I'd like to experiment on exploring the difference between a description of something and the actual experience of it; in this case I will be talking about music and film. My choice in the mediums will be ones of particular complexity, so I can emphasise the mutual difference between feeling and understanding.
First I would like to relate this text from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, when Alice is having a conversation with the Duchess:
___'I quite agree with you,' said the Duchess; 'and the moral of that is - "Be what you would seem to be" - or if you'd like it put more simply - "Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise."'
___'I think I should understand that better,' Alice said very politely, 'if I had it written down: but I ca'n't quite follow it as you say it.'
The trick of the passage is that it is written down, and in such a way you can read over it and follow its description and understand it. But imagine if it was said to you out loud. This is when it becomes an experience, and may put you at either a)a disadvantage due to being unable to follow its complex pyramid structure grammar or b)an advantage due to previously studying the phrase and dissecting its grammar so that it can be properly followed and understood as a sensible sentence.
The purpose of this exercise is to hopefully place one in situation (b), if one ever has the opportunity to come across any of the subjects of my experiment.
In Music
"Metal Machine Music" by Lou Reed
Description:
Taking an electric guitar and giving it an unusual tuning, Lou Reed would place it at various distances and positions close to its amplifier. The result is a feedback, which the frequency would hit the strings depending on the particular tuning, creating an overtonal vibration, The frequency of this overtone will collide with the overtones (or undertones) of other feedbacks when all mixed together, creating new overtones which collide with other new (and old) overtones - and on and on and on. All these feedback tracks were recorded on to tape, then manipulated and mixed together by Lou Reed's careful controlling hand. This constant infinite loop provides a sort of "therapy" for feedbackphiles, placed in 4 segements of 16 minutes (originally intended for it to played on vinyl), with the 4th segment infinitely looping in the ending groove around the centre of the disc.
Experience:
Unfortunately, I haven't experienced it on vinyl yet as it's a fairly difficult record to find. I do have it on CD, which provides an extreme outburst of high frequency noise, tediously carrying on like some kind of torture method. I still enjoy it immensely, and it only gets better with every listen.
The recent works of Meshuggah
Description:
In music, the rythm of a song is usually denoted by a time signature. The time signature looks like a fraction (eg. "3/4" or "4/4") whereby the denominator indicates the amount of equal parts the beat is divided into, and the numerator indicates how many of these beats will fill up the bar. Along come Meshuggah who decide to take the idea of screwing around with the weirdest and most unlikely time signatures in existence, then take it to further complications by having multiple time signatures playing at once, usually the hands of the drummer will be doing something manageable like 4/4 or 5/4 and the feet are off in their own world doing what's best described as "revolving time signatures". Mathematically, the combination would result as some twisted revolution of different time signatures I'm not even going to pretend to know or count. Sometimes the guitars are off on their own timings which complicates things further. Currently, Meshuggah reign as the kings of "Math Metal". Not only do they achieve inhuman possibilities in their composition, but they achieve machine-like precision in their sound.
Experience:
With the addition of a screaming vocalist, the lack of melodies give an overall thrash-sensibility, only the guitars seem to be strumming at any given random moment, fooling the listener in to headbanging when there is not a beat, and missing a potential headbang when the beat arrives. However, after many obsessive repeated listens, a headbanger will begin to understand the chaos and make sense of when to appropriately headbang. The consolation is in the fact that the guitar strumming and off-rythms are NOT random, the ultimate proof is in seeing this band perform live. An experienced listener will be able to headbang adjustingly - or just jump around and collide with other people in the mosh pit and crowd surf and stuff.
In Movies
"Adaptation" written by Charlie & Donald Kaufman and directed by Spike Jonze
Description:
During the production of "Being John Malkovich" Charlie Kaufman was given an assignment to adapt the book "The Orchid Thief" by Susan Orlean - a book mainly about flowers. It was Kaufman's decision to stay true to the book, to keep away from Hollywood conventions and just write a film that mainly concerns flowers. Meanwhile, 3 years ago, John Laroche (the "Orchid Thief") has been caught extracting various orchids from a state-protected swamp, only he was using the aid of native American indians to legally exploit a loophole to be able to extract them. During his court case, Susan Orlean enters the story to approach Laroche about making him the subject of her column in The New Yorker. By the way, I'm not just making an introduction to lead up to what this movie is about - this is all in the actual movie! The whole scene with Laroche and Orlean is the actual adaptation which Charlie Kaufman is writing. The movie proceeds to take us back and forth between Orlean's slow development of understanding Laroche, and never being able to, and Kaufman's slow development of his script, but never being able to write it. Enter Donald Kaufman, Charlie's twin brother, who has also decided to become a screenwriter. He attends a lecture by Robert McKee and suddenly decides he's going to write a thriller - one that he doesn't realise is the most conventional derived regurgitation of what has already been done a hundred times before. Over the course of the movie, we learn the past of John Laroche, yet haven't really gone anywhere with him yet, Charlie Kaufman enters himself and his brother into the script, plus his warts-and-all failed romance with his love interest, and we come to the end of the book - a failed search through the swamp which Laroche takes Orlean to find the elusive "Ghost Orchid". The story is only half-way finished, there's not enough here for a feature-length film, Charlie is at a loss and doesn't know what to do. He tries to arrange an interview with Orlean but can't bring himself to do it, so he bails out and decides to situate himself in a lecture by Robert McKee. McKee convinces Kaufman to bring his brother in on the script, just like the twin screenwriters of Casablanca - the greatest screenplay ever written (I'm pretty sure that was a joke, or in my opinion it should be). Now Donald Kaufman has taken over the script and handles it like it's one of his conventional thrillers, he throws in all the things Charlie said he wouldn't at the beginning - car chases, drug running, a love triangle - so technically Charlie has kept to his word. I should mention at this point that the characters in this story are based off real people, similar to how John Malkovich played a dramatised version of himself (I guess in "Adaptation" he appears to play a dramatisation of himself playing a dramatisation of himself). Nicholas Cage plays a dramatisation of Charlie Kaufman, Meryl Streep plays a dramatisation of Susan Orlean, Chris Cooper plays a dramatisation of John Laroche and Brian Cox plays a dramatisation of Robert McKee. Donald Kaufman, however, is a completely fictional character. He is also played by Nicholas Cage (in trick photography), but somehow he has also received writing credit for the film itself. So in short, this is a movie written by its own characters, who are dramatisations of real characters except for one guy who is entirely fictional, or perhaps a manifestation of Charlie's own split personality?
