Death of a Theatre Director: Synechdoche, New York
ed. Viola Chee and Gabrielle Ng
Author's Bio
BENJAMIN: I’m just a little person
One person in a sea
Of many little people
Who are not aware of me
I do my little job
And live my little life
Eat my little meals—
INNER VOICE EDITOR: No, no! This isn’t all about you, Ben! You can’t make Kaufman’s lyrics all about yourself! Don’t have pastiche for your bio!
BENJAMIN: Well, I’m out of ideas. I’m dead (Kaufman 01:49:23).
My editors are not impressed with me.
BENJAMIN: Oh bugger, I’ll go write something creative instead.
Abstract
This essay argues that Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008) functions as a meta-discourse on art and artistic adaptation in which the creation of authentic art requires the loss of the artist. The film’s protagonist—Caden Cotard—attempts at being true to life and depicting realistic representation on the stage are revealed to be postmodern artifice and mise en abyme. Caden’s loss of control over his sprawling set of New York, the rewriting and direction of his identity by other characters, and the usurpation of his directorial duties by Sammy and Millicent all gesture towards the ultimate failure of his ambitious desire to put his “true” self into an uncompromising piece of theatre. Paradoxically, such postmodern modalities return to a faithful representation of life, even in their ironic and dilapidated forms as they feed back into the life praxis by being true to Caden’s being as a failing theatre director. This paper, in drawing from the theories of Fredric Jameson, Linda Hutcheon, Peter Brooker, and Peter Bürger, ultimately suggests that Kaufman’s postmodern film articulates loss as the sincerest expression of postmodernity.
What does it mean for the artist to be incorporated into his very own work of art while he creates it? In Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008), the film’s protagonist, theatre director Caden Cotard, struggles to adapt his numerous struggles into his sprawling theatre as they manifest in his existence and play: his impending mortality, his troubled interpersonal relationships, his directorial troubles, his growing loss of autonomy, and above all, a desire to represent his life authentically. Caden becomes the subject of his stage and is himself directed by actors playing his person. One might therefore propose that if Caden adapts his life into his play while simultaneously being subsumed by it, then he becomes a synecdoche, himself a part of his theatre that begins to represent the whole creation, and in doing so, he brings into consciousness not only the schema of his art but also of his own artifice. The title of Synecdoche, New York as put by Richard Deming, draws attention simultaneously to the function of tropes and the film’s status as a trope (193), suggesting that the film is commenting on the capacity of synecdoches to simultaneously focus on and alienate that which is being represented (197). The awareness of the film’s artists characters as tropes (or synecdoches) springs into motion this paper’s argument: Synecdoche, New York can be viewed as a metafictional discourse that deems the loss of the artist a requirement for authentic artistic creation, made manifest in the directorial statements and actions characters of Caden, Sammy, and Millicent.
The film is, at its most essential, a contemplation on what constitutes truthful representation and successful adaptation. As put by Dorottya Cseresnyés, Synecdoche, New York probes the possibility of sincere representation within a hyperreal world (28). Similarly, Derek Hill identifies the desire to be authentic as the main directorial thrust of film (209-10). However, what is at stake in this paper is a reckoning with Caden’s methods of aesthetic creation as opposed to the efficacy of his strivings towards an authentic work of art. More specifically, I focus on Caden’s gravitation towards being true to life as a technique of adaptation and desired outcome of representation. To borrow from Linda Hutcheon, adaptation is both “product and process” (7), in which adaptation as product simply transposes one form to another, while adaptation as process involves the (re-)interpretation and (re-)creation of meaning between two mediums (8). Fidelity, or a faithful reproduction of the original in the something new, is for Hutcheon deemed as an inferior method of adaptation, because it signifies the “lack of the creativity and skill to make the text one’s own and thus autonomous [1]” (20). Her theoretical disposition would deem Caden’s attempt to adapt his own life with pinpoint verisimilitude a debacle. Such an exacting attention to replication is made evident in Caden contemplating titling his play “Simulacrum” (Kaufman 01:07:28). The name references Jean Baudrillard’s seminal work Simulacra and Simulation, in which simulation comes to supplant what is real and only references itself as a “pure simulacrum” (2, 6). This seems to be the case given the life-like simulation of Caden’s set.
