Charlie Kaufman: Adventures in Portraiture
By Stacy Elaine Dacheux
In Synecdoche, NY, Catherine Keener plays Adele Lack, a visual artist whom paints microscopically small pieces of art. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Caden Cotard, a theatre director determined to express a deep guttural truth while replicating a city and scenes from his personal life for the stage.
All of these artists speak, see, and feel lines that were dreamt up by Charlie Kaufman, the writer and director of the film. But, it’s not that easy.
Ignore the chronology of that last sentence, avoid putting Kaufman at the top of that food chain, include yourself as the viewer, and focus on the interchangeability.
We are all portraits and portrait artists—bodily, thoughtfully, and sleepily while sharing an identity of fiction.
***
In the first act of Kaufman’s film, a sink explodes, causing Caden to gash his face with a razor while shaving. On the way home from the doctor’s office, he and Adele explain to Olive, their daughter, how pipes exist behind the walls and under the floorboards of houses. He compares this act to the body and how capillaries carry blood while traveling underneath the skin.
This is pure Synecdoche to me: the body as the house, the house as the city, the city as a play, the play as a fractured projection of the self, nestled inside the brain of the body, constantly pumping and pumping and feeding itself back into itself.
Likewise, the elusive feeling of “I” in all of us is as fluid as the blood flowing through capillaries, as actors change roles, as we move from room to room or apartment to apartment, year after year, within the mirror maze of the psyche.
Kaufman’s latest opus surrealistically abandons the concept of solid identity by brutally mashing dreams, fiction, and the waking world into an adaptable form of subjective torture.
We play out certain personal experiences from our pasts over and over again in our heads—while we clean, while we wait for the tragedy to happen, while we create art, hoping to resurrect the dead buried below the surface.
***
When I worked in a home for the terminally ill, I cared for a woman with Alzheimer’s. At night, when I cleaned her teeth and tucked her in, she would often call me the name of her daughter, whom I had never met. She would kiss me on the cheek, say that she loved me, and at that moment, I would be her daughter.
In Caden’s epic play, Roger Ebert explains, “The actors are the people in roles we cast from our point of view. Some of them play doubles assigned to do what there's not world enough and time for.”
It’s not that the resident with Alzheimer’s forgot who her daughter was-- it’s more so that she was reminded of her daughter’s “essence” in the act of being cared for accordingly. Given the situation, I’m sure it was a very comforting feeling for a dying woman to have.
Webster’s Dictionary defines essence as “the individual, real, or ultimate nature of a thing especially as opposed to its existence.”
I like how essence works against existence here— this is relative to the waking world and more importantly to the art world. Portraiture should challenge the concrete human form and attempt to break free from its painterly restraints, relaxing into the atmosphere, beyond the frame, until it ephemerally becomes a part of the ether and mixes with the viewers’ own broken nostalgia.
In Synecdoche, NY, years pass without the bodily presence of Adele in Caden’s life, and he is left to commune with her cannon of paintings instead of flesh and blood. These works of art collide not only with Caden’s memory, but also Adele’s—sans Caden. Therefore, through Adele’s portraiture, he is forced to be an observer of a past life, which ages without him. In this sense, he is the viewer and also a ghost.
Alex Kanevsky, hired by Kaufman to create Adele’s paintings for the film, fills the canvas with powerful strokes that blur, bend, define, and pause form, in line with the work of Marlene Dumas, creating a lonely aura of space around each portrait, suggesting a sorrowful desire for resuscitation.
***
In I Am A Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter explains this power of art to transcend. He recalls a photograph of his recently deceased father, to which his mother sighs, “What meaning does this photograph have? None at all. It’s just a flat piece of paper with dark spots on it here and there. It’s useless.”
Hofstadter challenges his mother’s statement by asserting that the music of Chopin may simply be a few notes on a page, but yet, it has the power to move millions of fingers infinitely over the keys, connecting us to “the profound emotions that churned in Frederic Chopin’s heart, thus affording all of us some partial access to Chopin’s interiority—to the experience of living in the head, or rather the soul of Frederic Chopin.” He calls these works of art a “soul-shard of someone departed.”
