the following films, if you would:
Inception
The Truman Show
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
Fight Club
Imagine that those four movies got together in a drunken orgy and managed to somehow cross-pollinate, spawning a being with four genetic contributors. Then imagine that the ensuing offspring was not hugged enough as a child and therefor grew up to suffer from crippling paranoia, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and a host of other neuroses, including the Cotard Delusion, i.e., the sincere belief that he/she is a zombie. Now imagine that said zombie was also a Time Lord. And could read minds. And was on fire.
That is Synecdoche, New York.
This is a movie that does not just M. Night Shyamalan your ass with a twist ending to the whole film. This is a movie that M. Night Shyamalans your ass as a necessary element of almost every single fucking scene. This film may or may not feature the apocalypse as a historic event used to determine exactly when the fuck certain parts of the movie take place. This film may or may not even have more than one character in it who actually fucking exists.
And that character may or may not be a schizophrenic genderqueer lesbian who may or may not technically appear onscreen until the last 15 or 20 minutes of the movie.
Are you with me so far? Good, because here's where it starts to get weird...
Said character may or may not have had a wife who ran away to Berlin and shack up with some lesbian named Maria to raise their hypothetical daughter who may or may not have become a renowned tattooed erotic dancer and may or may not have had some kind of quasi-incestuous love triangle with Maria before dying of Plot Convenience Syndrome in a dramatic scene in which she accuses the main character of having abandoned her and her mother for a gay lover named Eric* who has never before been mentioned and appears only once thereafter...
*(A lot of stress is given to the "gay" part. The girl clearly has suffered a lifetime of pain and regret struggling to accept her estranged parent's sexual awakening with a character who has not existed until this point and extended that struggle into her own awareness of her homosexuality... homosexuality being a condition which she refuses to forgive her parent [herself?] for. This Eric person appears only one other time, much later in the movie, in a scene that adds and explains so much with so little actual action or content, I don't feel right trying to explain or even describe it in a footnote.
I'm getting ahead of myself, I feel.
So, to begin, the tone of the film is uncompromisingly bleak in a way that often tip-toes along the edges of fantastical beauty, but mostly, for the first 2/3 or so of the film, primarily just scared the shit out of me in a way horror movies don't but existentialist realism DOES. In fact, the main character, Caden Cotard, is given such a creepy and off-putting performance by the magnificent Philip Seymour Hoffman, and suffers from so many vague and not crippling but still completely terrifying physical maladies, that there were actually one or two points when I gave brief thought to asking Kyle to turn it off so we could just watch something else. While there are a handful of shots graphic enough to set you on edge if you're particularly sensitive to that sort of thing, they only last a few seconds at most. Being a repressed hypochondriac myself, the actual horror in this movie comes from the way all of these symptoms are played by the actor, and in the way he deals with having really freaky undiagnosable shit by pretty much just losing it and isolating himself in some place he proceeds to meticulously scrub down inch by inch with a toothbrush and presumably about an Olympic swimming pool's worth of bleach. No, he doesn't do this just once. If I recall correctly, he does this at least three times which implies to me that this is a regular thing for him, it just usually happens offscreen.
An artist character with a wife and daughter who abandon him to a hermetic life riddled with gradual, painful debilitation... Yeah, this scares the fuck out of me. Because I can see myself becoming this character. It's not likely, but it's possible enough that it's terrifying and it plays to just about every single one of my personal insecurities and phobias.
Also, both of the main character's (hypothetical) parents die during the movie -- one after suffering a long and excruciating battle with cancer that went undiagnosed until his last few days of life, and another in a robbery that resulted in murder. The latter was the main character's mother. Said main character proceeds to bring some girl back to the house where the murder took place and fuck her right across the hallway from the scene of the crime before the blood is even dry on the carpet.
This movie is a little bit messed up.
Anyway, getting back to the point... where I ALMOST asked Kyle to turn the damn thing off a couple of times? Because this movie takes a lot of my own issues, hyperbolizes them, and punches me in the gut with them? Well, there's a reason this was ultimately tolerable to me. Every so often, something happens that is so bizarre, so random, so completely reality-breaking that it pulls you straight out of your awareness of "reality" in the film's universe's terms and leaves you sitting there going "Wait... did.... did that just fucking happen? I seriously didn't imagine what I just saw here? WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT??"
I shall use as an example the very first instance of this occurring. About... oh... 20 minutes in maybe.... a bit more... so far, a deeply depressing movie about a guy who doesn't look like he has a real good chance of surviving until intermission, he's lost his family and stuff, and the movie cuts to a scene of this girl who has a thing for him... she's talking to a real estate agent, taking a tour of a house that is... um... well, it's on fire.
Hazel: I like it. I do! I'm - I'm just really concerned about dying in the fire.
Burning House Realtor: It's a big decision - how one prefers to die.
From this point on, every time a scene takes place in this character's place of residence, even after she's moved once or twice, THE SCENERY IS ARBITRARILY FUCKING ON FIRE. And aside from this line with the real estate agent, which I'm pretty sure is supposed to be funny (because it is... it really is HILARIOUS after nearly half an hour of this guy and his depressing fucking life)... this is never brought up again. Ever. No one else ever seems troubled by the fact that this chick's digs are in a state of perpetual conflagration. I think it may get another mention once, possibly twice, only to establish the fact that yes, within the confines of this movie's universe, her home is intended to LITERALLY be on fire and other characters DO notice it, it's not just in her mind or anything... and for SOME REASON everyone else is just okay with this.
