synecdoches, new york and otherwise

preface:

synecdoche |siˈnekdəkē|
noun
a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole or vice versa, as in Cleveland won by six runs (meaning “Cleveland's baseball team”).

yesterday morning:

a dream my hometown, between the towns, standing in the parking lot of a gas station where my father used to stop and buy me beef jerky. Jache drives up in his car, maudlin, determined, and suicidal. no words are spoken, but we see each other; he takes off around the curve and smashes in to the embankment. i run down the road trying to catch up to him. i see that his car is smashed, flipped, rolled over, and laying on its roof the. the windshield is shattered and smoke rises from the undercarriage. Jache is standing by the roadside, relatively unscathed. he stumbles off to continue his quest, and i feel a somber, terrifying certainty that his troubles have only just begun.

last night:

i watched Synecdoche, New York, trying to decide if it was a statement to which i am willing to devote two weeks of my life. i have seen it once before, but this time i watched with the eye of a would-be academic:

Philip Seymour Hoffman, note-taker

the film is interesting but disjointed, and the last several moments - from the time Caden formally cedes his role as director to Ellen - offers up an ambiguity that seems to undercut the first hour and forty-five minutes of the narrative. it is odd, but self-consciously odd.

unusual enough to trigger curiosity, but not truly bizarre;
subtle at times, but too pronounced to become enigmatic:

fade in from black, fade out to white;
it's 7:45 in the morning, it's 7:45 in chalk.

the world is crumbling outside the window.

in spite of this, the time disjunctions seem haphazard, as if Kaufman had a good idea but then got lazy. (as i, myself, am prone to do). basically, i'm unable to tell if the film actually interrogates itself in some incredibly nuanced manner, or simply comes up short. in one way, the film is as incomplete and incomprehensible as life itself, but something about the tone is off.

it is not the joyousness of simultaneity, but rather the nihilism of a mortality divorced from purpose. Caden's final words on the bench speak to his own failure of acceptance, and imply the existence of an extra-diegetic narrative certainty rather than the impossibility of continuity both within and without the film text. maybe in this way the film works precisely because it succumbs to the same flaws as its hero. maybe.

twelve hours ago:

i spoke to Jache last night, an hour after he wrecked his car.
he was relatively unscathed.