One of the wonders of cinema is the potential to reach inside the human psyche and explore the nature of the mind itself. A master of exploring the complexity of the human mind is Charlie Kaufman, an acclaimed screenwriter and director, who has written such films as Spike Jonzes', Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, as well as Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Then in 2008 Charlie Kaufman wrote and directed his ambitious masterpiece, Synecdoche, New York. Kaufman’s films, like Adaptation and Synecdoche New York, like to explore the internal mechanisms of his protagonist’s thoughts and fears. His movies use the tools of cinema to replicate the complexity of his character’s ambitions, feelings, and desires.
Adaptation is a film whose very concept gives the viewer a glimpse into its own creation. Charlie Kaufman even goes so far as to give his fictional brother Donald, a character in the movie who becomes a writer, screenwriting credit in the film. The protagonist of Adaptation is Charlie Kaufman who is attempting to adapt the memoir The Orchid Thief into a motion picture. Throughout the film, Spike Jonze and Kaufman employ techniques to make the viewer aware of the internal struggle of the writer’s mind. Kaufman speaks in voiceover to himself repeatedly throughout the film, beginning the story questioning whether he is even capable of any original thought whatsoever. The screenplay describes the story structure of the script as it continues. The visual style alternates between the dreary life inside Kaufman’s apartment and the lush, saturated adventure film that the protagonist ultimately writes. Kaufman writes in an identical twin character named Donald, the visual representation of the writer’s inner turmoil about the attempt to create unique ideas within a strict set of traditional standards. Donald’s character represents the desire of any artist to be original and interesting, while at the same time, constantly fighting against the constrictions of what is expected of them by mass tastes. Donald’s desire is to write a film that is almost completely formula and written in mainstream Hollywood style. Kaufman illustrates this tension later in the film during a scene set at a screenplay conference taught by Robert McKee, the famous teacher responsible for many storytelling conventions. Mckee berates Kaufman for having the audacity to believe that nothing happens in the world and a story should reflect that fact. Unfortunately, the quote is a bit too obscene to print on the blog, but to sum up McKee’s response, he counters by describing the turmoils of people all over the world that happen constantly. He accuses Kaufman of making nothing worthy of the audience’s time if he believes that nothing really happens in life. Adaptation describes the thought processes of a creator trying to find the proper balance between his desire for originality and the trappings of appealing to an audience.
Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, Synecdoche New York functions as a visual representation of a character that desperately wants to find and create the truth about his own humanity, but is unable to get out of his own head and realize the changes in the world around him. Kaufman begins the film with what appears at first glance like a single ordinary morning, but in the span of minutes, he moves the chronology across several months. When the protagonist, Caden Cotard lifts up a newspaper, the date reads September. A moment later, the television references a date in October, and the newspaper references a date in December. Caden is experiencing life disappear right before his eyes and he, like a viewer not paying close attention to the details, does not notice. He is a playwright, making art that takes years of work, but that does not seem to offer him fulfillment and in no way impresses his wife. Caden sees various doctors for an illness that consistently rots his body from the inside. Kaufman includes new symptoms continually throughout the many years of the chronology of the film. They often appear ghastly at first, but then they become a normal part of the mise-en-scene. Caden’s wife leaves him to go on vacation in Berlin, which quickly becomes permanent. He, of course, does not notice this fact, believing it has been only a few weeks, at most. After Caden receives a Genius Grant, giving him practically unlimited money to accomplish any goal he so desires, he finally feels ready to construct his masterpiece, constructing a replication of the reality of his world in a massive warehouse in New York. Kaufman constructs a visual representation of a New York that constantly expands, growing increasingly elaborate and bizarre. The play has so many layers of reality that Caden gets lost in the world. Meanwhile, the world outside is becoming a dystopian nightmare, but no one working on the play seems to notice or care. Kaufman includes these images only in the background of frames, never focusing on any of the turmoil in the world outside of the creation of the play. The characters are stuck because of the the prisons of their own mind, desperately trying to create something worth remembering, but never getting there. Human beings, according to Synecdoche New York, try desperately to make their existence matter, but most of them are end up getting trapped in their own heads and fail, always grasping, but never reaching.
One important note about both these films by Charlie Kaufman, is that the worlds he creates are not miserable. While he constructs universes that represent our fears and insecurities, he does so in his own darkly comic manner. His work identifies that life is absurd, and there is always some level of black humor in that fact. For instance, Synecdoche New York, features a character that spends the majority of her life living inside a house that is constantly on fire. The fire is a symbol for the lack of control human beings have when approaching death. Still, the motif is played for the absurdity. It is meaningful but profoundly funny. Kaufman’s characters represent the inner desires that are nearly universal, but do in a way that is consistently complex, fascinating, unique, and humorous.
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