just one person in a sea

...of many little people who are not aware of me.

file this under "must see"...

Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York

i could write many things about this film but suffice to say,
this is a complicated story with an ultimately simple truthful tale to tell. and i felt as much as watched this. and if it moved me, it was not so much for the story itself, but the relief that someone could be so honest as to how lost we can feel...

there are so many ways to interpret what's going on in this play. but one is certainly that
morbid fear, depression and narcissistic inadequacy all have the power to swamp the self with a narrative so that the person no longer experiences life as it is, but life filtered through that narrative. and that inner story of loss or fear or loneliness or failure spills out and influences the real life being lived on the outside. and so the narrative keeps being affirmed. and before you know it, real life's over and was never truly lived at all as it could have been. and at the centre of that story is that one cannot see beyond one's own experience, so that everyone else is just an extra, or perhaps, simultaneously, that we ourselves feel like an extra in our own life and have no idea how to direct ourselves beyond disappointment...

for as complex and richly layered as this film is, Charlie Kaufman has made an incredibly emotionally honest film... and for a film about the unavoidable nature of death we all face, and for as desperately sad a story as this is, it didn't leave me feeling depressed, but somehow quietly hopeful, that maybe one day one might meet someone who'll have the courage to say, 'what are we doing?' and hold on for the time we've got left rather than leave...

or maybe that person will have to be me. for, "no one is an extra" in their own life story...

LB