Like most great art, Charlie Kaufman’s brilliant movie Synecdoche, NY stimulates contemplation about some of life’s deeper questions. What does it mean to be in the world? What is the meaning of life? What is the meaning of death? The movie does not answer these questions. In fact, director Charlie Kaufman shares the postmodern viewpoint that Truth and Reality (i.e. the answers) as some objective ideal outside of everyday life/language and individual perspective do not even exist. The movie subscribes to the idea that meaning and being are deferred and that fully present meaning and being are denied.
The deferral of meaning begins before even viewing the movie. The title chosen by Charlie Kaufman, Synecdoche, is a word that draws attention to the fact that within language meaning is constantly deferred.
“Synecdoche: A figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole (as hand for sailor), the whole for a part (as the law for police officer), the specific for the general (as cutthroat for assassin), the general for the specific (as thief for pickpocket), or the material for the thing made from it (as steel for sword).” (Webster’s, 1)
Beyond language’s limitless deferral of meaning, synecdoche adds another layer of fragmentation with its representational purpose as a signifier of a signifier of a signified.
As the movie begins, the fragmentation of reality continues with the destruction of linear time. The opening scene is a domestic scene, the Cotard family of Schenectady, NY starting their day. Everything is seemingly normal, even banal. However, the viewer quickly realizes that something is wrong. Underneath the gentle interchanges of a family having breakfast, evidence builds that time is not what ...
... middle of paper ...
...e to determine, actors mercurially flowing from character to character. The warehouse set within a set within a set, practically ad infinitum, is a shrine to the infinite deferral of being. Caiden thoroughly fails to lay bare a final signified through his play (because there are no final signifieds to show). However, without referring to some absolute, Caiden is at peace when he finally reaches out towards Hazel. Their day spent together was the one time it seemed that Caiden was happy. Another example of this reaching out to others is (in a delicious slice of identity deferral) Caiden acting as Millicent Weems acting as Ellen, when he/she reaches out to his/her mother in the final scene. So in the end, in Synecdoche, NY meaning and being are not about some hidden objective reality (which po-mo denies). Being is about “mitsein”-“being with/towards” others.
“Metaphor.” Dictionary of World Literature: Criticism - Forms - Technique. Ed. Joseph T. Shipley. New York: Philosophical Library, 1943. 377-8.
The screenwriter chose an effective way of illustrating the point of attack, establishing the setting and handling of exposition. The first scene of the film was a black screen which had audio of a man and a woman having a conversation. After, the film switches to a grainy video of men being detained by police. The video clip manages to bring the dramatic tension to all time high because an unidentified character is shot by the police. Therefore, this left a sense of uneasiness and tension throughout the whole film. The beginning of the film also did a wonderful job of establishing the setting. The scene of the grainy video clip had a caption box stating it was “Fruitvale BART Station 2:15AM New Year’s Day 2009”. The film then introduces the
The story begins with a close up of an extremely elderly woman (Daisy) lying on her deathbed in a hospital. At her bedside is her daughter that has come to say her last goodbyes. Daisy fondly muses over a blind clockmaker, who built an extraordinary clock for Grand Central Station in New York. While this clock is being built, the clockmaker’s only begotten son is dispatched to fight in the war, and ultimately dies in battle. Even though the clockmaker is stricken with severe grief, nevertheless, he continued to construct the clock. Upon completing the construction of this glorious clock, the clock became a public spectacle. In the film, Daisy said “it was a morning to remember.” After the clock was unveiled, the second hand astonishingly ticks
Another way the director of the film and the author of the book showed me when a time change occurred was by the meals they were eating whether it be breakfast, lunch, or dinner. My last way of knowing when time changes occurred was when the kids when to school that showed me it was morning. Also words like goodnight let me know that it is night time. For Example “Come on home to dinner with us, Walter,” (Lee) (pg.25). The film was more effective showing me time changes because I can see them happening with my eyes, rather than reading words and trying to imagine
The film begins in New York City in a courthouse, it is clear by the expressions on everyone’s face including the judge that everyone is tired and it has been a long trial. The viewers are told that an unidentified, young Hispanic male originating from the slums is on trial for supposedly stabbing his father to death. The viewers are also given the final closing arguments, including the testimony of two witnesses; one an elderly man saying that he heard the father and son argue then heard a body drop, and the other a woman who lives across the
classicmoviescripts/script/seventhseal.txt. Internet. 4 May 2004. Blackham, H. J. Six Existentialist Thinkers. New York: Harper, 1952. Choron, Jacques. Death and Western Thought. New York: Collier Books, 1963.
