If ever there was proof that great art is made for the ages but not necessarily for its age, it lies in the fact that you haven't seen Synecdoche, New York.
By "you" of course I don't mean the few people who actually sought out Charlie Kaufman's unjustly unsung masterpiece when it was briefly in the theaters, or rented it after (the picture has made a paltry $3.08 million since its American release last October), but the general 2009 "you," i.e. the public.
I'm embarrassed to admit that I didn't catch up with the film until just this weekend, despite my love of Kaufman's work (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind being one of the great romantic comedies of the decade and Adaptation one of the greats, period). I meant to see it last Fall, and then it was gone, and then life got in the way, but it's not as if I wasn't informed. My friend Manohla Dargis told me to see it, after writing a full-on rave review of the picture in the NY Times that began:
To say that Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York
is one of the best films of the year or even one closest to my heart is
such a pathetic response to its soaring ambition that I might as well
pack it in right now.
Manohla wasn't entirely a stone alone in her rapture, with colleague Roger Ebert starting his review:
I think you have to see [Synecdoche]
twice. I watched it the first time and knew it was a great film and
that I had not mastered it. The second time because I needed to. The
third time because I will want to. It will open to confused audiences
and live indefinitely.

He was right about the confused audiences. I'm concerned about the "indefinitely." Having been moved to laughter and tears by this brave, sprawling howl of a movie, one of the most impressive first features by a director in recent memory, I'm confounded. How is it possible that such a major work came and went with barely a ripple of recognition in its wake?
The ad campaign didn't help (the poster suggests it's a movie about skyscrapers). My friend and fellow story analyst Doug, a Synecdoche believer, blames part of the film's dim reception on its title. What would possess people to go see something they couldn't pronounce (it's syn-EK-duh-kee) and didn't know the meaning of? (Synecdoche: using part of something to refer to the whole thing, e.g. all hands on deck.)
Doug also observed that the film "demands participation" on the part of its audience. Right. Synecdoche, New York isn't so much a spectacle you watch as an experience that takes over your consciousness. Kaufman has always been primarily concerned with the workings of the mind, and in the mid-section of this movie, as you enter the mind of its protagonist, theater director Caden Cotard (Phillip Seymour Hoffman),the very fabric of time and space seems to expand and evaporate, the question of what's "real" and what isn't becomes largely irrelevant, and you're left contemplating... well, the meaning of life and death, essentially.
Not what's considered popcorn fare -- which may account for the level of hostility that greeted the film in many critical quarters. Those who didn't get the movie trashed it with a particular passion, the indignation of a confused viewer who's been forced, against his/her will, to think. Explain this! reviewers cried, as if every movie is supposed to be abundantly clear, linear and immediately comprehensible. The outrage was inevitably coupled with accusations of elitist arty pretentiousness, as if there were something inherently despicable in Kaufman's attempt to go after something unabashedly left of center.
The film follows the attempt of a theater director, convinced that he's dying of an unidentified disease, to understand his life story by creating a theatricalized version of it -- a gargantuan work that ultimately overtakes and subsumes his life. I won't pretend to claim that I "understand" Synecdoche, just as I wouldn't make the same claim when standing in front of a Rothko painting, watching Pina Bausch dance or listening to Thelonius Monk. I can say I feel the movie, and that it speaks to me, even if I can't articulate exactly what I'm hearing. But isn't that the way art is supposed to work?
Though it recalls Fellini's 8 1/2 , Woody Allen, and bears traces of Kaufman's collaborator Spike Jonze, Synecdoche is unique: sui generis. And I can totally understand someone disliking the film for its difficulty, for its decay-obsessed, existential bummer bent. It viscerally evokes a psychedelic trip, the aura of a nightmare, and how it might feel to lose one's mind. What, that doesn't sound like date movie fare to you?
Musing on Synecdoche's failure to find its audience, I found one answer on the front page of this past Sunday New York Times' "Style" section. Alex Williams' article cites a cultural shift, in which nice has returned as a newly popular attitude:
That amiable guys and uncomplicated sweethearts could be today’s pop
heroes is one sign of an outbreak of niceness across the cultural
landscape — an attitude bubbling up in commercials, movies and even, to
a degree, the normally not-nice blogosphere.
“We are now in an age of nice,” said Eric G. Wilson, an English professor at Wake Forest University,
who... sees no end
of smiley faces. He cites as avatars of a new niceness the Obama
administration, which has been criticized for being too friendly to
some repressive world leaders; advocates of political correctness who
still hold sway in many public forums; and the director-writer-producer
Mr. Apatow, whose era-defining comedies feature “nice guys who finish
first — a great hope for non-threatening puerile males,” Mr. Wilson
said.
Makes sense, doesn't it, after a scary economic collapse, in the midst of ongoing terrorist paranoia, two endless wars overseas and general domestic angst, that we might be in the mood for a little bit of kindliness? Well, Kaufman's vision in Synecdoche, albeit deeply compassionate, is many things, among them dark, despairing, anxious, bitter, pained, fearful, and absurd (as in, mordantly hilarious), but one thing it assuredly is not is nice.
