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).

Milkman the Clubman

In the old days, before the fall of Lehman, obits routinely listed the names of clubs to which deceased executives had belonged. They were the hallowed halls of the University Club, (housed in the auspicious McKim, Mead, and White structure on the corner of 54th and Fifth), the Union Club on 69th and Park, the Racquet and Tennis Club (housed in another McKim, Mead, and White structure on Park Avenue), the New York Athletic Club (the monstrosity on the corner of 57th and 7th, once famed for the turbulent masculinity of its naked steam rooms). And then there are the cultural fixtures like the Grolier on 60th and the exclusive Century Club, founded by writers and artists in the 19th Century (Winslow Homer was a member), and housed in yet another Stanford White designed structure on West 43rd street. Here, the upper echelons of business and art met (and still meet) to decide what the rest of society would eat, both figuratively, in terms of the nourishment provided by ideas, and literally, in terms of the valences accorded to the preeminent cuisines of the day.

But times have changed. Many corporate leaders will finish serving their jail terms just in time to vanish into the great beyond, which begs the question of how their obits will read. Let’s take an example that is a composite of Ken Lay, the deceased Enron chairman, Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky, who both served time for illegal marketplace manipulations, and a number of other masterminds of corporate crime, like accused insider trader Raj Rajaratnam of Galleon, who is likely to be indicted within the year—to say nothing of Marc Rich, whose pardon by President Clinton failed to spare him opprobrium.

Let’s call this composite miscreant Michael Milkman. After recounting Milkman’s education (Harvard MBA), early training (worked for Sandy Weill at Amex), and very early success, in which he is compared to the the famed Saul Steinberg—not Steinberg the artist who did all the labyrinthine NewYorker covers, but the one who attempted to acquire the old Chemical bank with its own assets—the obit will come to the obligatory paragraph about club memberships. Milkman, it will say, was a member of the Century, Union and Racquets Clubs from which he was later asked to resign. At the time of his death Milkman was a member of BJ’s and Sam’s Clubs and of Costco, for which he retained a family membership card.