Fig. 1: A simulated construction site, indiscernible from the actual New York (Kaufman 01:25:26)
We can clearly see that the stage is naturalistic—the stage designers do not look out of place as actual construction workers in the real Manhattan Island. Only when Caden tells the construction worker “I need you to build this. This just the façade” is the impression of reality whisked away and affirmed to be artifice. At the end of the film realism self-implodes in the terminal dilapidated condition of the set.
Fig. 2: A 1:1 scale reproduction of New York, but with the warehouse roof and stage machinery visible and decaying (01:55:21)
The gargantuan set approximates the real-life size of the city, but visible presence of the fifth warehouse’s broken roof serves as a reminder that the buildings that Caden now lives in are mere simulations. Try as he might, Caden’s replication of New York cannot convincingly substitute the actual locale. However, the collapse of that naïve mimesis, even as Caden strives for it, affirms the production as his own, and that the warehouse falls apart without his input also is suggestive of the autonomy of the set. As elucidated by Georg Simmel:
But where a work, however many its faults, is animated by a real force of life, it releases, precisely like a real human being, a unique ideal image of itself from its unconscious being. This image is its individual law, its autonomy, allowing us, as soon as accomplished, to speak of the work as having fully realized its idea, or as not quite become as it is meant to be. (132)
The decay of the warehouse’s buildings and exterior aptly captures the fact that Caden’s play was incomplete, nor did it attain the lifelike impression he wanted to create. Just as Caden—by this point in the film—is dying, with his quest to complete and perform his play unfulfilled, the set parallels his condition, itself falling apart and incomplete. In this way, the set, despite the loss of its commensurability to New York, remains true to Caden in his collapse, all the while being independent from his whims.
By shifting to consciousness the theatricality of Caden’s endeavours, the film adopts a highly self-reflexive postmodern modality. This mode for Fredric Jameson, “is about art itself… meaning that one of its essential messages will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past” (7). If postmodernism invites a scepticism of all claims to authenticity by virtue of uncovering artifice (Gregson 4), the unveiling of the unreality of Caden’s verisimilitude affirms him as a flawed director unable to seamlessly (re)present life in art. As aptly observed by Deming, “Synecdoche, New York distances us from “the real” even as its protagonist insists on creating the real” (205). Peter Brooker, too, derides fidelity as “literal repetition…because a judgment of success or failure is clearly dependent on differently situated strategies of interpretation” (108). And yet, Brooker’s criticism of fidelity still accommodates the possibility of it achieving adaptational success on the condition that the successful interpretation of the source material is dependent upon its accurate replication. David Smith argues that the film’s outlook on the pursuit of Caden’s goals as an ultimately futile endeavour (250). Indeed, Caden self-confesses that he “[does not] know what [he] is doing” (Kaufman 00:44:56), seemingly indicating his failure to imitate life. And yet, this very utterance speaks to the reality of Caden interpreting himself as a floundering playwright. In other words, the problem of authentically adapting life to art is not resolved both by Caden’s resort to fidelity as an aesthetic strategy bur rather the ironic transcension of fidelity via the awareness he cannot truly attain perfect simulation. Fidelity as creative strategy is therefore “re-functioned”—to draw on Brooker’s terms—through the awareness of Caden’s mimetic shortcomings, and consequently the knowledge that faithful re-creation is impossible
[restores] the possibility of ‘‘originality,’’ understood as the practice of an imaginative re-making which edits, echoes, borrows from, recomposes and ‘‘re-functions’’ existing narratives or images; that is to say, makes them work in a different medium with an invigorated social and artistic purpose. (Brooker 114)
Synecdoche, New York, however, does not easily distinguish between the medium of life and art, nor can Caden’s artistic purpose be readily parsed from Sammy and Millicent. Nonetheless, as I hope to elucidate, the ontological and aesthetic porousness generated by the mobius strip of life becoming art and art becoming life, and Caden’s doppelgangers, allows his play to be original and honest to himself in their portrayal of Caden as a man who loses control of himself. Fidelity as a mode of adaptation breaks down by the film’s end, but in doing so gestures to its own aesthetic (and Caden’s) inadequacy and eventual obsolescence; the representation of authentic being is not achieved in replication but in aesthetic frustration.
