Synecdoche, New York

Synecdoche, New York is the most precise film ever made about the impossibility of an artwork that contains its own conditions. Caden Cotard, a regional theater director in Schenectady, receives a MacArthur-style grant after the success of a small production. He determines to use the grant to make a work of total honesty about his own life. He rents a warehouse. He hires actors to play the people in his life. He builds replicas of his apartment, his ex-wife's apartment, his daughter's bedroom, the streets of New York. The actors begin requiring direction in playing themselves playing their characters. He hires actors to play the actors playing the people in his life. The actor playing Caden requires direction. Caden hires an actor to play himself directing. The warehouse expands. Years pass. Decades pass. Caden ages. His daughter, whom he has not seen since she was four, dies of an addiction in Berlin. His ex-wife dies. His mother dies. His second wife dies. The actor playing Caden kills himself. The warehouse fills with the second generation of actors playing the actors. Caden, now ancient, accepts direction from a woman in the warehouse, plays the role of his own cleaning lady, dies. The film ends with the line 'Die.' spoken to him by an earpiece. The film is two hours and four minutes and contains the equivalent of half a century of subjective experience. It is the most ambitious depiction of mortality ever attempted by a major American director. It is also the most precise Buddhist statement about the unreality of the self ever produced in mainstream cinema. The self is the construction. The construction expands forever. The death is the only thing that interrupts the construction. The interruption is the meaning. Nothing inside the construction can produce it.

Caden Cotard, a regional theater director, lives with his painter wife Adele and their young daughter Olive. He suffers a series of strange medical symptoms — a faucet hits his head, his autonomic nervous system begins failing — that suggest catastrophic illness, though the diagnoses are inconsistent. Adele leaves for Berlin, taking Olive. Caden receives a MacArthur-style grant. He rents a vast warehouse in New York's theater district and begins constructing, with a large company of actors, a play that will be the unvarnished truth of his life. The construction grows. Replicas are built inside replicas. The play absorbs his marriage to Hazel, his unrequited longing for the box-office attendant Claire, his daughter's transformation in Berlin into a tattooed performer working in a circus, his daughter's death, his mother's death, his second wife's death. The actor he hires to play himself, Sammy, has been watching Caden for twenty years. Sammy eventually replicates Caden's life so completely that he commits suicide by jumping off a building Caden was about to jump off. Caden ages into his seventies, his eighties. The warehouse expands to encompass other warehouses. Caden, finally, accepts the earpiece direction from Millicent, a woman who has joined the production. He plays Ellen, the cleaning lady. He walks through the abandoned streets of the warehouse-city. He dies. The earpiece says 'Die.'

Synecdoche, New York draws from Buddhism, Kabbalah traditions. Kaufman made the film about the impossibility of representing one's own life. Caden Cotard builds an ever-expanding warehouse replica of his existence to capture what is happening to him, and the warehouse becomes its own life that needs its own replica. The film is the longest depiction of mortality in narrative cinema. Every character dies. Caden dies still trying to make the play that would explain what he was.

The construction can never close because the closing would require a position outside the construction from which to verify completion. Caden's project is to make a play that contains his life. The project is, on its face, the standard artistic ambition. The artist will represent their experience honestly. The representation will be the achievement. The artist will, by the act of representing, finally understand what their life was.

The Kabbalist found the universe by going inward. Caden tries to find the self by going outward into representation, and discovers the externality is not closer to the self but further from it. In Kabbalistic tradition, the human being is the microcosm of the universe. The structure of the Sefirot — the divine emanations through which the infinite becomes finite — is reflected in the structure of the individual psyche. To know oneself is, in this register, to know the structure of the cosmos. The self-investigation is not solipsism; it is the most direct route to the divine.

Synecdoche, New York (2008) directed by Charlie Kaufman is essential viewing for those interested in Buddhism, Kabbalah, Kaufman. The Replica That Requires Its Own Replica. It rewards multiple viewings and contemplation.