Experience:
To watch this film, although it is highly ambitious, it still plays out like a normal film. Each scene is logically followed by another, it is a complex narrative with broken chronology, but we can follow it just like any other film. It's hard to wrap your mind around how this film seems to have perpetuated itself, the film was created within itself and somehow we are able to see it, but is this film even real? There is a duality in understanding this is a self-perpetuating story and it's also one that was created in the real world. The biggest unanswered question, which I think makes it the loudest answer to be unanswered, is why didn't Spike Jonze make an appearance at the beginning during the production of "Being John Malkovich"? We know he's the director of that film, but he's also the director of this film, but, I guess he can't be director of both at the same time. "Adaptation" still remains a difficult puzzle from the nth dimension, but if you've seen it as many times as I have, it is manageable to get your head around. Besides, as we shall see, there are many other films that take complexity to new heights; even Charlie Kaufman's own movie "Synecdoche New York" (which I've talked about at length in previous posts so I will skip it here).
"Primer" written and directed by Shane Carruth
Description:
In a voice over - via telephone monologue - by Aaron3 we are introduced to four young engineers who decide to build some sort of machine (a kind of gravity-blocking device, I think). Upon building this machine, two of the engineers who are more closer friends than the other two; Aaron and Abe, have decided to take this machine further, then accidentally stumble upon a device that recycles the same minute 1300 times. They don't know why, but they explain how it works is that there is a time-point A and a time-point B (one minute into the future). Between point A and point B is a parabolic curve which moves the object in the machine from point A to point B back to point A. All of this is explained to an impatient Aaron2, who knows all this already. Abe, however, has already decided to build a bigger, smarter, version of this machine that allows one to carry an object from point B to point A - effectively travelling back in time. Abe establishes the testing of this machine to Aaron through a past-voiceover conversation laid over a future montage of events which show both of them setting the timer on the machine (which is when they will be coming out of them) and then disappearing in a hotel room for the day, then going back to the machine and sleeping inside them with oxygen tanks and coming back out a day earlier, when the timer reaches zero. This establishes a specific kind of time-travelling, where you travel backwards in real-time - no instantaneous zipping back to the past - and only to a point which the machine can allow; no going back to shake hands with Einstein. Now Aaron has also discovered Abe has secretly made a "failsafe" machine, this is when he becomes Aaron2 and carries back his own machine (which can be folded up and duplicated in another machine), then tampers with Abe's failsafe. The reason for all this is due to an event at a party, where Abe's love interest, Rachel, is confronted by her ex-boyfriend and his shotgun. Aaron decides to tamper with the timeline to become Aaron2 and go back to the party and become the "hero". Due to this situation, Abe has now become Abe2 and Rachel's father seems to have found out about the time machines and becomes Mr. Granger2, although we aren't told how he found out about the machines, it is only implied in some previous timeline that no longer exists because it's been "revised" by Aaron3. There is one part in the movie where we see Aaron2 drug Aaron's breakfast and then drag him into the attic, then Aaron3 struggles to fight Aaron2 but he's too weak to overcome him, yet convinces him to become Aaron3. In the end, Aaron3 saves the day at the party and becomes the hero, then disappears forever. Abe2 decides to constantly tamper with the original time machine so that the original Abe and Aaron never build one in the first place, and the whole story we just watched never happened.