It will now be useful to turn to a discussion of Caden’s aesthetic criterion and theatrical objectives. He envisages his play to be deeply ambitious in its scale, authenticity, and complexity, but also insinuates creative impotence as part of his project. He explains to Hazel that:
CADEN: You see, the idea is to do a massive theatre piece. You know, uncompromising, and honest. Here's what I think theatre is. It's the beginning of thought. It's the truth not yet spoken. It's what a man feels like after he's been clocked in the jaw. It's love in all its messiness. (Kaufman 00:38:55)
The wish to fashion an exacting and bona fide work of drama is evident. For theatre to be inclined to the precognitive and intuitive suggests a displacement of the rational; rawness and intensity of emotion is given a priority—the production should be shocking, disorienting, and painful, all the while being sensuous, tender, and complicated. Caden’s life thereafter succumbs to his artistic vision: he reads his estranged daughter’s diary entries, an impossibility since Olive lives in Berlin; Caden, amongst many other characters, undergo significant emotional events over the course of the production; a love quadrangle between Caden, Sammy, Claire, and Hazel blooms. One might surmise that Caden’s existence is determined by his own art, but Caden reveals that he also wants to be surrounded by creative inadequacy in the following lines:
CADEN: You know, and I want all of us, players and patrons alike to soak in the communal bath of it—the mikvah [2], as the Jews call it. Because we're all in the same water, after all. You know, soaking in our very menstrual blood and nocturnal emissions. This is what I wanna try to give people. (00:39:23)
The ideal production is not a refined piece of theatre, nor does it sanctify its participants; conversely, the play should be ontologically confused, crude, and impart itself onto the actors and viewers, as evoked when both actors and audience collectively soak in their bodily fluids. Caden’s choice of bathwater—menstrual blood and semen—is significant, for these fluids signify aborted attempts to generate life. For a playwright to be surrounded by his own reproductive discard, which come to symbolise the failed, disparate constituents of his creative thought, suggests his inability to bring life to the stage. In turn, the only “uncompromising [and] honest” piece of theatre he could produce is the depiction of his directorial downfall. Indeed, Caden remarks that he “will be dying” in his play, and that death is something he wants to explore (00:41:58). That he wants to depict something as unnarratable and unrepresentable as death should set him up for failure, and as we shall see, Caden’s demise is presented in a multitude of ways aside from the death of his physical body.
One such articulation of Caden’s decline is made apparent in the mutability of Caden’s identity. Caden wants his production to feature an authentic apprehension of himself, but this is shown to be a highly vexed proposition. He tells Madeline that he wants to create “Something big and true and tough. I'm gonna finally put my real self into something” (00:37:01). The audience can glean that Caden takes difficulty and realism as his aesthetic criteria to genuinely represent the director as he is reflected within his work. And yet, this nascent ambition is immediately challenged by Caden’s ironic realisation that he does not know his real self (Kaufman 00:37:13). His lack of knowledge of his own being punctures the hope for Caden’s true-to-self representation; the only possible depiction is a lack of identity. While Caden resolves to discover his true self shortly after, Madeline frustrates his efforts by confounding Caden with an already deceased five-year old writer:
MADELINE: Well, Azpiazu killed himself when he was 5.
CADEN: Why did he kill himself?
MADELINE: I don't know. Why did you?
CADEN: What?
MADELINE: I said, why would you?
CADEN: Oh, I don't know. (00:38:05)
As absurd and improbable as Madeline’s conflation of Azpiazu and Caden is, Madeline’s question “Why did you?” and Caden’s tacit assumption of Azpiazu’s name when he admits “I don’t know” implies that Caden’s sense of self is not particularly robust and thus susceptible to being reconfigured. Madeline has, for a moment, successful rewritten Caden a new identity, echoing Hans Berten’s assertion on the postmodern subject as being “other-determined, that is, determined within and constituted by language” (6). Madeline’s overwriting of Caden draws attention to him being other-determined and thus self-less. Consequently, the fulfilment of Caden’s artistic desire to represent an essential and true self is insinuated to be but an impossibility; the only true portrayal of Caden would require a negation of his identity.
