Synecdoche, New York

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Synecdoche, New York takes its name from two things simultaneously. One is Schenectady, the upstate New York city where much of the story unfolds. The other is synecdoche, a rhetorical figure in which a part stands for the whole, or the whole for a part. Charlie Kaufman embedded that double meaning into a film about a theater director who tries to make a play that contains all of life. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the director, Caden Cotard, a man whose body is slowly failing even as his ambitions grow without limit. How did this film, Kaufman's directorial debut, come to be called the best of its decade by one of America's most prominent critics? And how did the same film earn a D+ from another reviewer, who described its central obsession as not art but psychosis?

  7391

• 2. From Horror to Something Stranger

  ›

  Sony Pictures Classics originally brought Kaufman and director Spike Jonze together to make a horror film. The two agreed and began developing a project rooted in their own real fears rather than standard genre conventions. Before production began, Jonze left to direct Where the Wild Things Are. Kaufman then chose to take the director's chair himself. That decision cost the film its original studio backing: Sony Pictures Classics withdrew, citing Kaufman's lack of directing experience. Sidney Kimmel Entertainment stepped in with a budget of $20 million. Kaufman found that sum limiting for what the script demanded. The old armory the crew used for shooting grew intensely hot. Prosthetics worn by actors to show the passage of decades trapped sweat against their skin. At one point, Kaufman and several crew members were caught in an elevator, a phobia of Kaufman's. The film premiered in competition at the 61st Annual Cannes Film Festival on the 23rd of May, 2008. That same week, the Great Recession struck and Sidney Kimmel Entertainment shut down. Sony Pictures Classics then acquired the US distribution rights, paying no money but agreeing to share future revenue with the film's backers.

  5116502

• 3. Two Artists, Two Scales

  ›

  After a successful production of Death of a Salesman, Caden receives a MacArthur Fellowship. He uses it to begin an entirely new kind of theater project. He assembles an ensemble cast inside an enormous warehouse in Manhattan's Theater District and instructs them to live out their roles in real time. As years pass, the set inside the warehouse grows to contain a full-size replica of New York City. Then he builds a replica of the warehouse within the warehouse, and another within that, in a cycle with no resolution.

  Caden's wife, Adele Lack Cotard, works at the opposite extreme. She creates paintings so microscopic they require a magnifying glass to see. The miniatures shown in the film were the work of artist Alex Kanevsky. Kaufman noted that in Adele's studio early in the film there are "small but regular-sized paintings that you could see without a magnifying glass." By the time Caden visits her gallery years later, "you can't see them at all." Kaufman noted that Adele's full name, Adele Lack Cotard, functions almost as a mondegreen for "a delicate art." He described Caden's theatrical approach as "so literal" that the only way Caden can reflect reality is "by imitating it full-size." Kaufman placed the source of Caden's project not in artistic ambition but in personal feeling. He argued that Caden builds the enormous production to impress Adele, because "he feels so lacking next to her in terms of his work." Kaufman described Adele's miniatures as more effective than Caden's vast production. "As a dream image it appeals to me," he said of her work. Eventually, Caden hires a man named Sammy to play the role of Caden in the production. Sammy reveals that he has spent twenty years following Caden obsessively.

  132612

• 4. The Burning House

  ›

  Hazel tells the real estate agent showing her the house that she is "really concerned about dying in the fire." The agent's response is simple: "It's a big decision, how one prefers to die." She buys the house anyway. In an interview with journalist Michael Guillén, Kaufman explained his intention. "The end is built into the beginning," he said. "She chooses to live in this house. She's afraid it's going to kill her but she stays there and it does." That phrase, "the end is built into the beginning," recurs throughout the film. It connects to the film's thinking about birth and death: life, as the film frames it, is a fraction of a second against two vast stretches of not yet being born and of being dead. Commentators have compared the burning house to a line from Tennessee Williams: "We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it." In one interview, Kaufman mentioned that a Jungian scholar has read the burning house as a representation of the self. Hazel eventually dies of smoke inhalation inside that house. In the same conversation with Guillén, Kaufman described the larger truth he took from her choice. "That is the truth about any choice that we make," he said. "We make choices that resonate throughout our lives."

  132612

• 5. Delusion Embedded in Structure

  ›

  Caden's surname, Cotard, names a real psychiatric condition. The Cotard delusion is a disorder in which sufferers believe themselves to be dead. They may also believe their internal organs have disappeared or are decaying. His constant preoccupation with illness and mortality tracks closely to that condition. When Caden enters Adele's apartment building, the buzzer he presses carries the name "Capgras," pointing to a second psychiatric disorder. Capgras delusion is a condition in which familiar people appear to have been replaced by identical imposters. The film enacts that logic structurally. Actors replace real people in Caden's production. Doppelgangers replace the actors. A Sammy lookalike is eventually cast to replace Sammy himself. In the film's late sequences, Caden wears a permanent earpiece and receives spoken instructions from an actress directing his every move. Kaufman drew this from psychiatrist Kurt Schneider's identification of the auditory third-person hallucination as a first-rank symptom of schizophrenia.

  Carl Jung wrote that waking and dream states are both necessary in the pursuit of meaning. Caden seems to exist in both simultaneously. Kaufman described his own approach to this: "I think the difference is that a movie that tries to be a dream has a punchline and the punchline is: it was a dream." Jung described four stages of self-realization: the shadow, the anima, the archetypal spirit, and finally self-realization itself. These stages map onto Caden's arc across the film's decades. When Caden takes on the role of Ellen the housekeeper, he tells Tammy that his persona would have made him more adept in womanhood than in manhood. The actress directing Caden through his earpiece eventually delivers his final stage direction: a single word, "Die."

  21221326

• 6. A Divided Legacy

  ›

  On Rotten Tomatoes, Synecdoche, New York holds an approval rating of 69% from 195 reviews, with an average score of 6.8 out of 10. The site's critical consensus describes the film as one that "occasionally strains to connect, but ultimately provides fascinating insight into a writer's mind." On Metacritic, it holds a weighted average of 67 out of 100 from 34 critics. Those numbers conceal a genuine divide. Rex Reed, Richard Brody, and Roger Friedman each named it one of the worst films of 2008. Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly gave it a D+. He wrote that the film's obsessive self-examination was not the mechanism of art but "the structure of psychosis." Jonathan Rosenbaum argued that the film read more like an illustration of a script than a full-fledged piece of cinema, and suggested it proved how much Kaufman needed a collaborator like Jonze or Michel Gondry to realize his ideas. Several critics compared it to Federico Fellini's 1963 film 8½.

  Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times that he knew Synecdoche, New York was a great film the first time he saw it. He called it a film about "nothing less than human life and how it works." In 2009, he named it the best film of the decade. Manohla Dargis of The New York Times wrote that even naming the film one of the year's best felt inadequate to its ambition. Carina Chocano, writing in the Los Angeles Times, called it "wildly ambitious... sprawling, awe-inspiring, heartbreaking, frustrating, hard-to-follow and achingly, achingly sad." The film appeared on 101 "Best of 2008" lists, with 20 placing it first. In the 2012 Sight and Sound poll, four critics ranked it among the ten greatest films ever made. A 2016 BBC critics' poll ranked it 20th among the greatest films of the 21st century. In 2019, The Guardian placed it 7th in its 100 Best Films of the 21st Century poll. Some critics have since compared the film to the American docu-comedy television series The Rehearsal. The comparison suggests that its ideas about performance and the limits of representation continue to generate new conversations.

  3233394036