Synecdoche, New York [Blu-ray]

Excellent film by Charlie Kaufman, great musical score and screenplay, movie that probably is going to require analysis, the late and great Philip Seymour Hoffman is great in this movie (like he usually is) this movie is depressing but beautiful

So, yeah. This was a school project. My English professor asked us to write a paper comparing elements of this movie to some writings about maps and territories by Jorge Luis Borges and Jean Baudrillard among others. In order to write what I felt was a decent paper, with lots of references to and quotes from the movie, I watched it five times. It ended up really kind of touching me in a way I didn't expect it to. The maps and territory thing is cool and all, but this movie is about way more than that. It's about loneliness and the desire for a real connection, and the fear of being found out that prevents it. It's about wanting to make a mark, to create something real while we are here, something that matters, something that represents who we are. It's about love and fear and death and sadness. It's about life. A couple of the songs off of the soundtrack, both of which are performed by a tight little jazz ensemble at the bar Caden frequents with both Hazel and Claire, give a glimpse into the characters' motivation. I think we all feel this way sometimes and yet no one admits to it. If we did, it might help bridge the gap between the intimacy that we all so desperately seek and the lonely lives we lead.Little PersonI'm just a little personOne person in a seaOf many little peopleWho are not aware of meI do my little jobAnd live my little lifeEat my little mealsMiss my little kid and wifeAnd somewhere, maybe somedayMaybe somewhere far awayI'll find a second little personWho will look at me and say"I know youYou're the one I've waited forLet's have some fun."Life is precious every minuteAnd more precious with you in itSo let's have some funWe'll take a road trip way out westYou're the one I like the bestI'm glad I've found youLike hangin' 'round youYou're the one I like the bestSomewhere, maybe somedayMaybe somewhere far awaySomewhere, maybe somedayMaybe somewhere far awaySomewhere, maybe somedayMaybe somewhere far awayI'll meet a second little personAnd we'll go out and playSong for CadenI'm singing this songBut it's about youWhoever else is listeningIt's only about youSee there's just one storyAnd everyone's the starAnd it goes like this...No one will ever love youFor everything you areAnd so you build up layers of deceptionAnd you leave out things to alter the perceptionsOf the ones you loveWho would never love you backIf they knew all about youEvery solitary factAnd the sadness of your lifeIs built upon this lieOf really knowing anyoneOr having them know youIt's the sadness of the worldThere's nothing left to doAnd so just go to sleepJust let the hours passSleep it all awayNone of it will lastSoon it's all overYou're under cloverAnd none of it matters anymore

i thought this film was beautifully ambitious and challenging, and my wife thought it was "icky people, icky places, worst film i've ever seen". that pretty much covers the spread in the ratings here.about halfway through the film i burst out laughing. not at any particularly humorous turn (the film is full of humor), but because i had been hanging onto the film the way a dangling man hangs by his fingertips from a high ledge, and finally i just had to let go. my interpretation of what was going on collapsed. my belief that i was making sense of it all evaporated. i had to laugh.in retrospect, the words spoken by the priest near the end of the film tugged me back in. we pass through life playing roles, and pretending other people are playing roles, and thereby distance ourselves from life itself. synecdoche is the rhetorical device of using the part to stand for the whole (asking for a woman's "hand" in marriage), and kaufman presents a feckless stage director who orchestrates dramatic parts (the pun must be intentional) to stand for whole people, a director whose vast dramatic project is the vast inner theater of roles and the uncertain manipulation of action that form his connection to the real world. "when are we going to have an audience?" one of the dozens of actors demands of him. never -- because the director is the audience, and the impatient actor is just the image of some real person in the director's solitary mind.i can't claim to understand why every real person except his ex wife and their daughter is played by an actor (they become idealizations rather than real people?), or why the ex wife's paintings must be examined with magnifying glasses, or why the director's mistress reads proust and lives in a house that is continually afire, or why she turns flirtatious with the actor playing the director, or why that actor commits suicide and the director decides to take the part of a cleaning woman so that the actress playing the cleaning woman can replace the actor playing him as the director ... it becomes a hall of mirrors and puzzles, and meanwhile the dramatic project grows into the size of a city ... why? why? perhaps because our answers to the questions of life make a city of fiction, and we consume our life directing the actors we use to populate it.despite my wife's reaction, i believe the ambition, visual language, and life history arc of the narrative, the symbolism and interpretive traps, the quality of the acting (especially by philip seymour hoffman, christine keeler and samantha morton) and the sheer hilarity of the many dramatic metaphors, will commend this film to your attention ... at least once. i can't predict if you will laugh or snarl when the film finally escapes your understanding, but i hope it does, because the film seems to me to suggest that any interpretable theater of identity only walls us off from our brief and uniquely incomprehensible existence.