Experience:
I feel justified in giving away the ending because it is a film that you will have to watch many times to even begin to understand what is going on. The clever thing about this film is how extremely low their budget was, so every shot was maticulously planned out and rehearsed. In a low budget film, there will be many things that will not be shown, but here they are vaguely explained and so we are to work it out in our own minds. It plays well with the natural sense of curiosity for a human inquisitive mind, by logical thinking we can try to understand who is who, what is what and how it all comes together. Then it breaks apart because of timelines that never happened seem to explain things that did happen. One important aspect about the experience of this film is the dialogue never comes down to "our level", we have to keep up and go to their level. The explanations aren't simple, because if they were then the story just wouldn't work. What I wrote in the description could be entirely wrong, but the film hasn't told me so, I've had to try and work this all out myself. In the first experience it is a bit overwhelming, you won't get it and you know you will have to watch it many more times. The difficult part is to commit to doing that, because does it really matter in the end? The charm of a film like this, to me, is that it is presented as a challenge, it wants you to solve it, and if it is not in your interest to be challenged then you will not be interested in this movie at all. There is no reward in the form of a tangeable prize at the end, but for me, the real reward is the journey itself.
"The Fountain" written and directed by Darron Aronofsky
Description:
Experience:
"Funny Games" written and directed by Michael Haneke
(more to come)
Showing posts with label Charlie Kaufman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Charlie Kaufman. Show all posts
Theory on "Synecdoche New York".
WARNiNG: This post will contain spoilers for anyone who has not seen this film at least twice!
I have just watched Synecdoche New York at a cinema and it was absolutely thrilling. For the first time I fully appreciated the effect of the lights dimming when the picture started, then the lights coming up when the picture ended. The reason why is outlined in my previous post about this film, but that post is a jumbled unstructured mess so I will outline it here once more. The lights dimming indicates going to sleep, the picture appearing before your eyes is told like a dream with dream-logic and the lights coming up when the picture ends indicates waking up. I believe the best way to completely enjoy Synecdoche New York is in this way. Combined with the uncovering of this theory I am about to explain, overall the experience was more than overwhelming. I could have stood up and punched the nearest person in the face. It was also interesting to notice the scenes that made other people (watching it for the first time) laugh out loud. This was my third time so I laughed at a lot more scenes, but the comedy was more about how much I love watching this film. In the second viewing I hung on every word, while the third viewing I was able to look all around at other details while still gripping on dialog, making even more sense of the film.
I also discovered an amazing feeling of paradox. The ending of the film was so climactic, because to explain it properly you have to explain the entire movie, scene by scene, as it finally builds up to this amazing conclusion. But the conclusion is played out so subtly, so gently and softly. The context is HUGE but the scene is so small. It's the same paradox as the theater production itself getting bigger and bigger, but smaller at the same time. There might be more paradoxes in the film that I haven't noticed, so I will have to look out for them in further viewings.
My theory will be explained in two parts, the context of the ending (**SPOILERS!!**), setting up the scene and also the beyond the 4th wall meaning of it all. Or perhaps, going beyond the 4th wall is also another context, hidden from view.
1. CONTEXT
I will mainly center the context around the character of Ellen, the cleaning lady. I think she is a very important clue to the story. Caden Cotard goes on a search for his first wife, Adele (who is a painter), and when he's at her apartment he is mistaken for the cleaning lady "Ellen", but he assumes the role of Ellen anyway because it allows him to be inside his first-wife's apartment.
While seeing one of Adele's exhibitions he finds a portrait of Ellen. Where this portrait came from is a complete mystery, but my thinking of its origin is in my "beyond the 4th wall" theory that I will explain later. I haven't yet analyzed the film entirely scene by scene, perhaps there is a little detail I overlooked. I notice there was a scene of Ellen's dream on a television commercial much earlier in the film, but I don't think that has anything to do with the origin of the portrait. There is also the "dream logic" that crops up in the film but I like to think there's more to it, but I'll get into that later.
So, in the real world, Caden Cotard assumed the role of Ellen. In Cotard's play, he decides to recreate the scene where he assumes the role of Ellen, except use Ellen as an actual character based off this mysterious portrait. Then we get to a point where Hazel, the assistant and love-affair of Caden, dies and Caden decides to base the play on the final day before she dies. He needs a new actor to play himself (not including the actor who was playing the original actor (who comited suicide earlier) who plays himself), so in an amazing twist the actress playing Ellen convinces Caden that she can play him. After a successful rehearsal of the new version of the play (an overly dramatic version of a play within a play) Caden Cotard feels he has exhausted his creativity. The actress playing Cotard suggests she should take over the actual directing while he rests, and that he could fill the role of Ellen (in the play).
So here's the context: The actress who was playing Ellen is now playing Caden Cotard, but because Caden Cotard is now playing Ellen, the actress is playing Cotard playing Ellen BUT also directing the play at the same time. It's something that can be thought of in a single moment but will take forever to explain because your words will keep going around in circles. But when you understand it completely, you can then entirely take in the subtle, soft ending as an overwhelming climax.
But where did the portrait come from?
2. NO 4TH WALL
The easiest part to understand about Synecdoche New York is when Caden Cotard is making a play where actors are playing actors, then actors are playing the actors playing actors, and so on. But here's where my theory is: what if, from the beginning, we have been watching actors playing characters and not the actual characters themselves? Put it this way: we are watching a film by Caden Cotard, and we are not watching Caden Cotard on the screen, but we are watching Philip Seymour Hoffman playing Caden Cotard on the screen!
