Synecdoche, New York

"Is everything okay?"
"Everything is everything."

The directorial debut of Charlie Kaufman, Synecdoche, New York is a 2008 movie starring Philip Seymour Hoffman as Caden Cotard, a struggling theatre director trying to remain optimistic and creative in spite of his marriage collapsing and finding his life is ultimately meaningless. Following his successful young-cast production of Death of a Salesman, Cotard receives a "genius grant" that gives him a nigh unlimited budget, which he decides to use on a production that accurately depicts life. Cotard then tries to perfect his artistic vision over the space of several decades, all the while struggling to maintain a relationship with numerous women and come to terms with his mortality.

Especially notable in that the (relatively) basic plotline quickly turns bizarre when Caden hires an actor to play himself, which then extends to the people in his life too; needless to say, things turn into a mash-up of Meta Fiction, Recursive Reality, Post Modernism and flat out Mind Screw pretty fast.^[1]

And it's pronounced "sin-neck-duh-key".

The film admittedly received polar reviews, but Roger Ebert notably called it "the best film of the 2000s".

Tropes used in Synecdoche, New York include:

• Adult Fear: The idea the film was built around was that it be a horror movie about the things people are really scared about:
  • Fear of poor health? Constantly has bizarre ailments.
  • Fear of cancer? Even examines his stool for blood.
  • Fear of loneliness? His wife and daughter go to Germany without him.
  • Fear of sexual inadequacy? He get upset both before and during sex on two occasions, leading to guilt.
  • Fear of not protecting your kids? His daughter is taken away at four, is covered in tattoos by ten and becomes an erotic dancer, before calling him a bad parent and dying after refusing to forgive him.
  • Fear of parental death? His father withers painfully to death from cancer, his mother is bludgeoned to death during a break in.
• Ambiguously Gay: Is Sammy in love with Caden?
  • With Adele and Maria and Olive, it's also unclear precisely where the lines are drawn.
• Ambiguous Gender: There is frequent suggestion that Caden might by some bizarre means be a woman.
• Apocalypse How: Society collapses utterly over the course of the film, we never find out how or why. It's a kind of existential joke, usually meditations on mortality have the message "You will die and the world will carry on, and you have to accept that," but in this case the world dies and Caden has to carry on, more bewildered than ever.
• Chekhov's Gunman:
• The Chew Toy: Caden.
• Comedic Sociopathy: A very dark stripe.
• Covers Always Lie: The British Blu Ray edition carries the blurb: "The Smash Hit Comedy of the Year!"
  • It's true -- but only if you've read every book Charlie Kaufman's ever read.
• Dead Artists Are Better: Caden's psychiatrist recommends a brutal, controversial book about an anti-Semite that became famous simply because the author is a now dead four-year-old.
• Depraved Homosexual: It's implied that Maria is this and has turned Olive into one.
• Doppelganger: Played with in that although neither Sammy nor Millicent resemble Caden, they arguably do a better job at being him.
• Driven to Suicide: Sammy.
• Dying Alone: A common theme.

Ellen: You realize you're not special. You have struggled into existence, and are now slipping silently out of it. This is everyone's experience. Every. Single. One.

• The Eeyore: Caden
• Foreshadowing: You can see Caden's double in the background even before he gets the grant.
  • When discussing his version of Death of a Salesman he explains his reasons for casting young actors as old people. By the end of the film the cast have aged about 30 years.
  • Almost all scenes that have Caden cleaning his house and Adele's apartment have Adele referring to him as Ellen (Adele's cleaner that he later swaps lives with). An early scene also has a 911 operator referring to him as ma'am.
  • When Caden starts scrubbing the house with his toothbrush, the TV has the ending where the elderly Caden walks through his destroyed set. The commercial for cancer therapy also briefly shows a young Ellen and her mother having a picnic, which later resurfaces when the plot explores her regrets.
• Hope Spot: Caden finally finds fulfillment with Hazel only to lose her to smoke inhalation in the next scene.
• Identical Stranger: The actors who play other actors. Mostly.
• Ironic Echo: After Hazel breaks Caden's heart, he tries to jump to his death, but it prevented. Eventually, Hazel falls for Caden again, breaking Sammy's heart and causing him to jump from the replica of the same building.
• Kavorka Man: Caden starts out fat and gets progressively uglier over the course of the movie, not to mention being a charismatic black hole. Yet he somehow manages to reel in girlfriends/wives played by Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, Samantha Morton, and Emily Watson.
• Meaningful Name: Caden Cotard is named after a psychological/neurological delusion that one has already died. Wife Adele has a Punny Name in that "Adele Lack Cotard" sounds like "a delicate art."
  • At one point, Caden buzzes apartment 31Y, and the surname of the owner reads Capgras.
• Meta Fiction: The plot unfolds both as itself and as a play of itself.
• Mind Screw: A major understatement.
• No Ending: Caden's grand opus and his life doesn't so much end as stop.
• Noodle Incident: More like Noodle Apocalypse.
• Not So Different: A major point come the conclusion (but about everyone rather than the traditional hero-villain/good-evil comparison); Caden initially makes a point about how every extra is actually an individual, unique protagonist in their own story, yet by the end he discovers that regardless of individuality, everyone is the same when it comes to death and becoming old. A blatant example can be seen between Caden and Ellen, who, despite being a director and a cleaner respectively, literally interchangeable due to their similarities.
• One-Scene Wonder: Dianne Wiest has only ten minutes of screen time. She has major billing. These are related.
• Parental Abandonment: Caden spends little time with Ariel, the daughter he has with Claire, at one point referring to Olive as "my real daughter".
• Parental Incest: Olive comes to regard Maria as a father figure, (which since she's a lesbian has its own Unfortunate Implications), which makes it extra squicky when we find out that Maria took her virginity and had a relationship with her.
• Punny Name: The title is a combination of "Shenectady, New York" and "synecdoche".
• Show Within a Show: And how...
• Slept Through the Apocalypse: What seems to have happened to Caden at the film's end.
• Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome: Seems to be happening in-universe to Caden, as everyone gets older and time moves faster without him realizing it.
• Recursive Reality: The Movie.
  • Even the warehouse map contains a miniature version of the warehouse they're in.
• Rule of Symbolism: All over the place.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog: Caden decides to make a replica of Schenectady and its inhabitants to make an accurate play on life and death; he ends up spending decades perfecting it, it ends up falling apart, all of his actors inexplicably die, and Caden finally realizes how to perfect his masterpiece, only to die before revealing it.
• There Are No Therapists: Cotard's "Therapist" seems more like a sadistic psychopath; the closest she comes to helping Caden is selling him two overpriced novels, one of which ends prematurely when he ignores her sexual advances.
• Trauma Conga Line: Caden Cotard ends up experiencing basically every bad thing that could ever happen to a person over a lifetime.
• What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic: There's plenty of real symbolism, but it is possible to over-analyse the film. In Roger Ebert's essay on the film he suggested that the fact that people are in rooms is a metaphor for life.

1. ↑ Would you expect any less from a Kaufman movie?