1. Synecdoche, New York
- 2008
- 🎬︎✍︎ Charlie Kaufman
- 👥︎ Philip Seymour Hoffman
“This is everyone’s experience. Every single one. The specifics hardly matter.”
This is a pretentious film and i feel pretentious putting it up here, but it is, genuinely, just that good. It’s ridiculously ambitious and, despite its high concept and pathetic main character, it taps into that universal fear of mis-spending the only time one has on earth — i was bawling my eyes out by the end, after two hours that felt like four.
In which i get the conspiracy pinboard out…
I’m obligated to provide my own theory here, and i’m not sure it makes much sense, but here goes.
Synecdoche, New York takes place in layers within layers. Caden Cotard, in Warehouse 1, casts Sammy Barnathan to play himself in Warehouse 2 — who himself casts someone as Sammy-as-Caden in Warehouse 3, and so on, and so on. The invisible hand at the top of the chain of warehouses is of course Charlie Kaufman, in the real world, what we might call Warehouse -1. But the real story takes place only in implication, in a layer we’re not privy to.
Caden Cotard is a fictional character, the creation of “Warehouse 0”’s Ellen Bascomb, evidently a cleaner of some sort. (I would note that the name Ellen is suspiciously similar to El, the Hebrew term for God — that might be a stretch, but you never know with these things.) He serves as a coping mechanism through which she can consider her own broken home life. He has all of her problems — a continuing sickness, a fraught relationship with his child, and a profound mopiness — but equally has achieved all her ambitions: not just a mere cleaner, he is a celebrated artist, and a ladies’ man, to boot.
Caden himself is perpetually stuck as a model of Ellen at the time of his creation. He never gets any worse or better, always being about as sick as he ever was, and no amount of joy or pain can stop him from snapping back to his depressive equilibrium. Back in Warehouse 0, though, the story of Caden works, and Ellen slowly begins to turn her life around. She needs the concept of Caden Cotard less and less, a process that is reflected in the slow demise of Caden’s world. Sammy — from the Biblical Samuel, who heard voices from God — takes his own life; he falls out of the world much as Caden is falling out of Ellen’s. Ellen herself eventually shows up, much as Caden might oversee the plays inside his own, to tell him he is no longer needed. They have swapped places. Ellen is now the artist she always wanted to be, but Caden remains the lowly cleaner from all those years ago.
The last time we see Caden, in an emptied out grey world, he meets with Ellen’s mother. Perhaps it’s her funeral, and her daughter brings out the idea of Caden one last time, in the same realm of imagination that the memory of her mother has now been consigned to, to put them both to rest. He knows how to do the play know — and she knows how to do her life.
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