ART IMITATING ART

I finally saw synecdoche, new york. this is not a film you can absorb wholly during its runtime - it takes just that long for you to get all the ideas, and then they begin to rearrange themselves in your head for hours after you've left the theater. based purely on premise - man grows old and loses everyone, cannot finish his one creative work, and gets closer and closer to death - this might be one of the most depressing movies I have ever seen. I didn't feel altogether depressed while watching it, but I didn't feel too happy, after the first third of the movie. this one is not like kaufman's others; its metaphors are not neat, they don't "click" in the way the metaphor of getting into someone else's brain (malkovich) or erasing your memory (eternal sunshine) do. this caused me some confusion. I was sitting there waiting for the click which didn't come. instead, bizarre things happened - for one, the aging of caden's character was very odd and disorienting. caden is constantly misinterpreting how much time has elapsed - at one point, a character says it's been a year since his wife left, and caden counters that it's been a month. the viewer has no idea who's right. at another point, caden insists the daughter he's lost is four, and the other character says she's over eleven. the plotline with the daughter doesn't get anymore coherent, either. I thought it was one of the weirdest aspects of the film.

I kept watching this confusing stuff and wondering, "what the fuck?" so many things would just happen that were brutal - not in a gory way, but in an emotional way - and the characters would just keep going. it took me way too long to figure out that this story is based more on dreams than an actual story of a character who is supposed to represent someone in real life. the script at times felt like it was written by someone on drugs, particularly when caden started spouting abstract notions about what theater is. I thought, maybe I am just not artsy enough to appreciate this movie. obviously I could tell that having a real estate agent selling a woman a house that's constantly on fire is not realism. but I didn't get quite how the particular dream-logic of this film worked.

which is why I will need to see it again. I appreciate that it uses the psyche of one character to control events - for example, caden will see himself in every TV show and every advertisement - but I'm just not sure whether this was the point, or what the point was.

it's like, if kaufman were doing his usual thing, he'd set up a "real" universe where caden's life is unraveling in a comic way, and then a "simulacrum" art-universe, and the difference between the two would be clear enough that, at the key moment when art and life are conflated, the audience would get it and feel that "click" (kind of like when you realize that adaptation has been taken over by donald kaufman and becomes all about car chases and guns). but this film probably isn't only about art imitating life, because "life" as we know it in that equation is not present in this film. so it's kind of about art imitating art.

since I feel like the film I just described (art imitating life) has been done many times before - it feels old - I am glad kaufman didn't do this. and though, as the person I saw it with said, synecdoche breaks so many of the rules of storytelling, I love kaufman so much that I wanted to give him the benefit of any doubt. I would much rather a film fail like this than succeed in a typical way (e.g. the dark knight, which I watched recently and thought was somewhat boring and at no point transcended its genre). the character we see in this film might not be a hero, and he arguably doesn't even change through the story; but I know that kaufman knows what the rules are, and was deliberately breaking them.

(I feel confident in this conclusion because I've watched like every single interview with charlie kaufman about this film.)