No one creates films quite like Charlie Kaufman. Best known for his screenplay for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kaufman constructs stories filled with strange details that demand his audience suspend their disbelief. This doesn’t make Kaufman unique, many of the films we watch every year do the same thing (this month will bring a slew of such films: Wolverine, Star Trek, Terminator Salvation). But before you settle into your comfy, stadium style seat this summer for some explosions and sci-fi, check out a film you almost certainly missed this year: Synecdoche, NY.
Charlie Kaufman’s first shot at directing brings to life a film that continues in the line of his other screenplays [Adaptation, Being John Malcovich and Eternal Sunshine]. Each film is an exercise in both the absurd and the ordinary. The details of the story are ridiculous. Synecdoche, NY includes a woman buying a house that is on fire (and continues to slowly burn throughout the film), a theater production being staged in a warehouse in Manhattan that holds a scale model of Manhattan, which of course has a warehouse in it with a scale model of Manhattan in it that has a warehouse….you get the picture. The farther away from the story you stand, the stranger it seems. Describing it to someone makes you sound crazy. But, the brilliance of Kaufman’s film is that the emotion of the story makes perfect sense. The deeper into the story you move, the more it resonates. In the mass of strangeness lies a quality of the human experience that leaves the viewer feeling known from the inside-out.
I realized while I was sitting in the theater watching Synecdoche, NY that this blend of bizarre details and emotional accuracy is something I know from somewhere else. I have been captivated for years now by the stories found in Genesis. I read about naked people eating fruit and talking to snakes and I almost have to laugh. Does anyone really believe that this is how the wheels fell off of God’s grand plan for creation? But in the midst of the head scratching details is an emotional experience that I know, that I experience, everyday. I know what it feels like to think God is holding out on me. I know what it feels like to have voices calling me towards things that will destroy me. I know what it feels like to look at myself and feel shame. I know what it feels like to pull away from the people I was made to live in connection with. The further I step into these bizarre tales the more they make sense.
Kaufman plays in the same world as these ancient stories. He gives us the strange details that are required to bend our minds in a way that will open them up to realities beyond our conception. It is through the strangeness that the depth of the normality becomes apparent. Kaufman makes us ask, what is real in a story? What do we need to be present or not present in a story, in order to call it true?
Synecdoche, NY is Kaufman’s latest parable about the desire to be known and loved.
It is odd.
It is true.
