Synecdoche New York: A Movie Review

By John David Ebert

Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche New York, recently released on DVD, is his directorial debut and very possibly his finest work to date. Kaufman made himself famous as an auteur screenwriter in a medium which rejects the very idea of a screenwriter becoming an auteur, since film is primarily a director’s medium. Screenwriters are a dime a dozen in this business, and few of them ever manage to carve out recognizably distinct signature visions, since screenplays are usually so heavily trademarked with the director’s style and personality that there is not often much left that can be credited as unique to the screenwriter. But Kaufman, beginning with Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich, managed to rise above the limitations of the medium with a vision so wry and sardonically Kaufmannian that it was also immediately its own trademark; in the films that followed, such as Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, it became evident that Kaufman’s own particular way of looking at the world is unmistakably his own and as readily identifiable as, say, Stanley Kubrick’s. No one can duplicate the feel of a Stanley Kubrick film; Kaufman’s vision, it is becoming apparent, is just as inimitable.

In Synecdoche New York, Kaufman explores the phenomenon of time, ageing, senescence and death. The film is littered with references to Kafka and Proust; its opening scene of the film’s protagonist, Caden Cotard, waking up to an alarm clock talk show immediately reminds us of the opening of Groundhog Day, a film that explores similar themes; and its weaving in and out of the events of a play embedded within the film’s overarching narrative such that at times the viewer is not sure whether he is watching a scene from the play Caden is staging or an event in Caden’s life is thematically similar to the cartography explored by David Lynch in Inland Empire. Thus, the film belongs to a landscape molded out of the topography of other movies like A.I., Mulholland Drive, Jacob’s Ladder, or David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch. If you like those sorts of films, then you are likely to like this one; if not, then Synecdoche New York is probably not for you.

The story follows the life and course of Caden Cotard, a theater director who receives a MacArthur grant and decides to use it to stage the ultimate play set on the proscenium of a giant replica of New York City inside a hangar that looks like it could put Pennsylvania Station to shame. The remarkable thing about Caden’s play is that it takes him many decades to assemble; the cast is enormous, full of thousands of extras; and it is a story that is based upon his own life and experiences. No sooner do we watch an “episode” of Caden’s life than we see it mirrored and duplicated in his play.

But, the viewer soon notices, there is no audience for Caden’s play and it never receives a grand opening. Slowly, the viewer begins to realize that he the cinemagoer watching Synecdoche New York is the audience of Caden’s play, and that Caden’s play is not really a play at all but rather a metaphor for life itself. Life is a play and each of us is cast in supporting roles in everyone else’s lives, Kaufman seems to be saying. No one is the star because everyone is the star. And then we die. And, moreover, in undergoing the dying process, Kaufman adds rather originally, it seems to me, each of us is slowly stripped of his or her own individual traits, becoming more and more generically “human” as death approaches and less and less a unique phenomenon.

Now, of course, as the film’s title implies — Synecdoche New York deliberately parallels Schenectady, New York, where the film begins — the other main theme is the creation of a parallel reality to the physical world. Art is about creating a virtual double of the world which mirrors it in strange, tangential ways. But even more so, we today, as Jean Baudrillard never tired of pointing out, are involved in a global corporate endeavor to construct the world’s double, a gigantic virtual clone of the world that is essentially meaningless: the pyramids are duplicated as casino hotels in Las Vegas; the original Lascaux is closed to the public and then reopened as a carefully constructed facsimile; actors and celebrities, by descending into the electronic plasma pool of mediatic hyperreality are constantly engaged in the dangerous process of reproducing clones of themselves, clones which tend to destabilize and alienate the personalities of their originals; and so forth. Postmodern culture is engaged in creating a duplicate of the world, the earth’s double, if you will, constructed on a global scale.

Kaufman’s film explores this current hyperrealization and cloning of reality by electronic culture with its central metaphor of a duplicate of New York City built as the “stage” for Caden’s play. Everyone in Caden’s play is a “double” of a real person, himself, his girlfriends, etc., but these doubles are always less interesting than the real people they are based upon, for they are two-dimensional reflections, as are all mirror images, whether glass-based or lens based, of a real, three-dimensional and much more complex “originary” phenomenon that constitutes reality.

Another of Kaufman’s points: the film swallowed up the play, just as the planet has been engulfed by electronic optics. With the surrounding of the earth by satellites, as McLuhan pointed out, the earth was placed, for the first time inside a mechanical / electronic environment. The ubiquitous presence of the camera eye watching us all from orbit in outer space–the orbital space surrounding the earth which used to be occupied, once upon a time, by gods–has simultaneously transformed the entire planet into a gigantic theater with no spectators, only actors. We are all watching over these cities like playgoers watching actors on a stage, only the stage has been transformed and replaced by the electronic video monitor. Hence, with the death of the play as an art form, electronic technology has given it back to us in the form of the global video screen watched by each theater goer inside the flickering cavern of his own private living room. Now we watch each other, as we go about the business of constructing the world’s double.

But the main idea of Kaufman’s film is the passage of time: it is a unique attempt to capture the flow of time and its attendant emotions; the years slipping past you without notice, until one die somebody dies and you realize that decades have indeed gone by. You are older, as the Pink Floyd song goes, and the years are dwindling and the days are running out. People around you are dying and transforming into memories, taking up residence in your head, where they exist now only as ghostly reflections. Memory captures it, this flow, interrupting it, sustaining it, slowing it, but never stopping it except only momentarily.

We are all headed for death and there is nothing any of us can do to stop it. But in the meantime, we can write plays, build theaters and tell each other stories. It’s all we’ve got on this earth.

There may not be anything more.