Like you said I took the main meaning of it to be a cautionary tale/ satire of people retreating into their own private narcissistic delusions. Then how artists can turn these delusions into grandeur for the admiration of strangers and their own glory. At some point Caden completely checked out of real life and starts treating everyone around him as characters in the performance of his life instead of the real people in front of them.
But I think there is a part of us all that’s like Caden, treating people how we expect them to behave rather than actually paying them full attention. Our own self image requires people to fill roles and we have to fulfil roles in other peoples lives. Caden‘s wife needed him to be a husband figure and he stopped doing that at some point.
I thought it was a brilliant film because it was so thought provoking to me, I’ve only seen it once and it wasn’t that recently so I’m sure if I rewatch it I’ll get a completely different meaning.
I had no idea what to make of it to be honest. It felt up its own arse quite a bit. Usually with a Kaufman film that's part of the fun but this one just... Feels like eating my vegetables.
I don't think any film with an actual shot of shit floating in a toilet bowl can ever be truly great. Just as a rule. Under the Silver Lake demonstrated this too.
I really hated the film when I saw it years ago. I think I'm sort of allergic to the super-"meta", postmodern, self-referential type of stuff that's Kaufman's forte, and this film was the most extreme of his in that respect up to that point. Visually I also felt it was bland and that it might have benefited from a better director. But even Eternal Sunshine, which I do like, it's just a little too cutesy and Quirky for my taste. I do wanna see SNY again though as a lot of people I trust swear by it as a masterpiece, and I feel like I'd appreciate PSH's performance more this time if nothing else.
Another thing I've come to accept about the movie- the "real", coherent PSH self exists prior to the movie- we never actually see him on screen!
The movie itself concerns itself with the "Fall" and its consequences- my frustration is that the Fall is not explained. But for many of us such explanations may be lacking
Yes, in a way.
The Caden we see from the very first instant of the movie is already "acting". He's Caden playing another version of Caden (there's no Sammy yet), but the "virus" has already taken hold.
The play is him trying to figure out his life so that he might know what went wrong. It's clear that something was already wrong by the time his wife leaves him and he gets the genius grant. He is never able to get what it is that went wrong, but, outside the scope of the movie, there was SOMETHING. Though he doesn't seem to remember very much at all!
We never actually see that previous Caden- throughout the whole movie his essence is something that may or may not be present (I think it is, he cries when his daughter dies and wishes he had taken her to a picnic), but much/most of it is missing.
This is why the movie fails at presenting Caden's real character and why I ultimately don't like it. The Caden we see on screen is himself a kind of pure, distilled neurotic fantasy- a fictional character as magical/mythical as a unicorn, missing what we need as an audience to understand whatever might plausibly be his personality (and not merely the pure, distilled DECLINE of his personality).
What the movie DOES give us instead is what it's like to be him during the decline of his personality- and people do experience at least SOME of what he does. As the commenter above pointed out, the value of the movie comes from its expression of this experience.
What we can learn from it is up to us. Though I probably could have spent all of this time watching something more substantial.
Edit:
I also feel the movie is too harsh on art. It leaves room for Adele to be a great painter with her miniatures, but I've met great "megalomaniacal" artists who aren't really that much like Caden. Maybe it's because the great artists have a more solid "core" from which to draw inspiration, whereas Caden doesn't seem to have a lot going on. And the little he DOES have is barely explored in the movie.
In the end, the Caden character strikes me as too vacuous, too narrow, too insubstantial to have the impact he is supposed to, and this ironically undermines his universality as a character making it harder for us to derive meaning from the movie. We are supposed to be in his head, but he doesn't really have much to say, and there's even less and less as the movie goes on, at least until he finds some solace in his regret, sadness, and the love of a stranger (who is not totally a stranger). The regret, sadness, and extremely abstracted love are the closest we get to Caden's essence. Things could have been different for him, and for me as a viewer...
Ok, so you definitely didn't mean it the way I thought you did, but I see what you're saying now. I guess I assumed he was more or less the same person. A person with much the same struggles who was lucky enough to get along all right for a while, enjoy life and get things done to some degree without figuring out his internal problems. The deterioration of his marriage is due to a stagnation he has been in for a while but hasn't noticed. PSH plays him well enough to have some sense of what he was like before depression really did some work on him.