Signs and signification have been recognized throughout history as having great impact as to how language functions today. Ferdinand de Saussure, a linguistics prodigy, introduced a language model that would forever change the structure of linguistics. Saussure developed the historical study of languages to what most know as semiology – the study of signs. He defines the sign as a dualistic notion, consisting of the signifier and the signified. The signifier is a form linked to an idea, whereas the signified is an idea or concept linked to the signifier (Torres, 2017). The sign is the union of the word and the idea. One key argument discussed in the Nature of the Linguistic Sign is that the relationship between the two parts of a sign are completely arbitrary (Saussure, 1916). When Saussure discusses how the two parts are arbitrary, he means that there is no natural reason why these two parts are linked. This notion sets him apart from other philosophers, but has come to be the basic structure of language. People interpret language differently and their individual experiences shape how they view language,
Throughout a person’s life, they are exposed to many different people and objects that represent the current socially acceptable practices in, and they are forced to decide whether their path in life conforms to or opposes these common normative pathways. In the film, American Beauty (dir. Mendes, 1999), the audience listens to Lester, played by Kevin Spacey, as he prepares the viewers for what is to come while introducing them to the character the story is centered around, but in this narration, the ending to the movie is already spoiled. Going to the cinema is an adventure, individuals see plot arcs adjusted to represent a director’s vision and for films that provoke the interest it’s usual for the viewers to be on the edge of their seat
Charlie alternates between two mindsets: one of self loathing, characterized by counterproductive anxiety attacks, and one of orgstic fantasy, in which creativity floods from his mind. Donald — essentially a reflection of Kaufman’s* less contemptuous side and a symbol of reality — often appears during the latter, emphasizing the distinction between actuality and fantasy. For instance, Donald interrupts Charlie’s erotic dream about a waitress he met earlier, wrenching Charlie from this chimera. Jonze accentuates Charlie’s emotions by quickly changing a euphoric, high-key lighting into a dingy, low-key setup. Comparatively, a similar sequence shows the ecstatic screenwriter experience an outpour of ideas, almost screaming into his recorder: “We open on Charlie Kaufman.” After realizing that he placed himself into a piece which does not involve him, he cycles into a panic, where he remarks, “I’ve written myself into my screenplay … [i]t’s self indulgent [and] narcissistic.” Jonze hints at Charlie’s previous masturbation sequence, as they both shifts from high-key to low-key lighting.
In The Story of an Hour, the tone shifts dramatically from desolate to hopeful and then to ironic all within a short time frame. It is created by a swift progression of events and how Louise Mallard reacts to the supposed death of her husband. As Mrs. Mallard processes the latest events, the tone shifts as she comes to a conclusion about her feelings. The final tone is set when Mr. Mallard shows up at her doorstep, unscathed. These tones are clarified and enhanced with the use of imagery and language.
...deals with external events and so the passage of time becomes poignant since these events lack any meaningful experiences. In her transformation of time, Woolf is conveying that the perception of time is depended on the experience itself rather than any trivial external factor.
The film “Modern Times,” directed by Charlie Chaplin, is set in the mid nineteen thirties. This time frame places the characters in the middle of the Great Depression and the industrial revolution. The film depicts the lifestyle and quality of living for people in this era by showing a factory worker who cannot take the monotony of working on an assembly line. The film follows the factory worker through many of his adventures throughout the film. The film’s main stars are Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard.
For Genette, the metaphorical contour of literary space is expressed in three senses of spatiality: “spatiality of language”, “spatiality of text”, and “semantic space”. The first sense shows that “each element is qualified by the place which it occupies in a total picture and by the vertical and horizontal relations which it maintains with the related and adjoining elements” (qtd in Kestner 1978: 113). The second sense of spatiality “does not resides only in horizontal relationships of proximity and succession, but also in those relationships called vertical, or transverse, of those effects of expectation, recollection, response, symmetry, perspective” ( qtd in Kestner 1978: 113). The third sense entails that each word takes on literary and figurative meanings, creating in this way “the semantic space between the apparent signified and the real signified abolishing the linearity of discourse” (qtd in Ubersfeld 1999: 99). Therefore, the polysemic multiplicity of the metaphorical contour of space in Genette can establish the tropes of parody and intertextuality as spatial devices. In this respect, Genette defines intertextuality as "a relationship of co-presence between two texts or among several texts," as in quotations, allusion, or plagiarism (Genette 1997: 5; Emphasis added). In brief, Frank and Genette deny any sense of referentiality between fiction and reality. For them, the text becomes a hermetic autonomous entity purged of any extra-textual reference. Pavel calls this “textolatry,” (Pavel 1986: 9) which has its origins in the Saussurian semiotic model advocating the self-referentiality of language. This “textolatry” is practiced by the structuralists and founded in principle by Derrida for whom “there is nothing outside the text” (Derrida 1974:
In Jacques Derrida’s On Grammatology, logocentric hermeneutics are critiqued and deconstructed alongside Derrida’s consideration of Western philosophy and the ‘metaphysics of presence.’ Derrida points out the main limitation of logocentric theory being the promotion that writing is exterior to speech, and that speech is exterior to thought. He argues it is impossible to fully comprehend the written word if it is merely seen as an external representation of speech. Saussure also responds to this supposed flaw. Although logocentrism professes the signifier to be exterior from the signified, Saussure instead likens these concepts to one indivisible sheet of paper with the associated concept, the signified, on one side and the sound image, the signifier, on the other. This analogy by Saussure highlights the impossibility of isolating sound from thought, or thought from sound in language. Therefore, this view deviates from logocentric theory and instead suggests linguistics operates along the margin where sound and thought meet, hence Saussure’s comment, “The contact between them [the signifier and signified] gives rise to a form, not a
Ferdinand de Saussure is one of history’s greatest contributors to both modern linguistics and structuralist semiology. Semiology can be understood as the analysis of sign systems. Prior to Saussure’s theory, “linguistics was principally diachronic and he was the one who inaugurated the synchronic study of language and the way meaning is structurally generated” (Potter, 2015). Additionally, semiology can also be interpreted as the attempt to study reality as a text. There is not a single part of our reality that cannot in some way, shape or form be considered part of a text. “We may not realize it, but in fact semiology can be applied to all sorts of human endeavors, including cinema, theatre, dance, architecture, painting, politics, medicine,