Synecdoche, New York

GLGLF N MESR-SIY HEWC WEC.

Synecdoche, New York by Charlie Kaufman is one of the best movies every made.  I can say that because I've watched roughly half of IMDB's top 250 movies list.  It's the perfect blend of postmodern rumination, over-indulgence, and slapstick humor, the three qualities people look for in movies.

I've been toying with an idea similar to this film for a long time, examining the relationship between creator and created.  One of the first things I did to prepare myself for my capstone was to buy this screenplay along with the screenplay for Paul Thomas Anderson's Punch Drunk Love which also deals with themes I wanted to examine.  I was interested in examining the more technical aspects of screenplays, specifically how different writers dealt with dialogue within groups of people.

The biggest thing that reading Synecdoche made me realize was that time doesn't need to be a constraint.  Time can pass fluidly; you don't need to denote every time shift with a title card reading "2 months later."  Through dialogue or even set design, you can imply a passage of time. Synechdoche takes place over a period of roughly 50 years, but the time and date are never explicitly told to you.  You are told through dialogue, through expiration dates on milk cartons, and through the aging of characters.


When you reduce time to nothing more than a prop, a whole world of possibilities open up.  I have this tendency to try to make thing as realistic as I can, but in the end that's really boring.  Art imitates reality, it shouldn't mirror it.  Mirrors do that.  Someone should punch me in the face.