In Kaufman’s film—it’s not so much what a specific character is, although his characters are sharp, sad, ruthless and as interesting as usual. It’s more relative to Hofstadter’s concept of resurrecting the dead through “soul-shards”, my experience with Alzheimer’s patients, or Caden’s ghostly connection to Adele’s paintings, mostly an essence that triggers us as viewers.
***
Recently, I started thinking of Kaufman as Bob Dylan, not the real Bob Dylan, but Mr. Quinn, the one that Cate Blanchett plays in Todd Hayne’s I’m Not There.
It all began when I attended a screening and Q&A with Kaufman, hosted by Jeff Goldsmith from Creative Screenwriting Magazine.
The specific scene I’m thinking about is when Blanchett or Mr. Quin holds a press conference, and is asked by a reporter if he has a message, to which Quinn responds, “Do you?”
With Kaufman, Goldsmith starts acting a bit too big for his britches, and it annoys me for some reason, maybe because I am feeling arrogant, and I think that I can do it better. So, I start to imagine myself as a shorter version of Goldsmith, and I’m on stage wearing a curly mustache and a blazer with patches on the elbows, asking questions that are clever, sassy, or charming. Immediately, this image disgusts me as much as the real Goldsmith.
I’m sorry, Goldsmith. I never raise my hand for an audience question. I don’t know. I don’t know anything really. I don’t feel like a real journalist. I just want to imagine myself with a curly mustache and patches, two items of which, actually, don’t define Goldsmith at all.
I walk home with friends with an aching feeling in my stomach. Kaufman is tired from answering questions; perhaps, he wants us to do more of the work. And, in Martin Scorsese’s documentary No Direction Home, Joan Baez states, “I don’t know the man. I just know what he gave us.”
When she said that a long time ago, she was talking about Kaufman as Cate Blanchett as Mr. Quinn, in the same way that I wasn’t back then, but am perhaps saying now.
***
I spend three months in limbo on the phone with the assistant to Mr. Kaufman’s agent, almost getting an interview. Days pass by, and I neurotically toil with varying manifestations of myself reporting or interpreting or asking— all the while second-guessing what my intentions are in the first place for even signing up for this. Eventually, I return my unopened tape recorder to Target, accept defeat, fall back into a deep sleep, and have this dream:
I am at a small airport and greet Mr. Kaufman, who has a Todd Haynes mask on. He is tired and asks to visit my home by the lake. I never knew I had a home by the lake until just then. We go there. I introduce him to my family. They are not my real family, but my dream family, and they all look very dusty, like Great Gatsbyish, and somehow I welcome it. They are very nice.
We are all in an experimental interview of sorts, and Kaufman has moved out of frame. I don’t ask him direct questions like Goldsmith did, or like how I did when I was imagining myself as Goldsmith. Instead, we talk through a series of shared images projected against the wall of the house’s interior, while outside a shade of grey looms towards us— the fuzziness of swarming insects.
I have a sneaking suspicion that my real father exists as air particles mixing with the bugs. I am acutely aware of this all now being a dream, and I am upset that my father only visits me abstractly. I haven’t seen him for three years. Mr. Kaufman understands. We all battle our own individual losses collectively. There is a heartbreaking sensitivity trapped underneath our fingertips.
***
When I wake up, I start to see the film Synecdoche, NY as a portrait of myself, more so than of Kaufman, or anyone else. The essence of this cinematic work or “soul-shard” evokes in me an embarrassed longing to understand my own father’s very real and painful death, in addition to my own fleeting sense of self.
This admission feels very self-centered, yet honest. Andre Breton would be proud, and the secret jerk in me feels like I really nailed the interview.
***
In I’m Not There, the narrator suggests, “Even the ghost was more than one person” and "the only truly natural things are dreams, which nature cannot touch with decay." When he said that, he was giving a review of Synecdoche, NY, or Bob Dylan, or me, or you.
In between these frames of canvas and film, as viewers and creators, we build looming projections of our own internal landscapes. We share a room with Adele, even though it is empty. We become Caden’s audience, because he offers his work to us. We leave the cinema and it is cold outside. We develop questions that might be of value later on in life— when we are not asked by a young journalist whether portraiture or the essence of identity is important.
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