I didn't have time to watch the full movie again last night, but I did get through the first fifteen minutes again right before I went to bed. I might have been a little sloshed, too; it appears that I'm driving a burning car (as I can't seem to escape referencing Synecdoche, New York) and my sorrows needed a little drowning. My parents bought this car for me about a year ago, trying to replace a car that I didn't feel any need or desire to have replaced. Now, the electrical system is going out in this new one, and once it degrades to the point where repairs are necessary, it will set me back about $3000. Thanks, Mom and Dad!
And it sucks because I know they meant well, but at the same time, fuck them for not listening to me.
Anyway, I'll just let the fire burn for a while until, ya know, I probably die from smoke inhalation or something.
To add to the unending suckitude of yesterday, Amazon has decided to ship my Synecdoche shooting script with the requirement of a signature upon delivery. I'm never home when UPS comes by, so... I have not yet received it. And I might just let it get sent back, since I may be even more broke in the near future and can stand to spare every penny that I possibly am able to.
I did read through an early draft of the script, though, and I'm increasingly convinced that the connection between Caden and Ellen is a vital part of the film. Moreover, I am almost certain that they are meant to be the same person. I was tempted to discard as symbolic this blurb:
You are Ellen. All her meager sadnesses are yours; all her loneliness; the gray, straw-like hair; her red raw hands. It's yours. It is time for you to understand this.
However, I think maybe this is one of the keys to understanding the movie (if it is possible to do so).
I considered the scenes where alternately Caden and Ellen are at the door to Adele's apartment, with the old lady asking each time if he/she is Ellen. It is to be assumed, I think, that Ellen is the person who cleans Adele's apartment.
Why would the old lady not recognize that Caden, clearly not a woman, would almost certainly not be named "Ellen?" It's not as though it's anything close to a gender-neutral name.
But what if Caden is Ellen?
What I didn't catch until I read the July 2007 script (PDF) (which much of my thoughts in this post will come from) is that this isn't the first instance of Caden/Ellen name confusion. Here's part of the scene in which Caden calls Adele in Germany:
ADELE (PHONE VOICE)
Hello? Hello? Who is this?
CADEN
It's Caden!
ADELE (PHONE VOICE)
Ellen?
CADEN
Caden! I can't wait to see you and
Olive on the 12th. um... I went
someplace without you tonight, Ad.
I went some place you couldn't come
with me. I'm sorry.
ADELE (PHONE VOICE)
What? Who is this? Oh, I have to
go. There's a party. I'm famous!
I arrived at an important question: Was Caden actually married to Adele? Again, what if Caden really is Ellen?
While Caden is having a seizure:
OPERATOR (PHONE VOICE)
911. What's the problem, ma'am?
CADEN
I'm sick.
OPERATOR (PHONE VOICE)
We're out of ambulances, miss, but
we'll send a taxi. Please wait in
front of your house, miss.
I thought this was meant to just be humorous while I was watching the movie; I mean, I have a pretty obviously masculine voice, and even I have been called "ma'am" by some apparently deaf person on the phone before. It seemed like just another one of those glorious Kaufman odd-but-real life moments.
But maybe it's more than that.
Something that didn't make it into the final version of the film (unless I just didn't catch it):
INT. 31Y WALK-IN CLOSET (INT. WAREHOUSE SET) - 2050 - MORNING
Caden lies on his back, and opens his eyes. His pumps drone.
CADEN
(quietly, mournfully)
Eric.
Caden looks over. No note from Adele. He gets out of bed,
glances in the mirror, seems surprised by his reflection.
(Emphasis mine.)
And after communicating with whoever is actually cleaning her apartment as "Ellen," the following takes place:
INT. 31Y WALK-IN CLOSET - 2029 - NIGHT 146
Caden sees an unmade cot in the corner and a few cardboard
boxes marked "Stuff for Olive." The "Olive" is crossed out
and replaced with "Caden."
147 INT. 31Y WALK-IN CLOSET - 2029 - LATER 147
The boxes are empty as Caden finishes making the bed. The
room is decorated in a girly manner. Pink bedspread. Girly
lamps and furniture. Girly prints on the walls.
There's lots of evidence woven into the film, and even more cut out of the final product. But it's still not easy to make sense of it. This duality seems to indicate confusion about gender identity and sexual orientation in Caden or Ellen or whoever the subject of the movie actually is. I think a lot of us can relate to that, even if only a little, and this very well exemplifies that when we are looking at these parts of ourselves, there is no one of them that is the single "real" us; they are inseparable, one and the same.
