A Lesser, Better Me

But first, a Film Review. It's been over a week now but I saw Synechdoche, New York. This isn't of any consequence, but it actually was the last Netflix I watched before canceling my subscription.
I don't have anything groundbreaking to say about the film, but I was both impressed and disappointed by a few things. First, this being a Charlie Kaufman script, the plot was very complex. The problem with this one is that the oddities and meta-isms didn't really serve to advance the overall story much. The whole didn't equal the sum, that kind of thing. I'm also not really sure how confident I am in this assessment, but I think the almost-beyond-reproach-at-this-point Philip Seymour Hoffman was not very good in this film. He had a tough task in trying to carry this scattered story as a kind of anti-heroic lead, but still he didn't succeed. He's a kind of scumbag, which seems to be more and more revered in artistic pursuits lately, and he never really created much more. I felt sorry for him, but never ultimately cared.
Now, some things that I liked. Since I often watch from the point of view of the writer, Charlie Kaufman's movies are always somewhat personally exciting for me. This one was no different. If not autobiographical it was clearly and fundamentally at least a self-referential story, and the most interesting thing he did was to strip away most of the facade the story, leaving underneath a display of both the simple process of artistic creation and the whims of the author. If 8 1/2 is a masterpiece of directorial metafilm, then this would be it's less focused and, to borrow a usage from the film, less-Karamzov screenwriting counterpart.
Most fascinating is the realization that all the actions around the main character are fantasy, that everyone is acting just as he wants them to. Women plainly ask him if he wants to have sex with them. His side jokes are almost perfectly set up for him by the settings or the other characters. People often tell him exactly what they are thinking, but only in ways that advance our understanding of the main character, not the speaking characters. A character is even created whose sole purpose is to follow him around for 20+ years so he can understand himself better. I'm in real danger of pretension here, but these are all the things you think about when you are living your life if you're also thinking about writing. You see the world as just another character to be crafted and adjusted in the story of your life. You want your attractive young stage talent to be infatuated with you. You want the secretary-type at your office to have seemingly no other interests in the world besides you (she is a mere desired object for you, so why should she have a deeper history?). You want to indulge in your neuroses, be they mortality, sexuality, or whatever. You want to believe that you can encapsulate your whole world in fiction. And all of this is exactly what Kaufman, as a writer, lets himself do in created this film. He took all of this totally went with it. No matter if he fails or creates uncomfortable films, you must always completely respect him when he commits himself to a theme or a concept. He's also starkly in the minority on this, which makes him stand out even more.

Now that I have that out of the way, let me get to the more seriously personal part of this post, an indirect impression I had after watching this film. The main character is, like many characters before him, concerned mightily with death (and of course with it's sister emotions loneliness and longing). In the end he seems to perhaps accept that he does in fact have an interest outside of himself, but that unfortunately for him she has already died. That's classic theatric tragedy.
As I was left with this, my mind, as it will almost always do, turned to thoughts of myself. Through so much of my life, I have had a harsh fundamental pride in being in command of myself, of owning who I am and how I emote. I've never feared events because I have had my shit in order. Why worry about fate if you've taken care of yourself? This is no small thing.
Well I can announce now that things have changed. In the last couple years the solid-fucking-brick walls of me have been slowly and utterly breached. The foundation is still set in granite, but the house is laid open. (Down, metaphor.) I have a wife, and she has made me vulnerable. In almost every possible way, this is a wonderful thing. For one thing, complacency can be dangerous. And in the great flow of humanity, cohabitation and the blending and sharing of two sets of emotions is an exaltant and ultimately necessary advancement.
And yet she will always be my achilles heel. I don't meditate on this with any frequency, but I now fear death. Selfishly, I fear her death. I and we are far too deep into each other. I fear what would become of me without her. It's the only thing in my life that I'm unsure about, that I can't even think to control, that instead owns me.
And still I happily submit. It's more than love. It's biological.
Like I said, this is a new thing for me.