Synecdoche, New York

There are two ways of looking at this. First, to accept that every relationship, every imagined future, and every reassurance that things will persist as they are is already, in a sly and cunning fashion, slipping away even as it happens, and to try to, somehow, inhabit that tension without recoiling.

The other is to proceed as if none of that is true -- to go strolling down cobblestone sidewalks with the assumption that each cemented pebble will be there tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that, indefinitely, and to experience that assumption so completely that it appears to be true.

Put differently: do you have the luxury to believe in permanent guarantees?
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Synecdoche, New York strikes you right at your nerve endings. Kaufman gradually abrades and tears apart whatever sense you have that things hold together and posits that even the most basic features of what it means to be human are highly unstable. Who we are, who we relate to, what characterizes our surroundings, who we walk by on a Tuesday night -- these are all things that we maintain as part of the "present", as things we assume to be permanent guarantees, yet Kaufman pulls the rug out from beneath that farce. The things we assume are stable givens are, in fact, simply what enable us to cope with instability. In the film, this appears as Caden's totalizing art piece that consumes every part of his existence while also providing a layer of structure and consistency in his increasingly tumultuous life.

In the modern world, Caden's art project has analogs in consumerist culture, social media addiction, and even in my attachment to this website — each can serve as a distraction from the finitude of our lives. In other words, they can actively reassure and anesthetize us by giving us some control over our incredibly precarious lives. By purchasing products and curating a "taste", building a social media presence that we invest hundreds of hours into, or spending our nights writing up thoughts on film, we manufacture systems of meaning that allow us to trudge forward somehow. Kaufman's central problematic, however, is that these systems simply conceal the incredibly precarious nature of our lives. Even if they appear to be the solidified features of existence, they ultimately fail to protect us from confronting life's fragilities.

To phrase it more pointedly, the film’s central contention is that while key features of our lives may present themselves as if they possess a reassuring and tensile strength, these cornerstones of existence that we lean upon can quickly fray and distort in such a way that they are no more than just negotiated agreements we make with ourselves to keep functioning, to keep looking ahead, to have some sort of optimism to clutch upon. The question is, then, in the face of this instability, what should one do? 

The film doesn't provide an easy answer, and that's part of what makes it outstanding. That may not be for everyone, but if you sit with the shock, it rewards you handsomely.