There’s a bit in The Anatomy of Melancholy about the “madness” common to critics, artists, and philosophers, and by extension anyone who remains so lost in thought or creative action that they’re rarely actually fully present in life. “Is not he mad that draws lines with Archimedes, whilst his house is ransacked and his city besieged, when the whole world is in combustion, or we whilst our souls are in danger … to spend our time in toys, idle questions, and things of no worth?” And then author Robert Burton jumps straight into describing a similar sort of madness: “That lovers are mad, I think no man will deny. To love and be wise, Jupiter himself cannot intend both at once.”
Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, is impeccably acted, inventively designed, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, and often devastatingly sad. It was also still such a mystery to me after two viewings that I found it hard to trust my own vocabulary to describe what the experience of watching it is actually like. But Burton, rambling on 400 years before the fact, seems to nail it, or at least part of it: a life where the madness of creativity and the madness of love/lust are constantly exchanged for one another, to the point where pleasure from either is unattainable. But it’s also about the fear of death, the impossibility of romance in the absence of longing, the instinct to project our desires on to others and to seek answers about ourselves in mirror images. In other words, as theater director Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) says of his own life’s work, “It’s about everything.”
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The Circuit points to the news that a Los Angeles art gallery has mounted a show of the paintings of Adele Lack, the estranged wife of Caden Cotard, whose portrait graces the catalog for the show. Which is interesting, because both Lack and Cotard are fictional characters, played by Catherine Keener and Philip Seymour Hoffman in Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, NY, which not coincidentally opens in New York and LA on Friday.
Even more interesting, a number of art and culture blogs have written up the opening of the show without noting even the connection to the film, never mind the fact that the paintings themselves are movie props and the artist to which they’re credited doesn’t actually exist. One site even includes an image of Keener from the film, without indicating that they’re aware that it’s a publicity still not of an artist, but of a sort-of famous actress playing an artist.
It certainly seems like clever surreptitious marketing for the film — especially for this film, which resists relegraphing its intent or meaning –– but maybe it’s *too* clever? If the show itself is as free of Synecdoche signage as many of the blog posts about it, at what point are patrons of the show (which ends on Sunday) going to make the connection?
