Gonna need some help here

Gonna need some help here.
Watched it twice and get it was about him.
But was it real. Or was he dead?
I don't want to watch a YouTube video on it. Anyone here smart enough to explain it

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Don't overthink it. It's about being so afraid to take a step towards any direction, that you're stuck in the same place, as your life flashes by. It's why there are timejumps and "surrealism". It wasn't in his head, it was all just a big mess as his fear and "perfectionism" didn't let him act. The whole point is that good or bad, it's better to take an action and move forward in life rather than sit around, too scared to make mistakes and effectively wasting it all.

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>was he dead
No. A lot of what happened was metaphorical. He was trying to make that massive play but the scale was exaggerated. It was basically light-fantasy.

It's all more magic realism and metaphors/symbolism. Don't try to think about "is this real" but more about "what does this mean/represent".

Like the lady that buys a house that's on fire. What does that tell you about her?

i thought it meant she was going to die and the warning signs were there to show what would happen.

Am i being too literal

so for example,it implies he's gay and that hes the cleaner woman for real. thats when I lost all reason and started to think he was the woman and was dying and imagined him being the man all along, so nothing was real

Definitely being too literal, the whole shit near the end with the cleaner woman and the actor portraying him etc is more of a rumination on identity. Caden never finds out who he is, because he's too afraid to choose. We are who we choose to be.

He was real, most things were put in a metaphorical way, he never put past his fears, guilts and regrets and lived his whole life being complacent in what he could've done. The play never finishes because he never wants to finish it. He watches everyone move forward and then pass on until it gets to his time and he realizes he didn't do shit throughout his either. Glad you watched the movie OP!!

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Ok but it has to be fake
The McArthur grant would only have sustained a tiny bit of what he did so it can't have been real.

Ands who's apartment was he actually cleaning. I can't believe it wasn't imagined or dreamed. The therapist seems to the the one who indicates clearly to him he is dying or dead as she keeps appearing with the "truth" of what he is going through

>Ok but it has to be fake
>The McArthur grant would only have sustained a tiny bit of what he did so it can't have been real.
Have you considered the fact that it's a movie that doesn't obide by the same rules as our universe? Is this literally your first encounter with magic realism, and with metaphors?

It isn't supposed to make sense

If you expect an adult response you're going to have to ask actual adults

www reddit com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wvghy/eli5_synecdoche_new_york/

Thanks for the recommendation user, I'll check them out.
>MUH DAUGHTER ENDED UP A GAY TATTOOED STRIPPER WHO REJECTED ME WITH HER DYING BREATH
You may think that's a farfetched worst case scenario but for a lot of men that shit is becoming more common.

youtu.be/IJBKPFGzFjQ
The clip with the ophthalmologist in this montage demonstrates my point exactly: In what world does the doctor in this situation not just explain what he means by saying "The eyes are part of the brain" and at most briefly explain the fuzzy grey areas and disagreements in classification of anatomy e.g. the mesentery only recently being classified as an organ; or if he's being metaphorical somehow then explain what he means by that? Instead Kaufman chooses this ridiculously artificial path to generate an awkward silence that isn't at all awkward because I'm not invested in the scene anymore, it's just irritating. Compare to, say, the early pre-shark-jump episodes of Peep Show where even when things that seem less realistic happen (Mark getting bullied by kids) it's still funny and doesn't break suspension of disbelief because the progression of events feels natural and logical within the bounds of the show. Instead here we get a situation where the embarrassing situation feels fake and you can almost feel Kaufman's presence in the script hurtling back at you like "No, no, you find it irritating and conceited because his character IS irritating and conceited!" but you can bet if you take it seriously the film is saying "Oh yes, this scene is sincere, isn't interacting with others a chore?" It's a two-faced movie by a man weaponising his self-pity to feel superior to others like a real-life Shinji Ikari. The definition of emotionally dishonest.

everything.explained.today/Synecdoche,_New_York/

Here you go bunch of numbnuts

It's daft, the whole thing with her running off with the Russian nanny or whatever? Nah, you might have one or two of those things happen but all of them at once just comes across as contrived in an irritating both-sides-of-the-line-straddling self-aware way. Even if it happens in real life, that doesn't mean it makes good cinema. Film is supra-real. That's why motion smoothing and low-budget telenovellas look like shit to most of us instinctively even though the picture itself is closer to real life. No excuse.

>that doesn't mean it makes good cinema
Why not? If you're going to make an existentialist/surrealist piece, having a pathetic main character would only add to the theme of dread the director is trying to capture. It still is a movie, it doesn't have to be realistic and if you don't like it then it wasn't a story made for you.

Based, Synecdoche has a few tricks but it isn't honest, it's pornographic misery for normalfags

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There are plenty of dark, absurdist/existentialist movies that don't fall into the same traps as Synecdoche New York, for example Holy Motors, which is a dazzling yet bleak film (in part) about the death of the 20th century. There's even good absurdist/existentialist movies with "pathetic" main characters e.g. In Bruges that don't have the same shitty attitude. Hell, an even better example is The Act Of Killing- that really is real life, amplified to the big screen & blurring the line between life and art. Oppenheimer uses contrivance to unveil ecstatic truth- awful and brilliant- a simple cut to a couple of girls in a shopping mall at one crucial point encapsulates the end of the world and the horror of historic injustice in a single shot. True artistic genius.

The moment a film cuts from one shot to another it is no longer an authentic mimetic of real life, so it's silly to argue for or against films on the basis of how realistic they are, that's beside the point. This is a case of the director's personal flaws showing through in his work to a greater extent than would benefit the movie because he's lacking a collaborator to act as mediator between his ideas and the finished product such as Jonze or Gondry- Like Tarantino losing Sally Menke. Kaufman is an ideas man, not an auteur, and would have been best off in the days of writing-by-committee in the Golden Age of Hollywood.

>i thought it meant she was going to die and the warning signs were there to show what would happen.
That's what it mean. She even asks about the fire, knowing about it but still makes the choice to live there.
We make choices like that all the time without thinking about the consequences of those choices that might eventually lead to our deaths.

>synecdoche
isn't that the guy who draws chubby elfs?

I'm impressed and satisfied with this response, you have good taste in film.
I do agree Kaufman needs someone else to bolt his ideas in reality a bit, Being John Malkovitch and Eternal Sunshine are great movies that benefit from competent directors while Anomalisa and Adaptation are boring self-masturbatory exercises which show just how shit the result of an unchained Kaufman can be.
I think Synedoche is in the middle of this spectrum in terms of his filmography and I still enjoy a lot of what it does even if I don't like the push for more Existentialist ideas in mainstream media. It's not what the masses need right now.

I swear to fucking Christ people itt would read 100 Years of Solitude and complain about how it isn't logical
fucking autistic INTPs need to die