One person in a sea
Of many little people
Who are not aware of me.
Jon Brion - "Little Person"
I rented this film this week, not knowing if I'd like it or not and after one viewing, I just can't get it out of my mind. "Synecdoche, New York" has totally fucked with my head. It's like I see the world through an unimaginably complex crystal now, cut into innumerable facets, some clear as can be, others totally opaque, and the rest, every combination in between. Words, in fact, can't even begin to describe.
Charlie Kaufman is nothing short of a fucking genius. If "Being John Malkovich", "Adaptation" or "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" hadn't already convinced you of that, then Synecdoche surely will. If you can't see it, you just didn't get it.
I won't go into a review here. There are plenty of other peoples' blogs that can do that far better than I could. But I did want to share a quirk of coincidental synchronicity I picked up on just now as I was re-watching the movie, simultaneously analyzing and researching it, virtually frame-by-frame.
Right now on my computer, I have the DVD paused on the scene where Philip Seymour Hoffman's character learns about the fictional book "Little Winky." I googled the book title and came upon a YouTube video of the same scene that I'm watching in the movie filmed by someone direct from their TV screen as they tested out a new video camera. So, like the multiple themes of duplication and redundant representation highlighted in the film, I find myself watching a movie, while watching a flash movie on the internet of a scene of that movie videotaped while someone was watching the same movie that I'm watching.
Um, I told you words can't describe it.
Now I'm afraid that I'm doomed to spend the rest of my life catching glimpses of infinite regression archetypes and nihilistic visual metaphors in a semi-coherent jumble of Jungian-Kafkaesque-Fellini-meets-David Lynch on acid vignettes.
Oh, but actually, that's how I've always seen the world. This movie just made me more aware of it.