Caden’s dramaturgical exertions contribute to his loss of self and counter-productively signal the failure of his fidelity-based approach to theatre. As a director, he demands that his cast obey his instruction when he announces “I won’t settle for anything less than the brutal truth…Each day I'll hand you a paper. It'll tell you what happened to you that day. You felt a lump in your breast. You looked at your wife and saw a stranger, et cetera” (Kaufman 01:02:18). While his actors’ actual selves are necessarily displaced under Caden’s orders to convincingly perform their role, his authoring of his own commands also entail an effacement of himself. Caden’s direction is as diverse as it is exacting in its detail, and this is conveyed in the below shot of him scribbling down his daily notes.
Fig. 3: A seemingly endless spread of roles and actions (01:03:39)
The shot makes use of deep space composition and a slow upward tilt of the camera to emphasise the vastness of the cues Caden has prepared before him. Caden is silhouetted in the foreground facing away from the camera, himself an aporia lacking distinct features, surrounded by the papers that sketch his outline. My point here is that the cinematography illustrates Caden’s slavish dedication to his hyperdetailed recreation of multitudinous persons as concomitant with the privation of his being. This is also expressed when Caden casts an actor to play himself within the production:
CADEN: Alright, I'm not excusing myself from this either. I will have someone play me to delve into the murky, cowardly depths of my lonely, fucked-up being. And he'll get notes too, and those notes will correspond to the notes I truly receive every day from my god. Get to work! (Kaufman 01:02:49)
Not only does the hiring of an actor to perform as Caden dilute and upset the notion of the individual as unique, Caden’s awareness that he also receives notes from his “god” breaks the fourth wall and draws attention to the extradiegetic Kaufman who wrote him, thereby highlighting the self as a predetermined textual construct. For Jameson, the destruction of the ideology of the unique self produces a kind of artistic aimlessness, or at the very least a confusion over what artists and writers are meant to be doing (6-7). To provide a provisional answer to Jameson, I would venture that Caden’s doubling is a scene of artistic failure in the pursuit of artistic creation by evoking the figure of the mise en abyme, a self-referential analogy that is ontologically subordinated from one layer of diegesis (McHale 176-7). As explained by Brian McHale, “mise en abyme is fiction at play…[it] tells us nothing except that the work before us is fiction” (177). The duplication of the artist figure makes conscious the fictitious nature of Caden and his constructions, thus exploding the illusion of realism of his work despite Caden’s yearning to mimetically reproduce himself and the world around him. Caden’s fidelity to life became a self-defeating enterprise the moment he was doubled—the artist’s art recursively points out the non-success of his creative process.
By being cast as Caden, Sammy permits Caden to recognise the deficiencies of his artistic methodology by holding a mirror to his dramaturgical practices. Sammy, like his screenwriter, embraces close examination and imitation as a part of performance, as seen in his introduction:
SAMMY: Well, I've been...I've been following you for 20 years. So I knew about this audition because I follow you. And I've learned everything about you by following you. So hire me, and you'll see who you truly are. (Kaufman 01:05:05)
This revelation as shocking as it is accurate—Sammy was stalking Caden before he even conceived of his play.
Fig. 4: Sammy watches Caden open his mailbox in the film’s beginning (Kaufman 00:03:01)
We might therefore claim that Sammy is similar to Caden in his extreme dedication to dissect and perform life in all its veracity. But in spite of Sammy’s intense and prolonged scrutiny of Caden’s character, Sammy’s directorial cues do not live up to Caden’s expectations:
SAMMY: I've talked to you before. This is not a play about dating. It's about death. Make it personal. Move along.
CADEN: He doesn't need to yell at them…It is a play about dating. It's not a play just about death. It's about everything. Dating, birth, death, life, family all that. (01:23:43)
In his disagreement with Sammy on the meaning of the production, Caden expands the thematic umbrella of his work. This is in contrast to Caden’s earlier desire to explore death, marking an evolution in the play’s thematics. Their differences in directorial style are also spotlighted by Caden’s instantaneous contradictions of Sammy’s orders:
SAMMY: We need to fire him.
CADEN: We don't need to fire him.
SAMMY: Jeremy's playing to us. Tell him to talk to Donna and we'll hear what we hear.
