Synecdoche, New York is a film that resonates with a lot of my education. I like framing it within that prism because while I remember sitting in class, reading Derrida and Bahktin and everyone else in between, the experience of it is a little fuzzy. And if I position myself in that desk, paging through the Rivkin & Ryan anthology, the details and concerns of my life are decidedly different, and at that time I think I was probably thinking of a different self, a different me – but the shades of that self are completely different and lacking the identity I, myself, would give to it now. But is that part of myself accessible but for the trip through the other?
I literally just found myself tapping out a paragraph ruminating on the ridiculous nature of this kind of thinking. When did I become such a luddite? Isn’t the great part of this film that it actively engages us in these kinds of thought experiments? It’s a film about humanity at its most base level, and if you abstract yourself out from the “plot,” you have a perfect everyman in the shape of Caden Cotard that is successful because he’s the “director”, which is the role we all take in our lives. Sometimes we wish we had someone to give us notes that tell us how to feel, but if you want to be Cartesian about it, it’s just us. Usually stories about writers bother me, and while this isn’t a story about a writer, it is ostensibly about the insular creative world – but Cotard’s problems are universal, and the play he’s putting on, as it gets larger and more ‘real’ and more about the lives we look back on and the regrets we had and still have, becomes less about the director than the directed. Caden frequently phones Hazel’s cell, and even though she is now 60, 70 years old, the voice on the voicemail never ages. Does this suggest that Caden is constantly calling deeper and deeper into the nested warehouses, to the point where Hazel and he had a chance? Or does it suggest that regrets do not age and that to be over them, we must simply let them go?
The biggest flaw in the film for me is the burning house of Hazel, which is a detail that makes me recall what I thought of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and a Charlie Kaufman script being directed by Michel Gondry: It’s a little like adding sugar to coke for flavor. And while there are a couple of funny moments with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Samantha Morton acting while the house burns down around them, there’s just something a little too present (or if you’re looking for a Manhattan-bound 4-train ten-cent word, “centered”). It’s meant to suggest that choices we make early in life vibrate throughout our whole lives (when Hazel states her worry about the fire to the real estate agent, she tells Hazel it is difficult to choose how we die). A better metaphor to this in the film is the suggestion that every choice we make is connected to a thousand threads, and when you pull just one, everything shifts to accommodate.
Now where did I put that Papa John's receipt.
This is well beyond the post-modern games that Kaufman plays so freely with in the last third of the film. Things really start to bog down as we see Cotard and Hazel trailing Sammy and Tammy (the second Cotard and Hazel) trailing the third ones, with them acting out a scene rife with gauche artifice. At this point, we see Cotard coming to realize who he is, with the gender swap with Ellen, whose bedmate is Eric which makes us recall Olive’s death scene and has the issue of pulling us deeper into the warehouses, since it doesn’t appear as though this switch has happened yet, so it must be “above”. The gender swap seems to suggest the animus, which comes just before self-identification in Jung, but also corresponds to the ‘mirror’ stage in Lacan, and so it makes sense that the narrative becomes uncontrollably slippery (10¢), disjointed and senile.
I found myself, having recently listened to a podcast on identity in Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, thinking a lot about how our conceptions of ourselves form our identities. Cotard really likes to clean, and while he doesn’t necessarily think all of his organs have gone missing or that he’s a walking corpse, he doesn’t really appear to get much self-awareness until he meets Sammy (who knows more why Adele left than Cotard himself). But even if Cotard isn’t in a warehouse at the beginning of the film, there’s plenty of evidence that suggests he’s only one in a line (Hazel is reading Proust in the box office, where a Dr. Cottard makes several appearances). So there is a Cotard that came before, several that will come after, and at each level life is written and knowable, but at the same time uncontrollable because it has already happened.