This could have been the original intention of Charlie Kaufman the whole time, that there is this world beyond the 4th wall that the actual events on the screen are merely imitating, taking artifacts from and playing them in the film. Not that it's based off Charlie Kaufman's own life, although maybe it is, I wouldn't know. We don't see what's behind the 4th wall, we are just seeing what's being reflected from it (perhaps represented by seeing Caden through his reflection in the mirror in the opening scene?).
A theory shouldn't be without evidence, so here are a couple moments that I think are essential clues:
Firstly when we see Caden directing the young actor in "Death of a Salesman". He gives him advice to acknowledge the fact that the audience knows that he is a young actor playing an older character who will meet his demise, and feel the tragedy of it. I find this a suitable allegory to the whole film if you take my theory into practice. Most of the actors (Philip Seymour Hoffman, Samantha Morton, Catherine Keener etc) are younger than the characters they play in the film, and we know they all meet their demise, if we're already acquainted with the story that is.
Secondly when we are watching the rehearsal of Ellen outside Adele's apartment in the play, Caden hears the voice of Adele (on a tape-loop) and attempts to open the door to the apartment himself. The actress playing Ellen says "You're breaking the 4th wall!". My thoughts are too scrambled to put this into words, but I think it's a very important clue.
As for the mysterious portrait of Ellen, well that may just be an artifact from the existence behind the 4th wall that somehow creeped its way into the 3-wall story. And if that's the case, then my hat goes off to Charlie Kaufman for blowing my mind harder than double-barreled shotgun ever could, and I don't even wear a hat!!
---
One more thing to mention about this film. I have read some scathing reviews about it and it mainly concerned how uncomfortable it is to watch at some points. For me it's when Caden gets his head split open at the beginning, but other than that I am absolutely enthralled and spellbound by this film. I think I could watch it a hundred times and never get sick of it. It makes it even harder to watch it analytically because I get so easily drawn into the story. I think it has something to do with the music (notice how many times Charlie Kaufman's name appears in the song-writing credits), as if the music plays the film and not the other way around like we usually perceive. I think this film is crafted to the finest detail, even everything we barely see out-of-focus in the background. Everything. Synecdoche New York could possibly be my number 1 film of all time, surpassing 2001: A Space Odyssey. I love this film and that's the brutal truth. Brutal.
Brutal.
Thinking about thoughts on "Synechdoche New York"
Warning: this post may contain spoilers to the films "Human Nature", "Being John Malkovich", "Adaptation", "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind", "Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind" and "Synechdoche New York".
I re-watched this film just now. I can't really say what my thoughts are, they're too complicated to put into words, I don't think my head has really wrapped itself around this film enough. In the fashion of the film itself, or in the fashion of Charlie Kaufman's beyond-the-4th-wall mind, I will share my thoughts about the thoughts of the film.
Because I see the film itself about being a film in itself. One thing Kaufman himself pointed out is that he was interested in dream-logic, which this film contains, yet I don't think it's all just one big dream. I see this film as being a story told in dream-language. It goes back to the old analogy that the cinema is a portrayal of a dream. Think going to the cinema, past all the trailers and commercials, the lights dim and it's totally black in the room (ignore the glowing exit sign down the bottom corner, or do your best to), this is like closing your eyes and then suddenly without noticing a moving picture with sound plays before you in your mind. This moving picture seems to have a story, familiar characters that you know or feel, but it doesn't play like real life. Time is not linear, people don't act the way you expect or sometimes they are exactly what you expect, the logic is nonsense but it doesn't mean it's not logical. When the film ends the lights go up and you stretch and feel like you've just woken, but the story plays through your mind and the more you think about it the more it gets weirder and weirder. The great thing about films opposed to dreams is that you can watch them over and over, so that if you forget something you can re-visit it again.
In "Synechdoche New York" the story is like a dream, but it's not the main character, Caden, who is dreaming, it's you - the viewer. That's what I'm trying to say.
The one thing I really love about watching this film is that it's completely the vision of Charlie Kaufman. This story wouldn't have worked if he didn't direct it. Everything about the film is complicated, like it complicates complexity and turns into itself to make the complex complications multiplying by its own value. I will talk about turning points later. As for what I'm talking about now, I'd like to explore Charlie Kaufman's other works.
I usually hate to admit that to understand a masterpiece you will usually have to understand the artist who created it. I hate to admit it because it's just too much work. I also like the idea of separating myself from "who done it" syndrome so I can try to appreciate the piece (in this case the film) from the point of view from someone who has no idea what it is, what it's about and who made it. I like that feeling of being amazed for the very first time. But then there's that part of me that says it's not enough, I need to know more and understand it more.