CADEN: Sammy's explaining too much. It feels expository. It needs to be shorthand, like, "Jeremy, big." (Kaufman 01:35:31)
Again, Caden, by seeing Sammy’s rendition of his own modus operandi, departs from his initial intricate, detail-oriented instruction to a more succinct and direct command. Caden transitions from a literal to more conceptual form of dramaturgy, tacitly indicating the insufficiency of his prior guidance. These two instances of directorial clashes between Sammy and Caden deflate fidelity as adaptational means, for the reason that the accumulation and scrutiny of detail, as expressed in Sammy’s 20-year study of Caden, does not produce artistically rich outcomes; literal replication is shown to be an impoverished and stunted form that does not grant a richness of meaning.
This paper would be remiss to suggest that Sammy’s contributions ameliorate Caden’s artistic woes. Sammy is not merely a passive mirroring of Caden that allows him to see his flaws. On the contrary, Sammy exacerbates Caden’s burgeoning loss of authority by mimicking and supplementing his role as director. This is shown when he emulates Caden by passing a note to him revealing Adele’s address in a bid to “follow [Caden] there and see how [he loses] even more of [himself]. Research. You know, for the part” (01:09:45). By giving Caden a stage direction, Sammy commits a metaleptic transgression because he, while embodying a fictional role, reaches out and directs his own director. Sammy confounds the narratological layers of Caden’s play by staying in-character (and hence subordinated by Caden) while bringing Caden under his control beyond the stage. Alice Bell and Jan Alber propose that the movement of characters from one narratological level to another as a form of ascending or descending metalepsis (167-8). While Sammy’s metaleptic movements does not quite subscribe to Bell and Alber’s proposed models—since they only consider the unidirectional movement of characters between layers of narration—the effect of Sammy’s transgressions concur with their assessment that metaleptic movements “[illustrate] confrontations with creators or their loss of control over their own creations” (186). Accordingly, Caden visits Adele’s apartment and accordingly takes on the name of her cleaning lady in a bid to gain access to it:
ADELE’S NEIGHBOUR: Are you Ellen Bascomb?
CADEN: What?
ADELE’S NEIGHBOUR: I'm to give the key to 31Y to Ellen Bascomb.
CADEN: Yes, I'm Ellen. (Kaufman 01:11:16)
Caden yet again loses his sense of self as he once more becomes another person. But there is another way in which Sammy negates Caden’s identity. The similarity of the directorial actions between Caden and Sammy, to quote Peter Bürger, is a “negation of the category of individual creation…all claims to individual creativity are mocked” (51-2) because the two directors have become interchangeable in their function. Caden’s surrender of his monopoly on the play’s production to Sammy disavows the uniqueness of Caden’s identity as an artist. And so it follows that if the “radically democratic” (Bertens 5) postmodern sensibility is created by Caden in sharing directorial responsibilities with Sammy, by that same token is the notion of Caden as an individual, brilliant artist is concurrently made farcical.
The paucity of Caden’s ingenuity is exemplified in his unimaginative re-creation of Sammy’s funeral. Sammy unexpectedly and dramatically breaks character by committing suicide after being heartbroken by Hazel. The scene forces Caden to acknowledge the unpredictability and interiority of the people around him, as he whispers to Hazel at Sammy’s burial:
CADEN: I know how to do it now. There are nearly 13 million people in the world. I mean, can you imagine that many people? And none of those people is an extra. They're all leads in their own stories. They have to be given their due. (01:40:03)
His epiphany underscores the uniqueness of each individual, every person special and worthy of his or her own screen time. This moment of artistic clarity is, however, ironically undermined with the straight cut to Caden’s rendition of the funeral with another actor playing Caden, reciting the exact same lines.
Fig. 5: Caden at Sammy’s funeral (Kaufman 01:40:03)
Fig. 6: Sammy’s funeral on stage (01:40:20)
The cut preserves the position of the Caden and Hazel with their actors, stressing the continuity of the two scenes while suitably illustrating the disjunction between the real funeral and the performance of it. The narrative of the scene on stage still centres on Caden and his own recollection of the event. If anything, Caden appears bereft of ideas in spite of Sammy’s death, his emotionally hollow and literal-minded recycling of the past a capitulation to pastiche, the stage a “world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible” (Jameson 7).
