Everything You Ever Need To Know About Life...

... you can learn from:

Synecdoche, New York (2008)

Millicent Weems: What was once before you - an exciting, mysterious future - is now behind you. Lived; understood; disappointing. You realize you are not special. You have struggled into existence, and are now slipping silently out of it. 

This is everyone's experience. Every single one. The specifics hardly matter. Everyone's everyone. So you are Adele, Hazel, Claire, Olive. You are Ellen. All her meager sadnesses are yours; all her loneliness; the gray, straw-like hair; her red raw hands. It's yours. It is time for you to understand this. 

Walk. As the people who adore you stop adoring you; as they die; as they move on; as you shed them; as you shed your beauty; your youth; as the world forgets you; as you recognize your transience; as you begin to lose your characteristics one by one; as you learn there is no-one watching you, and there never was...

You think only about driving - not coming from any place; not arriving any place. Just driving, counting off time. Now you are here, at 7:43. Now you are here, at 7:44. Now you are... Gone. 

Sorry for doing this to everybody. I know that passage, the closing passage of Synedoche, is crushing stuff. I just re-watched the movie for what, the tenth, twelfth time, and for that entire last half an hour - starting right around the time that Caden and Hazel finally climb into bed together in her smoking home - I'm just an inconsolable ball, a trembling wreck. Putting the pieces together of What's What stops mattering as the emotional force of what Charlie Kaufman wreaks with this story buries your heart alive. 

As with all Great Films there's something different that hits you every time you watch them - this time for me it was the line contained above: "As you learn there is no one watching you, and there never was." Caden's lifelong pursuit of the elusive definitive statement, the expression, the piece of art that will outlive him... well I understand the panicked need to leave that mark and to be remembered only too well (what is this site but an erratic holler into that void), and the meaning that Kaufman uncovers (one of a dozen, probably) in setting that desperation aside and actually uncovering someone outside of yourself, in as they say walking in somebody's else's shoes - the difficulty and the divinity in that - well it bowls me over every single time, is all. Everyone's everyone.

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