I've been a follower of Charlie Kaufman since "Being John Malkovich". I thought that movie was great, especially how you can watch it again and pick up things you didn't notice before but were of great importance to the story. I see "Being John Malkovich" as a self-contained movie, it works without working against anything else. It was a couple years later when I heard about "Adaptation". I saw that film and then I saw it again. I later found it on DVD and watched it plenty times more. It was in this film that Charlie Kaufman wrote himself into his own story, and Susan Orlean's story. Both "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation" were directed by Spike Jonze, which were his first two feature films. "Adaptation", as opposed to "Being John Malkovich", was not a self-contained story. It contained references to Charlie Kaufman's own (split?) personality, it even contained behind-the-scenes of "Being John Malkovich" as a reference-point of who Charlie Kaufman is. It is a story about him adapting a book, "The Orchid Thief", then we see the actual film-adaptation of the book (which we know Charlie is working on), but then it turns around and Charlie's fictional twin brother, Donald, decides to finish the adaptation by involving himself and Charlie in a thriller ending that breaks the rules by following them, which in turn is breaking them. It doesn't make sense in words, but happened in the film and that's the only way to accept it. Watching these films I can't help but notice the creative influence of Spike Jonze when it comes to this strange deadpan realism of Kaufman's fantastic psychological experience.
I'll briefly touch on George Clooney's "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind". In this one Charlie Kaufman was commissioned to adapt a book by Chuck Barris, infamous TV show producer and host of the original "Gong Show", where he confesses that he was really leading a double life as a hired assassin working for the CIA. A story like this seems right up Kaufman's alley, riddled with a confusion of truth and fiction, and easily complex storytelling. But George Clooney and Kaufman didn't really have too much communication, if any, and the film turned out to be more to Clooney's vision more than Kaufman's. I still think it's a great film, as a George Clooney project, and Charlie Kaufman's presence is vaguely there through some of the writing and humour.
Now we have Michel Gondry's side of Charlie Kaufman. Kaufman's first adapted screenplay, "Human Nature", was relatively obscure compared to his other stories. From the get-go "Human Nature" was an already complex narrative, starting as a story being told by a man who is dead. What we eventually get is a story being told from three different viewpoints, piecing together a whole story about a man who grew up in the wild, was taken out of the wild by a nature-loving woman and a nature-hating scientist. The scientist decides to use this man as a subject to prove that manners and sophistication can be taught to the most primitive beast, but we learn from an alternative viewpoint that the man was only willing because he wanted to impress women and get laid. Thus we have sophistication as being a result of primitive desire, which is also prevalent in the nature-woman's character to impress the scientist. My favourite line is "Words are evil!". The other Gondry-Kaufman project is of course "Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind". I'll briefly try to explain the complex narrative of this one: We start at the conclusion of two people who don't know each other but feel like they do because they get along so well, then we start from the start, when these two people actually did know each other but they broke up, it's important to note that we are in the memories of the main character, but this isn't obvious until we're up to the point where the procedure of his memories being erased begins within his memories. At this point his memories start moving backwards, but outside his mind there is also the forward-narrative of the people erasing his memories. The people have trouble along the way because when he discovers that he doesn't want to continue the procedure (in his mind), he starts to complicate things by hiding in points of his past that are buried deep down and can't be tracked. There's an important subplot with the people carrying the procedure which leads to the important discovery when we're at the conclusion (continuing from the beginning of the movie) and the ultimate answer to all the problems: "Yes".
I don't know why I even tried.
Now I'd have to talk about Michel Gondry's influence on these films. I've been a fan of some of his most iconic music videos, and his "how did they do that? That must of been hell to pull off" experimental techniques in film. One in particular is Kylie Minogue's "Come Into My World" music video. I can see that Gondry also likes to play with dream-logic. Most of his work is usually set within a dream or memories of the main character(s). He has made films that he wrote and directed himself. I've only seen "Be Kind Rewind" which was a truly fascinating experience. I see Gondry as more of a playful film-maker, whereas Spike Jonze is more of a hybrid of deadpan realism and fantasy, as if they were the same thing.
Now we come to "Synechdoche New York", a film written and directed by Charlie Kaufman. My first viewing of this film I felt he had a style that might have been cross-between Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze, but then afterwards I realised that it's really not like that at all. It's all Kaufman. There are so many things so subtle and complicated that you're forced to view it multiple times, even freeze-frame it and notice things that you will only notice by doing that. I would think only Charlie Kaufman could put subtle hints into backgrounds/foregrounds, even if they're out of focus, that you would notice important plot points. The stalker who eventually plays Caden in his play, is the most obvious one. And then there are the turning-points, as I mentioned earlier. Every scene seems to have a turning point, which turns into itself but also moves the story forward. Imagine a wheel turning and moving along the ground, and then a wheel inside the wheel, turning as caused by the overall turning of the larger wheel, and another wheel inside the smaller wheel, etc. The wheel is an analogy of the plot.
