Synecdoche, N.Y.

This is...sort of a review?

(1)  I am one of the few people who already knew what synecdoche is—also, how to spell it, and how it's different from metonymy.  So now I am your king.

(2)  I like Charlie Kaufman.  I thought the last ⅓ or even ¼ of Being John Malkovitch was iffy, and I didn't like Adaptation or Human Nature all that well until I saw them a second time, but Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is truly excellent in my opinion, and Charlie Kaufman deserves all the praise he gets and more.  He deserves praise for things he hasn't even done.  Like, "Hey, Charlie—nice mohawk!"

(3)  So but what about Synecdoche, N.Y.?

One thing people don't tend to say about Charlie Kaufman and that I felt big-time in Synecdoche is that he is fucking honest...or at least it feels that way.  This is sort of what I was saying about David Foster Wallace, too.  Kaufman uses strange premises and wacky ideas just on this side of sci-fi (e.g., somebody's having all his memories erased) to speak to very real human shit...also like DFW.  This, by the way, is also why I don't like the sentimental: I think of it as, almost by definition, a cheap and almost counterproductive way of achieving seriousness, and often I think the best way to get to something real is in a sort of...roundabout way?  Success in circuit lies.

But...(a) what we've got here is an artist making art about the making of art, and somehow it's even more intense than in Adaptation because not only are we seeing him struggle and seeing the struggle itself and the product of the struggle, and not only is the struggle about how to struggle, but here somehow it's almost about how to struggle with the struggling with the struggling?—like almost a meta-Adaptation; and (b) there's a difference between neurotic contortions and emotion, and somehow Synecdoche, N.Y. made me feel like maybe Charlie Kaufman can't always tell the difference—either that or he thinks neurotic contortions are enough for a whole movie, in which case I respectfully disagree.

I'm not sure I can articulate this.  Basically there's a difference, e.g., between "I'm lonely"—even "Look at me and how convoluted my thinking is: it sure does make me lonely"—and "Look at how convoluted I am and how self-conscious I am about the convolution and the self-consciousness and how afraid I am that you'll judge me for these things, and, but, hey, on the other hand I guess you can maybe forgive me for it because you can at least identify with the fact that all this shit makes me lonely...?"  In the latter case emotion is almost an afterthought or excuse—an accident, even.  Not that that level of near-infinite psychological regress* can't yield valuable feeling—John Barth pulls it off in his "Menelaiad," where form matches function, and I think DFW does a pretty good job in "Octet" with something even closer to what Kaufman's trying—but, I don't know, at a certain point in Synecdoche, N.Y. (which started out great, by the way, and which is admirably ambitious and largely enjoyable or at least interesting) I started to feel that it was less about solipsism than it was just solipsistic.

I still love you, Charlie.

OR: . . . maybe I just didn't get it?

* A warehouse within a warehouse within a warehouse within a warehouse...