Synecdoche was released in a cultural moment of reigning upbeat escapism (that Times page features an article on People Magazine, citing "20- and 30-something [celebrities] falling in and out of love, aging boomers growing out of and into their clothes" as the subject of this past year's most popular covers). Given that aging and death looms large in the movie, it's safe to say that when it came out, it wasn't exactly... in synch.
Same as it ever was, when you consider how the history of the arts is littered with the corpses of creators who didn't live to see their enduring works get their due. But Charlie Kaufman is alive and well, thank goodness, so see Synecdoche, New York if you'd like to support art that isn't aimed at the cover of People.

Given that the film's protagonist is a writer/director, it's left me mulling over questions like: How do you know when you're writing for yourself so much that you're not speaking to anyone else? Does a work have to achieve commercial success to be validated as "good?" When is "working through a personal issue" a viable basis for creating a project and when does that approach defeat you? If a screenplay falls in a forest and nobody shoots it, was it a vision worth having?
It's the kind of stuff that keeps a scribe up at night, and I'll wager that Synecdoche, New York -- the stuff that fever dreams are made of -- will be fueling such creative insomnia for many, many years to come.
Always surprised on those days when the mind makes her shotgun, metaphoric leaps for reasons I've never been able to trace. Remembered that Wang Wei said a thousand years ago, "Who knows what causes the opening and closing of the door?"
--Jim Harrison
There's a story told about James Thurber at a dinner party, caught by his daughter staring into space while the rest of the guests were in the midst of conversation. "What's the matter with Daddy?" she asked, and her mother assured her, "Don't worry, honey, he's just writing."
You're still writing, you just aren't aware of it. Somewhere in your brain, in the "not-top-of-mind" part, you're arranging, rearranging, connecting, disconnecting and more or less figuring out what needs to be done. Inspiration is when the guys in the R&D area of your brain knock on the door and say, "Here it is."
-- Bill at WriteLife
Bill's quote came in a comment on my last post, in which I was kickin' some writer butt, saying that now, now is the time to get your writing done, as in: get your ass in the chair and your hands on the keyboard, whether you feel inspired or not, because waiting around for inspiration is a loser's game.
This time out I feel obliged to offer a corollary, as suggested by my subsequent musings and Bill's comment: When you are writing regularly, really working and working it, immersing yourself in the writing on a daily basis, it is equally imperative that you stop.
Take a break. Leave it alone.
Because it is when you are deeply steeped in the work, writing as much as your hands can stand to keep up with your brain, that the other less conscious parts of you are freed to take over the reins when your hands give out.
When you're out in the world, you listen to dialogue and think about other things while your subconscious is working on whatever the problems are in the script. Once, when I really got stuck on something, I took a weekend off and went to Santa Barbara. I wasn't thinking about it and woke up in the middle of the night suddenly understanding where I had gone wrong and what I had to change. Sometimes, your mind has to be released in order to get past things, like a muscle that knots up so tight, there isn't enough blood going through it. It has to relax in order for the blood to flow again.
-- Amy Holden Jones
So many Eureka! moments for writers occur in the car, in the shower, at the dinner party. But I do believe they occur because the writer has been down in the mines every day, shoveling away. Naturally enough, many writers integrate away-from-the-desk time into their schedule.
Walking is best. Any physical activity helps. For instance, I'm often full of ideas the day after my wife and I go dancing.
--Tom Schulman
If a man who writes feels like going to a zoo, he should by all means go to a zoo. He might even be lucky, as I once was when I paid a call at the Bronx Zoo and found myself attending the birth of twin fawns. It was a fine sight, and I lost no time writing a piece about it.
-- E.B. White
Whatever your chosen alternate mode of activity, it's useful not only for letting that other side of the brain take over, but for holding onto your mind, as well.
The solitude of writing is quite frightening. It's quite close sometimes to madness, one just disappears for a day and loses touch. The ordinary action of taking a dress down to the dry cleaner's or spraying some plants infected with greenfly is a very sane and good thing to do. It brings one back, so to speak. It also brings the world back.
-- Nadine Gordimer
So peculiar, this pursuit of ours, that feeds on the world yet needs to hide away from it, to create another world all our own. Is it any wonder -- Write! Don't write! -- that a writer often lives from one confusion to another?
There was a period last fall when every time I began to write, I went into a perfect blank-minded euphoria, where I stared out the window and felt a love for and oneness with everything. I sat in this state, sometimes for the whole time I had planned to write. I thought to myself, "Lo and behold, I am becoming enlightened! This is much more important than writing, and besides this is where all writing leads." After this had gone on for quite a while, I asked Katagiri Roshi about it. He said, "Oh, it's just laziness. Get to work."
-- Natalie Goldberg
But seriously --
Flogo photo by Mark Humphrey
Amy Holden Jones and Tom Schulman quotes from: The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters by Karl Iglesias, a useful tome for all screenwriters to own.