I will be dying and so will you, and so will everyone here.
That's what I want to explore.
With Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman has created a truly absurdist work of fiction.
As we follow the journey of Caden Cotard, Kaufman lets days pass in minutes;
October 14; October 20th; a week becomes a year.
A painter’s fame rises as her paintings grow tinier,
a woman buys a burning house that will kill her decades later,
and the play that will give meaning to it all fades into oblivion.
For French author and philosopher Albert Camus, the human experience is fundamentally absurd.
He observes how we spend most of our time in ignorance or denial, living out our routines;
eating, sleeping, interacting, struggling, waiting;
always hoping for tomorrow when things will be better, when we will figure it all out.
But then a day comes when that rhythm is broken,
when the absurdity of the world creeps into our soul and for a brief moment; we feel the void;
the impermanence of all things, including ourselves.
We're all hurtling towards death, yet here we are for the moment, alive.
Each of us knowing we're going to die, each of us secretly believing we won't.
The absurd is awakening; A step lower and strangeness creeps in:
perceiving that the world is ‘dense’, sensing to what degree a stone is foreign and irreducible to us,
with what intensity nature or a landscape can negate us.
At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of
the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with
which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise.
The world becomes itself again, leaving our heart in a desperate state of trying to reconnect
itself to all the things that were so familiar for so long.
It is from this confrontation between the human need for unity and understanding,
and the unreasonable silence of the world, that the absurd is born.
Caden struggles to reconcile with this absurdity.
He wants to make sense of it; get to the truth of it.
The idea is to do a massive theater piece. Uncompromising and honest.
Something big and true, and tough.
But for Camus, this unrelenting desire for reconciliation is the great mistake;
it is an irrational leap at the end of what was so far a rational observation of our condition.
It is forced hope driven by human nostalgia, which is why it never quite satisfies us.
I won't settle for anything less than the brutal truth.
Brutal.
Caden.
What?
When are we gonna get an audience in here?
It’s been 17 years.
Instead, Camus wants to find out it if it’s possible to accept the absurd and to live
with it as it is, and not bring in anything that is not certain;
I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.
– he writes.
This does not mean embracing the absurd in some quiet form of despair or passive acceptance,
but rather he is interested in the choice we have to really accept our fate.
He refers to the myth of Sisyphus,
who was condemned by the gods to push a rock to the top of a mountain, only to have it fall back down again,
a task that was to be repeated for all of eternity.
The gods deemed this pointless labor to be the ultimate punishment, but as Camus points out:
the story is only a tragic one when the hero is conscious of his hopeless situation;
Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him?
It is therefore that Camus is specifically interested in the moment when,
after watching the stone rush down, Sisyphus begins his descent down that same slope
where he will soon enough push his rock back up again.
That hour like a breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering,
that is the hour of consciousness.
He imagines the melancholy that must arise in Sisyphus’ heart
when his hope for salvation is annihilated by the awareness of his eternal damnation.
But it is this same awareness that is capable of revolt;
capable of turning that ultimate end into a source of strength and freedom;
Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or happiness, is liberty.
This however is only achieved by abandoning hope, by living without appeal.
And to help us get to that place, Camus turns his attention towards the artist who,
unlike the philosopher; doesn’t seek to explain or solve, but instead describes the absurd,
lets us experience it; lets us feel it so that we can come to terms with it.
The theatre especially stands out to him because, as he writes;
The actor’s realm is that of the fleeting.
– Within three hours he must experience and express a whole exceptional life.
In those three hours he travels the whole course of the death-end path
that the man in the audience takes a lifetime to cover.
Try to keep in mind that a young person playing Willie Loman
thinks he's only pretending to be at the end of a life full of despair.
But the tragedy is that we know that you, the young actor will end up in this very place of desolation.
This, I believe, is where Charlie Kaufman emerges as a rare example of absurdist artistry;
creating a film without appeal; a world without judgement,
where our inevitable fate is made clear from the very beginning;
the burning house, the physical ailments,
the cough that develops into lung cancer, the tattoo that becomes poison.
The end is built into the beginning.
We see the paradox of Caden, being both aware of his absurd fate,
and yet completely ignorant towards the futility of achieving some form of absolution.
He wants to make sense of his existence, but by persistently clinging on to that hope,
his life passes him by, leaving him in desperation and disconnectedness,
blinded by a self-centeredness that is only rarely breached by brief moments of genuine understanding.
There are nearly 13 million people in the world, and none of those people is an extra.
They're all leads in their own stories.
But as the lines between him and those around him start to blur,
as the same roles are played by different actors, and the same actors take on different parts;
we are shown that there is no frontier between being and appearing,
it’s not just Caden’s journey, it’s ours as well;
a struggle that continues until that one moment where it ends forever,
where all our experiences and revelations disappear back into nothingness.
You have struggled into existence, and are now slipping silently out of it.
This is everyone's experience.
Every single one.
The specifics hardly matter.
Everyone's everyone.
It’s a story that gives the void its colors; sheds light on the prison of our absurd condition,
and in doing so, humanizes it.
It teaches that all is not, has not been, exhausted.
It drives out of this world a god who had come into it with dissatisfaction
and a preference for futile sufferings.
It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among men.
The rock that was a punishment of the gods now becomes ours.
By refusing to appeal to heavens and hells, ultimate meanings and destinies;
our fate becomes our own.
Caden, everyone has to figure out their own life, you know.
And yes, as Caden faces the onslaught of suffering, of funerals, of sickness and heartbreak,
that contemplative walk down from the mountain will likely be filled with grief, pain and regret.
But that same descent can also take place in joy.
My heart aches so much for you.
We are here Caden, I am here.
Camus believes there’s a metaphysical honor in enduring the world’s absurdity,
and whenever we revolt, whenever we claim our freedom and make the most of what is given
in this campaign in which we are defeated in advance, the universe will no longer be sterile nor futile.
The struggle is enough to fill our hearts.
We must imagine Caden happy.