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Art, Time and Meaning in Synecdoche, New York
CADEN: I was thinking of calling it 'Simulacrum'. What do you think?
CLAIRE: I don't know what it means.
Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is determined to find a title for his theatrical production, a sprawling, life-size re-creation of New York City with a cast of thousands and no apparent audience. His list of suggestions includes 'Verisimilitudinous', 'Unknown, Unkissed and Lost', 'Infectious Diseases in Cattle' and 'The Obscure Moon Lighting an Obscure World'.
Synecdoche, New York's writer and director, Charlie Kaufman, cares as deeply about names as his protagonist. Take a look at the titles that adorn his films: the finicky Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004), cribbed from an Alexander Pope poem; the fastidious full stop at the end of Adaptation. (Spike Jonze, 2002). His latest film, stop-motion romance Anomalisa (Kaufman & Duke Johnson, 2015), has the self-conscious wordplay of someone who thinks carefully about words.
The title of his directorial debut takes the cake, and tells you about the kind of film that Synecdoche, New York wants to be. For starters, you might need to look up what its title means, and hence you're going to have to prepare yourself for a hefty chunk of ambitious artistry. Here's the definition of 'synecdoche', since that's apparently obligatory when writing about the film: 'a figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole (as fifty sail for fifty ships) [or] the whole for a part (as society for high society)'.1 In context, it refers to Caden's version of New York - mimesis gargantuan in its scale nestled within the larger city - but more significantly it refers to the film's scope, how it struggles to contain the multitudes of life and death within its fragile framework.
The significance of signifiers to Kaufman is apparent within the film itself, even just in Caden's surname - Cotard, a presumable reference to Cotard's syndrome, a mental illness that causes individuals to believe they are the walking dead. While Caden doesn't suffer from this delusion, he's nonetheless obsessed with his own mortality, which is clear right from the film's opening scene: his daughter, Olive (Sadie Goldstein), sings of being 'dead and buried', while...