The Blog

I'm sick of artists being punished for taking on "big" subject matters, like the meaning of life. If anybody's qualified for taking on such a feat, it would be the artist, for he/she is the only one bloated and irrational enough to due proper justice to something so...well, bloated and irrational. And isn't self-seriousness by nature suffocating? And if self-seriousness is supposed to be the problem then I'm at a loss, for we've thereby asked our artists to be limited to clowns and jesters. I'm at least glad to see that Roger Ebert, a man who has undoubtedly had serious brushes with death, has found special value in Kaufman's ruminations.

PAT--so it's between self-seriousness and clowns and jesters ... but maybe we need a little more negotiating space? * and presumably "artist(e)s" have other things to be "seriously" invested in besides the "self"--like, what ever happened to negative capability?

Speaking as someone who was only lukewarm on Kaufman before now, I actually liked "Synecdoche" a good deal. Though apart from the increase in ambition, it didn't strike me as much of a derivation from his usual work. I'm surprised by how angry it's making some viewers. Is it because it has all the signifiers of a Great Work but without an overt message to tie them all together? This is also how I'd describe a lot of Nabokov's novels, which I thought "Synecdoche" resembled in some ways. (Tangentially: Is there anyone out there who's read "Ada" and willing to explain it to me?) Also, I didn't find the film nearly as self-serious as the usual Best Picture nominees. A real estate agent selling a burning house? An actor successfully auditions for a part because he's stalked the director? These are funny ideas, no?

BEN--the difference is that in nabokov word choice matters, prose rhythm matters, the incised clarity of line matters ... but where's the cinematic equivalent in kaufman's work? * in fact, it might even be the UGLIEST movie train wreck, in a cinematographic sense, that frederick elmes has ever shot (and to think i'd dubbed him BROKEN FLOWERS's de facto auteur; maybe it was jarmusch after all!) * i'll concede that all the SIGNALS of "great ambition" are there--that you're meant to think that, the semaphore as equivalent to the execution--but what's actually being delivered, to me anyway, seems little more than mawkish, maundering indulgence * but it does have its moments: i liked that burning house too

"so it's between self-seriousness and clowns and jesters ... but maybe we need a little more negotiating space?" I agree with you there. The problem arises when you want to shame a filmmaker for simply going to an extreme. When you do that, it makes me think you'd rather confine and limit the director to this "negotiating space." The best American films of last year seemed to laugh in the face of such spaces (ZODIAC, SOUTHLAND TALES, THERE WILL BE BLOOD), and SYNECDOCHE, NEW YORK follows that trend. The good writers, I feel, are often the most tortured ones. It reminds me of Faulkner's famous 1956 Paris interview where he discussed the artist living with demons inside him/her, and he/she cannot rest until they release them through their art. Nope, there's no negotiating space with SYNECDOCHE; it's just flat-out what keeps Kaufman up at night, and however strange it may seem, I actually relate to it.

Haven't managed Kaufman yet, probably won't get the chance with it until the dvd release. But the worst film lists are always a little more conversation stirring than best of lists. It's easy to see how someone liked something more or less than you, but to loathe something you like seems like a distance that needs anecdotal inspiration. That being said, I liked about half of Jürgen's hated list. As a video store owner, I have to say best of lists are iffy for the general audience because often movies on critics lists have never had the chance to reach my eyes, or alternately, my own top ten list would include movies that I've only just watched this year (many times due to dvd).

PAT--presumably the "best" writers are the ones we like/want to read, who, however intangibly, give something back, and whether they're sufficiently "tortured" or not seems irrelevant to what they produce, obviously the final arbiter of whatever we call "value" * in any case, it's a discussion that's been going on at least since heine and novalis and the self-dramatizing romantics--i'd suggest earlier (e.g., 18th century) writers and "artistes" were likely less "tortured," and that the privileging stereotype's infected everything since ... maybe a disease of language, or of gender and male machismo (do women writers fit the same romantically inflected typology?: my guess would be mostly no), or of cultural expectation: e.g., can't consider myself an "artiste" unless i'm also a drunkard, substance abuser, suicidal, etc, etc so i'm proposing a slightly different formula: writers suffer because they write, in a damned, invented medium of gratuitous complication, not write because they suffer * which i suspect is closer to the truth ...

Don't get it twisted though, I thought that "for me" would hint towards the amount of subjectivity and coincidence present in my statements. And "tortured" doesn't need to relate directly to "self-destructive," even if they do often coencide. I don't disagree with the dynamics your chicken-and-egg proposal, but I don't agree either: I'm sure the motivations for writing and suffering vary quite a bit depending on who your talking to/about.