Synecdoche, New York, the 2008 directorial debut of Charlie Kaufman, is a movie that must be watched more than once. In fact, I’d be impressed if anyone who isn’t Kaufman himself was able to tell me precisely what the film is about– let alone after only one watch. After watching it, I felt that I was teetering on the edge of understanding something big that Kaufman was trying to say about the absurdity of humanity and consciousness, but never quite getting there. Like watchers of the movie, Kaufman’s protagonist, playwright Caden Cotard, struggles to construct meaning from absurdity. The film opens as Caden lies in bed and listens to the morning radio: It is September 22nd, the first day of fall, and the announcer recites an excerpt from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Autumn Day”:

“Whoever has no house now, will never have one.

Whoever is alone will stay alone,

will sit, read, write long letters through the evening,

and wander the boulevards, up and down,

restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing.”

The poem drips of hopelessness and stagnation, and we quickly see that Caden is a perfect representation of this mentality. Instead of helping his wife Adele raise their four-year-old daughter, Olive, he obsessively reads the obituaries and visits doctors about strange physical symptoms that he is sure indicate terminal illness. He immerses himself in theater, ignoring real-world responsibilities, in an attempt to construct meaning from the aimlessness of an existence leading to inevitable death. 

As Caden distances himself from his family life, Adele becomes more and more disinterested in Caden’s work as a playwright. His work lacks inspiration: he restages existing plays and seems unable to find his own creative voice. Tensions in their marriage grow, and Caden and his box office woman, Hazel, maintain an explicit flirtation that seems to exist in some grey area of infidelity. Finally, Adele leaves Caden and moves with Olive to Berlin, where she quickly finds success as a miniature portrait artist. With Adele out of the picture, Caden and Hazel try to sleep together, but Caden cannot go through with it without breaking into tears. But just as Caden reaches a low point in his life, he gets miraculous news: he has been awarded a MacArthur Genius Grant. He becomes determined to use the money to stage a masterpiece, and, though his relationship with Hazel is strained by their failed attempt at intimacy, he convinces her to join the crew. 

Caden envisions a piece of theater that will reveal the gritty truth of humanity, that will break the boundaries of writer, actor, and audience, fiction and reality. (“Here’s what I think theater is,” he tells Hazel, “it’s the beginning of thought. The truth not yet spoken. It’s a blackbird in winter. The moment before death. It’s what a man feels after he’s been clocked in the jaw. It’s love… in all its messiness. And I want all of us, players and audience alike, to soak in the communal bath of it, the mikvah, as the Jews call it. We’re all in the same water, after all, soaking in our very menstrual blood and nocturnal emissions. This is what I want to try to give people.”) He hires actors to portray himself and significant people from his life. Claire, one of his most devoted actors from previous productions, joins the cast  playing herself, and they eventually marry. As the play develops, it becomes more and more convoluted. Caden’s actors begin to become significant themselves in Caden’s life, requiring new actors to play the actors. The boundaries between the play and reality, and between actor and character, blur to near nonexistence. Claire and Caden’s marriage dissolves over a fight instigated by the fake Caden. Yearning for Hazel, Caden sleeps with the actress who portrays her.

Through his play, Caden reaches the epitome of self-absorption.  He recreates New York City with himself at the center. Every character is defined by how they fit into his narrative, from the significant (Adele, Olive, Hazel, Claire) to the insignificant (Adele’s cleaning woman Ellen, neighbors, and pedestrians). Caden’s attempt to portray “truth not yet spoken” is ultimately a portrayal of his own truth. His attitude toward the world is representative of the philosophy of solipsism– the belief that one’s own perception of reality is the only reality. Caden can only know his own mind, thus his mind must be the only one that exists.

Similarly, Caden fixates on his ailing body and impending death, while remaining absurdly oblivious to the death and destruction that surrounds him. We gradually see that the real world is devolving into chaos– at one point, Caden refers to the world’s population as “nearly thirteen million,” implying that some sort of cataclysmic extinction has occurred. Residents of real New York camp outside Caden’s life-sized recreation of New York seeking safety; in his egotistical delusion Caden assumes they are fans waiting to see his play. Kaufman suggests that we live in denial of our mortality– “each of us knowing that we will die, each of us secretly believing that we won’t.” Towards the beginning of the film, Hazel tours a house for sale which is entirely engulfed in flames. “I like it, I do,” she says to the realtor, “but I’m really concerned about dying in the fire.” Yet Hazel buys the house, and lives there until she dies in her sleep beside Caden on their first night finally together as a couple, after decades of failed connections and unrequited feelings– of smoke inhalation. Hazel’s decision to ignore the fire that ultimately kills her is a powerful metaphor for the human condition– we love knowing that we will get hurt, we live knowing that we will die.

Ultimately, Caden’s search for truth through theater leads to the disintegration of his insular, solipsistic view of the world. After the actor who played Caden dies, the part is taken on by Millicent, an actress who previously played Ellen, the cleaning lady. Caden, in turn, takes on the part of Ellen. As Caden embodies Ellen, the boundary between his identity and hers begins to collapse, and Ellen, previously an insignificant background character, is suddenly allowed complexity. The collapse of the external world mirrors the collapse of the inner: New York continues to disintegrate as Caden lives according to Millicent’s instructions through an earpiece and attempts to accept his fast-approaching confrontation with mortality. 

“You have struggled into existence,” Millicent narrates, “and are now slipping silently out of it. This is everyone’s experience. Every single one. The specifics hardly matter. Everyone’s everyone.”Kaufman shows us that Caden is Ellen is Hazel is Adele is Claire is every one of the 13 million– is the watcher. As the saying goes, we are all main characters in our own stories. Kaufman suggests that there is only one main character: humanity. The individual is one manifestation of the shared human condition, and each instance of suffering and joy a mere stand-in for the suffering and joy of humanity. What the individual experiences as unique and personal suffering is in fact shared by every nameless face that passes on the street. Thus we are synecdoches of the human race– parts which are made to represent the whole. Caden’s attempt at meaning-making through theater falls short because of the scale of the piece: he wanted to portray the human condition by portraying everyone, when in fact he should have focused on the individual as the representation of the whole. For this same reason, Adele is successful in her art where Caden is not– she recognizes from the beginning that the window to universal truths is through the individual. The scale of the work is insignificant– Adele creates miniscule portraits to Caden’s life-sized recreation of New York. The concept of the synecdoche suggests that the smallest part can represent the whole; in some cases, this whole is impossible to represent except through the part. Kaufman’s Synecdoche New York is thus a strong argument not only for doing away with the idea of the “other” and the self as the center of the universe, but also for narrowing the scope of one’s art to access the meaning hidden in the small, mundane, and individual.