Synecdoche, New York

Samir Mehta | December 6, 2008
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Scott Hardie | December 6, 2008
I've wanted to see it for many months, since I heard who directed it. But alas, it has not hit Netflix yet, and my queue moves slowly these days anyway.

Steve Dunn | December 6, 2008
I definitely want to see this, and might even make a rare excursion to a theater to see it. Glad to hear you liked it, Samir.

Samir Mehta | December 9, 2008
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Amy Austin | September 28, 2009
Creepy. Difficult. Painful to watch. Very... very... very.

Samir Mehta | September 28, 2009
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Steve Dunn | September 28, 2009
I loved it, Samir. I watched it four times before returning it to Netflix and have been thinking about it ever since. The first couple times through, I did not understand the multi-layered "warehouse within a warehouse" concept - only picked it up from the DVD extras. So for example, when you see the previously-finished newsstand under construction again, I thought it meant they had gone back in time rather than being in a new layer of the warehouse. Even after catching on to the concept, I still didn't follow everything. Not even close.

The only part I didn't love was the house on fire. That was just a bit too much for me.

Anyway, the thing I like most about Charlie Kaufman films is his honesty about life - his confrontation of actual rather than idealized experiences of living. (Seems odd to put it that way, since his films are generally set in surreal fantasylands). The final scene, the way the movie ends, I found incredibly touching.

Amy Austin | October 1, 2009
Sorry... I should have posted that one under TMR. It's definitely a film that could benefit from multiple viewings, though, and there is *plenty* of good food for thought and analysis here. For someone already in an overly analytical mode/mindset about life, however... and with a depressed bent, to boot... this may not seem like such a good thing. I think the minister's monologue sums it up for me best (and perhaps those who think they might wish to see the film would prefer not to read any quotes from it here... though I'm not really sure if that would constitute "spoilers" or not?) -- I was already having some more than minor sympathy pains well before that point, but this was where it just got to be too much "honesty about life" for me (I still can't bear another viewing of Eternal Sunshine, which I've already seen numerous times now, for similar reasons):

Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for twenty years. And you may never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it's what you create. And even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but it doesn't really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along. Something to make you feel connected, something to make you feel whole, something to make you feel loved. And the truth is I feel so angry, and the truth is I feel so fucking sad, and the truth is I've felt so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long I've been pretending I'm OK, just to get along, just for, I don't know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own. Well, fuck everybody. Amen.

Scott Hardie | February 9, 2012
I finally saw this today. I'm too late to join the conversation, but being able to read everything about the film at last (I had been avoiding spoilers) has given me a better understanding of it, so I'm not sad that it took so long. There's been enough written online about most of the important aspects of the film, so I don't feel any need to repeat it. The one topic that I couldn't find online was identity, which baffles me, because it seems like such a big part of the film.

The main character Caden eventually imagines himself as an old woman, Ellen, after confessing that he wants to be one, a woman who has her own separate childhood memories. And in the only "literal" scene I can remember Caden being absent from, when his assistant Hazel buys a house on fire, she meets a hot young stud named "Derek," suspiciously similar to the "Eric" who Ellen later shares a bed with, after Caden's daughter accuses Caden of a homosexual affair with an Eric. So... Is he Caden, or Ellen, or Hazel, or all of them?

Some critics (especially Ebert) saw this as a matter of projection, the way that we behave differently to different people. Others just saw it as part of the mind-fuck, which feels like a cop-out answer. To me, it seems like a struggle for identity, of the protagonist trying to figure out who he is or will himself to be someone else. (Of course, it could be that Ellen imagined herself as a man named Caden for most of the film, suggested by the radio earpiece.) What that says about Kaufman or about us is open to speculation, but the fact that Cotard and Ellen and Hazel talk to each other despite sharing some identity between at least two of them suggests how little of the film might have really happened. Are Caden's ex-wife and daughter the only people who really existed outside him?

I guess there's one more topic that I haven't seen mentioned much, which is madness, as in the entire movie seems like an insane person's imagined state of existence, more so the longer it goes on. But maybe that's just too obvious.

Samir Mehta | February 9, 2012
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Samir Mehta | February 9, 2012
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Scott Hardie | February 14, 2012
I could get behind the Caden's-dead-the-whole-time theory. There's at least one explicit reference to him having killed himself, in the psychiatrist's office.

Good thinking about Ellen, too, and about the (apparently infinite) grant money giving Caden a license to indulge his exploration of self. This movie might be the most profound statement anyone has made against organized funding of the arts.

Samir Mehta | February 14, 2012
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Denise Sawicki | February 14, 2012
Weirdly enough, Scott, this was also the last thing I saw before cancelling Netflix (I will probably resubscribe at some point though). Anyhow I was not in the mood to analyze too deeply, I just kind of enjoyed the weirdness. But I did have a kind of an insignificant question. I was wondering, as it seems to be set in present day, if you think there is any significance to Caden's name being "Caden" which overwhelmingly would only be a name for someone born very recently.

Scott Hardie | February 16, 2012
Yeah, I thought the name Caden was weird too. It reminded me of Ryan, the main character of Up in the Air: That seems like too contemporary of a name for someone George Clooney's age. His younger boss was named Craig and was played by Jason Bateman; the two should have had each other's names.

Is there any significance to the name Caden? I can't think of it offhand. According to babynames.com, the name means "fighter," but that doesn't really describe the character. I can't find the name of Charlie Kaufman's son, but my Google Fu isn't as strong as some other people's on this site. Does the movie definitely take place in the present day?

Denise Sawicki | February 16, 2012
Well, the IMDB FAQ says, under film timeline:

"Here is a general timeline based on the screenplay which dates each scene:
2006 - Opening of the film (Caden is 40 years old). "