Millicent finally takes over Caden’s position as director and provisions the much needed affective and imaginative slant to the play. Given her initial casting as Ellen—Adele’s cleaning lady—it is oddly commensurate that Millicent is the one who tries to artistically tidy up the sprawling mess of Caden’s production. She seems to know Caden better than himself despite never tailing or resembling him like Sammy:
MILLICENT: …. I think I understand [Caden].
CADEN: I don't understand him.
MILLICENT: Well, Caden Cotard is a man already dead. He lives in a half world between stasis and anti-stasis and time is concentrated, chronology confused. Yet up until recently, he's strived valiantly to make sense of his situation. But now he's turned to stone. (Kaufman 01:45:30)
Millicent’s request to play him shows that she grasps much of Caden’s experiences: his obsession with death and sickness, the obfuscated boundaries of real life and the stage, the bizarre non-linear progression of time in the film, and his unfruitful persistence in theatre. That she is able to understand Caden without incessantly following him is indicative of her imaginative prowess and empathetic sensitivity. While acting as Caden directing Sammy’s wake, Millicent refuses to succumb to a strict replication of the funeral. Millicent removes the actors playing Caden and Hazel, and she fashions in a new soliloquy that is arguably rawer and more moving than anything Caden has ever produced:
PASTOR: Everything is more complicated than you think…. 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 okay 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. (Kaufman 01:47:06)
The performance of the pastor is met with approval from Caden’s assistant. The success of Millicent’s addition evinces the need for art to depart from an uninspired faithful duplication of life, and in turn obtain a more affective charge which signals beyond the circumstances it originates from. Caden, too, recognises this, conceding his artistic defeat and redundancy of his methodology by declaring himself “out of ideas. I’m dead” (01:49:23).
By the film’s close, a complete and radical renunciation of Caden’s self and autonomy is played out. Millicent has now usurped the directorial position, and through an earpiece dictates Caden’s every single thought and movement:
MILLICENT: Reach for the toilet paper. Wrap some around your hand. Wipe yourself. There was supposed to be something else. You were supposed to have something, a calm. Love. Children. A child, at least. Children. Meaning. (01:50:59)
Even something as banal as Caden wiping his own bottom is narrated to the last detail—what should be instinctive is now second-hand, deliberate and manufactured. Caden has totally surrendered his autonomy to Millicent. More interesting, however, is that Millicent mentions the absence of Caden’s children and meaning in his life. On the one hand, this scene could be read as Millicent imposing her ideals and identity as a woman in a loveless marriage who desires children onto Caden, and this is yet another example of Caden’s diminishing self being overwritten. This is conveyed by the superimposition and graphic match of Millicent onto Caden, establishing a connection between the two of them where eventually Millicent emerges supreme.
Fig. 7: Match of Caden and Millicent (Kaufman 01:51:21)
On the other hand, I suggest that Millicent is also vocalising the disappointment of Caden’s artistic labours. As discussed earlier, Caden desired to be metaphorically surrounded by discarded sexual fluids. These liquids are unable to create children, or more figuratively, a lifelike performance of Caden’s life on the stage. Millicent’s observation that Caden is childless and inhabits a meaningless life in his old age thus harkens back to his creative impotence. Later, Millicent achingly narrates Caden’s transience and absolute insignificance to him:
MILLICENT: …. You realize you are not special. You have struggled into existence and are now slipping silently out of it. This is everyone's experience. Every single one. The specifics hardly matter. Everyone is everyone. So you are Adele, Hazel, Claire, Olive. You are Ellen. All her meagre sadnesses are yours. All her loneliness. The grey, straw-like hair. Her red, raw hands. It's yours. It is time for you to understand this. (01:55:40)
Having lost all markers of identity, Caden emerges as a clean slate, a provincial representation of human strife and insignificance that comes to represent every single person. He comes to represent everyone and becomes no one. The notion of adaptation once again rears its head: Caden transforms—or shall we say, adapted by Millicent—from an individual to a synecdoche of the everyman. For Caden to represent part of the world and humanity, and create a piece of massive piece of theatre uncompromising to himself, is to commit to a tragic abandon of everything, including his profession as a theatre director and above all, his life. Millicent orders Caden to die, and the film fades to grey and ends (Kaufman 02:00:15). The realisation that he “knows how to do the play now” at the moment of his demise is no coincidence—the only honest representation of death is its non-representation. The playwright, in being honest to himself and his work of art, must at last vanish from it. If Caden’s inhabitation within his set would, for Bürger, signify the pure development of the aesthetic in its removal from the life praxis (22), then Millicent’s direction of Caden’s death creates his dearly desired avant-garde moment by returning him to reality. This is because his bodily demise is the material manifestation of Caden’s radical detachment from the play, which ultimately permits Caden—as Millicent’s actor and thus her work of art—reintegration as back into the praxis of life, and thus true to himself and his work in death.
