Spoiler alert: I do divulge specific plot points of the film and the subsequent commentary may alter your viewing experience. The film is best viewed without any prior knowledge either from me or from someone more knowledgeable. If you intend to see the film, I suggest you avoid any commentary until after.
Synecdoche, New York (2008, director: Philip Seymour Hoffman) is one of those films on which the critics cannot reach a consensus. Many of them love it (like Roger Ebert, who named it the best film of the 2000s) and many of them hate it (like Rex Reed of The Observer, who dubbed it the worst film of all time–keep in mind, this so-called critic didn’t watch the whole film). I’m glad that I find myself in the former category. Watching this film for the first time around the beginning of the year, I can understood why some don’t care for it. I had no idea what to think initially, for that matter I wasn’t sure I really understood the plot let alone the subtext. It remained stuck in my head for the subsequent days and weeks, as I find that most great films do, as if my subconscious were trying to decipher it. Finally, I watched it again and then a while later. Finally, I watched it for a fourth time last night. With each subsequent viewing I found that I enjoyed it much more the second time and that I had understood it much better.
The film has many dimensions and many motifs, however the one that stood out to me the most (a common thread in many of my favorite films) is the microscope it puts on the way that we go about our lives. The viewer needs to allow him/herself to go beyond the hyperbole of what the protagonist (Caden) is undertaking. The idea of creating a mimetic representation of his life inside a giant warehouse and of creating a cast to play himself and all his associates (and ultimately of doing it yet again inside small warehouses inside the first warehouse like Russian dolls) is absurd. But it says something important about our life: many of us can only watch our lives from the sidelines as other people live it for us. Caden, the director of this magnum opus, per se, is lost, indifferent, and he can only create meaning when he’s the ‘director’. He casts another man as himself and watches his own life, directs it, and makes life decisions through him. Ultimately, the fake Caden begins to live the real Caden’s life. In what I view as the seminal moment of the film, the fake Caden gives Caden the address of his ex-wife’s art exhibit because he wants Caden to go there so he can “follow [him] there and see how [he] loses even more of [himself].” For the fake Caden it has become more than character research, he is now actively participating in the real Caden’s life. Later on the fake Caden precipitates the real breakup of Caden and his girlfriend, who is promptly replaced with an understudy. Ultimately, Caden, tired of decades of directing this play, leaves his role as himself, switching places with the actress depicting the cleaning woman. He is no longer himself and now he is receiving the cues through an earpiece.
It’s interesting just how true it is that many of us can only live vicariously, never willing to seize life, or that many of us can only live dependent on the instructions of others.
These notions are underlined by the burning house motif. Early on in the film, Caden’s to-be girlfriend Hazel purchases a house that is perpetually on fire. While absurd at face-value, it’s merely a metaphor for the decisions that we make in our lives. She comments to the real estate agent, “I like it, I do. But I’m really concerned about dying in the fire,” to which the realtor responds, “It’s a big decision, how one prefers to die.” The house, which does ultimately kill her (from smoke inhalation), doesn’t resound to me as a comment so much on how we die but rather on how we live. This idea is connected to her death, in my opinion, several scenes later, during a funeral scene in Caden’s fake life. The pastor’s eulogy goes like this:
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 20 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. 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…
This is not to say that Hazel committed suicide, in effect, because it’s not. This monologue is more optimistic than that, even if the optimism is well concealed. You can see the point if you connect the lines, “You can destroy your life every time you choose” to its foil, “So you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along.” It’s a warning, in my view, to seize opportunities. Hazel bought the house on fire because she had found a house that she truly liked. But if you think about it, everything we do is on fire. Everything we do brings us closer to death (it’s not pessimistic to think like that because it’s a fact) but it’s what we do that determines if we die satisfied or not. Hazel could have turned down that house and spent the rest of her life looking for one that wasn’t on fire–but she wouldn’t have found it.
I suppose that the opposite side of this view would entail the idea that life is meaningless (taken to the extreme by philosophies such as cosmic pessimism, by Italian writer Giaccomo Leopardi, which holds that human civilization is an insignificant passerby on a time line of creation and destruction). I believe that such theories entail at least a fair amount of psychological reasoning, specifically the fact that perception is constructed. If perception is, to the best of scientific knowledge, a figment of our neurological processes, then life is a fantasy, no? I take exception to this notion; the idea that perception is constructed doesn’t mean that life is meaningless but rather that it empowers us to create meaning. Life can be whatever it is that we want it to be
So ultimately, going back to the film, two of the main characters, Caden and Hazel, are contrasted. Hazel makes her own decisions and plays her own role. On the other hand, Caden needs decision to be made for him and needs someone else to play his role. The clearest contrast is viewed in their respective deaths. Hazel dies in her burning house, a result of the decisions she made, with a Mona Lisa-esque smirk on her face. Caden, however, dies resting his head on the shoulder of his deceased mother, his life having devolved into taking cues from a director on how to go about any and all daily events. In his final breath he utters he utters the words: “I know how I’m going to do the play now,” which also symbolically refers to his own life. Then he receives his final cue: “Die.”
