I love fucked up movies.
Last night I started watching Synecdoche, New York as I was going to bed. I’m not sure at which point I shut it off, but it must’ve been about halfway through where things start to get a little surreal. Tonight I finished watching it and have since been feeling simultaneously giddy and glum.
As viewer the movie satisfies me so completely, but I’m not sure I know how to write about it. It’s a movie made by a self-reflective film director about a self-reflective theater director who creates a deeply recursive play about his creation of a play about plays. “It’s not a play about about dating, it’s about death!” shouts Hoffman’s character’s duplicate. “…it is a play about dating, not a play just about death. It’s about everything: Birth, death, life family. All that.” corrects Hoffman’s character.
There are so many little details and techniques that upon recognition provide me with such wonderment. The homonym title (and subsequent wordplay throughout), the unaccounted and often disorienting passage of time, the recurring theme music (“just a litle person, one person in a scene, of many little people…”), Hoffman’s character’s daughter’s diary as an impossible window into her estranged life, the apparent collapse of society into a military state in the background. I feel like I could watch this movie over and over and still not find every awesome nugget.
Yet at the same time, as it did the first time I saw it, the movie makes me feel really sad and lonely,worried about my life, and more than anything confused.
Which in turn makes me like it even more for so effectively fucking me up.
I’ve read that Synecdoche wasn’t very successful, wasn’t promoted very well, and (partly as a result of poor marketing) didn’t do well at the box office. I can understand this, I just hope that the people who finance these kinds of masterworks have enough faith in their eventual recognition.