Synecdoche, New York is about the death of a theatre director for the sake of his art. A fairly literalist interpretation of the metafictional discussion of artistic control in the film (as I have done—the irony is not lost on me) would intimate that the prospect of apprehending an authentic sense of life on the stage cannot be attained by simply duplicating life itself. Such a process, as Caden displays throughout the film, is an infinite, vertiginous regress that blends life and art together. To reiterate Hutcheon and Brooker, fidelity to life is not a tenable artistic methodology; one must transform and deviate from life to articulate something meaningful. Postmodernity, in its suspicion of all representations, points out artifice in what was once thought natural; naturalistic depictions are shown to be naught and lacking in life. Returning to Jameson, the artist in the postmodern era can only represent art in its fallen form; it is only fitting that Caden, in his decline, inhabits his own estranged and incomplete magnum opus, surrounded by the meaninglessness of his life, longing for an artistic resolution beyond his reach. Perhaps then, despite the vertiginous, all-encompassing layers of artifice, is a return to a most sincere expression amidst postmodernity: one of loss.
Footnotes
[1] Autonomy does not refer to the detachment of art from the political domain as articulated by Peter Bürger in Theory of the Avant-Garde (22). Rather, autonomy is simply regarded here as the adaptation being distinct from a parent text, and possessing its own self-contained meaning independent from its creator.
[2] In Judaism, the mikvah is a clean pool of water used for ritual purification.
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Hill, Derek. ““There’s No More Watching”: Artifice and Meaning in Synecdoche, New York and Adaptation.” The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman, edited by David LaRocca, UP of Kentucky, 2011, pp. 208-223.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. Routledge, 2006.
Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998. Verso, 1998.
Kaufman, Charlie, director. Synecdoche, New York. Sidney Kimmel Entertainment; Likely Story; Projective Testing Service Russia Inc., 2008.
McHale, Brian. “Cognition En Abyme: Models, Manuals, Maps.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 4 (2), 2006. 175-189.
Simmel, Georg. Georg Simmel: Essays on Art and Aesthetics. Translated by Austin Harrington, U of Chicago P, 2020.
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Works Consulted
Carroll, Noel. Interpreting the Moving Image. Cambridge UP, 2012.
Cartmell, Deborah. “100+ Years of Adaptations, or, Adaptation as the Art Form of Democracy.” A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation, edited by Deborah Cartmell, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, pp. 1-13.
Davers, Rebecca. “‘I Know How to Do the Play Now’: A Part of Willy Loman in ‘Synecdoche, New York.’” The Arthur Miller Journal, vol. 6, no. 2, 2011, pp. 25–45. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/42909473.
Derrida, Jacques. Life Death. Translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, U of Chicago P, 2020.
Evans, Joel. “Figuring the global: on Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York.” New Review of Film and Television Studies, vol. 12, no. 4, 2014, pp. 321-338.
Hand, Richard J. “Adaptation and Modernism.” A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation, edited by Deborah Cartmell, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, pp. 52-69.
Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction. Taylor & Francis, 1988.
Benjamin is a final-year English Literature major with a minor in Southeast Asian Studies. If he is not busying himself with questions of art, justice, and ethics, he can be found giving himself existential crises by reading Pessoa, Dostoyevsky and Osamu Dazai. All colours made him happy: even gray—the mystery which binds him still. He has measured out his life with coffee spoons. A sadder and (not) a wiser man, he must change his life.