Like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), for
which he wrote the screenplay, Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche,
New York is a play about time and memory, and in particular
the ways in which time both wounds and heals and memory becomes
almost infinitely corruptible. Also like the earlier film, it
makes use of the realistic bias of the medium to produce a
quasi-surrealistic parable which has the power, like the best
examples of surrealism, itself to become a kind of artificial
dream or memory in the mind of the audience. At the narrative
level, it is an essay about the particularities of life. How
important are they, after all? A man’s wife leaves him, but there
seems to be no shortage of willing females to take her place —
though the man is severely depressed and, by most reckonings, not
very attractive even apart from the fact that he suffers from
various disgusting illnesses. One of them gives him another
daughter. If you love, does it really matter that much precisely
who you love? How about if you are loved?
“Synecdoche” is the rhetorical device of substituting the part
for the whole (“hands” for workers) or, loosely and by extension,
the whole for the part or other forms of metonymic substitution.
It is also, in this context, a pun on name of the city in upstate
New York, Schenectady, where the hero, Caden Cotard (Philip
Seymour Hoffman) is living with his wife, Adele (Catherine
Keener), and their daughter Olive (Sadie Goldstein) when the film
opens. Caden is a professor of theatre whose own production of
Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman is about to open.
The big idea of the production is to cast young actors in the
roles of Willie and Linda Loman, so that the failure and futility
that characterizes their aged selves will be seen as implicit in
their young and (therefore) hopeful selves. In other words, time
itself is to be filleted out of the play like the skeleton of a
fish in order to reveal — well, what? A timeless life.
Instead of Synecdoche, maybe the film should have been called
Tautology. Or, better still, Oxymoron. One of its central images
is the house on fire that is never consumed. Hazel (Samantha
Morton), one of women who are powerfully if inexplicably
attracted to Caden, buys the house — she’s told it has a
motivated seller — and lives in it for years, apparently,
ultimately growing old there and dying (“Might be smoke
inhalation,” says the paramedic) all the time that it remains,
like the burning bush in the Bible, a paradoxical negation of
time and the normal laws of the universe. But it is also a
negation of what we normally take to be — the wise might say
wrongly — the central fact of human life, which is that it is
just one damned thing after another. No! says the Cadenesque and
Kaufmanesque view. It’s the same damned thing over and over
again, an endless rehearsal for a play which is never presented.
For that is what Caden’s life becomes in the telling of Mr.
Kaufman, who both wrote and directed the picture. Once Adele
leaves him, taking Olive with her, to go to Berlin and become a
famous painter, Caden wins a MacArthur “genius” grant, and with
the money decides to produce a play on such a massive scale that
it will become indistinguishable from life itself — in
particular, his life. The point then becomes both to
confuse the multiple Cadens, the star of the play as well as its
author and producer, as well as to jumble up the times of his
life, so that it is soon hard to tell whether it has been weeks
or decades since Adele has left and the play has begun. At some
point he marries Claire (Michelle Williams), the star of
Salesman, and has a daughter with her, so that she
becomes a second Adele and the daughter a second Olive. He also
hires an actor named Sammy (Tom Noonan) who has been following
him around, he says, for 20 years to play himself. Sammy knows
Caden better than Caden does.
Meanwhile, the original Olive becomes an exotic, tattooed dancer
who dies when her tattoos become infected. On her deathbed, where
Caden visits her, she tells him that she has to hear him ask for
forgiveness for leaving her before she dies. He tries to persuade
her of the account of events that we have seen — in which Adele
left him and took her away to Berlin when she was a little girl.
But Olive rejects this and vigorously opposes it with the rival
narrative of Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Adele’s friend and her
own substitute father, as she tells it, which she obliges him to
mouth word for word: “Can you ever forgive me for abandoning you
to have anal sex with my homosexual lover, Erik?” he says
obediently, though there is no Erik and he is not a homosexual.
Whereupon, she says, no, she can’t forgive him, and promptly
dies.
How far either she or Caden are simply making up the story of
their own lives we never know, though it soon comes to seem a
matter of little moment. More important is the fact that Olive
and everybody else are in some sense as much the directors and
impresarios of their lives as Caden is of his. This is the
reflection that gives rise to the film’s moral, which is that
“there are nearly thirteen million people in the world” —
actually, it’s only about half that — ” and none of those people
is an extra. They’re all the leads of their own stories. They
have to be given their due.” To me this sounds like a counsel of
despair, as does its corollary that the simulacrum is not
reliably to be distinguished from the original.
In what might have been an affecting scene near the end, for
example, Caden and Hazel in age embrace like an old married
couple. “I wish we had had this when we were young,” says Hazel
wistfully. “And all the years in between.” But in the context of
the film, such a wish hardly makes any more sense than Caden’s
wish for Adele to come back. They’ve had the life they have had
— insofar as they, or we, even know what those lives have been
— because of choices they have made. Regrets make no sense. But
if there is nothing to regret, how can there be anything to love?
The film seems to end by adopting Adele’s view that “This whole
romantic love thing, it’s just a projection anyway.” If that were
true, who would ever go to the movies? In the same way, if life
were just an elaborate stage extravaganza, who would ever go to
the theatre? This is a movie to kill the thing its author loves.
