Complex Narratives in Cinema

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Again in Synecdoche, New York, the perception of space gets completely distorted as the movie evolves. When Caden starts building a theatre set in a warehouse that replicates his neighbourhood in New York and actors who mimic his life, reality bleeds into fiction. When actress and lover Claire gives up on Caden and his play, she demands that he collects his stuff from the apartment, and he does so, but from the apartment of the theatre set. However, Kaufman plays with the fact that their reality in itself is a fiction as well, as they belong to the storyworld of the movie. The plot thickens further with the complications of Caden’s assistant and lover Hazel having a romance with his doppleganger Sammy and Caden sleeping with Hazel’s doppleganger Tammy. The fine line that separates performance from reality makes us doubt if emotions or relationships can be genuine.

[Cinematic images] represent actors, sets, natural scenes, or whatever it was that projected or deflected light into the lens of the camera. By intention they represent fictional things and events. (…) The claim of presentness is part of a more general view about the nature of cinematic experience: that the viewer images himself within the space of the fictional events presented on screen, watching them as they occur. (Currie 1992:346).

These metanarrative layers can also be observed in Being John Malkovich, where Craig as a puppeteer embodies himself in other selves, in first instances with his puppet and later leaping into John Malkovich’s mind through a mysterious portal he finds in his office.

Right at the beginning of Synecdoche, New York, it might strike us as strange that Olive’s poop is green, but it is not until Hazel goes to the viewing of a house in flames and decides to buy it that we clearly grasp the surrealism of the film. From that point on, one can decide to embrace this fact or wrap up and leave. Surrealism is about presenting images that evoke irrational responses, often through metaphor or unlikely juxtaposition. (Podhoretz, 2008). These dreamlike scenarios, the overwhelming scale of the warehouse theatre set and the warehouses within it, his appearance in television adverts and cartoons and bizarre encounters with minor characters add surrealism to the film. Caden, terribly obsessed with his own death, only interprets what he wants to hear in his consultations with the doctors concerning his unjustified illnesses. His relationship with his psychologist and their encounter in the plane where she controls what Caden reads in the book written by her; Olive’s left behind diary where he reads her writings after she’s gone or his slow transformation into Adele’s cleaning lady, Ellen, are other elements that are introduced to complicate the plot and disorient the viewer. This gives a sense of drugged perception where the protagonist takes the viewer on a journey to the subconscious mind. This is more explicitly exposed in Being John Malkovich, where the journey is as literal as crossing a muddy tunnel into another person’s mind. The film, though more structured and straightforward, is also loaded with elements of surrealism that make the narrative uncanny and rather complex. When John Malkovich decides to enter the portal into his own mind, he encounters a dreamlike scenario where every person around him has his face and the only spoken or written word is ‘Malkovich’. The chase of Craig’s wife Lotte and Craig’s other love Maxine through Malkovich’s subconscious also gives insight into Freudian interpretations of dreams, the nature of relationships and the bizarre love triangle (perhaps square if one includes John Malkovich’s body) that represents the confrontation of the psyche where Craig plays the Id, Maxine the Ego and Lotte the Superego.

In this territory, Kaufman and Jonze explore profound philosophical ideas mainly revolving around existentialism and the nature of the self. If we look closely into Craig’s puppet play ‘Dance of Despair and Dissolution’, we see the vicious circle of lack of acceptance and self-denial he leads himself to (Paulsberg, 2002). It exposes the truth of human experience and how this truth is strictly limited to the singular experience of every individual self. Now, if we take into consideration the meaning of the word ‘synecdoche’ (a figure of speech in which a part is made to represent the whole), one could argue that Caden’s fear of death and his brutal existentialist crisis speak for humanity as a whole.

Movies with complex narratives take more than one viewing to grasp key concepts or get a sense of what they are about. However, the conclusion one arrives with them will be always be an absolute subjective truth. As Walter Chaw once phrased it, “I don’t understand Kaufman’s films, they seem to understand me.” (Chaw, 2012). Behind the apparent ‘mindfuck’, complex narratives refuse to guide and manipulate their audiences through conventions that fit genres, but rather choose to give food for thought by exposing universal truths of oneself. We watch movies to understand complex worlds that are not our own, and it is by watching other people’s dramas that we gain understanding of our own problems. When we contemplate universal fears such as loneliness or death, we find a big sense of relief by seeing that we are all in it together. In a deeper reflection, an anonymous blogger tells us we are all separate and alone and yet the same. Our identities bleed into one another – we are similar, we are different, we change. We are all leads in our own play but cannot accept others as leads too. We want to control a chaotic and bewildering universe with our own system of meaning. We all feel scared, alone, confused, and we are all searching for meaning and love and truth. Postmodernism is the method for communicating this existential terror. It gives us the theoretical framework to explore the universal human experience. (Anon., 2013).

Bibliography

Anon., 2013. The Value of Postmodernism. No, really. Available at: https://watchyourfingers.wordpress.com/2013/08/18/the-value-of-postmodernism-no-really/comment-page-1/#comment-1 Access date: 3 January 2016.

Buckland, W., 2009. Introduction: Puzzle Plots. In: W. Buckland, ed. 2009. Puzzle Films: Complex Storytelling in Contemporary Cinema. Singapore: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Chaw, W. Being John Malkovich (1999) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc. Available at: http://www.filmfreakcentral.net/ffc/2012/06/being-john-malkovich.html#more Access date: 9 January 2016.

Currie, G. 1992. ‘McTaggart at the Movies’ in Philosophy, p.343-355. Cambridge University Press.

Dancyger, K. &