Apes that are Aped, Apes who Ape, Aped Apes Aping: a review of Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, NY.
By Matt Nathanson | November 6, 2008
Category: The Wasteland
Matt Nathanson is PhillyJock’s critic.
If a film or any work of art revolves around a question and rotates upon a philosophical axis, Synecdoche, New York’s fundamental question is “Am I dying?” and it’s axis reads: “Everyone is Everyone.” Its gravitational message then, its pull through space and time and distance and vacuum, is simple: The answer is yes. We are all dying, and there’s not one God-damned thing to do about it. But also: nothing is real, and the Medium doesn’t give two shits about Message, and Be Kind, Rewind. And if these metaphors are muddled, they are purposefully so: Synecdoche ‘s a world where metaphors don’t merely mix, they cohabitate, they fall in love, they wake up in the morning to find their shit is green—their actual shit—they forget the reason for their love, they drift, they become estranged.
In Charlie Kaufman’s abstruse screenplay (and directorial debut), Philip Seymour Hoffman deftly plays Caden, an over-the-hill, suburban theatre director who struggles—in the face of his mortality and failing health—to create something “real” before he goes. His wife is a frigid bitch and brilliant artist (her peculiar medium tiny, impressionistic portraits) who takes their daughter Olive and leaves him to “find herself” in Europe. He is staggered artistically as much as personally, but the awarding of a “genius grant” allows him to mount a theatrical production like none seen before. In an endeavor that literally becomes his life’s work, we watch this man recreate the New York City skyline within a giant Manhattan warehouse. He fills this shrine of Simulacra with “actors” who play out any number of scenes, not for an audience but in the name of some existential exercise in authenticity. They are working towards some sort of grand performance but what it is, and how it could ever be physically performed, is never actually articulated by the Caden or the actors. Throughout this creative endeavor, the director struggles with memories of his estranged wife and daughter, the failure of his health and sexually potency, the hollowness of his love for his colleague Hazel, and the melancholy echo of artistic failure. This all swirls together in a surreal, often-Kafkaesque mélange of anachronistic, schizophrenic, and dreamy landscapes. Heavy stuff then, plus a few (high-brow) jokes smattered throughout.
Like in the wonderful film Adaptation, Charlie Kaufman has written himself into his screenplay. But unlike that film, where Nicholas Cage actually plays a character named Charlie Kaufman, here it’s Kaufman’s ambition, his vision, that is mimicked in his story. We realize as the movie progresses that this film is itself Kaufman’s Great Untitled Warehouse Project, his well-funded and redundant pile of nothing, his endless iteration of theme without regard for real structure. His theme, Everyone is Everyone, reverberates through the film so perseveringly that by slowing to listen to this echo we realize it is the only thing to hear: despite the cluttered proscenium, the endless and interchangeable characters, the set-upon-set-upon–set, the theme itself is the only story, is the only thing filling the film’s own warehouse with meaning or truth.
But, like Adaptation, this sort of narrative flexibility and aesthetic fascination with conveyance is not going to appeal to everyone. We prefer—because we are used to—our message being far from our medium, that a book is a cover and pages and ink and a story is words and grammar and syntax, filling these pages, taking us somewhere. I can see many people absolutely hating this film. Especially since, while Adaptation is about the process of storytelling, Synecdoche, N.Y. is about the process of living, and because living is only the Heads-side of the mortal coin, the process of dying. And so it’s even more self-indulgently interested in the act of creation(and destruction) itself. What’s disarming about stories like these, and why I think many people rejected the paratextual acrobatics of Adaptation, is that—in showing us the process—we are exposed. Our inclinations, our expectations, our weakness for narrative tropes: if an artist can see these, can repackage them, can use them to provoke emotional response, then we are so far from our seraphic vision of ourselves, our epistemological plumbing, our baseline self-concept that whispers in that voice that’s only in our heads and on the occasional answering-machine: I am complex, I am unique in my suffering. If we can be aped we are apes, stripped of humanness, left naked and in the Wild.
But Synecdoche argues otherwise, postulates that it is this very lack of uniqueness that makes us human. And while this is almost certainly a bleak perspective, I wouldn’t call it “depressing.” And while I wouldn’t deny that or any emotional experience to someone who sees the film and finds it there, I think those that find this movie depressing are forgetting that depression is despondency rather than boundless affirmation of grief. Can anything boundless be truly “depressing,” even boundless sadness? That is, for me, the most interesting question raised by this film, and one that I didn’t expect to be asked. Our suffering is the mark—like Olive’s Tattoos—that confirms our identity (human beings, mortals) and our soil (our shit is green, we are marked, something is amiss). A lack of uniqueness, a blurring of characters, a peculiar and sexy anachronism, these things allow entry into stories because we can see right before our eyes nothing less than ourselves, the people we know, the stories we believe in, the dreams we’ve had.
