In watching Charlie Kauffman’s newest film Synecdoche, New York one is confronted with the difficult task of following colliding notions of reality presented through dream-logic, reconciling temporal abnormalities with traditional ideas of plot and narrative, watching the sorrow of human existence portrayed in vivid vignettes of struggle, pain, heartache, and loss, and ultimately, trying to come to grips with what the hell the film means. Because it has to mean something, right? That’s what we do, isn’t? We look for meaning. We approach life as a constant effort to decipher fate, divine providence. We use retrospect to read past acts and moments as purposed and ordained puzzle pieces that fit together in a way that allows the present or future to make sense. We often read in to our daily existence greater and grander narratives, attempting to justify action, choice, consequence, existence.
There has to be a meaning!
And, though we can pithily argue over the actuality of divine ordination, universal providence, or controlling fate in our everyday lives, we might be able to agree on the idea that when we confront a text or film or any other object which beckons for our thought we try to find some meaning in it. David Bordwell, while investigating how that very concept materializes in a viewer writes in Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetorics in the Interpretation of Cinema that meaning is created in two ways: through comprehension and interpretation (3). The act of comprehension, Bordwell articulates, strives for the narrative’s basic meaning; while interpretation looks for the narratives more complex meaning, hidden meaning (3). In the modernist tradition, those meanings might be thought of as inherently built into the narrative. In other words, the act of comprehension or interpretation is really an act to uncover the “correct” meaning of the narrative, or the narrative’s “truth”. But since we know that author is now dead (in cinema’s case, the director has bitten the dust) and we are “increasingly incredulous to metanarratives” and constructions of “truth”, it can be assumed that a text is void of inherent meaning. Along this thought, Bordwell writes, “meanings are not found but made” (3). The viewer, through a process of inference often dictated and controlled by ideological points of view, individual history, and momentary desire constructs a meaning personally appropriate. Nonetheless, just as we want our own real lives to fall perfectly into plan, so to for our fictional narratives. And so, despite if multiple meanings of narratives exist, often, as the casual film goer or book reader, we want narratives to feel coherent, universal and tidy. Thus, we get a long history, at least in terms of the cinema, of traditional Hollywood style films, with scripted narrative structure, proposed singular meanings and non-obtrusive editing patterns that allow for time and space to flow without interruption. Graeme Turner, a film scholar, says “the act of interpretation [of film] is essential...to the pleasures film offers” (92). Just as the real life search for meaning and purpose can (though at times, doesn’t) render joy, on a smaller scale, the same is true with our interaction with narrative: if frustration can be born from confusion, joy can be wrought from meaning.
But (and I promise I am getting the film), what happens when meaning cannot be found, when comprehension and interpretation are left dead in the water? What do we do? How do we react? Luckily, it is not too often, at least in mainstream film, that we are confronted with such a problem. Instead, we are spoon fed recycled narratives with changed names and more expensive special effects that yield, even if we don’t particularly like the film, a sense of joy when we realize as we search for the final drops of soda in our huge tub of a drink, watching the credits roll with a dumbfounded awe, “I got it.”
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As we left the theater, listening to final moments of the melodic, haunting refrain in Charlie Kauffman’s film Synecdoche, New York, my wife looked me and said something like “did you get it?” Ummm, I don’t think so. And that’s because Kauffman, the adroit and talented writer of such films as Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich, and Adaptation, has created a film that resists the traditional habit of discovering meaning. The film is about Caden Cotard, a theater director, who stages a life-size play about real life. As the production grows (it takes place in a huge warehouse), it begins to infiltrate the real life it is portraying. Art and life become so intermixed that characters have a hard time telling the two a part. Cotard, who thinks he is dying from an unknown illness, hyper aware of his finitude, tries to stage something that is grand in scale, scope and rawness, something honest and authentic. However, the grandiosity of the performance eventually spins out of control and, as the life size replica of New York City becomes hard to differentiate from the real New York City, Cotard finds himself unable to separate the two realities, consequently allowing what is fake to control what is real and what is real to control was is fake (which is, I acknowledge, paradoxical). The film, in all of its oddity, sorrow and discord, is a complex fairytale of the simulacrum, confusing and whimsical, and yet, in it’s convolution, beautiful. The cast, headed Philip Seymore Hoffman and supported by Samantha Morton, Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, and a chilling Diane Wiest, who eventually ends up playing the theatrical version of Hoffman’s Cotard, are all masterful in their varying versions of the cinematic and theatrical characters. They support Hoffman (who has become, in his own right, one of the greatest character actors of our time displaying the human condition in far greater brutaility and honesty than most other participants of the craft) along his journey of trying to understand humanity, pain, love and life. But at the end, after a number of interesting plot occurrence, one is left with the question that my wife asked, “what does it mean?”
