The Haute Critique

There is a lot to say about this Charlie Kaufman bit.   It is indubitably Haute, structurally resonant with flicks like I am Not There and Mulholland Drive, with enough layers, metafictions, mixed identities and inexplicabilities to keep you busy for its whole 2+ hour run-time .

Certainly if you blazed to those two post-modern twisty-turnies, you should put Synecdote: New York on your NetFlix queue.   If you considered Being John Malkovich an uncomfortable mindfuck, I’d suggest you shy away from this one unless and until you are ready for another shot at the rabbit hole.   Reading other reviews, it is clear that the initiated aren’t the only ones exclaiming “I have no idea whats going on!”.  So at least the green brigade can rest easy that we were expecting to be a bit confused and ride with it.   This film is unabasedly about death, illness, despair, loneliness, relationship problems, metaphysics, and heartbreak (among other things), so you can be sure that there are plenty of tasty treats along the way (just in case, bring your Hawaiian Sweet Maui Onion Rings and it will be all good.)

This is not to say that this is a fun film.  Perhaps a better way to describe it is “relentless”.  Absolutely nothing makes sense and yet everything hangs together-all at the same time.  Rumor has it that it was originally crafted as a horror film, and it certainly is that – if your idea of horror is the deep existential realization of your own inevitable personal death, the deep abyss that separates each one of us, the meaninglessness of both personal endeavor and personal identity, being powerless to prevent the destruction of all that you value or the pain of being utterly rejected by someone you love.  Synecdoche isn’t “about” these things, it “is” these things, pars pro toto.  Put *that* in your pipe and smoke it.   This isn’t a film so much as it is an upgrade artifact of deep existential experiences.  There really isn’t much more I can say about it – if you want more you pretty much have to watch it yourself.

Watching yourself watching.

That said, there is just one *tiny* thread in this tapioca tapestry that I want to pull on.  Namely, its implied historicity.   One main character is shown with a birth-date of 1965 and we are introduced to her with a daughter who is between six and twelve years of age.  That pretty much puts the opening of the film somewhere around 2005 (a date that I seem to recall is validated once or twice) with the main characters around 40.  They age in what appears to be a reasonable fashion as they go through their lives somewhere around their 80′s or so.  Thus, from all appearances, the film opens in 2005 and moves into somewhere around 40-50 years into the future.

So far, so good.  Except that as you look around the environment of “2005″ you see anachronisms or oddities that are in tension with that date.  Phones and televisions seem to be from the 70′s.  Homes are oddly run-down and over-crowded in a manner more reminiscent of the Great Depression.  [I don't want to mention the character who lives in a house that is literally "on fire" and comes complete with a guy who lives in the basement.]  You could chalk this all up as surrealist non-sense, except that it is amazingly consistent.  In fact, in a world that is frequently on frappe, this bizarre timeline seems to be one consistent anchor.

2010?

That means that as you progress through the timeline of the film you are seeing, very passively and through fish-eye lenses, some sort of Charlie Kauffman sci-fi vision of the near future.  So what does it look like?   The economy in this world seems bad – whole towns seem unemployed and available to work as cast members in an increasingly all-consuming “community theater”.  You still have MacArthur Genius Grants (that seem to be more like WPA projects than “grants”) and trips to Berlin seem reasonable, but things increasingly seem to be breaking-down, with elevators on the fritz and the elderly in old-folks homes left abandoned to (fail to) fend for themselves.  Overcrowded houses, failing infrastructure and technology on retro-grade.

Which is to say that it is frighteningly realistic, embedded as it is in such an apparently surreal context.  If you forward project a deepening economic recession, peak oil, crashing governmental institutions, etc., you end up with something that is at least tolerably close to the world that is painted entirely as a passive background to  Synecdoch: New York.  This starts to connect some interesting dots.  In spite of (perhaps indeed because of) the strangeness and madness of the world that Kaufman has created, the primary emotional aftertaste of the film is its intense Truthfulness.  The surface is a whirling, swirling postmodern swing-dance, but if you sit back and allow that tide to pass over you, watching the whole thing from your peripheral vision as it were, the deep, painful, raw reality shines on through.

Relentlessly

Look at that sly devil.

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