None of those people is an extra. They're all the leads of their own stories.

[intertribal]

Based on an essentially speechless review in moviebuffs a while back, I decided I wanted to see Synecdoche, New York. As luck would have it, it came to Lincoln this weekend, so my mother and I went to see it. Lincoln's one "independent" (university-associated) theater was the most full I had ever seen it, jam-packed with people who were going to see the other indie movie opening this weekend, Slumdog Millionaire. I have in all honesty never seen so many people go to see a movie at the Ross. It had gotten a two-page spread in the entertainment section - the spot reserved for movies like Lord of the Rings, Benjamin Button, etc. Those spreads tend to work wonders in Lincoln.

So we're sitting in the other, tiny theater at the Ross, with the eight other people who are seeing Synecdoche, New York instead of Slumdog Millionaire. A trailer comes on for Slumdog Millionaire. It's bright and colorful and has "Hoppípolla" playing and Time magazine says it's a hymn to life and oh! My mom leans over to me. "It might be interesting just for the visuals of India." I just snorted. Then they showed a trailer for Stranded: I've Come From A Plane That Crashed in the Mountains, and my mom was like, "There, that's more your thing." But anyway, our movie started - Synecdoche, New York - and I can tell immediately that it's not going to be a visual feast, it's not going to be a "hymn to life" in the typical sense, and I'm afraid my mother is going to hate it. I already have the feeling that I will love it, from the opening frames, partly because I love Charlie Kaufman's work. Well, I love Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich. Those are the only two of his movies I've seen.

I don't know how to give a review of Synecdoche, New York. Basically and importantly, it's directed and written by Charlie Kaufman and stars Philip Seymour Hoffman, who's brilliant as always. I'll give the barest of plot descriptions: A theatre director who's spent his professional life directing adaptations of other people's plays gets a MacArthur genius grant after his super-famous-artist wife takes his daughter and relocates to Berlin, and he launches into the construction of his magnum opus, a "brutal" and "tough" and "honest" work that is true to his self, whatever that is. He takes over a huge abandoned warehouse in New York City and starts building within it the world inside his head - replicas of the apartments and houses that feature in his "real" life, replicas of the people that have featured in his life, replicas of himself. That's about as far as I can go. I read several reviews of this movie before seeing it and none of them did it justice. It's definitely a Kaufman movie both in style - extremely surreal and dark and loving and hilariously absurd - and content: mental processes, memory, desire, creation, the self, the self in suffering. Synecdoche, New York in particular reminded me very much of a commencement speech Lindsey gave me a link to, by David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College in 2005. So Lindsey, I especially recommend this movie to you.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving and [unintelligible -- sounds like "displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.

After the movie ends my mother sits there staring at the screen. (I have been crying, but I'm always crying these days) Usually she jumps up at the end of movies and gets me up and on our way out. She's not a movie buff - she sees them once, enjoys it, and the experience is over. Not this one. It reminded me of the time we went to the Lied to see some very bizarre singer whose name I can't remember and my mother was totally overwhelmed by this one song about what goes through the mind of someone who's dying. I can't get her to look away from the screen until the credits were over. And of course she is my mother and I'm an only child and my father is dead, so it's strange for me to see her so absorbed in something that has nothing at all to do with me, something that has spoken to her own self... whatever that is. After the credits end (and we never stay for the credits) we push our way out of the Ross, because it's now overflowing with people who are there to see Slumdog Millionaire. My mother says, at last, "And all these people are going to see that other movie!", laughing and shaking her head. When we get out into the open she takes a deep breath, points to the sky, and exclaims, "Look at the moon!" It's very bright and full tonight, and the clouds look all layered and textured. Then she sighs and says, "That was one of the most amazing movies I have ever seen."

I can't really say much else, except that it left me feeling peaceful and strangely centered given that it opens with the main character getting a sink blown up in his face, and I'm very happy to have seen it. I give it the strongest recommendation I've given to a movie in a long time, but be aware that it's a movie you'll either love or hate. To me, it was absolutely beautiful. Perfect, as Caden Cotard would say. I'm going to include one last thing - a monologue by an actor playing a minister presiding over a funeral from late in the movie that my mother and I and apparently some IMDb user agree is the psychological and narrative climax of Synecdoche, New York:

Everything is more complicated than you think. You only see a tenth of what is true. There are a million little strings attached to every choice you make; you can destroy your life every time you choose. But maybe you won't know for twenty years. And you'll never ever trace it to its source. And you only get one chance to play it out. Just try and figure out your own divorce. And they say there is no fate, but there is: it's what you create. Even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but doesn't really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope for something good to come along. Something to make you feel connected, to make you feel whole, to make you feel loved. And the truth is I'm so angry and the truth is I'm so fucking sad, and the truth is I've been so fucking hurt for so fucking long and for just as long have been pretending I'm OK, just to get along, just for, I don't know why, maybe because no one wants to hear about my misery, because they have their own, and their own is too overwhelming to allow them to listen to or care about mine. Well, fuck everybody. Amen.

Comments

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Well, there are a lot of movies in the world, and I would probably agree that most of them are kinda lame content-wise, although not because they're fleeting and trivial, but because I don't care about the content.

