Synecdoche, New York plot analysis

We can extract its meaning from its title in Synecdoche, New York (2008, Charlie Kaufman) the film stands in for the play stands in for Caden stands in for Adele Hazel Olive Ellen et al.

 

There’s a moment CADEN COTTARD dictates to his assistant the play should all take place in the course of a single day. This is the key to understanding the narrative. At the very end of the movie when Caden is Ellen walking and a note he receives from Ellen as Caden is Now you are here it’s 7:43 Now you are here it’s 7:44 Now you are. Gone.
     And as Caden sits on that bench talking to the actress playing Ellen’s mother he looks over and sees a spray paint tagged brick wall of a clock with its hands reading 7:45. The very first scene in Synecdoche, New York is an alarm clock at 7:44 AM that goes off at 7:45 AM. Near the end when Ellen auditions for the role of Caden she says Caden Cottard is a man already dead. He lives in a half world between stasis and anti-stasis. And time is concentrated. Chronology confused. 
     The entire film is the play itself. And a pretty damn funny one at that. Full of Kaufman wordplay existential dexterity. Like when the psychiatrist played by Hope Davis probes Is that why you killed yourself? Then corrects herself foreshadows SAMMY as Caden committing suicide by jumping off that roof. And Caden emphatically repeating I didn’t jump! Between stasis and anti-stasis. Everyone is everyone. Every day is every day.
     Other evidence that supports emphasizes it’s all a play is the way Sammy turns away from our angle to jump on the other side of the building we don’t see. So the film can conveniently cut to the aftermath. And the way in which at the funeral of Caden’s mother his dad is there and he mutters that his father shouldn’t be there because he’s already dead similarly reflects this as well. 
     

Eternal Sunshine plot analysis

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004, Michel Gondry) is an excruciatingly painful confrontational indictment against our weakness and inability to move on from the past without succumbing to the desperate need against our better judgement to reclaim the sentimental mild painkiller of a problem relationship that’s over with someone unattainable. Remember how happy we were together = If I could only get her back I’d be happy again = And everything would be better. No. It’s so dangerous because for romantics in our mind our memories of emotions and fantasies about reoccurring connection is as potent powerful as the real thing.

 

In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind the first thing helpful to understand is the reason why its nonlinear narrative is arranged the way it is. Howard from Lacuna erases Joel’s memories starting with the most recent. So if we reverse their chronology what we get based on the color of CLEMENTINE’S hair is.
 
1. Green When JOEL and Clementine meet it’s at a party Joel’s fighting couple friends Rob and Carrie invite him to. At Montauk. On the beach Clem is wearing an orange hoodie and her hair is dyed green. Later that night she B&Es into a large beach house and once inside Joel mutters about his reluctance to be there and Clem disdainfully tells him So go. Humiliated he does.
 
2. Red Joel goes back to Clementine seeking her out at the Barnes and Noble where she works. Clem has dyed red hair. Filling in some blanks it could be Joel and Clementine experience their honeymoon phase during this time. Bliss. Their happiest. Their first time going to the frozen Lake Charles. And though not placed here chronologically and shown in its entirety it seems they go back to what they refer to as Our House on Montauk on a freezing day and run along the shoreline in the snow.
 
3. Orange Honeymoon’s over phase. Clem dyes her hair orange. At Kang’s Chinese restaurant having dinner Joel realizes he’s bored with Clementine. They argue. One day at the flea market Clem says she wants a baby. They fight some more over that. One night Clem goes out alone has some drinks wrecks Joel’s car doorscraped fire hydrant. They fight some more. Joel berates Clem assuming she fucked someone because that’s how she gets people to like her.
 
4. Blue Clem has gone to Lacuna to have Joel erased. Rob and Carrie reveal the truth to Joel well Rob does. Joel cries in car and throws tape out window. Joel erases Clementine. The next day he wakes up and ditches work to go to Montauk. He meets Clementine on the train. They go back to her place. The next night they go to the frozen Charles. The following morning they realize they’ve met before. And erased each other. Decide to get back together.
 
The fun part is the first time you see Eternal Sunshine you think when they meet on the train they’re meeting for the first time. And at the end you think it’s romantic that despite their flaws they accept each other because relationships take work and no one’s perfect. No.
     After the opening sequence when Joel is in his car crying we’re already in his mind and this is the first memory to be erased. Notice how when he has that interaction with his neighbor played by Thomas Jay Ryan there’s already a dot on Joel’s temple. The messy confusing aspect of us seeing Joel in his own memories is due to the conflict that is Joel’s jealousy Patrick is stealing his identity to hook up with Clementine.
     The midpoint of the narrative is Joel wanting to call off the procedure. Iconic line reading by Carrey. Can you hear me I wanna call it off? So because the time Joel spent with Clementine when she had dyed red hair was when they were happiest Joel chooses in his imagination dyed red hair Clem to spirit away reconcile and make a pact to outwit the procedure with.
     But the thing is this isn’t Clementine remember. Dyed red hair Clem is Joel’s idealized fantasy of her. Not real. The only Clementine we could ever consider real in the film is blue dyed hair Clem. At the end when dyed green hair Clementine tells Joel to meet her in Montauk that’s Joel telling himself to. Then how does Clementine know to meet him there?
 
