The depiction of suffering has its requisite cycle: the early pains of birth; the resultant, inevitable decay of the body; the renewable torments of aging; the fear of death & the fear of being reborn to death. Variables that are to be seized with pliers and placed in a frozen jar on exhibition. Or broken up, boiled, and stirred until the bloated carcass is made digestible again for a merry banquet and a lascivious round-about. To this banquet are invited all those you had wished to bed with, those you had imagined a few times naked, & those who saw you naked and in bed with your lurid vulnerability.
Suffering may also take form as a positive procreative construction of a world-at-large set shrewdly within another. Example: when one person reads the word, 'hazel', he will not think of the color but of a girl whom he had lost to a fire; likewise, for a 'house on fire' we would bend our necks to peer at the unconscious anxiety of a young woman seeking to house a family with maternal urgency; and so forth: for a woman named 'Adele' he would divine the secret to his life, namely that he 'lacks' her; for 'teardrop' he would witness not merely the effect but the consummation of 'sadness'; for 'nose' he would consider the color 'pink' and with that color too would be attached the name of his longlost daughter 'Olive'; things in consequence of representing within their minute particularity the essential confluence of the world.
Caden Cotard, a theatre director who excels at portraying young people playing old, cries whenever he goes to bed with a woman not his wife. Yet the sundry and perennially attractive women that sleep with him insist on sleeping with him. He either imagines each and every one of these hither-come ladies like flowers that one day bloom and the next day fade, or he dreams them piecemeal as part of a grander scheme... In which the lives of little people are enlarged to the sum of every possible emotion to be felt within the closed sphere of emotions that we map out and call the human world. The human world in this case would stand for a representation of what such a sphere of affairs (in which the activity of people - waking and walking and sleeping and talking - would trump the primitive meaninglessness of the language gamep played in reverse) would register if one were to stage a monumental recovery of its blinks and seizures. Set out in copious notes, the emotions that are aroused in the common exchanges between citizens of the social experiment that is the living city, would take place in a miniature setting, a model town much like 'our town' except that its cycles would storm over with nebulous misunderstandings (rather than epiphanies.) The stock exchange of the language game would trade on the passing glances of strangers and debutantes, directors and actors, sons and lovers, on their fabricated habits in posture and in transit, and on the extraneous duplicity of asking someone whose name is unknown what her name would be if she were someone else. The interchangeability with strangers would connote the interchangeability with words used in stray dialogues on the street or in bed, or in the playhouses and movie theatres in which desperation plays out its fatigued sick joke; despair was what was implied by Breton as the epitome of 'mad love', and in Kaufman's mindset it is the epitome of (potential) revelation.
(Except that this film does not breathe air the way that 'bicycle thieves' breathe air. The realism in "Synecdoche" is one of pure and idle and self-congratulatory simulation; Cotard does not love women as Guido Anselmi does, that is, with indulgent humor and masculine nostalgia; nor does Cotard direct his life with the distinct self-absorption that Sébastien-Pyrrhus directs the pseudo greek drama (Racine's "Andromaque") that reciprocates the lovestruck folly of his pseudo life. They are translators, these director-men, but only one of them connives to whine his way through much ado about nothing; the other two are self-aware conveyors of the joys and joyful sorrows of nothing.)
Caden Cotard also believes that he is dying; he is a hopeless hypochondriac, or more precisely, an overweight man afflicted with Cotard's Syndrome, in which a person comes to believe that he or she is dead and/or that the world no longer exists in any vital sense. (The french psychiatrist Jules Cotard, after whom it is named, described this condition as being le délire de négation.) Cotard, stuck in the island of his own projected suffering, allows the conspiratorial folks of his life and the scenes they inhabit like expressbus waiting rooms to pass away from him with a velocity out of joint with the complexities of life (or otherwise in strict observance of its conundrum); it is only when Cotard begins to invest his newfound money (a don from a Macarthur Genius Grant) and the rest of his life's energy on magnifying the feeble diameter of his life (from outside his own self-absorbed psyche) that he begins to approximate the value of each person that subsists, as if by miracle, outside his immediate directorship.