The movie starts out simply enough, and besides the color of Olive’s feces there’s little that seems out of place for these lugubrious, encumbered middle-aged characters. But the dream spiral winds down fast, and soon enough we realize metaphorical flourishes aren’t embellishments but actual, principal elements of the story. Of the many metaphors—the many synecdoche—at play in this movie (the changing titles of the therapist’s book, the green shit, the tiny portraits, the bubbling pustules on Caden’s face…), perhaps none is as neatly cordoned off from “reality” as we know it than is Hazel’s house, which over the course of the movie and Caden’s lifetime is perpetually burning down. Like the punch-line to an old joke, while a realtor is extolling the home’s ample closet space and various amenities, Hazel is worried about “being killed in the fire” that is indeed roaring at their feet. The metaphor system is in place—houses and fires and being consumed by domesticity but still buying into it—and it’s a good laugh. But when later, forty or so years later for the characters, Hazel is killed due to “smoke inhalation” in the smoldering house, we see the intrusion of the metaphor-system on reality, or, alternatively, the breakdown of reality into metaphor.
And here’s where the great success of this movie comes into play. I would even go so far as to say that the story meanders a bit in the beginning and middle, takes us down some circuitous paths. But I firmly believe that this parallels (purposefully or not) the evolution of the warehouse-play itself. Soon enough, a jewel is revealed, something fragile, light, and beautiful. It is the story of Ellen, a cleaning lady played by Diane Weist who worked for Caden’s wife in some sort of (invented?) fragment of reality. In the film’s bizarre final crescendo, Caden plays out Diane’s story, her melancholy, her memory of childhood. It is something truly spectacular, it takes us by surprise, it makes us proud a bit—in the midst of all this sadness—to behold. But more than any of this, the film’s focus on Ellen’s story is in a way both the reiteration and illustration of the authentic “truth” the screenplay seeks to uncover, that everyone is everyone, and that suffering of one woman can easily be used to understand the whole of suffering. Therefore, in the film’s final, redemptive scene, having Ellen’s mother (and not a character we know) whisper I love you to a dying Caden is as good as his own mother – is as good as The Virgin Mother – it becomes a Jungian archetype for finding meaning, accepting failure, facing the past and letting it fill you up on in a final, gasping breath. I loved the end of the film, I believed it, and what made it magical to me is that I realized what it ultimately was: we were seeing the warehouse play unfolding before us. This is how a story about all of Human Misery can be told: through the sad story of one cleaning lady. This representation is itself synecdoche.
So yes, a discussion of this cerebrally-named film must at least briefly linger on the title and the contribution of synecdoche to the story. The literary device from which the titular pun springs forth (the characters begin the movie living in the homophonic Schenectady, New York) of course refers to using a part of something to represent the whole or entirety. So, for instance, we say The Crown but we mean the royal authority of Great Britain. Synecdoche here is not merely the circuitry that connects small details and profound meaning in the film, it is, quite literally, the point. For all the implied connection, the tiny New York that becomes and replaces the real one, the many iterations of Caden and Hazel and everyone else, we come to view the tragedy of Ellen’s story as a synecdoche for the tragedy of mankind. Her sadness represents the whole of sadness, and so it applies, and it’s ours.
And what strikes me as odd and sort of sweet is that, pondering the film this morning, I could not help but think of it in the context of the only other thing I did with my Sunday this hung-over Halloween weekend. Standing on the Park Avenue, watching the endless procession of New York marathon runners parading by (feeling guilty I had just had a huge amount of bacon at brunch) I was touched by what I thought would be just sort of cheesy and dumb. Lots of people, from all over the city, cheering on total strangers for their (ridiculously fucking tiring) accomplishment. Why? Just general goodwill? A belief in the power of good-natured support, in some sort of karmic reversal? No, it struck me as something else. In watching these runners at mile twenty-four, so close to their goal, there’s something totally magical that happens. We see our aunt, a breast-cancer survivor, in runner # 23440. We see a best friend we thought we had forgotten in #29883. We see ourselves, sweaty and sore, so close to what seemed an impossible goal (was that me, beaming graciously, thanking God I was almost through, in #14560?). We see the triumph of people like us; we see our triumph. A procession, then, of stories, of narratives that cross paths on this street corner in the borough of Manhattan, in the city of New York, in the year 2008. It is an extension of what Synecdoche has shown me, perhaps with a more triumphant and optimistic spin, when we see ourselves in others we find our humanity. When we are aped, we are so much more than apes.
November 11th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
This was a rare case where I was moved by the review though I haven’t yet seen the movie. I’m looking forward to checking it out this weekend. Thanks Matt.