Ebertiana

What the hell does Synecdoche mean? Websters defines "synecdoche" as a figure of speech, in which a part is used for the whole or the whole for the part. For example, a rich man can be coined a "Croesus" or a garishly made-up girl a "Monet".

In one of the recent entries in his online journal, Roger Ebert elaborates on his choice for the best film of the decade. His lists for the best films of the year, or for that matter the decade, are usually pretty eclectic, but the underlying element in all his chosen films is how well they present the human condition. The director of his "best film of the decade", Charlie Kaufman, has made some pretty unusual films that all deal with the vagaries of the artistic mind and how it blurs the line between what is fictive and what is real. Kaufman's writing is typically very nebulous but its aims are very ambitious. Ebert states that Kaufman's newest film, "Synecdoche, New York", is the director's most successful attempt yet to create a crystalline vision of the human condition. He writes:

"Synecdoche, New York" is the best film of the decade. It intends no less to evoke the strategies we use to live our lives...Charlie Kaufman [the writer and director] understands how I live my life, and I suppose his own, and I suspect most of us. Faced with the bewildering demands of time, space, emotion, morality, lust, greed, hope, dreams, dreads and faiths, we build compartments in our minds. It is a way of seeming sane.

Ebert explains that the "artist" in question, the theatre director played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, finds that his play is not just some ersatz reality, something non-subjective and hermetically sealed. No, he comes to realize that the play, the characters, and the actors playing these characters are organic in nature. They yearn to break free from their prescribed barriers. They are not points on a Cartesian grid, but living, breathing sentient beings. Ineluctably, they start to intermingle with the "real people" off the stage, affecting them in ways they never thought possible. The seemingly impermeable membrane between fiction and reality now becomes permeable and indistinct. Think about it, when an author writes characters, do you think he/she does so objectively, with no personal investment? Would he/she spend the time, all those arduous hours it takes to write something enduring and cogent and not make it personal? Isn't a character just an emanation, either slight or substantial, of the author's own persona or what he/she thinks of as an ideal persona? It is the same for actors. There job is to develop a persona, either culling it from personal experience or through total invention, to fit the role. Either way, there is personal investment in it. In real life,as Ebert states, we ourselves develop personae to deal with variegated aspects of our lives. Whether we are playing the dutiful son/daughter for our parents, the stoic husband/wife for our spouse, or the "cool", acquiescing friend to our buddies, we play a role to placate our intended audience. Kaufman is saying that the whole world, in essence, is a stage, and that we are actors upon it, that we are both real and fictive at turns. We simply can't dismiss our creations because we are our creations, at least in some part. To think that we cannot learn from them stems from an inner naivite or a recalcitrance to confront one's own inadequacies.

Consciously or not, whether we want to or not, for good or for bad, we are creating, action by action and choice by choice, a comprehensive representation of the human condition for future generations to judge. This is precisely Kaufman's goal with his films (or any other serious artist for that matter) and especially with "Synecdoche, New York", whose stage and settings serve as a microcosm of the real world. The stage, then, is the world. The word "stage", then, is a synecdoche.