Housekeeping

Argument clinic

By March 20, 2009No Comments

Last night my buddy Aaron Aradillas con­vened a little group to debate the mer­its of Synecdoche New York, a film that appar­ently you just can­’t run out of argu­ments about. On the pro side: Myself and FIlmbrain Andrew Grant. On the anti, Mr. Aradillas and the estim­able Keith Uhlich, of The House Next Door and now, as you’ll see, Time Out New York. I am proud to say that as far as I can recol­lect, nobody stoops to using the word “pre­ten­tious” dur­ing the entire hour-plus con­ver­sa­tion. You can con­firm that here if you’re so inclined. 

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No Comments

  • The Chevalier says:
    March 20, 2009 at 11:28 am

    Here’s your explan­a­tion. Which I under­stood after only about 15 minutes of watch­ing movie and was sub­sequently con­firmed to me by some­body close to the picture.
    There is no tem­por­al real­ity in the movie. None. No object­ive real­ity. All of the char­ac­ters and situ­ations are rep­res­ent­at­ives, sym­bols, of the thoughts and exper­i­ences of the cre­at­or, his self-centered view and his cre­at­ive pro­cess, hence: SYNECDOCHE.
    It’s like Eyes Wide Shut or Mulholland Drive, in that the nar­rat­ive is func­tion­al only in that it’s a series of scenes or moments one after anoth­er – yet it’s not really a nar­rat­ive in the true sense, because there’s no lit­er­al sense to it. It’s a series of com­piled images put togeth­er in a spe­cif­ic order to cre­ate an emo­tion­al reac­tion from the view­er, but these images don’t actu­ally fit togeth­er in any out­ward logic­al man­ner. You either go with it or you don’t.

  • T. Holly says:
    March 30, 2009 at 3:32 pm

    Love how Kenny makes up words, like miser­ab­list and Warshovian, and how he mocks Kevin Buist at the end; he’s a man after my own pure heart.