Synecdoche New York
Black Comedy is a funny thing. It may not be laugh out loud, guffawing, slap your thighs kind of funny, but it does make us laugh. Ok maybe a wry chuckle?
Black Comedy is more thought provoking, a comment on life. It looks at the dark parts of life, the aspects of humanity and the soul that we may not want to face, and force us to confront it and laugh it.
One of the masters of this genre is the multitalented Charlie Kaufman whose directorial debut Synecdoche New York comes to Blu-Ray and DVD on the 12th of October.
"I think the movie is fun," says Kaufman. "It has a lot of serious emotional stuff in it, but it’s funny in a weird way. You don’t have to worry, ‘What does the burning house mean?’ It’s a burning house that someone lives in that’s funny.
"You might get more out of it if that particular metaphor speaks to you, but you don’t need to. Hopefully the movie will work on a lot of levels and people can read different things from it depending on who they are."
Black comedy on the cinema screen isn’t exactly new. Dr Strangelove is perhaps the best known mainstream example. Despite the main themes being nuclear war and the animation of the world the film is played for laughs.
The audience sees the futility of the situation, and can laugh at it because they see how ridiculous it truly is. The same stands for Synecdoche New York, and the main character of Caden Cotard, played by the marvelously versatile Phillip Seymour Hoffmann.
Certainly the nucleus and anchor of the film’s verisimilitude is the stark performance of Philip Seymour Hoffman as Caden.
Caden’s life is veering widely off course, he is embarking on a wildly ambitious play, his wife has taken his daughter to Berlin and a mysterious condition is systematically shutting down each of his autonomic functions, one by one.
Sounds like a laugh a minute right? To think that would be to miss the point of black comedy. Take the most recent Coen Brothers film A Serious Man. The main character of Larry Gopnick has a run of bad luck that would bring most people to their knees.
In the case of Kevin Spacey’s character Lester Bernham, in the throes of a mid-life in American Beauty it does indeed end in the bleakest way possible.
However, as the situations that both of these characters encounter are presented in humorous way we don’t leave the cinema depressed, we leave stimulated, and even, perhaps uplifted.
Synecdoche New York, and the entire genre of Black comedy may walk the fine line between despair and humor, but the reason they do this is to challenge us an audience and force us to make our own conclusion about what’s taking place on screen, and in the world around us.
Kaufman doesn’t want to spell it out for people. "One of the things I think is really exciting and joyful about the experience of being an audience member is figuring things out," he says.
"When you make a connection, it’s yours, and there’s a thrill to that. After all isn’t that what good cinema is all about?