Watching this movie can be compared to reading a really serious, well-written, deep, introspective, moving novel... wherein every 10 pages or so, for absolutely no reason, the author inserts the word "bananaphone" in the middle of a sentence, like a google search that got typed into the wrong window and never edited out.
And that's another thing... this movie does constantly go out of its way to show that any time some seriously weird shit is happening, the movie wants to fuck with you by making sure you understand that other characters can see this, too. It's not just one wacko like in fucking The Sixth Sense where this asshole only ever interacts with one dumbass kid and somehow doesn't know he's dead despite not talking to any other human being for months. Noooo, in this movie, you can't tell the difference between what may be hallucinations, delusions, or actors rehearsing their roles in a life-sized replica of New York inside another life-sized replica of New York inside an impossibly immense abandoned warehouse...
...oh yeah, that's another thing. That exists. As far as you know.
The movie's plot doesn't actually hinge entirely on the fact that this guy has some very obvious mental problems. Pretty early on in the film, Caden gets a letter saying he's been awarded a MacArthur Fellowship -- an award of $500,000 paid out over 5 years to artists who receive it just for being geniuses -- which he somehow uses to fund a massive ongoing construction project and pay a cast of what may be hundreds or even conceivably THOUSANDS of actors who do nothing but continually rehearse an unscripted, untitled experiment in realistic theatre that continues to grow in scale exponentially for WELL OVER 20 FUCKING YEARS. Well... the only reference we're ever given comes at a point where an actor whines about how they've been rehearsing for 17 years and when are they going to get an audience in here? And a lot of time may or may not pass after that so it could well be a project that is simply continuously maintained for 40, maybe 50 years.
The concept of linear time tends to like to divorce itself from this movie every so often so it's kind of hard to tell. It's equally possible that everything in the movie might REALLY happen within the space of less than 10 years, or less than 5, or less than 1, and almost all of it really is just the result of the entire story being told from the point of view of a character who is insane on so many levels he-or-she-or-zie makes the entire Medici family history look like an extended episode of Mr. Roger's Neighborhood.
Also, the movie arranges for it to be suspiciously difficult to buy why Caden is even given this award in the first place, since all we ever see of his "genius" are a few shots of him directing a fairly mediocre production of Death of a Salesman. Naturally, this casts even MORE doubt on how much you can trust the reality of anything that happens to anyone in the movie, EVER.
Look, kids.... suspension of disbelief is an integral part of any good production, onstage or onscreen. This movie sets up a universe that makes it very easy to suspend your disbelief and get really invested in... at first. It then proceeds to give you every reason there is to second guess yourself, and once you think you've figured out more or less where to draw the line between in-world "reality" and "stuff the movie is doing just to fuck with you," they introduce yet ANOTHER level of meta that forces you to question not just which scenes are not occurring in which level of "reality," but also to retcon all previously established reality and wonder whether any or all of that was really taking place on a massive theatrical stage. And THEN... JUST TO MESS WITH YOUR ALREADY MESSED UP HEAD... the movie goes on to brilliantly both explain and NOT explain that the main character may or may not have actually been every other character in the movie and any other characters who may or may not have existed may or may not have had backstories in the REAL-REAL-REALITY that made them gay, genderqueer, transsexual, dead, imaginary, or people who the main character saw or met once and then cast them as people in an elaborate internal delusion where they were given names, histories, families, interacted with the main character and other delusions...
...oh yeah, and pretty much all of the reappearing named characters are assigned doppelgängers to play themselves in one of the sets, some of whom invest themselves so thoroughly in their roles that they assign OTHER doppelgängers to act out real-person fanfiction in yet another level of reality created by yet another cast of method actors in a life-size model. All of whom may or may not be playing themselves, regardless of what level they are cast in.
"Hey, Inception? This is Charlie Kaufman speaking. Go back to kindergarten and keep playing with your flea circus and LEGO sets. My shit is so far our of your league you can't even fucking smell it."
Synecdoche, New York is the kind of movie that both baffles and fascinates me on a level that I think is similar to the kind of fascination that, according to Kyle's review of Primer, has led internet people to spend way too damn much time trying to diagram how that movie fucking works. I would really love to watch this again with a list in my hand of all my crazy theories that developed later in the movie and retconned earlier scenes to see if they hold up. I would love to watch it several more times and try to assign every scene to one of what I believe to be FOUR separate coexisting realities defined by this movie's universe, and try to pin them all down along a timeline... and then use all of that to try to figure out whether it was all happening in the mind of a seriously mentally ill person from the beginning.
FINAL THOUGHTS: Synecdoche, New York is a mindfuck in the best way possible. Moments of total insanity interrupt all of this heavy, depressing shit often enough to prevent you from wanting to kill yourself or at least drink yourself unconscious, but those moments of insanity manage to be subtle enough to not COMPLETELY derail the movie into a silly, goofy mess. The acting from everyone in the cast is commendable, but it's worth watching ESPECIALLY for the performances given by Philip Seymour Hoffman and Dianne Wiest, both of whom deserve all the praise the world of art can give them for what they did with their roles here. This movie is like a sudoku puzzle in narrative form... on the surface, its logic seems to work on Alice in Wonderland principals, but it always feels as if there MUST be sense behind it, and if you can only watch closely enough and think hard enough, you might be able to crack its code and maybe learn something in the process.
This is an easy A+ movie, especially for artists and theatrical-type people, but if you have a whole lot of hypochondria-type phobias.... basically, if you can't handle House, MD... the intellectual stimulation this movie provides may not be worth the potential panic-triggers it contains.