Synecdoche, New York Analysis

Synecdoche, New York

Written & Directed by: Charlie Kaufman

This is a complex and an intimidating film and yet it seems so personal and intimate - similar to Charlie Kaufman's previous screenplays like Adaption, whose logline in itself blew my mind and of course, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind which won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. Charlie Kaufman's protagonists are empathetic, they aren't really flawed - they seem flawed because of the brutal honesty with which he writes them, they are actually like people we see in real life. Charlie Kaufman in a BAFTA masterclass encourages students to not let anyone tell them what they can write – he encourages people to write what they feel like writing and not get influenced by who they are writing it for. He is a champion for true artistic expression.

We see a lot of motifs and symbols – one of them is a burning house. It’s so funny, that a person is shown a burning house and that person agrees to buy it and stays in it. I think it’s a commentary on how we buy houses with money that we don’t have – through loans and how on such a quest for wealth, we end up getting burned out. The play that he is arranging, gets so big that it becomes difficult to figure out reality. He gets doppelgangers to a lot of people, to play them and they start acting like how they should have been behaving honestly – they play the real self. There’s a funny scene where Cotard is walking and an actor of the play walks by and asks him if the walk seemed good enough, to which Cotard asks him to be himself, to which the actor tries a more genuine version of the walk. It’s a commentary on how we try to live on our terms and act independent – in order to impress others and get validation. The mistake of the actor was that, he asked for Cotard’s feedback – else he wouldn’t even have noticed.

The film is definitely abstract and it didn’t leave me emotionally satisfied by the end, but it definitely spiked my interest in terms of what it did to my brain. I was thinking about how many this films reflects what we do in our daily lives as the film kept going. Kaufman’s writing makes us uncomfortable and laugh at the same time – whether it’s the scene where Cotard’s wife says that she fantasizes about Cotard dying, the scene where his daughter asks him to ask her an apology in a specific way. These writings come from a place where you engage and entertain with the most cruel and idiosyncratic thoughts that come to our head. It’s difficult to even make sense of them a lot of times – even Bong Joon-ho’s writing has the same quality. If your writing is unique and idiosyncratic, and if people get what you are trying to say – it straight away becomes a modern classic.