In the ruins of Charlie Kaufman, each of our lives is hidden

Andrew 2022-10-17 12:21:39

From "Puppet Life" to "Adapted Screenplay" to "Warm and Light", Charlie Kaufman's screenplays are always brilliant and brilliant. In 2008, the talented screenwriter finally picked up the guide tube for the first time, so there was such a masterpiece.

The protagonist of the story is the New York theater director played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, who has a strange illness, and his wife and daughter left him. On the verge of collapse, he wanted to seek answers in drama creation. He built a miniature city, and found someone to play him and the people around him to make a mockery of reality. The New York allusion method, hence the name.

Charlie Kaufman's writing is never easy to understand, and this is probably the most obscure in his sequence. The idea of ​​the theme is almost indescribable, but the lofty artistic conception and the grand pattern bring the shock like five thunders. The great film critic Roger Ebert said, "Even if you don't understand the film, it will grow in your heart." No wonder I read it for the first time many years ago, but now I only read it. It is found that what is gradually withering in that ruin is not our own life?

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Synecdoche, New York quotes

  • Sammy Barnathan: I've watched you forever, Caden, but you've never really looked at anyone other than yourself. So watch me. Watch my heart break. Watch me jump. Watch me learn that after death there's nothing. There's no more watching. There's no more following. No love. Say goodbye to Hazel for me. And say it to yourself, too. None of us has much time.

  • [over radio]

    Millicent Weems: What was once before you - an exciting, mysterious future - is now behind you. Lived; understood; disappointing. You realize you are not special. You have struggled into existence, and are now slipping silently out of it. This is everyone's experience. Every single one. The specifics hardly matter. Everyone's everyone. So you are Adele, Hazel, Claire, Olive. You are Ellen. All her meager sadnesses are yours; all her loneliness; the gray, straw-like hair; her red raw hands. It's yours. It is time for you to understand this.

    Millicent Weems: Walk.

    Millicent Weems: As the people who adore you stop adoring you; as they die; as they move on; as you shed them; as you shed your beauty; your youth; as the world forgets you; as you recognize your transience; as you begin to lose your characteristics one by one; as you learn there is no-one watching you, and there never was, you think only about driving - not coming from any place; not arriving any place. Just driving, counting off time. Now you are here, at 7:43. Now you are here, at 7:44. Now you are...

    Millicent Weems: Gone.