Synecdoche, NY (written a few months ago... late 2014. For some reason, was unposted)
My favorite movie is long, sad, slow, confusing, strange, thoughtful, beautiful, gruesome, honest, brutal, brutally honest... I think that Synecdoche can be called the most [intentionally] depressing movie of all time. However, it doesn't feel depressing to me. I understand that death is the subject matter, illness is unavoidable, disappointment is inevitable, relationships are meaningless... I see that everything is gray, sex is ugly, people are sad... But I don't feel depressed watching it. I feel connected. The human experience portrayed, however mercilessly depressing, is relatable. I am not depressed, and never have been, but watching this movie still feels like watching real life in its truer form, seeing only what's lying under the surface. It feels like observing real life through a gray lens, through the eyes of an existentialist who is honest with himself. I don't feel dark-hearted as this movie passes by me. The terrible things don't poison my insides as one would expect; rather, I accept them. They are acceptable to me. Everything happens, and it happens. There is little emotion connected to the progression of events, as if everything were inevitable. Life is inevitable. "The end is built into the beginning", it goes. The sermon of the preacher is empowering--"and they say there is no fate--but there is, it's what YOU create"--but this happens in the middle of a hurricane of dreadful disappointment. The sermon doesn't belong--thus it doesn't feel like the tiny but unwavering light in the midst of darkness, but more so like an unreachable ideal. Caden looks at the message--he faces it, literally--and then continues on with his life. Caden is tragic. What can he do? He can't reach for the light, grab hold of his fate. The illnesses eat away, time pushes on like a massive beast, death is coming. At every moment of life, death is working its way closer. This is the truth for everyone. The matter of existence is second by second transforming from all-life to all-death. Creeping on, yellowness chemically becoming grayness.
The moment something becomes what it should be--the moment something becomes right--it is instantly lost. Rightness vanishes nanoseconds after coming into existence. This is Caden and Hazel. Caden and Hazel is what is correct, but the universe must be incorrect. The universe builds itself toward correctness but then upon reaching its peak restores its natural state of incorrectness instantaneously. The laws of the universe conserve incorrectness, as they conserve momentum, energy and mass. "The end is built into the beginning", the universe cycles itself in restoring absurdity.
This is the world of Synecdoche. Everything is off: medical professionals are absurdly rude, poop is weird, paintings are impossibly tiny, warehouses are impossibly large, the impossible is all around. Nothing makes sense. The world is impossible to make sense of. Life happens in patterns of chaos. We exist and then things happen to us and then we don't exist. There is no salvation-giver--nothing to pull us out of the chaotic pool. Not love, nor Jesus. Not reason. There is a dominant power over the universe, and it deals in chaos and nonsense. And this is belittling for humankind. We want to be lifted up, but instead we are subject to a powerful arm of fate. That is why this movie is depressing. Because humankind wants to be more than it is. It believes in itself, so it tries. Fruitlessly. But this is not sad; the universe has no empathy. Humankind doesn't lament over its position, but crying is just a natural reaction to the non-pity of the universe on man.
The defining quality of life is that it comes before death.
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