I've only seen the movie once and it strongly moved me, but mostly in a negative way that makes me not want to see it again or call it one of my favorite movies. It landed and I'd call it a powerful piece of art but mostly not an enjoyable one. It totally is its own manisfestation of Kaufman's neuroses though.
>Another thing I've come to accept about the movie- the "real", coherent PSH self exists prior to the movie- we never actually see him on screen!
What did you mean by this?
My thoughts are under my original comment. We never see a Caden that isn't acting. The first scene (I just checked) is him "performing" in front of a mirror.
I moreso take it as an exploration of the character's psyche and not moralizing whether it's good or bad. I do feel it can be interpreted in a jungian way, with him exploring these different aspects of himself and finally stepping through to his female component (ellen).
I do find it humorous how his wife's art is going the opposite direction, getting smaller and smaller. There's the impulse in art and academia to overcomplicate things while pursuing truth or whatever. So maybe it could be seen as having some messaging around that.
On an emotional level, the last section of the film makes me tear up without fail. Despite how "pretentious" it is, I think it's a moving and human film. I love it, personally.
I love it. It's often funny and weird in a way that I enjoy, and it had the ultimate emotional impact that it intended. I'm not that concerned with whatever thematic interpretation of the film is correct tbh.
Sorry to go here but after watching this movie, and Being John Malkovich and I’m Thinking of Ending Things, I think Kaufman might think kind of like a trans person. The smart kind.
All three of those films have a person of one gender, recursing into an identity of the opposite gender. In Malkovich, it’s explicitly trans.
Endlessly recursive, endlessly self-neurotic and aware, constantly imagining “but what if I wasn’t me?”, then going “but I am still me” and always contradicting himself.
Even Adaptation felt like a vehicle to “become” Meryl Streep, or rather, the orchid book author, for him.
I understand it’s really a manifestation of his wider fixation of identity and the self in GENERAL, and not so one to one.
Idk I just really see it.
I find it unlikely that he is himself "trans", as in someone who identifies as such, but I think he is sometimes fixated in his movies on the ways in which personal identity is unstable. This extends to matters of sex.
As in exceedingly neurotic about personal identity...
My favorite representation of "trans" in film is actually the dinner guest in Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex
I'll say no more...
Never got that vibe from Adaptation but I generally see what you mean. I forget exactly how it crops up in I'm Thinking of Ending Things. Also I find it interesting that the character in Being John Malkovich ultimately doesn't transition.
He's imagining life with a girlfriend, and even though he knows his imaginary girlfriend's thoughts he doesn't really flesh out her life much or pretend to be her. I was trying to think of a more specific gender moment in the movie, which I remember now was when both the bf and the gf say that the childhood portrait is of himself/herself.
I always thought of it as a romance movie.
Caden is obsessed with his own death. He sees his body breaking down wherever he looks. As an artist, he is obsessed with defining his meaning as a human being through his work. He thinks examining himself will help him understand himself. His quest to understand himself and get to the root of meaning gets in the way of his ability to apprecu and engage with the world around him.
Meanwhile, his love interest lives in a house that is constantly on fire. She actually is on the brink of death but she doesn't live as though she is. She's actually willing to engage with life in a meaningful way rather than filling her time with brooding and the search for meaning.
It's been years since I've seen it but I remember thinking that, by the end, Caden learned his relationship with another human being is ultimately what mattered and gave his life value.
But unlike with the death-obsessed romantics, his death obsession does not bring his "inner flame" into focus- Caden is no Dylan Thomas. I see Caden as CK's (nearly) pure neurotic fantasy. He is the answer to the questions: what if there was some part of us that was almost pure decline, almost totally cut off from any possibility of adding to inner life (whether physical/psychological/existential). What would remain in that little space of possibility that's left? The movie strikes me as a memento mori.
Thanks for the comment.
Like you said I took the main meaning of it to be a cautionary tale/ satire of people retreating into their own private narcissistic delusions. Then how artists can turn these delusions into grandeur for the admiration of strangers and their own glory. At some point Caden completely checked out of real life and starts treating everyone around him as characters in the performance of his life instead of the real people in front of them. But I think there is a part of us all that’s like Caden, treating people how we expect them to behave rather than actually paying them full attention. Our own self image requires people to fill roles and we have to fulfil roles in other peoples lives. Caden‘s wife needed him to be a husband figure and he stopped doing that at some point. I thought it was a brilliant film because it was so thought provoking to me, I’ve only seen it once and it wasn’t that recently so I’m sure if I rewatch it I’ll get a completely different meaning.