I think maybe I just find insight in either a lot more things than you do, or a looooot fewer (as in, in none). I mean, I find insight in Jurassic Park. You know? Is that Art? Who knows. I even find insight in movies I can't stand to experience and fall asleep during, in the three minutes that I'm awake.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

Well, I guess I think a lot of human existence is fleeting and trivial.

Hm. Actually, Jurassic Park left some sort of impression on me, though that may be because I was so young when I saw it. I think a lot of things are really awesome at the time, then forget them a year later and think back and wonder how I could've been such an idiot. But the movies that leave a lasting impression on me are quite rare. I'm learning to distinguish them at the time, to recognize what it is about the movie or whatever that resonated with me, but it's a slow process. The immediate reactions you seem to have of "this is amazing" or "this sucks" are kind of foreign to me. I'm usually somewhere inbetween, unless it really was just that amazing or really, really awful. And the sort of buzz in the head I get after movies that resonate with me, leaves me sort of inspired or like, stuck on a feeling of the movie...that happens with movies and plays I think are stupid, too, but it's also something very impermanent. Unless it's something very new to me, something that actually left a change in how I see the world, I'll forget it.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

also, I think...I defeat my own awe with a moment's reflection. Partly because the things I have that reaction to are often so very very stupid. and somehow i managed to separate being involved with the characters from some sort of insightful reaction. ummmm...thoughts dead now.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

it's called being human, man.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

if you say so

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

I do. But you evidently want to be more.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

hahaha. not really? i don't think so, anyway.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

ubermensch ftw.

or rather, probably just a space-traveler.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

no ubermensch! seriously, though, i am very human, and i think i'm at peace with that.

lol. space-traveler? yes.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

you would make a great space-traveler.

the very idea frightens the hell out of me, though. The ending of Close Encounters of the Third Kind made me so, so upset.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

haha, really? i might go crazy. but i like the idea of it, sorta.

yeah, see, that's one of those movies i saw a number of years ago and forgot. lol. i really don't remember it at all. except lights.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

and that's one movie that convinced me of how much I want to stay at home and have a family! LOL. Seriously, it made me way more depressed than I think Spielberg meant it to. Have you seen Mission to Mars? That had the same effect on me, except not as severe.

Also, I'm reading about the Leopold and Loeb thing, that's really weird but interesting. I'd never heard of it before.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

really? how'd it do that? Mission to Mars sounds really familiar...I may have seen it, I don't even know. How sad is that?

Yeah, that's what I thought. I found out about it when people were joking about Nietzsche (and annoying people who like him, like me :P) on the philosophy community.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

You saw it before I did, as I recall. I remember you talked about it once. It's about these astronauts that go to Mars and they try to go into the "face" on Mars by sending a little robot that plays a sonar wave of human DNA or something. I don't know, it's pretty weird. At the end there's aliens inside the face and they're like, "we are your ancestors, humans! come with us and we will show you!" and one of the astronauts goes with him.

When people go off with peaceful aliens and leave their human lives behind it depresses me. I'm just like, "think about your wife and children you fucking selfish fuck!!!"

um, yeah, anyway.

I should really try to study Nietzsche at some point in my life.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

LOL. that does sound familiar.

Hm. I guess if you have a wife and children, that makes sense.

I wonder what you'd make of him... Also, Nietzsche loved Dostoevsky's writing, and it kinda shows. Whether because they were similar beforehand, or Dostoevsky influenced him, or whatever (I tried to figure this out, but apparently he discovered Dostoevsky the same year he wrote The Genealogy of Morality, so I don't know). But he's notoriously difficult to interpret, esp. cause he's constantly referring back to past philosophers but not always explaining how, who, etc. Also 'cause he got syphilis and went mad.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Yeah, at least in Mission to Mars the guy's wife had just died and he had no children (he was kind of mopey throughout the whole movie), so I understood that one more. I just felt sad for him that he was leaving Earth. Also, I'm probably the only person in the world who prefers Mission to Mars to Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

I probably wouldn't get Nietzsche, but I could always try.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

Hahaha, I can't really speak to my preferences, although I don't remember ever liking Close Encounters.

You could probably get him as least as well as I do, if you wanted to anyway.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Wow, really? But it's all we have.

There's some movies that definitely don't "last" for me too - a lot of prestige pics - and some movies last because they make me so angry that I can't forget them (Pan's Labyrinth). Some movies are definitely helped out by the music, like 28 Days Later. But anyway, the whole thing about recognizing what it is about the movie that resonated - or, rather, why do I like this or why do I not like this - is something my film professor in Melbourne introduced me to, and it made me appreciate movies even more.

I guess I wouldn't say that I necessarily live with and by all the movies I like and think are good - although the movies on my "top ten list", like Apocalypse Now and Picnic on Hanging Rock, did change my life - but that doesn't make me any less excited and loving of movies, you know what I mean? The fact that I may forget it later doesn't really matter to me. I mean, I try to make that my approach to life in general.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

Pretty much, I guess.

The fact that it doesn't really change how I view the world kind of disappoints me. I crave that. Changing my mind.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

I guess the way I view the world isn't so static that little things don't change it, in little minute and wonderful ways.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

but of course little things are always changing...

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

micro-evolution makes up macro-evolution...