Here are a couple examples still fresh in my mind: When Caden is at the after-party of his opening-night of Death of a Salesman, he talks with Hazel and she suggests they get stoned. He says he gets "bothered" when he gets stoned so he has to turn her down. He gets home the next morning and finds his wife Adele and her friend Maria have gotten stoned, they say they can't wait to see the play but he seems to take it with a grain of salt (because they're stoned). They do see the play that night and Adele hated it because Caden borrowed something that wasn't his so it couldn't be entirely truthful to him. Caden doesn't defend himself, even so the play turned out successful, but he decides to make something original and truthful to himself. There's always this constant struggle between people not doing things and other people doing that very thing, turning themselves and it creates a self-perpetuating momentum. Another example is how Caden decides to assume the role of an elusive "Ellen", the cleaning lady of Adele's apartment, then in his play he casts a woman to play Ellen based on a portrait painted by Adele. Meanwhile Caden mentions when he has an affair with Tammie (an actress in a whole other complex twist and turn in the story) that he thinks if he were a woman he'd be better at it than being a man. In the play Caden decides he needs a new actor to play himself, the woman playing Ellen convinces him that she can play the role, but then a new turn happens when Caden decides he needs time off, but the role of Ellen (who he originally was in the real world) is open and that he will play her. So now the role of Caden is played by a woman and Caden is playing the role of a woman. It is after this turn that the whole story is now about Ellen, a woman who never really existed because it was Caden all along, but Ellen is being played by Caden, who is being directed by the woman who was acting as Ellen but is now acting as Caden. At this point I think the wheel has now turned into a spiral but I still haven't quite wrapped my head around it.
Another aspect of Kaufman's directing is the dream-logic, that the story isn't really a dream but it's not really real either. It's like it's self-conscious of being a film. I also kept trying to analyze Kaufman's directing style but I couldn't help myself being so immersed in the story I had to actually snap myself out of it from time-to-time, only because I was trying to watch it objectively and not really trying to enjoy it as it is, which I'll do once I get all the pieces put together. Some examples of the dream-logic are quite obvious: the house on fire, the dark novel written by a four-year-old, Caden constantly seeing himself used as images in commercials and cartoons and of course the heavy time-jumps between scenes, among other things. My favourite example is one I had to freeze-frame, when it shows a close up of the book that Caden is reading which was given to him by his therapist. The therapist's voice is narrating the words, which don't see, but when we do see the words I noticed there is a paragraph of absolute nonsense, either that or way too complicated for anyone to understand. This is the kind of dream-logic where you are reading something, but the words are always changing when you read them, and they don't make sense the more you read them.
My final point on Charlie Kaufman's directing style is the structure. This is more relating to the turning wheel analogy. This isn't a film with "acts" or "set pieces". You could say there are major plot sections, but each of them roll into each other with these turns and twists, each happening in every scene. This is not a story for people who want simplicity and clarity (which is why we have "acts" and "set pieces"), but at the same time there is no reason why a film like this shouldn't be made, especially if it has something important to share.
There are more things to talk about in Kaufman's style, like his visual complexities in every frame, every scene, but I couldn't begin to describe them unless I had accompanying screen-shots, which I don't have on me at the moment.
When I go through all the previous works of Charlie Kaufman, I also notice how they seem to be from a researcher/writer point-of-view. "Human Nature" had the scientist, "Being John Malkovich" had the puppeteer (a form of story-telling), "Adaptation" had Charlie Kaufman himself writing a screenplay, "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" had the confessions written by Chuck Barris and "Eternal Sunshine" had a poet, although I can't remember what Jim Carey's character did for work..but that's besides the point. It's amazingly appropriate then that Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut is a story about a theater director. Especially with some scenes where he's directing actors, saying things like "the audience should be conscious of you being a young actor who is aware that he's not going to make it by the end" (in referring to the performance of the actor playing an older man in "Death of a Salesman"). Or when he's directing in his own play he says "Now you two are having an affair off-set, which isn't good for the show. Keep in mind you're actors playing actors. And you (to actor playing a cameraman), you're not just filming the scene, you're in the scene, so act like you're in the scene!"
Charlie Kaufman has worked his way from writing about writers to directing a story about a director, directing an actor who's playing a director (both inside and outside of the story, take your pick).
I re-watched this film just now. I can't really say what my thoughts are, they're too complicated to put into words, I don't think my head has really wrapped itself around this film enough. In the fashion of the film itself, or in the fashion of Charlie Kaufman's beyond-the-4th-wall mind, I will share my thoughts about the thoughts of the film.
Because I see the film itself about being a film in itself. One thing Kaufman himself pointed out is that he was interested in dream-logic, which this film contains, yet I don't think it's all just one big dream. I see this film as being a story told in dream-language. It goes back to the old analogy that the cinema is a portrayal of a dream. Think going to the cinema, past all the trailers and commercials, the lights dim and it's totally black in the room (ignore the glowing exit sign down the bottom corner, or do your best to), this is like closing your eyes and then suddenly without noticing a moving picture with sound plays before you in your mind. This moving picture seems to have a story, familiar characters that you know or feel, but it doesn't play like real life. Time is not linear, people don't act the way you expect or sometimes they are exactly what you expect, the logic is nonsense but it doesn't mean it's not logical. When the film ends the lights go up and you stretch and feel like you've just woken, but the story plays through your mind and the more you think about it the more it gets weirder and weirder. The great thing about films opposed to dreams is that you can watch them over and over, so that if you forget something you can re-visit it again.
