Synedoque, NY

This movie helped me regain my equilibrium. Well, this movie, the departure of my boyfriend for a week-long business trip, and landing a role I actually very much wanted to play.

When I was reading all the Pulitzers (I forgot I'd stopped - must restart reading of Pulitzers), I complained to my Father that every Great American Novel was about a white man going through a mid-life crisis. As a white man going through a mid-life crisis, he was not only unsympathetic, I think he might even have taken umbrage.

After seeing Synedoque NY, a film about a white man in a mid-to-whole life crisis, my frustrations with these topic have finally shifted. Women are most appealing as literary heroines when they are teetering on the brink of puberty. When I was 11, I was indomitable in a way I have never recaptured. It's exciting to read books about girls who are unbreakable, since most of us become so very fragile once we enter junior high. Just as prepubescent girls are fascinating for their strength, middle aged white men are mesmerizing in their fragility. These are the world's most privileged DNA strands, and to watch them lose themselves in a self-inflicted morass of loneliness, boredom, mania, fear, paranoia, bankruptcy, adultery, you-name-it-I've-read-it-in-a-Pulitzer does make for great fiction and one great, great film.

When I watch a movie or see a play, I have only one demand as an audience member. Surprise me. Once is all I really need. One minute of the unexpected will get me through the remaining 1 hour and 59, and might even make me feel like I learned something. Somehow, Charlie Kaufman's films manage to incite, not a drip or a trickle but an endless wave of surprise that builds builds builds like a massive intellectual orgasm, the rosy after effects of which I have felt for at least an hour after the films are over.

A surprise in theater can be almost anything, but the ones I prefer are the familiar, quotidienne moments made beautiful, unique, even unrecognizable through a shift in perspective. Kaufman builds layers upon layers of these twists in all his films, all the while anchoring us in a (somewhat) creditable story and characters, so that, by the story's end, everyone is hopelessly enmeshed in a horrific nightmare fantasy which still manages to provide the audience with a satisfying catharsis and denouement. During this film in particular, I marveled at the disconcerting familiarity I felt with some moments (this is what my dreams are like too! this is why I think theater is irrelevant and narcissistic too! that's what I was like as an actor too!) while at the same time feeling overwhelmed by the sheer weight of his invention.

I hope to never look at my overly-optimistic theater friends the same way again. I hope to never look at middle-aged men in the same way again. I hope to never forget this feeling of having been simultaneously plumbed to my depths and given the blueprint to the soul of a stranger.