In Charlie Kaufman’s 2008 film Synecdoche, New York Caden Cotard, the main character played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, is a theatre director working on a grandiose production that will capture life as it really is. Cotard’s project, autobiographical in its essence, would aim to represent each and every important moment in the life of its creator, Cotard himself, by painstakingly recreating it to be performed on stage in all its details. The theatrical performance would, thus, be a kind of detailed commentary on its director’s life, a narrative within a narrative, a meta-narrative of sorts, that would reveal the true essence of something.
As soon as the pre-production begins, in the film, the project turns out as an increasingly convoluted and all-encompassing scale model, an ever-enlarging and yet detailed structure that includes the original material, i.e. Cotard’s life, staged key moments of this life, a meta-reflection whereby the staged scenes are treated as material themselves and are presented in secondary stages alongside the originals, reflections of all this, and so on and so forth.
In short, an ever-expanding world-within-a-world fractal, a true synecdoche of New York itself.
