Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York; A Move Beyond Post Modernism In Film

        Charlie Kaufman’s 2008 directorial debut Synecdoche, New York is a layered and complex exploration into the human psyche and the limitations of art. The man at the center of the story, Caden (Philip Seymore Hoffman) is in a dead-end marriage doing dead-end theatre that he is not happy with. Suddenly his wife leaves, and everything improves for both of them. For his wife, she finds success and fame in Germany. Caden however is left alone and broken but is granted a MacArthur grant. He decides to put on a huge original theatrical piece that will cement his legacy and finally will be something he has done all on his own. What he does instead is embark on a two decade long surreal exploration that sees him recreating his life, and practically all of New York inside a Wearhouse. All the while fear of death looms and questions about what it all means linger for long stretches. But Synecdoche, New York is more than just a surreal film about death and art, it pushes the notion of how a story can approach a theme. Death is simultaneously fiercely feared, but calmly accepted. Art imitates life, but that life is only imitating something else. Questions are raised right and left, and no clear answer is given at any point. While this is nothing new, the way that the film accomplishes this dichotomy, though complete sincerity, and belief in grand narratives and ideologies challenges many troupes of Post-Modernism. Boundary pushing films like Synecdoche, New York seem to indicate that a transition is happening where art is moving beyond Post-Modernism influences, in a way that Cinema of Attraction indicated a move from classicism to the beginnings of modernism.

        Post-Modernism was a complete flip around from Modernism and included the rejection of most of its ideas. Attitudes of skepticism, irony and a rejection toward grand narratives and ideologies rose to prominence much like an angsty teen coming into their own. Synecdoche, New York however does not have this irony. Instead it treats everything with complete sincerity, while on a quest to fulfil a grand narrative. Caden is always shown as a serious man trying his hardest to put a stamp on the world. However, this is not simply a return to Modernism ideas that Post-Modernism rejected. The complexities and levels of complete faith and seriousness the film puts in Caden’s massive quest seems to show that both ideas have takeaways, but also flaws.

        One take on the overall meaning to the films central plot is David Crewe. Like the film does at many points, he tiptoes the line between two contradictory ideas, he says “The ultimate hubristic failure of Caden's Project--which, seventeen years after its inception, has no audience-- could be read as commentary on the insularity of art and its inability to capture life ... or entirely the opposite” ("Stages of Life."). Both sides of the argument seem to be competing to win out, but Crewe is unable to pick a winner. The film shows on one hand the insularity of art – a Post-Modern thought, that art is incapable of revealing the truth of the authors experience - through Caden’s project, which increasingly becomes more and more concerned with portraying the exact particulars of Caden’s life, as actors are hired to play real life people in Caden’s life, and then become people in Caden’s life, at which point actors are hired to play them. Caden’s self interest in only himself pushes everyone in his life away, and ultimately, he is unable to draw an audience to speak to, because the only one his creation can speak to is Caden. 

        On the other hand, Kaufman subverts the idea of insularity by the very act of making a film about the insularity of art. The audience identifies with Caden’s ambitious, but ultimately doomed task of recreating his own life, as the increase of social media in the average person’s life makes documentation of our experiences more normal. But we know, just as well as Caden that we can never truly communicate the particulars of our lives to others. The widespread accessibility to this idea of the self not being able to be fully portrayed challenges the notion that art is unable to capture life. Instead the film insists life is art, and art is just capturing it and saying, “Look at this!” We see this in the film as several important moments in Caden’s life are recreated and revisited on set, to emphasize that these moments carried weight in Caden’s life. For example, his father’s funeral, or the rooftop he tried to jump off, and eventfully Sammy, the man who plays Caden does jump off. Ultimately this tiptoeing between the contrasting ideas allows the film to say they are both right, one can not truly explain how it feels to be themselves, but as we all share this same dilemma, that creates a bond in its own right. 

        While there are many other implications and interpretations about the different parts of and the film at large, I feel this is one that Kaufman wanted to make outward and important. While the title alludes to the real-life town in New York, the spelling points to a literary devise, a synecdoche; something that is a reference to a greater whole, like wheels refers to a car, or vise versa where something that is a whole is a reference to a smaller entailed thing, like when referring to Minnesota winning a Wild Card berth it can be inferred that speaker is referring to the Minnesota Twins. This in essence is what Kaufman is doing with the film. It references a wider feeling that can not collectively be pinned down. By showing a single instance of this feeling in a single, tragic character however, Kaufman can use the film as a synecdoche for the collective aching of the words populous, unable to truly express itself. The audience can then take away both a feeling that no one else can feel, but the collective feeling that is having a feeling that no one else can feel.

        This kind of boundary pushing in indicative of a potential culture shift, but it takes a trend to change the period’s prevailing movements. There are trends however, that we can all see are reshaping things, and Synecdoche, New York has some influences from these trends, and arguably exemplifies them. Anne Friedberg argues that cinema is being changed by modern technologies when she says: 

“As this millennium draws to an end, the cinema - a popular form of entertainment for almost a century - has been dramatically transformed. it has become embedded in - or perhaps lost in- the new technologies that surround it. One thing is clear: We can note it in the symptomatic discourse inflected with the atomic terms of the "media fusion' or "convergence' or the pluralist inclusiveness of 'Multimedia' - the differences between the media of movies, religions, and computers are rapidly diminishing.” (“The End of Cinema : Multimedia and Technological Change.”) 