With respect to the narrative, though, it's difficult to make sense of. Maybe it's impossible, in fact, and intentionally so. The foremost question is who it is that the real world sees at any given time. Was the main character Caden first and then became Ellen? Or vice versa? Or was it always just one of them?
I wondered if Ellen came first and was just living under the delusion that she was married to Adele when, in fact, she was just the housekeeper. Or perhaps Adele's lesbian lover.
I don't know if it was just my own mind, perpetually in the gutter, that felt some sort of static in the air when Maria first appeared with Adele, but I definitely felt it. Is it there? Caden certainly seems suspicious of them in that scene. Maybe it's just because they're intoxicated and he assumes that his being "bothered" while high is a universal phenomenon. But we find out later that Maria and Olive end up becoming lovers, so Maria is definitely inclined towards homosexuality. She's also quite obviously very close to Adele. It's easy to wonder just how far that closeness goes.
And then there's "Women I Love," Adele's collection of tiny paintings of naked ladies. Are they naked because "love" is meant sexually, or is the nudity more innocent or symbolic than that? Olive is among the subjects of these paintings, so I'd guess that the word is used broadly to cover friendship, motherly love, love of self... but perhaps also sexual love. ("The whole 'romantic love' thing is just projection. Right?")
Going on a momentary tangent, I also am compelled to ask, why are the paintings so small? You need magnifying lenses to even see them at all. This is another one of those things that I thought was just typical bizarre Kaufman humor, but it's not a stretch to say there's some obvious symbolism in it as well.
So, anyway, one of the paintings is of Ellen. Here's the description of the scene wherein Caden looks at the painting from the early screenplay:
He comes to a wall titled: "Women I Love." He sees
a self-portrait of Adele, a portrait of Maria, a portrait of
Olive, naked and covered in tattoos. Then he comes to a
portrait entitled "Ellen Bascomb." He steps back for a
second, unable to look. The people behind him are impatient.
Finally he flips the glasses and studies the painting. Ellen
appears to be a chubby, 40 year old white woman, her mousy
brown hair tied back in a kerchief. She is naked and
spreading her vulva for the viewer. She has a kind face and
what appears to be an appendectomy scar.
(Emphasis mine again.)
Earlier, while pondering over this movie, I wondered if maybe Caden saw this painting, noticed similarities between the subject and himself, and then used that image to conceive the Ellen of his theater. But this description would seem to say that he already knew it was himself (/herself/whatever).
Note the age attributed to Ellen. I will mention now that the age given for Caden in the first scene of the film is 40.
So, does this mean that Ellen's is the face that the world sees? And if so, does this remain true for her/his/their/its entire life? Does Ellen get a sex change and become "Caden?"
Then why, when talking with Tammy before they "fuck," does he say that he thinks he might have been better at being a woman? Is he only voicing regret? Or simple confusion? Or is all of this meaningless to unlocking an underlying narrative?
Olive refers to Caden as "Daddy" a number of times, Adele refers to him as "Dad" at least once (in the car, during the plumber conversation), and as "Caden" several times at the beginning of the film. And although I take most of Olive's diary entries as figments of Caden's imagination, one entry expresses how much better her other daddies are than drunk, smelly, rotten-toothed Caden ever was.
(Adele's two husbands also provide a gentle shove against the innuendo suggesting her lesbianism, though they certainly don't preclude her bisexuality (or even homosexuality) from being a possibility.)
Hazel never calls him anything but "Caden" that I am aware of. Nor does Claire.
Charlie Kaufman has already given us one movie (I speak of Adaptation) in which, during the process of trying to interpret it, we, the audience, are forced to ask questions about things beyond both form and content -- about the very process of the creation of the story itself. Synecdoche does not beat us quite so squarely over the head with this requirement. Adaptation was effectually about the screenplay itself; in contrast, while Synecdoche contains a lot of contemplation of the process of creation, storytelling, etc., it is first and foremost a raw and visceral attempt to make us feel something. To oversimplify and probably sound like an ass: Adaptation is about creating a story's life, whereas Synecdoche is about creating a life's story.
So, how the screenplay is made is less important in this case, but we are still led there. Is there a story being told here, in however a nontraditional way? Or is Kaufman working purely in images, sounds, and symbols to try to make us feel the emotions that he set out to stir up in the audience?
