A few days ago I airily declared to a colleague that cinema never really did it for me, not as much as fiction, in any case. I'd always rather read a novel than watch a film. That snooty belief in the superiority of the written word has been as happily shaken up as my boggled brain itself since I emerged from a screening of Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York.
Before seeing it I'd heard that it involved Philip Seymour Hoffman's character staging an enormous "theatre event", filling simulated rooms with actors simulating actions and this sounded shockingly like a conceit lifted straight from Tom McCarthy's radical and brilliant novel Remainder. The real shock of watching the film, however, had nothing to do with such perceived borrowing - in its doublings, replications and simulacra the film is full of tropes seemingly pilfered from postmodern novels. What was really startling was that the presentation of those ideas was on a greater and more complex scale than these (apparent) literary antecedents. (Incidentally, in the Q and A that followed the screening someone asked whether the film was inspired by Busby Berkeley's Footlight Parade: the parallels were so obvious that it must be, they insisted. Kaufman had never seen it. Likewise, these perceived novelistic borrowings are most likely just that - perceived: any good piece of art probably reminds a million people of a million different things.)
In McCarthy's novel an unnamed protagonist who has suffered a head injury is seized by a memory (or fake memory) of a building. With a multi-million payout from those responsible for the head injury, he becomes obsessed with reconstructing the building, furnishing it and filling it with actors re-enacting specific tasks. In Kaufman's film, instead of one block of flats, we have all of New York replicated in a warehouse in New York. This in turn is replicated within another, even bigger warehouse. This vast set-within-a-set explains the film's staggering $20m budget. Kaufman explains here that an exact replica of New York City would also have to occupy the same amount of space as New York City and there's a pleasingly direct echo here of the one-paragraph Borges tale in which a map is made of an empire "whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it."
This is also the tale with which Baudrillard begins his essay on simulacra. But a purely mental wrangling with simulacra et al is not nearly as pleasurable as experiencing that concept made visual (if not "real") in Kaufman's dizzying shots of city-within-city and warehouse-within-warehouse. His version has, in every sense of the word, greater scope.
Doubling and redoubling also prove ideas eminently suited to the screen. Sammy, the man who follows and observes Caden and is then hired by him to play him in his theatre piece, inevitably becomes more Caden than Caden himself: there are all sorts of resonances with Paul Auster's story, City of Glass but of course on-screen semblances give this doubling an extra dimension. Being able to see how Hazel (Samantha Morton) comes to resemble Claire (Michelle Williams) and then to experience the visual bewilderment of seeing their actor-doubles is somehow much more powerful than relying on words to render them.
Finally, though as kaleidoscopically clever as the finest postmodern novel, the film is also full of heart. Which, for all his brilliance, is more than you can say of Baudrillard. Pathos and humour however, aren't surprising coming from the screenwriter who admits, "I'm looking for the emotional thing as opposed to the logical thing". What is surprising is that the "emotional thing" could be partnered with the "cerebral thing" so spectacularly. Kaufman is often described as "novelistic", yet his first directorial effort may well have outdone the postmodern novel at its own game.
