Synecdoche, New York Revisited

In Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York (2008), Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a character who is suffering from a number of symptoms, but it soon becomes apparent that the real culprit is existence. Caden Cotard (Hoffman’s character) is dying of life, as we all do. It’s appropriate that Caden is a theater director whose gesamtkunstwerk is an autobiographical piece of performance art because by definition what we his audience all strive for is, at least, the illusion that we're in control of our destinies. And what is life according to Charlie Kaufman? Perhaps no movie has ever envisioned the protoplasm of being in a more poetic way that also rings true. Life is a fungible currency which is  constantly trading. It also resembles a labile dream in which people suffer the neurological conditions of either Capgras syndrome (in which an imposter seems to occupy a recognizable face) or prosopagnosia (in which the ability to recognize face is totally lost). Finally it also resembles the ephemeral stage set Caden is building whose fragile layers comprise a tower of aspiration leading to nowhere, a tower of Babel in which all the inhabitants are locked in themselves and where, lacking a common language, no one effectively communicates with anyone else. Lovers become strangers and strangers turn into lovers. And all the while the director and his proxies wander from room to room, with part of the movie also devoted to Caden’s search for the child who had been snatched away by an estranged wife. Lewis Thomas wrote a classic called Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher. In biology the cell is the basic unit of organic matter whose DNA and RNA can tell you everything you want to know about a living organism. In Synecdoche, New York, Kaufman creates the imaginative equivalent of a basic component of human life, fragile, ever changing in shape, elusive and contradictory in its instinct both for creation and extinction.

Bipolar Disorder, ADHD and Man’s Soul

Bruno Bettleheim

One of the lagniappes of psychoanalysis is the philosophical attitude it takes towards mental illness. There is no cure for life. In fact in Charlie Kaufman’s masterpiece Syndechoche, New York (2008) that is precisely the mysterious illness that afflicts the main character, Caden Cotard, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman. The DSM-5 offers a smorgasbord of diagnoses that offer the illusion or delusion that there is some sort of cure for mental states which is achieved by 1)naming them 2)medicating them and 3)making them insurable. This is not to say that there aren’t severely ill patients who don’t benefit greatly from medication. But these days every other person you talk to is either bipolar, ADHD or if their behavior is more over the top, borderline. And having received one of these diagnosis a buffet of medications awaits these sufferers. It’s not surprising that the Times recently ran a front page piece about the abuse of  attention deficit disorder diagnoses, emphasizing the beneficial effect the diagnoses are having on the profits of the drug companies (“The Selling of Attention Deficit Disorder,” NYT, 12/14/13). What’s most disturbing is that much of the medicating is being done willy-nilly by the worst kind of practitioners, those suffering from the arrogance of not knowing how little they know. Moliere would have had fun writing a parody of these Tartuffe’s of psychiatry. Perhaps he might have called it “Le docteur imaginaire.” When Bruno Bettleheim wrote Freud and Man’s Soul :An Important Reinterpretation of Freudian Theory back in l982, he was dealing with the American psychoanalytic  establishment’s need to use language as way of making psychoanalysis more scientific sounding. The fact is that while analysis may be quite helpful to the small number of patients who have the time and money to afford it, it’s hardly what one would classify as a scientific discipline. And that’s probably the good part. Psychoanalysis might not be the cure for ADHD or bipolar disorder, but it offers a broad view of human existence that attends to the one part of the human being that you can’t locate on an MRI or FMRI for that matter--the soul.

Synecdoche, New York

Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York is the best film of 2008 ... and 2009. It may also be the best film of 2010. With a one-night revival at The Philoctetes Center this Friday, it could even make your top-ten list for 2011. What other film features a heroically sexually dysfunctional central character, and what other film raises sexual dysfunctionality to its rightful exalted place in the pantheon of human pathology? What other film in the history of cinema is named after a figure of speech? (By the way, Charlie Kaufman should expropriate William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity as the title for his next film). Much is made of the illness of Kaden Cotard, the film’s central character, a theater director whose MacArthur grant supports a lifelong piece of performance art. But Kaden’s malady is life. He is dying of life, a brilliant reference to Samuel Beckett, whom Kaufman outdoes at his own endgame.

Numerous neurological afflictions, including Parkinson’s, manifest themselves throughout the movie. The most significant of these is Capgras syndrome. Capgras, which appears in the film as a name next to a buzzer in an apartment house, occurs when doubt is thrown on the identity of  an otherwise familiar individual. It plays deftly into the estheticizing of reality that takes up the last half of the film. Virtually every element of so-called reality is turned into a scene of the play that Kaden is creating. There is theater within theater, as set pieces reappear in later scenes from the director’s “actual” life. To this Kaufman owes a debt to Pirandello, who is the eminence grise behind Synecdoche. At one point Kaden is proposing new titles for his work—The Obscure Moon Lighting an Obscure World and Infectious Diseases. What about Twenty Post-Modernist Characters in Search of a Mise en Scene?

Come to think of it, Synecdoche is not just the best film of 2008-11. It’s the best American film since Hal Hartley’s masterpiece, Henry Fool (1997).