Maybe he just sat down and wrote, thinking about the things he wanted to say and just stringing scene after scene to say those things. Maybe he was speaking in universal terms, speaking of life and the conclusions that he has formed about it, unconcerned with the specifics of any given person or type of person or sequence of events. "The specifics hardly matter. Everyone's everyone." In which case, all of this searching and thinking was in vain, and I have missed the point.
Or maybe he had a specific story in mind as he wrote. Maybe as he went along, he asked himself how he could cast the events of our protagonist's life through a prism of perception so we could come closer to understanding the inner workings of that person's mind as he or she experienced various events. If this is the path he took, we could maybe figure out what is actually happening (as though it matters). Unless Kaufman decided that life is incomprehensible and confusing and can't be figured out, and he decided that the specifics should be muddled and blurred... in which case, my struggle to make sense of the mess of this film reflects the pointless struggles of the film itself.
With all that being said, is it built into the script that we will never find the answers?
I'd say that these are the most likely scenarios that we could use to explain the Caden/Ellen duality:
- The world always sees Caden, and Ellen is a strictly internal representation of his sexual/gender conflict.
- The world always sees Ellen, and Caden is a strictly internal representation of her sexual/gender conflict.
- The world sees Ellen at first (i.e., the main character was born Ellen) and then she changes her sex outwardly (perhaps surgically and permanently, perhaps not).
- The inverse of scenario #3.
There are problems with each of these, though, if you're looking for consistent evidence against all doubt.
The painting of Ellen kills off scenario #1 (for me, at least).
Caden being distressed at his reflection near the end of the July '07 script may break #2. Of course, at this point, he is playing the role of Ellen, so maybe that's the cause for his surprise. Or maybe it's just surprise at his age or state of unhealth. I'm not sure what Kaufman's intentions were with that scene.
But does it make sense that Ellen would only show up in her own psyche towards the end of her life? Even if she'd allowed the Caden part of her to step up to the forefront of her personality or what have you, why would she just suddenly be "cast" so suddenly so late in the show?
Also, Caden is definitely a father figure in Olive's life. Maybe all the instances of her and others referring to him as a father are merely being filtered through Ellen's perceptions. It seems unlikely, though.
#3 seems most likely to me, thought it's not without problems. The surprise at the reflection works against this one, too, although it doesn't quite deal a fatal blow.
But how could "Caden," anatomically a woman, produce a child with Claire? Could this give meaning to his "real daughter" comment? There's so much that's not shown that it's difficult to tell if the gaps are just omissions of obvious, mundane details, or places where (fuck you, Charlie) it would make it too easy to figure out what the hell is going on?
And Olive also could not really be his daughter. Not a problem with the scenario, really, just an observation.
What would pose a problem is Caden's confession to dying Olive concerning his abandoning her to have a homosexual affair (and more specifically, anal sex) with Eric. To repeat my thoughts from a prior post, we may have reason to doubt that this confession is a sincere one anyway. I mean, Adele took off to Germany with her. We have a few holes in time, once again, to obscure what may or may have happened afterwards, though.
I think it's very interesting that we never actually see any part of the process of divorce from Adele. But that could work in the favor of several different possibilities.
Regardless, it wouldn't make sense for Adele to start off calling the main character Caden and then to call him/her Ellen later on. Would it?
I hate it that these inconsistencies come up, because it seems so perfect in so many ways. If I can form some sort of apologetics to make these issues go away, this would appear to be a great jumping off point for unraveling the rest of the chaos of this film. It clearly explains the overt menstruation references, and the picnic dream, and the disappointment at never having had a child while simultaneously mourning the loss of a child, and probably a whole lot of other stuff.
Bah. Oh well. Moving on, and finally...
Scenario #4 seems unlikely to me because of the dream with Ellen and her mother and, again, Tammy's questioning whether Caden wishes he were a woman. (Really, I guess that's a problem with #3 as well.)
Of course, this all might be a million miles off from whatever actual explanation there may be. This is likely all meant to be taken figuratively. We've still got "you are Adele, Hazel, Claire, Olive" to contend with, so... All I can do is try to make some logical guess.
In parting, for your consideration, here's the song from the beginning of the movie that Olive sings:
There's a place I long to be
A certain town that's dear to me
Home to Mohawks and G.E.
It's called Schenectady
I was born there and I'll die there
My first home I hope to buy there
Have a kid or at least try there
Sweet Schenectady
And when I'm buried and when I'm dead
Upstate worms will eat my hand
For every person that you know
Once you say, think you've seen...
You won't see them again
There's always a last time
That you see everyone
There's always a never again
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