Synecdoche

Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York, is amazing. 

I immediately thought of Beckett's "First Love," an extremely unique short story about love -- far from a unique subject on its own -- which builds formally upon an endlessly accumulating mass of perceptions (rather than intelligible concepts and ideas) culminating in a general understanding of a single human relationship.  Beckett doesn't use words like "jealousy," but he writes about it nonetheless, allowing the communication of brief, loosely associative details to stand in for a complicated human emotion.  Synecdoche, then, provides a similar experience.  Everything is perception, a constant digging into the surface of things, but not a digging deeper -- rather, a digging out of confusion into, hopefully, clarity.  The words "mid-life crisis" are not present in the film, nor are the words "suburban malaise," but they are perceived concepts -- themes, even -- arrived at after connecting an abundance of images and feelings linked together with the sole purpose of guiding us backwards, rather than forwards, toward understanding.

For example, Hazel, a theater box office attendant played in the film (at first, at least... long story) by Samantha Morton, is at one point being shown a house by a real estate agent.  She seems interested in the house, and the agent is rattling on and on about the generous size and rigorous upkeep of the house, the partially finished basement, etc, but when she asks if Hazel is interested in buying, Hazel quietly states her single objection to the house: "I'm worried about dying in the fire."  And indeed, the house is definitely on fire; subtly, casually on fire, in a way that it will always be on fire.  Dangerous in a vague but real way.  Hazel ends up with the house anyway, suffering through this inconvenience until her death, years later, of smoke inhallation.  The burning house is not clearly relevant to the plot of the film but is nonetheless an essential perception, representative here of the inevitable compromises we make to our happiness -- and, subsequently, their ultimately tragic, unavoidable consequences.  And it functions within Kaufman's project as a guidepost towards understanding, rather than a punchline.

Which is good, I guess, because there really isn't a punchline at all in Synecdoche.  There's no big reveal.  The ending is incredibly moving, but it doesn't provide clarity -- actually, it probably raises even more questions.  But I think Beckett, at least, would approve of Kaufman's circular ambivalence towards an intellectual imperative, favoring instead an emotional and almost unconscious truth that bursts out of each perceived moment, each seemingly inconsequential image.  The story of Synecdoche, New York is either too simple or too complex to really discuss in detail here, but it's worth noting how little the story matters to the experience of the film.  In a world of screenwriting theories promoting rigid structure, a tightly controlled narrative accompanying a carefully manipulated arc of character development, a Charlie Kaufman script is a messy, muddled, meandering, beautiful breath of fresh air.

Comments

[Steven Augustine]

Quite excited about this one; Kaufman has single-handedly revived my interest in contemporary cinema (after the Coen Bros began letting me down: laugh).