What does life mean to you?

Mental Negotiations

I have always been interested in how the mind negotiates with reality, fantasy, hallucination, desire and dreams, but I usually approach my fascination from a literary standpoint. After I read Roger Ebert’s review of the film “Synecdoche, New York," I realized I needed to see that film. Ebert spells out how life is supposed to work in his review, yet the hollowness of his definition echoes down the hallway of my doubts and uncertainties: Shouldn’t there be more to this entity that human beings narrowly define as life? I feel as if I don't get anywhere when I ask the question, but at the same time I can't escape the pondering.

“Synecdoche, New York"
(excerpts from a November 5, 2008 film review by Roger Ebert that enticed me to the theater)


Here is how life is supposed to work. We come out of ourselves and unfold into the world. We try to realize our desires. We fold back into ourselves, and then we die… The job, the name, the race, the gender, the environment, all change. The human remains pretty much the same.

Here is how it happens. We find something we want to do, if we are lucky, or something we need to do, if we are like most people. We use it as a way to obtain food, shelter, clothing, mates, comfort, a first folio of Shakespeare, model airplanes, American Girl dolls, a handful of rice, sex, solitude, a trip to Venice, Nikes, drinking water, plastic surgery, child care, dogs, medicine, education, cars, spiritual solace -- whatever we think we need. To do this, we enact the role we call "me," trying to brand ourselves as a person who can and should obtain these things.

In the process, we place the people in our lives into compartments and define how they should behave to our advantage. Because we cannot force them to follow our desires, we deal with projections of them created in our minds. But they will be contrary and have wills of their own. Eventually new projections of us are dealing with new projections of them. Sometimes versions of ourselves disagree. We succumb to temptation -- but, oh, father, what else was I gonna do? I feel like hell. I repent. I'll do it again. Hold that trajectory in mind and let it interact with age, discouragement, greater wisdom and more uncertainty.

Charlie Kaufman is one of the few truly important writers to make screenplays his medium. David Mamet is another. That is not the same as a great writer (Faulkner, Pinter, Cocteau) who writes screenplays. Kaufman is writing in the upper reaches with Bergman. Now for the first time he directs.

It is obvious that he has only one subject, the mind, and only one plot, how the mind negotiates with reality, fantasy, hallucination, desire and dreams.

Source: Rogerebert.com

[Synecdoche: A form of the metaphor in which the part mentioned signifies the whole.]