A friend of mine is fond of saying that the best movies are the flawed ones. His theory rests on something akin to the idea that everyone screws up their children; the important this is to screw them up in an interesting way. This is probably the best way to describe Synecdoche, New York, which I saw this afternoon amid a sea of New Yorkers who are, admittedly, an easy crowd to please when the menu contains such bookish ennui about how little anyone every knows of themselves, let alone their own life.
This is not the kind of movie that you walk away from with a clear idea of where it started and ended, or indeed, what happened. And of course, that’s part of the point – that you cannot see the whole except through a part of it, and then what you see is altogether inadequate. The point is to miss the point, I suppose.
Ordinarily this kind of abstract narrative – if it can even be called one – would have annoyed me. Back in my B.R. Myers appreciation phase, I used to rail that I needed plot in the things I read. That I saw no point in stories without stories, that playing with language for language’s sake seemed aimless.
But this largely plotless movie sent me home on the subway in a fog about whether, even if I aligned the stars and did only what was creatively important to me, I would get it, whatever “it” is. Whether you need to have a point. Whether the only thing that matters is the day before someone you love dies. Whether you see everything in small things, not in the big picture, which is so wide there is very little one can actually look at.
I read that a reviewer somewhere said the whole thing seems less a movie than a suicide note, which is at once apt and bound to drive people away. I hesitate to say much more about it, because it’s the kind of thing one can only write about in the most pretentious terms. And also because I know half my friends will hate this movie. Half of Cannes did, after all. A lot of people are going to tell you it’s boring, and it drags in places. That it doesn’t “make sense.” But that’s because they’re forgetting what a synecdoche is – at best a reference, that suggests a whole but isn’t the same thing as it. And most people, I guess, don’t have the inclination to live with any blanks.
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Three weeks ago I visited some friends of mine in Toronto while renewing my visa. All are of a bookish liberal sort. We were at brunch, and during the conversation. I commented that some friends lived in a “more working-class” part of my Brooklyn neighborhood. Raucous laughter erupted at the table, at which sat two lawyers, an English lit PhD student, a legislative aide, a financial consultant and a former junior curator at the Tate. “By working class,” said one, “Michelle means people who work for the government, or, like, teachers.”
In that moment I was embarrassed on so many fronts that I could feel my blush seep into my cheekbones. Of course, I hadn’t meant it that way – it was, indeed, my impression that “working class” was the proper term here – but I had, as I seem so often wont to do in this particular set of company, spoken incorrectly. Even worse, all of these people – again, who I like a great deal and who surely did not intend all of these layers of shame to wash over me – were not people who knew the working class demographic very intimately at all.