In "Synechdoche New York" the story is like a dream, but it's not the main character, Caden, who is dreaming, it's you - the viewer. That's what I'm trying to say.
The one thing I really love about watching this film is that it's completely the vision of Charlie Kaufman. This story wouldn't have worked if he didn't direct it. Everything about the film is complicated, like it complicates complexity and turns into itself to make the complex complications multiplying by its own value. I will talk about turning points later. As for what I'm talking about now, I'd like to explore Charlie Kaufman's other works.
I usually hate to admit that to understand a masterpiece you will usually have to understand the artist who created it. I hate to admit it because it's just too much work. I also like the idea of separating myself from "who done it" syndrome so I can try to appreciate the piece (in this case the film) from the point of view from someone who has no idea what it is, what it's about and who made it. I like that feeling of being amazed for the very first time. But then there's that part of me that says it's not enough, I need to know more and understand it more.
I've been a follower of Charlie Kaufman since "Being John Malkovich". I thought that movie was great, especially how you can watch it again and pick up things you didn't notice before but were of great importance to the story. I see "Being John Malkovich" as a self-contained movie, it works without working against anything else. It was a couple years later when I heard about "Adaptation". I saw that film and then I saw it again. I later found it on DVD and watched it plenty times more. It was in this film that Charlie Kaufman wrote himself into his own story, and Susan Orlean's story. Both "Being John Malkovich" and "Adaptation" were directed by Spike Jonze, which were his first two feature films. "Adaptation", as opposed to "Being John Malkovich", was not a self-contained story. It contained references to Charlie Kaufman's own (split?) personality, it even contained behind-the-scenes of "Being John Malkovich" as a reference-point of who Charlie Kaufman is. It is a story about him adapting a book, "The Orchid Thief", then we see the actual film-adaptation of the book (which we know Charlie is working on), but then it turns around and Charlie's fictional twin brother, Donald, decides to finish the adaptation by involving himself and Charlie in a thriller ending that breaks the rules by following them, which in turn is breaking them. It doesn't make sense in words, but happened in the film and that's the only way to accept it. Watching these films I can't help but notice the creative influence of Spike Jonze when it comes to this strange deadpan realism of Kaufman's fantastic psychological experience.
I'll briefly touch on George Clooney's "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind". In this one Charlie Kaufman was commissioned to adapt a book by Chuck Barris, infamous TV show producer and host of the original "Gong Show", where he confesses that he was really leading a double life as a hired assassin working for the CIA. A story like this seems right up Kaufman's alley, riddled with a confusion of truth and fiction, and easily complex storytelling. But George Clooney and Kaufman didn't really have too much communication, if any, and the film turned out to be more to Clooney's vision more than Kaufman's. I still think it's a great film, as a George Clooney project, and Charlie Kaufman's presence is vaguely there through some of the writing and humour.
Now we have Michel Gondry's side of Charlie Kaufman. Kaufman's first adapted screenplay, "Human Nature", was relatively obscure compared to his other stories. From the get-go "Human Nature" was an already complex narrative, starting as a story being told by a man who is dead. What we eventually get is a story being told from three different viewpoints, piecing together a whole story about a man who grew up in the wild, was taken out of the wild by a nature-loving woman and a nature-hating scientist. The scientist decides to use this man as a subject to prove that manners and sophistication can be taught to the most primitive beast, but we learn from an alternative viewpoint that the man was only willing because he wanted to impress women and get laid. Thus we have sophistication as being a result of primitive desire, which is also prevalent in the nature-woman's character to impress the scientist. My favourite line is "Words are evil!". The other Gondry-Kaufman project is of course "Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind". I'll briefly try to explain the complex narrative of this one: We start at the conclusion of two people who don't know each other but feel like they do because they get along so well, then we start from the start, when these two people actually did know each other but they broke up, it's important to note that we are in the memories of the main character, but this isn't obvious until we're up to the point where the procedure of his memories being erased begins within his memories. At this point his memories start moving backwards, but outside his mind there is also the forward-narrative of the people erasing his memories. The people have trouble along the way because when he discovers that he doesn't want to continue the procedure (in his mind), he starts to complicate things by hiding in points of his past that are buried deep down and can't be tracked. There's an important subplot with the people carrying the procedure which leads to the important discovery when we're at the conclusion (continuing from the beginning of the movie) and the ultimate answer to all the problems: "Yes".
I don't know why I even tried.
Now I'd have to talk about Michel Gondry's influence on these films. I've been a fan of some of his most iconic music videos, and his "how did they do that? That must of been hell to pull off" experimental techniques in film. One in particular is Kylie Minogue's "Come Into My World" music video. I can see that Gondry also likes to play with dream-logic. Most of his work is usually set within a dream or memories of the main character(s). He has made films that he wrote and directed himself. I've only seen "Be Kind Rewind" which was a truly fascinating experience. I see Gondry as more of a playful film-maker, whereas Spike Jonze is more of a hybrid of deadpan realism and fantasy, as if they were the same thing.