If he does not negate the intimate strangers that populate and situate his life, he may find himself neglecting them: Kaufman cuts his film not out of use for elliptical expression, but out of sheer need to translate the already rapid quickening of life into an augmentation of its motion toward death (a fast-forward that emerges from the realization that death is the sole object of life's procession.) On the other hand, if he sees in himself a growing & inescapable mortality that affixes his body to the slow rot of unforeseen vicissitudes, yet he does not die; others, his closest and best loved, die instead of him. The velocity of the film is what ultimately takes over Cotard's life; the speed with which scenes come and go, and faces, and sex, and marriage, and breakup, and diseases, and fears, and desires; and ultimately death; pass forth from him and his recyclable fear of fear itself so violently that he ends up losing them one by one. While he remains alive to witness the passing forth from his mind the representations of people on parade, the theme music (& a solitary jazz song sung by a solitary person in a sea of solitary people) keep playing to remind him of his original premise: (you are alone...)
Yet he is not alone. He is merely guilty, it could be said, with K's jewish guilt of knowing not why he is alone. (Meanwhile the stagehands and actors and actors' actors cross and recross the labyrinth of his affected solitude and pan out for him the gross tide of human endeavors.)
One viewer very cleverly recalled Baudrillard's Simulation and Simulacra after watching the film; another appositely cited Fellini's "8 1/2"; if both partial influences were mixed in a sleek and terrifically artificially miserable cocktail, then you would have the synecdoche in "Synecdoche, New York": simulated suffering as a cure for real suffering (in much the same way that we are inoculated against viruses with small strains of the virus itself.) It is a film so enriched by its profusion of failures (as well by its serenely concealed capitalist guilt at having no real misery to speak of - an 'authentic' misery that is imagined by pragmatic new yorkers as occurring in impoverished countries torn by the very real strife of hunger, war, and dispossession) that one can only gawk at it and laugh awhile and shake one's head in evident halfmooned dissatisfication. It is not even a monumental failure as one would hope, but something that so meekly comes to its point that one can merely come to agree with its final solution to the spiritual asphyxia that is the modernity of a world set on automatic:
I'm just a little person,
One person in a sea
Of many little people
Who are not aware of me.
The intensity of the suffering in such a world, a world that is a representation of the real world, amounts to no more than this simple and pure evocation: the loneliness of having no emotion in communion with another. It is loneliness which drives one to recreate what cannot possibly be understood from the single-point perspective: Cotard, the would-be playwright, the director of human emotions, is driven to objectless distraction by the protean symbology of the absence of the Other (whether it be his departed wife, his stolen daughter, his first adulterous love, or the gradually jeopardized authorship of his own life, he cannot seem to fathom the great depth of his infinitesimal will - at the end of the film the symbols of his nameless loss come to merge in a single frame: he is no more than an extra in a film about his life - except no circus, no laughter, no ring around the rosy by the ghosts of Guido's life on a movie set... only a bench shared with a stranger in a wartorn simulacrum, a sudden cut, and the coma white of a fadeout caught indistinctly in circumstantial radio bleeps...)
...So Cotard excavates his body in search of the Cartesian reciprocal; an excavation that conversely takes an outward convex form, a building-up rather than a mining-down. It is perhaps to his mutual horror and relief that in the immense absence of his heart he discovers a tremendous mise en abyme of the entire city of New York blossoming and withering in a few hundred clipped frames like the petals that fall from the tattooed arm of his german-speaking daughter. She is small, and he is small, and that is more than metaphysics could provide them in a burning house, a house on fire in the instant future.
...
Cf. Rivette's "L'amour fou" & "Out 1" / Fellini's "8 1/2"
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