Synedoche, New York

Synedoche, New York – I saw this 2008 film (d. Charlie Kauffman) a couple of years ago at the apartment of my twin daughters in Fargo. I wrote a note about the film that may now be lost. This movie has haunted me since that time and so I have wanted to watch it again. In my memory, the film was very witty but sad. I thought the picture was too complex to be grasped in one viewing. My thought about the film is a little confused by an emotional overlay relating to the events of the day on which I saw the picture – I rarely visit my daughters who live six hours away and feel that I don’t know them well. (They are the children of my first marriage and did not live with me after they were 18 months old.) A sort of obscurity, perhaps conflated with my distant relationship with my twin daughters, confounds this picture – it seemed that I could not hold it firmly within my memory. On this viewing, I think I can see what blurs the picture: the film is so devastatingly melancholy that it is hard to remember without almost physical pangs of grief. With Spielberg’s AI, this film is the most persistently grim and sorrowful movie ever produced in Hollywood. Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is the director of a regional theater in Schenectady, New York – he is mounting a production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. From the outset, it is apparent that something is badly wrong. Cotard’s shabby home is inexplicably battered; he thinks he has blood in his stool; plumbing fails and a faucet smashes into his forehead gouging a deep laceration. Cotard is convinced that he is dying and seems “unstuck in time” – vast amounts of time seem to pass without him being aware of it. His wife leaves him and he loses touch with his daughter. (This subplot which is powerfully developed may confound my thinking about the film in light of my own experiences). Then, suddenly, his fortunes seem to change – he wins a MacArthur Foundation genius grant and has money to make an original theater piece. He decides that he will produce a truthful version of the events in his own unhappy life. At this point, the film’s implicit surrealism becomes overt. The movie is like 8 ½ on steroids, an infinite series of recursive representations of Cotard’s miserable existence – as if one version of his sorrow were not enough the film replicates version upon version, all nested within one another. Thus, a man named Cotard produces a play about a man named Cotard who is producing a play about a man named Cotard who is directing actors who are acting the parts of actors who are acting within a play within a play within a play ad infinitum. Half way into this baffling series of iterations, the actor playing Cotard decides that innovative casting requires that others be cast against type as Cotard – for instance, Cotard can be played by a woman; similarly, the Cotard in the play can also play the part of other roles – an old person can represent Cotard as a young man and a child actor can play Cotard as an old man. Sometimes, the actors shift between levels of representation – the actor playing Cotard sleeps with Cotard’s actual girlfriend, an event that traumatizes Cotard and, then, becomes a part of the play itself to be represented again and again multiplying the misery indefinitely. The film seems to be a metaphor for involuted depression, hopeless sorrow where every dark thought is endlessly replicated, reflected from mirror to mirror in an infinity of reflections. In the end, Cotard sickens and dies. Someone points out that the actors have been rehearsing for 17 years – “isn’t it about time we had an audience brought to watch us?” someone asks. The extras riot, the sets collapse, and Cotard withers away in an apocalyptic ending, recognizing there was no audience for the spectacle of his protracted humiliation and death. This film is deeply upsetting. I had forgotten its limitless morose misery. It is a kind of masterpiece but deeply flawed. Hoffman’s Cotard is so relentlessly unhappy, so dull and hapless, that you simply wish that someone would put him out of his misery. He’s a wreck from the first scene and so dramatically the film has nowhere to go – but it is an amazing spectacle.