The line between TV and movies is as blurred as its ever been, as many people watch most movies at home or on the internet. Increasingly art is becoming more personal as a massive boom in content has come with the wide spread ability to create and distribute content. People who have seen the same content are able to connect through that. At the heart of this new culture of spectatorship, Synecdoche, New York’s idea that the individual is vividly there, but hard to communicate can be seen as an exploration into the idea of connection. Perhaps this will be a popular topic to muse about in a world where everyone is a couple clicks away from being in contact with anyone.

        While no one can predict what the next cultural trend or important issues to address is, looking back at the past, its easy to see when and where certain ideas grew from. As such a look back can provide insight into the future. Tom Gunning discusses how the cinema of attraction grew out of the transitional epoch between classicism and modernism. He writes “To summaries, the cinema of attractions directly solicits spectator attention, inciting visual curiosity, and supplying pleasure though an exciting spectacle - a unique event, weather fictional or documentary” ("The Cinema of Attractions”). Classicism was rooted in ideas of realism and romantic ideas of the world. The cinema of attraction went against this grain completely, and arose in the transitional period between the old and the new. Modernism completely rejects the idea of realism and instead aims for the spectacular. The spectacle then becomes more important than the subject. While Classicism was interested in specific, and realistic items, the Cinema of attractions fed the notion that the experience of the event and its surrounding discourse is just as important as the content of the event.

         Approaching it by looking at the past as a map for the future, the transitional period between Classicism and Modernism can be seen as the eventual if not already beginning of the modern shift of Post-Modernism to whatever is beyond that. Where in cinema of attraction grew out of the rise of modernism, the rise of the internet, and other technologies that have vastly impacted cinema can be seen to have grown with the rise of something past Post-Modernism. Responses to this will define this new wave, much as responses to the cinema of attraction defined Modernism.

        Other films also key into these modern themes. One such film is the Indie slacker film Sulemani Keeda. The film is an exploration into the creation of a slacker film in the modern-day Bollywood system. While we never find out the exact contents of the film trying to be made in the film, they share the same name, indicating to the audience that the protagonists are trying to make the film that is being watched. This creates a connection in the audience, as the characters are trying to portray their own struggles into their art. This is similar how we try to portray and curate an image of ourselves on social media. Ultimately The film is a call out against the machine of Bollywood. This anti-establishment approach to film style was the crux of the Indian Parallel Cinema, which was a Post-Modern film movement in India. This movement grew into slacker film as the world has begun to move past Post-Modernism. The Slacker film is primarily concerned with the struggle of doing something, often times making a film, in the modern world. This resonates similarly to the message of Synecdoche, New York where in no one can understand the particulars of ones own struggle filled situation, but by glimpsing into the world of the struggle, the audience can identify with the feeling of having their own struggle that they can not express themselves. 

        There are many more themes in the film than the one specific one explored in detail here. Death in omnipresent thought the film, even Caden’s last name Cotard refers to an illness where one believes that they are dead. The idea of Death is similarly dealt with in duality, and ultimately no one answers wins it out. Despite fearing all his life that he will die and leave nothing behind, when that time comes he excepts it, find release in it. In the Caden is also obsessed with the obituaries in the newspaper, sometimes even reading other stories as obituaries. In the end death catches up to Caden, as everyone around him slowly vanishes away; his father dies of cancer, his mother to a home invasion, all of his romantic interests to various ilnesses, his daughter to illness, and his impersonator Sammy to suicide. Time and how it slips away is also an important theme. The first scenes is an entire fall and winter, as the monotony of life lets a large chunk of it slip by without hesitation. Later in the film years pass and Caden thinks it only weeks. He is so caught up in his own world, he does not see the outside world continuing to move on without him. All along the way these two themes are complicated by the small interweaving’s of Caden with other people. These interweaving’s show that Caden is never alone, every action reacts onto another person, but at the same time he is alone, and time does not heal that wound.

       Boundary pushing films like Synecdoche, New York seem to indicate a transition beyond Post-Modernism influences, similarly to how Cinema of Attraction indicated a move from classicism to the beginnings of modernism. While no one can predict the overarched attitudes of the next sweeping art movement, trends can be seen, and history can lend in to point in a direction. Ideas of the self, and how the self can be expressed in a world that’s less personal seem to be surfacing trends, but certainly nothing is set in stone. In the end however, one can undoubtable say that as our world is changing and technologies around art are growing exponentially, the boundary for what art is, and how it can express is being pushed, and eventually a new movement will take shape.

Resources Pulled From:

CREWE, DAVID. "Stages of Life." Screen Education, no. 82, Winter2016, pp. 114-119. 

Friedberg, Anne. “The End of Cinema : Multimedia and Technological Change.” 

Anne  Friedberg, The End of Cinema : Multimedia and Technological Change - PhilPapers, 1  Jan. 1970, philpapers.org/rec/FRITEO-2. 

Gunning, Tom. "The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde"

Sulemani Keeda. Directed by Masurkar, Amit. Tulsea Pictures and Mantra/Runaway  Entertainment, 2013.

 Synecdoche, New York, Directed by Charlie Kaufman, Performance by Philip Seymore Hoffman