Synecdoche, New York

Synecdoche, New York (/sɪˈnɛkdəki/ sin-EK-də-kee) is a 2008 American postmodern, surrealist, psychological drama film written and directed by Charlie Kaufman in his directorial debut. It stars Philip Seymour Hoffman as an ailing theater director who works on an increasingly elaborate stage production and whose extreme commitment to realism begins to blur the boundaries between fiction and reality. The film's title is a play on Schenectady, New York, where much of the film is set, and the concept of synecdoche, wherein a part of something represents the whole or vice versa.

The film premiered in competition at the 61st Annual Cannes Film Festival on May 23, 2008. Sony Pictures Classics acquired the United States distribution rights, paying no money but agreeing to give the film's backers a portion of the revenues. It had a limited theatrical release in the U.S. on October 24, 2008, and was a commercial failure on its initial release; executives at Sidney Kimmel Entertainment said they recouped much of the budget through international sales.

The story and themes of Synecdoche, New York polarized critics: some called it pretentious or self-indulgent, but others declared it a masterpiece, with Roger Ebert ranking it as the decade's best. The film was also nominated for the Palme d'Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, and has since appeared in multiple polls of the greatest films of the 21st century.

Theatre director Caden Cotard finds his life unraveling. He suffers from mysterious physical ailments and has been growing increasingly alienated from his artist wife, Adele, who creates microscopic paintings. He hits bottom when their couples' therapy fails as Adele leaves him for a new life in Berlin, taking their four-year-old daughter, Olive.

After Caden's successful production of Death of a Salesman, he unexpectedly receives a MacArthur Fellowship, giving him the financial means to pursue a new theatrical project on a gigantic scale. He decides to create a play of brutal realism and honesty that will span years and into which he can pour his whole self. Gathering an ensemble cast into an enormous warehouse in Manhattan's Theater District, he directs a celebration of the mundane, instructing the cast to live out their roles in real time. As the mockup stage inside the warehouse grows increasingly mimetic of the city outside, Caden continues to seek solutions to his personal crises. He is traumatized to discover that Adele has become a world-famous painter in Berlin and given their daughter Olive a full-body tattoo.

Following a failed attempt at a fling with his box office employee, Hazel, Caden instead marries a leading actress in his cast, Claire, and has a daughter with her, though reality is blurred as he refers to Olive alone as his "real daughter". His and Claire's relationship fails, and he continues his awkward friendship with Hazel, while still harboring feelings for her across the years. Hazel lives inside a home that is inexplicably in a constant state of being on fire and filled with smoke. She marries and has her own children, eventually coming back to work as Caden's assistant. Meanwhile, an unknown condition is gradually shutting down Caden's autonomic nervous system so that he has to walk with a cane.

As the decades pass, the continually expanding warehouse is isolated from the slow decline of the city outside. Caden buries himself ever deeper into his magnum opus, further muddying the line between reality and the world of the play by populating both the cast and crew with doppelgängers. For instance, Caden hires a man named Sammy to play the role of Caden himself, after Sammy reveals that he has been obsessively following Caden for 20 years. (Eventually, a Sammy lookalike is even cast as Sammy, etc.) In one scene, Caden is mistaken for Ellen, the housekeeper of his absent first wife Adele's apartment, and he passively takes up the role, regularly scrubbing objects in the model of her apartment. In other scenes whose fictionality is unclear, Caden meets with his now-adult daughter Olive who works as an erotic dancer; finally, she demands that he ask forgiveness for abandoning her as she lies on her deathbed as a result of her tattoo becoming infected. He also experiences the deaths of both his parents, and he begins a short-lived affair with Hazel's doppelgänger.

Sammy begins to romantically pursue Hazel, which simultaneously sparks a revival of Caden's own relationship with her, but this makes Sammy feels spurned. Mirroring an earlier moment where Caden nearly jumped off a building in anguish, Sammy now jumps to his death off one of the many buildings inside the warehouse. Caden and Hazel finally enter into a full romantic relationship, but Hazel soon dies of smoke inhalation in her constantly burning house.