Now we come to "Synechdoche New York", a film written and directed by Charlie Kaufman. My first viewing of this film I felt he had a style that might have been cross-between Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze, but then afterwards I realised that it's really not like that at all. It's all Kaufman. There are so many things so subtle and complicated that you're forced to view it multiple times, even freeze-frame it and notice things that you will only notice by doing that. I would think only Charlie Kaufman could put subtle hints into backgrounds/foregrounds, even if they're out of focus, that you would notice important plot points. The stalker who eventually plays Caden in his play, is the most obvious one. And then there are the turning-points, as I mentioned earlier. Every scene seems to have a turning point, which turns into itself but also moves the story forward. Imagine a wheel turning and moving along the ground, and then a wheel inside the wheel, turning as caused by the overall turning of the larger wheel, and another wheel inside the smaller wheel, etc. The wheel is an analogy of the plot.
Here are a couple examples still fresh in my mind: When Caden is at the after-party of his opening-night of Death of a Salesman, he talks with Hazel and she suggests they get stoned. He says he gets "bothered" when he gets stoned so he has to turn her down. He gets home the next morning and finds his wife Adele and her friend Maria have gotten stoned, they say they can't wait to see the play but he seems to take it with a grain of salt (because they're stoned). They do see the play that night and Adele hated it because Caden borrowed something that wasn't his so it couldn't be entirely truthful to him. Caden doesn't defend himself, even so the play turned out successful, but he decides to make something original and truthful to himself. There's always this constant struggle between people not doing things and other people doing that very thing, turning themselves and it creates a self-perpetuating momentum. Another example is how Caden decides to assume the role of an elusive "Ellen", the cleaning lady of Adele's apartment, then in his play he casts a woman to play Ellen based on a portrait painted by Adele. Meanwhile Caden mentions when he has an affair with Tammie (an actress in a whole other complex twist and turn in the story) that he thinks if he were a woman he'd be better at it than being a man. In the play Caden decides he needs a new actor to play himself, the woman playing Ellen convinces him that she can play the role, but then a new turn happens when Caden decides he needs time off, but the role of Ellen (who he originally was in the real world) is open and that he will play her. So now the role of Caden is played by a woman and Caden is playing the role of a woman. It is after this turn that the whole story is now about Ellen, a woman who never really existed because it was Caden all along, but Ellen is being played by Caden, who is being directed by the woman who was acting as Ellen but is now acting as Caden. At this point I think the wheel has now turned into a spiral but I still haven't quite wrapped my head around it.
Another aspect of Kaufman's directing is the dream-logic, that the story isn't really a dream but it's not really real either. It's like it's self-conscious of being a film. I also kept trying to analyze Kaufman's directing style but I couldn't help myself being so immersed in the story I had to actually snap myself out of it from time-to-time, only because I was trying to watch it objectively and not really trying to enjoy it as it is, which I'll do once I get all the pieces put together. Some examples of the dream-logic are quite obvious: the house on fire, the dark novel written by a four-year-old, Caden constantly seeing himself used as images in commercials and cartoons and of course the heavy time-jumps between scenes, among other things. My favourite example is one I had to freeze-frame, when it shows a close up of the book that Caden is reading which was given to him by his therapist. The therapist's voice is narrating the words, which don't see, but when we do see the words I noticed there is a paragraph of absolute nonsense, either that or way too complicated for anyone to understand. This is the kind of dream-logic where you are reading something, but the words are always changing when you read them, and they don't make sense the more you read them.
My final point on Charlie Kaufman's directing style is the structure. This is more relating to the turning wheel analogy. This isn't a film with "acts" or "set pieces". You could say there are major plot sections, but each of them roll into each other with these turns and twists, each happening in every scene. This is not a story for people who want simplicity and clarity (which is why we have "acts" and "set pieces"), but at the same time there is no reason why a film like this shouldn't be made, especially if it has something important to share.
There are more things to talk about in Kaufman's style, like his visual complexities in every frame, every scene, but I couldn't begin to describe them unless I had accompanying screen-shots, which I don't have on me at the moment.
When I go through all the previous works of Charlie Kaufman, I also notice how they seem to be from a researcher/writer point-of-view. "Human Nature" had the scientist, "Being John Malkovich" had the puppeteer (a form of story-telling), "Adaptation" had Charlie Kaufman himself writing a screenplay, "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" had the confessions written by Chuck Barris and "Eternal Sunshine" had a poet, although I can't remember what Jim Carey's character did for work..but that's besides the point. It's amazingly appropriate then that Charlie Kaufman's directorial debut is a story about a theater director. Especially with some scenes where he's directing actors, saying things like "the audience should be conscious of you being a young actor who is aware that he's not going to make it by the end" (in referring to the performance of the actor playing an older man in "Death of a Salesman"). Or when he's directing in his own play he says "Now you two are having an affair off-set, which isn't good for the show. Keep in mind you're actors playing actors. And you (to actor playing a cameraman), you're not just filming the scene, you're in the scene, so act like you're in the scene!"
Charlie Kaufman has worked his way from writing about writers to directing a story about a director, directing an actor who's playing a director (both inside and outside of the story, take your pick).
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