It is the inability to reconcile the fact that that question may not have a concrete answer that led many of the reviewers to discount the film as a complex dissapointment. Claudia Puig of the USA Today writes, “The meta-narrative is sprawling disjointed, and experimental, so often eluding comprehension that it seems intentionally and arrogantly unclear” (USAToday.com). She concludes that of all Kauffman’s film, this one is the most “maddening.” Maddening in its complexity and refusal to abide by narrative rules. Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly argues something similar, saying that the film is such a “turgid challenge to sit through that it sends most people sulking out of the theater” (EW.com). (By the way, at the viewing that I was at, no one left during the whole film, not even to refill a soda.) Both reviewers seem to assume that Kauffman is purposefully trying to make things complex in order to confuse the audience. Operating on the notion that often a film’s obfuscation can be used to constitute its greatness, Puig and Gleiberman discount SNY’s complexity as a gimmick, a kind of trickery that can be deployed to make a bad movie seem really good. There is certainly some credence in that thought: complexity does not necessarily make something great. But, on the other hand, complexity does not necessarily make something bad. Gleiberman goes on to say that SNY is “one of those ‘visionary’ what-the-hell doozies” and that we should “prepare to be told that it’s a masterpiece” (EW.com). In not finding a central meaning, in being confronted with a narrative that resists interpretation and some comprehension, Puig and Gleiberman seem to discount the complexity of SNY as pure gimmick, a gimmick that ultimately, in their views, fails to work. And Gleiberman, foreseeing his opinion as minority, takes the rhetorical step to discount any future reviewer’s attempt to hail the film as a masterpiece, saying that those conclusions will simply be based on the film’s complexity. Gleiberman is patently wrong in his assumption.
Manohla Dargis, for The New York Times, calls the movie one of the best of year, but not because it is confusing, complex, or even slightly intellectually arrogant, but because it captures life and resists the Hollywood compulsion to color life in nicely wrapped narrative package, complete with cause and effect, purpose and reason. Dargis writes that the film is “about failure, about the struggle to make your mark in a world filled with people who are more gifted, beautiful, glamorous and desirable that the rest of us—we who are crippled by narcissistic inadequacy, yes, of course, but also by real horror, by zits, flab, and the cancer that we know (we know!) is eating away at us and leaving us no choice to lie down and die” (NYTimes.com). Dargis also acknowledges that the film is messy and confusing, but unlike Puig and Gleiberman, she sees the through the narrative’s labyrinth. She says, “[The film] is extravagantly conceptual but also tethered to the here and now, which is why, for all its flights of fancy, worlds within worlds and agonies upon agonies, it comes down hard for living in the world with real, breathing embracing bodies, pressed against other bodies. To be here now, alive in the world as it is rather than as we imagine it to be, seems a terribly simple idea” (NYTime.com). Despite the narrative’s complexity, Dargis argues that maybe the film is simply about life, and that no matter how hard we try to conceptualize life, to glamorize it and to find in meaning in it, we always end up simply living it. Cotard tries, in other words, to construct a version of reality in order to understand reality, and in the end is forced to confront the notion that no matter how hard we try, no matter how much we attempt to search for meaning in life, we are ultimately left with all we have—life in the moment. Roger Ebert, in a very odd and wandering review of the film, says something similar, writing that in the end “The world is but a stage, and we are mere actors upon it. It’s all play. The play is real” (RogerEbert.com). This enigmatic summary of the film echoes, albeit in abstraction, Dargis’ view that life, despite any attempt to rationalize or understand it, is simply that—life. Ebert, who seemingly loved the film, its complexity, execution and ponderance, said that “it will open to confused audiences and live indefinitely” (RogerEbert.com). Ebert’s remark, though simple, is important. He acknowledges that the film will confuse and that the film will experience a certain longevity. He also, however, does not say that the confusion will decrease with the film’s longevity; the two are not reliant upon each other. And that’s because the film’s confusion, which has stymied so many reviewers, is not the reason for the film’s greatness. The confusion is merely part of the film, as it is a part of life: and the film is great, but in part, for that very fact. It is superbly acted, curiously directed, and wonderfully written, but like the project that Cotard himself undertakes, the film is honest about the human condition, the ugliness of it, the constant struggle to understand it and ultimately, the complexity and confusion of it.
Which gets back to the main point that if we generally pull enjoyment from film’s through our understanding of them, than how can we enjoy a film that resists concrete understanding. For this film, I believe, the answer might be found in an interview with Kauffman. The interviewer, Michael Guillen, says that Joseph Campbell explained that compassion is a joyful participation in the sorrows of the world (twitchfilm.net). Kauffman replies:
The idea that we will be joyful by ignoring what’s going on around us is a lie...Some people say SNY is depressing and my reaction to that is: when I read something that speaks to me or makes me feel connected to other beings like, “Oh Yes! I feel that or I’ve felt that!” and often—when I am reading something that was written 300 years ago, 500 years ago, that someone wrote that I’m relating to now, through time, they’re dead for many years but it speaks to me, even if it’s sad, maybe especially if it’s sad—I feel a connectedness to human beings that I don’t normally feel. (twitchfilm.net)
Watching Kauffman’s film is a sad experience that is emotionally draining and cognitively demandning, but it is honest. Though it plays with reality and concepts of time it is true to the human struggle to understand life, to try and find reason for sorrow, pain, to reconcile with our finitude, and as viewers our joy in watching the film is produced through our willing act of compassion, through our willingness to participate in the sorrows of the world, even if that world is a constructed replica of the real thing.
If you try your hardest to find meaning in the film, to interpret it, to comprehend every scene, to dissect every choice, your efforts will most likely end in frustration. We search for meaning in everything. We want cause and effect. But life is not like that. When we search for the meaning, we often miss the point.
In Act 5, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Hamlet talks about the inability to operate outside of divine providence and he says that the best way to cope with that idea is to accept it. He says, “Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what is't to leave betimes, let be.”
Watch Synecdoche, New York. Take joy in the confusing, complex, and sorrowful struggle of human life.
Watch and let be.
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