As Caden becomes ever older and feebler, he continues to push against the limits of his relationships in his work and private lives. One day, the actress he hires to play the housekeeper Ellen offers to take over his role as director so that he can fully commit to the role of Ellen, which relieves him of his many professional duties and stresses. She soon presents him with an earpiece she instructed him to leave in permanently. Through the earpiece, she directs his every move as he lives out his remaining days cleaning Adele's apartment. The world outside the warehouse deteriorates into chaos until some unexplained calamity leaves the warehouse in ruins, with the corpses of his cast and crew now strewn around the massive set. Finally, Caden prepares to die as he rests his head on the shoulder of an actress who had previously played Ellen's mother, seemingly the only other person in the warehouse still alive. As the scene fades to gray, Caden realizes that he has a new idea for how to do the play, but the director's voice in his ear cuts him off with his final cue: "Die".

Sony Pictures Classics approached Kaufman and Spike Jonze about making a horror film. The two began working on a film dealing with things they found frightening in real life rather than typical horror-film tropes. This project evolved into Synecdoche. Jonze was slated to direct but chose to direct Where the Wild Things Are instead.

Early in the film, Hazel buys a house that is perpetually on fire. At first showing reluctance to buy it, Hazel remarks to the real estate agent, "I like it, I do. But I'm really concerned about dying in the fire," to which the agent responds, "It's a big decision, how one prefers to die." In an interview with Michael Guillén, Kaufman said, "Well, she made the choice to live there. In fact, she says in the scene just before she dies that the end is built into the beginning. That's exactly what happens there. She chooses to live in this house. She's afraid it's going to kill her but she stays there and it does. That is the truth about any choice that we make. We make choices that resonate throughout our lives." The burning house has been compared to Tennessee Williams's line "We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it." It has also been said that the house is a reference to Jungian psychology. In an interview, Kaufman mentioned that a Jungian scholar sees the house as a representation of the self.

The film continuously brings up the phrase "The end is built into the beginning", which refers to death's connection to birth. This is emphasized by how most of time is spent being not yet born or being dead, and how life is a fraction of a second in comparison. Another connection to this theme is the film's starting and ending with a fade-in to a grey screen.

Caden and Adele are artists, and the scale on which they both work becomes increasingly relevant to the story. Adele works on an extremely small scale, while Caden works on an impossibly large scale, constructing a full-size replica of New York City in a warehouse, and eventually a warehouse within that warehouse, and so on, continuing in this impossible cycle. Adele's name is almost a mondegreen for "a delicate art" (Adele Lack Cotard). Commenting on the scale of the paintings (actually the miniaturized paintings of artist Alex Kanevsky), Kaufman said, "In [Adele's] studio at the beginning of the movie you can see some small but regular-sized paintings that you could see without a magnifying glass ... By the time [Caden] goes to the gallery to look at her work, which is many years later, you can't see them at all." He continued, "As a dream image it appeals to me. Her work is in a way much more effective than Caden's work. Caden's goal in his attempt to do his sprawling theater piece is to impress Adele because he feels so lacking next to her in terms of his work", and added, "Caden's work is so literal. The only way he can reflect reality in his mind is by imitating it full-size ... It's a dream image but he's not interacting with it successfully."

Many reviewers believe Kaufman's writing is influenced by Jungian psychology. Carl Jung wrote that the waking and dream states are both necessary in the quest for meaning. Caden often appears to exist in a combination of the two. Kaufman has said, "I think the difference is that a movie that tries to be a dream has a punchline and the punchline is: it was a dream." Another concept in Jungian psychology is the four steps to self-realization: becoming conscious of the shadow (recognizing the constructive and destructive sides), of the anima and animus (where a man becomes conscious of his female component and a woman becomes conscious of her male component), of the archetypal spirit (where humans take on their mana personalities), and finally self-realization (where a person is fully aware of the ego and the self). Caden seems to go through all four stages. When he hires Sammy, he learns of his true personality and becomes more aware of himself. He shows awareness of his anima when replacing himself with Ellen and telling Tammy that his persona would have made him more adept in womanhood than in manhood. In taking on the role of Ellen, he becomes conscious of the archetypal spirit and finally realizes truths about his life and about love.