Today...

...my left pointer finger smells like a big buttery salted pretzel.

In the spirit of Synecdoche…NY

I just spent 124 minutes watching a man make everyone around him believe that the only thing that matters is the fact that we’re all going to die, and I feel like a million bucks! I suppose that’s a lot like the schoolyard bully that feels better about himself by making the rest of the kids feel inferior, but I don’t care. Just give me the propeller cap and call me Big Bobby.

Synecdoche, NY—a reference both to the rhetorical device of using a part of something to represent the whole (i.e. terming a monarch simply “the crown”) and a homonym of the upstate New York city of Schenectady—the film begins with the protagonist’s daughter singing a song about wanting to be born, live, die, and never leave Schenectady. This turns into a major theme as the main character, Caden Cotart, is awarded a MacArthur Genius award with which he plans to create the ultimate play about the essence of life…death—more specifically, his own impending death.

With slight pangs of a catastrophically scaled Six Characters in Search of an Author, Luigi Pirandello’s disillusionist play about a play within a play, Synecdoche manages to let us sit back and just watch as one man’s very being deteriorates while he demands a cast of potentially thousands to reenact the very minute details of his own life on a set the size of a small town until some of the characters’ lives become so invested in his dramatic piece that their personhood is enrapt within it.

Phillip Seymour Huffman plays the best ailingly-miserable-but-eternally-not-dying stage director I have ever seen. Then again, that may be very reminiscent of telling my dad he’s my favorite—to which he would sometimes respond (rather than saying “That’s because I’m your only Dad.”) with “That’s because you couldn’t imagine it any other way.” EXACTLY! It’s obvious that the man is a brilliant actor, but seeing him play a man who suffers from a physical twitch for the last twenty years of his life alongside open sores and a propensity to daily examine his own BMs while moving fluidly in and out of relationships with the leading ladies in his play/life is just plain remarkable to watch.

Charlie Kauffman, writer of Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, seems to like utilizing practically ludicrous plotlines to make a point about our personal reality. And although there are moments in this film where the interactions between Caden and those surrounding him are just absurd enough to make you chuckle and think of Wes Anderson’s propensity to create characters that continuously desire just to be desired, it is Kauffman who can develop a keen sense of unique personhood for each of them and yet allow them to squander it and let it dissolve within the greater work of Caden Cotard’s autobiographical play.

As Caden is continually asked by the characters surrounding him—and that is all they are, characters—to try and “let go” and “lose yourself,” Synecdoche asks one simple question of its audience members: Can you “lose yourself” to your own narcissism?

I hope you get to see it because I can’t tell you what it meant to me, exactly, but it was finger-in-the-middle-of-a-plumb-pie kind of good.