There’s a scene towards the end while Joel and Clem are in his mind on the run from the erasure when they wake up in bed on the snowy Montauk and Clem gleefully says Look where we are but then Joel says Clem this isn’t good. Something ominous about the way he says that line. Because Joel knows that Mierzwiak is definitely going to look for them there. Why?
     Because it’s their happiest purest memory together? So why is Joel troubled? Obvious reason is because it’s surely going to be erased. But the fear in his reaction reveals a dual purpose. It’s because this regressive distant impossible to return to state of jubilation is precisely what deceptively leads Joel and Clem to wrongly foolishly vulnerably pathetically think they can repair their future. 
     That’s why the last scene of the couple running together on the snowy shoreline is jump cut repeated several times. And the sad heartbreakingly aching song plays again the one during the opening credits that Joel was in tears over when the film begins. This is a horror ending. Tragedy impact. They're like addicts. This toxic relationship is destroying them. Yet they will still go back to chase that elusive remote far-gone brief moment when they were in love along with the feelings it brought them over and over again for years to come. And it always ends the same. Impossibly.

Coming home is terrible, whether the dog licks your face or not. Coming home is terribly lonely, whether you have a wife or just a wife shaped loneliness waiting for you.

“Other animals live in the present. Humans cannot, so they invented hope.”

 

I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020, Charlie Kaufman) is a comedy about a YOUNG WOMAN meeting her boyfriend’s parents. Okay, but the movie itself is really a dance between:

·      The interior sadness of the JANITOR
·      His object of hope, the young woman

   And it is through the process of simultaneously depicting these two ideas as art in which we move through a narrative relentlessly shifting its perspective instinctively and intellectually. The fun comes from how neither of these two inventions are straightforward. And thus, we get to explore this fictionalized psyche thinking of ending things for our own edification as audience.
 
   Maybe the best symbol of this quality can be seen as represented by the two Oreo Brrrs (a frozen treat akin to the Dairy Queen Blizzard). Early on as the couple are driving, they pass a billboard advertising the Tulsey Town ice cream stand. A disembodied voice says, “Come, join me.” The voice is creepy. One meaning that could be read into this is that of being lured into obtaining something through the suggestive thought implanted by advertising, here being code for a romantic relationship.
   Much later when JAKE decides to indulge in stopping for a Brrr, along with the young woman, he suddenly realizes he doesn’t even want it. More than that, now as he drives it starts to melt and he has to stop somewhere and get rid of it. Then he becomes distraught over thinking about how it’ll leave a sticky residue, nothing can calm him until he disposes of the dessert.
   In the dumpster where Jake’s thrown away his and the young woman’s Brrrs, there’s a shot of the two discarded confections still full, atop a heap of nothing but other empty Brrr cups. This image left me wondering what it meant long after the movie was over. Sure, there’s the link to nostalgia that comes with the Tulsey Town song, like this’s Jake’s “rosebud.” But that seems too easy. It’s more like the hope the Janitor’s invested in finding love with the right woman, then at the end of his life finally being disgusted by that desire, painfully desperate to rid himself of it and any trace of it entirely.
 
   I’m Thinking of Ending Things is so full of endlessly enjoyable self-reflexive occurrences. And these are what are so effective at defining its artistic tone. Take the pigs that died from being underfed. The way Jake describes it, the neglect happened thoughtlessly. Like it’s at the same time horrific and inevitable. And there’s a poignancy to the way he refers to both of the pigs being eaten alive by maggots. He doesn’t say how many pigs there were, but “both” seems to imply two—as in a couple. 
 
   Somehow this film is still always a comedy. Kaufman’s novel Antkind (published last month) is full of comic wordplay, including several different vaudeville acts and their routines. And though his screenplays have often played around with this kind of schtick, Antkind and now I’m Thinking of Ending Things present a phase where it’s used more often, and consistently.
   Also amped up more in Antkind and the as yet unfilmed Frank or Francis screenplay is Kaufman’s satirical contempt for Hollywood, which comprises a significant part of the comedy in I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Although on a lighter note, one comedic vignette that soars particularly high is when the young woman suddenly performs as both Gena Rowlands’ MABEL LONGHETTI (aided by a cigarette she smokes that appears out of nowhere) and recites by rote the infamous scathing Pauline Kael review of Rowlands performance of that role at the same time. 
   I don’t have any evidence to support this but, my final point I’ll end with is that I think the young woman met the janitor when he was around twenty, at the bar on trivia night. He asked for her number and she gave it to him. He called her and asked her out. And he never saw or heard from her again.


8/29/2020 Landmark Midtown Art Cinema
Atlanta, GA