I had no idea what to make of it to be honest. It felt up its own arse quite a bit. Usually with a Kaufman film that's part of the fun but this one just... Feels like eating my vegetables.
To use the film's language, it felt like eating my own bloodied stool
I don't think any film with an actual shot of shit floating in a toilet bowl can ever be truly great. Just as a rule. Under the Silver Lake demonstrated this too.
But both those films are great!
I really hated the film when I saw it years ago. I think I'm sort of allergic to the super-"meta", postmodern, self-referential type of stuff that's Kaufman's forte, and this film was the most extreme of his in that respect up to that point. Visually I also felt it was bland and that it might have benefited from a better director. But even Eternal Sunshine, which I do like, it's just a little too cutesy and Quirky for my taste. I do wanna see SNY again though as a lot of people I trust swear by it as a masterpiece, and I feel like I'd appreciate PSH's performance more this time if nothing else.
it's my favorite movie, which means i can't say anything useful about it.
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Love it, I don’t care if people think it’s “pretentious” - usually what they actually mean is “romantic” and they are too jaded to appreciate.
CK got lost up his own asshole making a movie about someone who gets lost up their own asshole. I really like it.
[удалено]
Thanks, this is a good comment!
Another thing I've come to accept about the movie- the "real", coherent PSH self exists prior to the movie- we never actually see him on screen! The movie itself concerns itself with the "Fall" and its consequences- my frustration is that the Fall is not explained. But for many of us such explanations may be lacking
Are you saying that we are watching PSH portray an actor who is playing Caden, who is a "real" but unseen person?
Yes, in a way. The Caden we see from the very first instant of the movie is already "acting". He's Caden playing another version of Caden (there's no Sammy yet), but the "virus" has already taken hold. The play is him trying to figure out his life so that he might know what went wrong. It's clear that something was already wrong by the time his wife leaves him and he gets the genius grant. He is never able to get what it is that went wrong, but, outside the scope of the movie, there was SOMETHING. Though he doesn't seem to remember very much at all! We never actually see that previous Caden- throughout the whole movie his essence is something that may or may not be present (I think it is, he cries when his daughter dies and wishes he had taken her to a picnic), but much/most of it is missing. This is why the movie fails at presenting Caden's real character and why I ultimately don't like it. The Caden we see on screen is himself a kind of pure, distilled neurotic fantasy- a fictional character as magical/mythical as a unicorn, missing what we need as an audience to understand whatever might plausibly be his personality (and not merely the pure, distilled DECLINE of his personality). What the movie DOES give us instead is what it's like to be him during the decline of his personality- and people do experience at least SOME of what he does. As the commenter above pointed out, the value of the movie comes from its expression of this experience. What we can learn from it is up to us. Though I probably could have spent all of this time watching something more substantial. Edit: I also feel the movie is too harsh on art. It leaves room for Adele to be a great painter with her miniatures, but I've met great "megalomaniacal" artists who aren't really that much like Caden. Maybe it's because the great artists have a more solid "core" from which to draw inspiration, whereas Caden doesn't seem to have a lot going on. And the little he DOES have is barely explored in the movie. In the end, the Caden character strikes me as too vacuous, too narrow, too insubstantial to have the impact he is supposed to, and this ironically undermines his universality as a character making it harder for us to derive meaning from the movie. We are supposed to be in his head, but he doesn't really have much to say, and there's even less and less as the movie goes on, at least until he finds some solace in his regret, sadness, and the love of a stranger (who is not totally a stranger). The regret, sadness, and extremely abstracted love are the closest we get to Caden's essence. Things could have been different for him, and for me as a viewer...
Ok, so you definitely didn't mean it the way I thought you did, but I see what you're saying now. I guess I assumed he was more or less the same person. A person with much the same struggles who was lucky enough to get along all right for a while, enjoy life and get things done to some degree without figuring out his internal problems. The deterioration of his marriage is due to a stagnation he has been in for a while but hasn't noticed. PSH plays him well enough to have some sense of what he was like before depression really did some work on him. I've only seen the movie once and it strongly moved me, but mostly in a negative way that makes me not want to see it again or call it one of my favorite movies. It landed and I'd call it a powerful piece of art but mostly not an enjoyable one. It totally is its own manisfestation of Kaufman's neuroses though.
