Did you know that every human being literally constructs their own reality? Our senses can only decode the small slice of reality they’re equipped to perceive, after which the brain, working from those five limited streams, assembles a version of the world inside our heads… And that leaves open the possibility that, alongside or beyond those narrow sensory bandwidths, there may exist an entire realm of reality that is fundamentally unknowable to us. How’s that for an idea to ponder over with your morning coffee, hm?
And that is, of course, only how it works if you are what is considered to be “normal,” whatever that means. Because it only takes an ultra-tiny glitch somewhere in the way an axon fires onto a dendrite, a single molecule misread, and suddenly you’re not experiencing the ‘real’ world anymore. You hear voices. You see demons crawling out of the walls. You’re insane!
And all of what our senses perceive… that’s just data. Streams of information. Quanta, bits, and bytes in an endless continuous flow. Processed by a central system. A bit like you might see in The Matrix. So maybe it’s not our biological limitations that determine what we see of the world. Maybe it’s simply that this particular simulation was written with cheap software. Let us hope, if that’s the case, that our creators don’t discontinue this series. Or accidentally hit the pause-but
(Funny thought, no? If this really were a simulation, it could be paused for eons at a time and then started back up again without us ever knowing anything about it. Yeah, man…)
And besides all that, just consider what strange fluidity of reality is happening right now, between you and me, while you’re reading this: a stream of consciousness that is my mind, consisting of this wildly varying kaleidoscope of feelings, images, memories, and emotions, that uses these strange symbols called ‘words,’ yes, these very words, to somehow translate that maelstrom of being that is me into electric signals via this device that is, at its core, merely highly organized sand, at nearly the speed of light across a vast and intricate, globe-spanning network of other machines just like it, to the point where finally you, reader, sit in front of some screen and light travels from it to your eyes carrying information that is transcribed by those three pounds of gray goo between your ears into something meaningful and you go like, hey, yeah! Or something. What I mean to say is, I think, that just reading this, as you are doing right now, is weird as FUCK. Yes.
Also, brain researchers have shown that the thoughts and sensory impressions that reach our conscious mind don’t originate there. Instead, unconscious parts of the brain pre-sort a flood of incoming information, letting through only what seems important and filtering out the rest as noise. In other words, what we experience as “reality” is in fact a watered-down, secondhand version of it. You’re running behind on the real world, so to speak. Nice, no?
So, Synecdoche, New York. I love weird movies. I love movies that mess with reality, insanity, perception, and death. So, obviously, I like Charlie Kaufman movies. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Being John Malkovich: all his. This is his directorial debut. It stars Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Caden Cotard, a neurotic, hypochondriac theater director who, using the money from his MacArthur grant, decides to build a life-size replica of New York inside a giant hangar for his next play.
His life slowly begins to spiral out of control as his marriage to his wife Adele ends and their daughter Olive leaves with her. Plagued by mysterious ailments, he immerses himself fully in his project, directing the cast to live out their roles in real time, blurring the line between reality and performance. As the stage grows ever larger, Caden’s personal life intertwines with his work: he marries actress Claire, fathers a child, pursues and loses Hazel, and confronts his daughter Olive as an adult. The boundaries of identity and reality collapse further as he casts doppelgängers of himself and others, inhabits multiple roles, and faces his parents’ deaths and other crises.
As decades pass, Caden ages and weakens, the city outside deteriorates, and he increasingly submits to direction through an earpiece from an actress playing the housekeeper Ellen. Eventually, the warehouse lies in ruin, most cast and crew are dead, and as an old and tired Caden rests on the shoulder of an actress, still imagining new ways to stage his play – his final cue arrives: “Die.”
Yes. And then this strange, weird, and wonderful movie ends. And then, you know, everyone has an opinion about it: ‘It’s brilliant!’ or ‘It’s incomprehensible, tedious, self-indulgent crap!’ And…
About what it all means, you know… About death, and decay… Jungian psychology… Life imitates art imitating life impersonating art… Mirrors within mirrors within reflections of memories… Layers upon layers within layers… And…
What was I saying? Something about squirrels, maybe? In the Magellanic Cloud? Or… I don’t know, man. This movie is great. Or at least I think so. I think. But hey, what do I know, right? Because what does it really mean, in the end, that my kaleidoscopic maelstrom of consciousness, while running two seconds behind on what may or may not be an actual or simulated version of reality, tries to use weird things like these to inject its insanity like literary laser surgery into your very eyeball as we speak? Nothing, man. Nothing at all…
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