Synecdoche, New York
With moments of not-so-subtle clarity, reservedly woven into a winding, temporally adrift narrative, the film asks you to believe it's about introspection. Yet as it dances forward, there's an unnerving feeling that something larger is happening beyond our "central" question and corresponding character. As the scope of Caden's meta-nonfictional world expands, as he descends further into a depressive search for meaning, its hard not to feel like you too are on the brink of overwhelm. Like at any moment, if you think too hard about the scale of the world, about the past, present and future of everyone in it -- you might just disappear into your own thoughts.
The word for this phenomena is called sonder - to look at someone and imagine where they came from and where are going, a life as complex and detailed as your own, but completely hidden from you aside from the moment you are witnessing. Synecdoche, New York approaches this storytelling from a sondering perspective, and combines it with the theory that every creature sees the world in their own way; is my green the same as your green; umwelt.
Synedoche, New York plays and winds these two concepts together - sonder and umwelt. Unable to reckon with them, our main character descends into depression and a lack of satisfaction, despite a full life's pursuit. And how do we fare as viewers? Do we also succumb to the overwhelm of it all? No, instead we are given an intravenous drip of sonder and umwelt, so as to not go mad. Caden's story becomes Ellie's story before it becomes ours to decide what to do with, as the screen goes white.
Watching Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York conjured an unexpected connection to Barry Lopez’ Arctic Dreams, a philosophical examination of humanity through the lens of the Arctic, a region that doesn’t follow the “rules” we’ve set up to make our perception of the world legible. In the book, Barry discusses the concept of umwelt - the specific ways organisms perceive the world based on their sensory organs and what they are "designed" to look for in the world around them (food, predators, certain colors, etc). I’ve been thinking about this concept now as it relates to our perceptions of physical space. We bring our own individual understanding, informed by our experiences and brain chemistry, to every space we move in and yet, we design spaces to be shared, to be universal in some ways. What does it mean to share our umwelt? What does it mean to dip into the umwelt of another, to gain a deeper understanding of how they view a space? And what would our ability to do this umwelt-exchange mean for the development of shared public infrastructure? While we can never fully understand how others perceive spaces, what could we gain as a community if we could help each other get closer to understanding each other's perceptions?