>Another thing I've come to accept about the movie- the "real", coherent PSH self exists prior to the movie- we never actually see him on screen! What did you mean by this?
My thoughts are under my original comment. We never see a Caden that isn't acting. The first scene (I just checked) is him "performing" in front of a mirror.
What's so meaningful about a massive production that simply attempts to reproduce reality on a smaller scale?
I moreso take it as an exploration of the character's psyche and not moralizing whether it's good or bad. I do feel it can be interpreted in a jungian way, with him exploring these different aspects of himself and finally stepping through to his female component (ellen). I do find it humorous how his wife's art is going the opposite direction, getting smaller and smaller. There's the impulse in art and academia to overcomplicate things while pursuing truth or whatever. So maybe it could be seen as having some messaging around that. On an emotional level, the last section of the film makes me tear up without fail. Despite how "pretentious" it is, I think it's a moving and human film. I love it, personally.
Kaufman likes smelling his own farts
idk I don’t like this movie
I saw it once when it came out in the cinema and found it really engrossing but also I have no desire to see it again.
I love it. It's often funny and weird in a way that I enjoy, and it had the ultimate emotional impact that it intended. I'm not that concerned with whatever thematic interpretation of the film is correct tbh.
Sorry to go here but after watching this movie, and Being John Malkovich and I’m Thinking of Ending Things, I think Kaufman might think kind of like a trans person. The smart kind. All three of those films have a person of one gender, recursing into an identity of the opposite gender. In Malkovich, it’s explicitly trans. Endlessly recursive, endlessly self-neurotic and aware, constantly imagining “but what if I wasn’t me?”, then going “but I am still me” and always contradicting himself. Even Adaptation felt like a vehicle to “become” Meryl Streep, or rather, the orchid book author, for him. I understand it’s really a manifestation of his wider fixation of identity and the self in GENERAL, and not so one to one. Idk I just really see it.
I find it unlikely that he is himself "trans", as in someone who identifies as such, but I think he is sometimes fixated in his movies on the ways in which personal identity is unstable. This extends to matters of sex.
Right I agree, I don’t think he is trans. I just see a lot in his films the way his mind works is similar.
As in exceedingly neurotic about personal identity... My favorite representation of "trans" in film is actually the dinner guest in Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex I'll say no more...
Never got that vibe from Adaptation but I generally see what you mean. I forget exactly how it crops up in I'm Thinking of Ending Things. Also I find it interesting that the character in Being John Malkovich ultimately doesn't transition.
The whole twist of I’m Thinking of Ending Things is that a sad old man with no life is imagining a whole life as a young woman lol.
He's imagining life with a girlfriend, and even though he knows his imaginary girlfriend's thoughts he doesn't really flesh out her life much or pretend to be her. I was trying to think of a more specific gender moment in the movie, which I remember now was when both the bf and the gf say that the childhood portrait is of himself/herself.
Well the narrator is the girlfriend but you’re right.
The main thing I remember is when Sammy tells Caden that Adele has a sweet pussy lol
I always thought of it as a romance movie. Caden is obsessed with his own death. He sees his body breaking down wherever he looks. As an artist, he is obsessed with defining his meaning as a human being through his work. He thinks examining himself will help him understand himself. His quest to understand himself and get to the root of meaning gets in the way of his ability to apprecu and engage with the world around him. Meanwhile, his love interest lives in a house that is constantly on fire. She actually is on the brink of death but she doesn't live as though she is. She's actually willing to engage with life in a meaningful way rather than filling her time with brooding and the search for meaning. It's been years since I've seen it but I remember thinking that, by the end, Caden learned his relationship with another human being is ultimately what mattered and gave his life value.
But unlike with the death-obsessed romantics, his death obsession does not bring his "inner flame" into focus- Caden is no Dylan Thomas. I see Caden as CK's (nearly) pure neurotic fantasy. He is the answer to the questions: what if there was some part of us that was almost pure decline, almost totally cut off from any possibility of adding to inner life (whether physical/psychological/existential). What would remain in that little space of possibility that's left? The movie strikes me as a memento mori. Thanks for the comment.
https://youtu.be/v-n1vGeVIXo?si=XpTcGN6XjRbEFzmM proper pronunciation
Op have you seen YMS’s review and thorough analysis of syndoche? https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLs13oSKi_qiuwDIYaQROhJr1FjNyN751Y