Sunday, July 26, 2009
Sunday, July 19, 2009
Friday, July 17, 2009
Ticket Stub of the Moment #2
Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Being Caden Cotard
There’s a scene near the end of Being John Malkovich in which the eponymous character (played by the eponymous actor) crawls through the passageway that has allowed the other main characters in the movie access to his consciousness. The result is a strange sequence in which he (and we) perceives a crowded restaurant in which a number of men and women eat and talk while a singer sings softly in the background. The thing is, all the people in the room have Malkovich’s face, and while they appear to speak (and sing) normally, the only word they can say is ‘Malkovich’ The sequence is a great illustration of solipsism: the philosophical doctrine whereby all that one can know is one's own mind. Indeed, the world (including all its inhabitants) may well only be the product of one’s own mind.
Charlie Kaufman wrote BJM, and his directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York (SNY), is that sequence at feature length. Caden Cotard, a depressed, constantly ill, theatre director in upstate New York, wins a prestigious ‘genius grant’ and sets about producing an unfathomably ambitious theatre project, on a vast stage (a full reproduction of New York City in a huge warehouse) and a cast of thousands. The enterprise estranges him from his friends, family, and collaborators, and while Cotard spends the rest of his life continually rehearsing and reconceiving his play, it is never actually performed for an audience.
That’s one story in the film. There are tons of others, constantly overlapping and getting in the way of each other. None of them really get the upper hand. As such, SNY may be any number of things: A comedy, a drama, farce and tragedy. In other words it’s a big mess of a movie.
But to the extent that SNY is any one thing, I’d argue that it’s a dream play—Caden Cotard’s dream of himself. Solipsism may seem to be an esoteric philosophical concept, but we’re confronted with it every time we dream. Our dreams are all about us—our obsessions, our fears, the images and random bits of information we pick up over the course of our daily lives. Our dreams are created by us. And they are, by and large, about us. And one of the things you notice about the movie is Cotard’s ubiquity. He shows up (in animated form) in his daughter’s favorite television show. He’s in all the advertisements we see in the movie. Most importantly, Cotard’s play, which is supposed to be about all the real dramas at play in a city of several million people, seems to end up being all about him. He casts someone (a man who has been following him since the beginning of the movie) as himself, then casts another actor to play the role of the first. Ultimately, despite the vast scale of the play, despite all of his plans to make ‘something real, something true’, the whole thing (and indeed the movie itself) ends up being about himself alone
But this is only one possible story of what’s going on. There are, as I said before, others. This is not entirely a good thing. Kaufman’s earlier scripts were nothing if not ambitious, but there was at least some overarching story that helped pull you through. If those movies were interesting stories about interesting ideas interestingly told, SNY ends up just being a whole bunch of interesting things mashed together. It may be great fun, but it is ultimately a rather cold (albeit cool) way in which to spend a couple of hours.