The subjectivity of pain is something we recognize implicitly, but rarely really think about, unless we're in pain, of course, and then it's all we think about.  While suffering (to paraphrase Nietzsche) seems to be contagious, the particulars of an individual's pain remain a mystery to others.  We recognize the broad outline of emotional pain and often respond to it in kind, but try as we might, even the most empathic among us can't really feel another's physical pain.  As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it, "pains are thought to be private, subjective, self-intimating, and the source of incorrigible knowledge."

Incorrigible, indeed.

What I have learned in my experience of illness, dying, and death is that even when surrounded by family and friends, you die alone.  No one can do it with you, and, unfortunately, no one can sit in for you, either.  As my father's cancer quietly consumed him he came to occupy two worlds at once.  He could be present in ours and at the same time in one in which the fabric of time and space had frayed.  But as he approached death he seemed to move further from us, into a No Man's Land where the dead and the dying mingle freely.  The house, the garden, the lawn, were all occupied by his ghosts, with whom he would interact, and even serve as a kind of translator when I would ask about them. 

He seemed perfectly lucid in this state, and despite the occasional obscure and somewhat intriguing reference ("the midget is with the entourage" he told me at the breakfast table one morning), whenever he was in this state he seemed calm and contented. I enjoyed chatting with him at length whenever he could see dead people.  I would see him peering into the empty distance, and ask him what had caught his eye.  He would interrupt his reverie, as if he were talking to an old friend on the telephone and I had asked who had called. "Oh, it's the woman in the hall," or "just the soldiers on the lawn."  He obviously knew I couldn't see them.  But he accepted his new status as seer as if it were perfectly normal and natural.  In fact, we all did. 

I had a vision of him, the last time we spoke, a few hours before his death, in a little dinghy a ways from shore.  The vision was so real it's stuck with me, stronger than a memory.  What was peculiar about it was that suddenly I seemed to be two places at once, too, allowed momentarily into that shadow country between living and dead.  Standing on a foggy stretch of beach just before dawn.  The water calm and the air cold and still.  I could breathe in the mist.  And my father in a boat without a sail or oars, drifting into the fog, cheerfully shouting his goodbyes and I love yous.  And then he was gone, swallowed up by the mist.  When I tell people about this they think I'm speaking metaphorically, but the truth is, I was there.  It was real.  A different kind of real, but real nonetheless.

I don't know what it's like to dissolve into that mist on the Lethe myself, of course, but it seemed my dad was ready when the time came, although he had taken his time making his way to that shore, calmly and methodically, procrastinating a bit along the way, as was his wont in life.  His body labored on another couple of hours after his goodbyes.  It was good to see he had the sense at last to abandon the old wreck.

I was reminded of these glimpses into the interior of that secret country the other night when I went to see Synecdoche, New York, with a friend.  Charlie Kaufman's exceptional new film takes you deep into one man's experience of his own demise, and instead of the creepy, paranoid, or inscrutible fare we're used to with cinema that seeks to confront the subjectivity of our experience (see Jacob's Ladder, Donnie Darko, Mulholland Drive), Synecdoche, New York ends up a subtle, sharp, and moving meditation.


Halfway through the movie you start to really marvel at the fact that it ever got made at all.  It's a daring film, more daring than any of Charlie Kaufman's previous projects (namely, as writer: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and Being John Malkovich) which were all pretty off the wall. This one, which Kaufman wrote and directed, unfolds like a revelation, with signs and wonders along the way.  Never stopping to make sense of itself through exposition, it requires that we traverse the same strange landscape its protagonist does, just as he does: without the benefit of a road map. 

And while it doesn't over-explain, it's not a Lynchian nightmare of impenitrable symbolism, either. Even through its nonsensical scenes it makes a certain elemental sense.  It uses the true language of the medium to push the boundaries of our shared experience. So fluent is its language, in fact, that it achieves the embodiment, not just the explication of its theme.  Along the way, like all successful art, it reaches us somewhere deeper than mere exposition, eliciting empathy — we feel the sense of it.  Great movies, great books and art become a part of our experience — we feel their rightness and realness — not merely a pale copy of someone else's to help us pass the time.

Lynch's movies, which I have been rewatching lately, while fun to watch are sometimes infuriatingly forced and affected.  They're missing some elemental truth we're getting here.  They present a subjective reality, but never make the case for its internal linearity, how it makes sense to the subject.  Kaufman's films, as flawed as some have been, do manage to capture the sense in the subjectivity, the strange ways in which connections are made in the mind, even when they're too finely tethered to hold up outside of it.  What I especially liked about Synecdoche, New York is that he built his case over the course of two hours with the narrative, not with labored exposition.

Frankly, I knew the film was for me in the first couple of minutes, when a woman on the morning radio reads Rilke's poem Autumn to usher in the first day of fall.  The poem, like the movie, addresses loneliness, a theme Rilke worked over pretty rigorously.  The movie is also about pain (both physical and psychic — and maybe partly about the ways in which they're entwined), and death: a shared fate that we experience alone.  And not least it's about art.  Not only how we try to make sense of all that — to scour experience for truth — but how we use it, with decidely mixed results, to assuage our isolation and mitigate the loneliness that is our inescapable lot.

The story begins at 7:44 a.m., and ends moments later.  What the film packs into that moment of time takes considerably longer to unfold, layer upon layer.  It's never entirely clear, like I said, what exaclty is happening "objectively" and what is the subjective experience of Philip Seymour Hoffman's Caden Cotard, but in the end it's irrelevant.  The film is not really about what's real versus what's a dream.  It's more about how — to borrow from Poe — "All that we see or seem/ Is but a dream within a dream." 

What most impressed me about the film, aside from impressive performances by an incredible cast (Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, Michele Williams, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Hope Davis, Emily Watson, and Dianne Wiest, to name a few) was the absence of any nudge-nudge-wink-wink in the performances or direction.  There is plenty of humor in the script, but it's a kind of gallows humor.  There's no undercurrent of irony that gives the audience an out.  We're right there with the rest of them: no exit. 

Nor did Kaufman need the drunken visuals of a Terry Gilliam or Oliver Stone circa Natural Born Killers, or the symbolic cues that we are entering surrealist territory that you find in David Lynch's films.  While some of the sets are fantastic, they are not shot from strange angles, in too stark or vivid a pallet, or through distorted lenses — typical visual cues to help delineate the real from the surreal, or at the very least to clue us in that we're dealing with the theme of subjectivity versus "reality". 

The movie contains so many moments of truth, so masterfully strung together, it's really a minor marvel, a movie masterpiece that seems like it would reward multiple viewings.  But like I said, the fact that Kaufman's movies are getting made, and not just made, but major-league made, is as heartening as it is utterly baffling.  The fact that they are only getting more daring, and more masterfully rendered seems, frankly, a little surreal.  Watching such intelligent and moving filmmaking you might have to pinch yourself.