What Can Synecdoche New York Tell Us About Our Current Political Moment (that The Matrix Cannot?)
The Matrix is based on Baudrillard’s work - but he famously didn’t like it. Why this Charlie Kaufman film might do a better job of representing his thought and today's public sphere.
This piece is based off a talk I originally gave at the Kairos Club in London.
At first glance, Synecdoche New York, a film that turned 15 this past month, is a reflection on the existential absurdity of death. The protagonist Caden is dying, plagued by a mysterious illness. His daughter, too, notices her stool is an improbable green. The first scene with an obvious break from reality provides the telling image: people living calmly in a house on fire. Mortals won’t last long.
Other moments of unreality reflect the nature of aging: Caden is plagued by time slippages. Where it seems like a week has gone by it has in fact been months, the four-year-old is now eleven. Time is slipping through his hands.
This alone makes a perfectly presentable existentialist absurdist play, Beckett for 2008. For those who don’t know the film, Caden soon wins a MacArthur Fellowship and uses it to endlessly rehearse a miniature version of his own life in a giant, expansive and ever-growing warehouse set, for what appears to be years. He hires an actor to play himself, and one to play the people in his life. Soon there are multiple people playing each role, with plays within plays. More than this, the reality of the warehouse merges and changes his real life, and before too long it is his life. Indeed, throughout the film, reality is not just elusive but part of a Mobius strip whose indistinguishable other side is a fiction partly of his own devising.
Time slippages are not just a phenomenon of aging, after all, but central to fiction, where we jump forward and flash back. We see signs of this unstable relationship between art and life throughout: Freudian slips provide spoilers for later parts of the film. The character Clare attends a funeral and discovers the eulogy is somehow her own; the character Hazel seems to improbably know things she should not, as if in touch with the script of the film itself. Tellingly, many of these odd elisions and disjunctions in perception happen via the media: Caden finds himself in his daughter’s television cartoons and, without permission or causation, on his therapist’s website. The movie is overall highly attuned to - and perhaps even anxious about - the way art can invade and reshape life. “I don’t get this book”, Caden tells his therapist. “Oh, but it is getting you,” she says with unrepentant glee. The art in the film ‘gets’ its audience, far more than the audience gains mastery via art.
It is for this reason that the movie is perhaps most commonly tied to the works of the French theorist Jean Baudrillard, who argues that modern life involves living inside a sort of simulation. Baudrillard does not mean a sort of computer simulation or one run by aliens of some kind; he is not suggesting that in the facile way Elon Musk does. Rather, he means we are living inside a system of signifiers that stand in for the real things, in such a way that they essentially become the real things for those using them, untethered from any wider reality. If you are a public figure (and to some degree, even if not!) your social media profile is a signifier that may at this point take up more space in people’s mind than anything about the ‘real’ you. It is more real, in this sense, than you are. In some cases entire systems of representation are created that only vaguely approximate anything from the material world (consider the stock market!) and yet these simulacra - representations of things that either never have existed, or no longer exist - are incredibly real in their effects. This is of course especially relevant for politics. We do not experience most political events firsthand; we see them through the lens of the media. Baudrillard’s most famous example is the Gulf war. In a series of essays entitled “The Gulf War Will Not Take Place”, “The Gulf War Is Not Taking Place” and “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place”, written before, during, and after the Gulf War respectively, Baudrillard notes that for most people on earth, the war was only observable through mass media, where it was portrayed, propagandistically, as a true two-sided war, whereas it was in fact a mostly one-sided atrocity, with the reality of civilian deaths largely obscured. The insight was powerful in 1991, of course, but it’s all the more true today: we relate to the world through the lens of a particular diffuse set of media that may have very little to do with some reality on the ground.
Like Baudrillard’s work, and perhaps consciously building on it, Synecdoche New York demonstrates our reality is not just perceived through art or the media but created by them, until fiction and reality merge. Indeed, a more intelligent version of the reactionary psychologist Jordan Peterson would love this movie for its gentle jabs at the sort of strawman postmodern aesthetic in which there simply is no fixed signifier for what is good or beautiful or true. Caden hopes that he can find stable meaning through his great work of art, claiming “theater is the beginning of thought” and hoping that in making his magnum opus “something honest will evolve.” But that honest thing remains elusive. Artistic expression is not enough for a good life, and unmakes us as much as makes us.
It is notable that Caden and those around him are highly complicit in their own pain: they are literally creating a fiction that is meant to replicate modern life, and in the process of performing this they make perception, for themselves and others, all the more difficult. This is particularly true when it comes to relationships. As each person in the film, acting in the meta-meta-verse of Caden’s theatrical creation, increasingly preoccupies themselves with acting like someone else, recognition becomes impossible, even as the characters increasingly long for one another. “There’s a side of Caden I can’t explore without Hazel,” Sam says. Absolutely; so it is with us all. We rely on others to construct and maintain our sense of self, to access our own possibilities for being. But this is a risky business, especially in a world of intentional fictions - the world of the giant warehouse play, to be sure, but also the world of 2023 (more on this shortly). No matter how beautiful, our fictions have a tendency to misbehave, as Caden most obviously learns when the actor who plays him secretly dates the woman he, real Caden, desires. Fiction takes on a life of its own as we rush towards death and reach for each other.
Lest this seem specific to the absurdity of a Charlie Kaufman film, allow me to suggest that we all are cast in our own and other’s fictions all the time. Most obviously, we create narratives to retell and explain what happened to us in the past. When we face loss, we tend to replace one person with another (what else is a rebound relationship?); when we have emotional needs, we might force a stranger to step in and play a crucial role. This is not only a matter of the human condition but also a matter of the insidious influence of fiction in our lives, of our too-passionate adherence to our own stories. What ultimately follows is something recognisable to anyone who has had a parasocial relationship with a celebrity, a difficult relationship with their parents, a gut-wrenching breakup, or even a falling out with a friend: two people can see the same situation so differently that no recognition is really possible. We can love deeply and become indecipherable to one another, unreachable, untrustable. Caden’s last scene with his adult daughter is a perfect depiction of the impossibility of recognition in a world where fiction has torn understanding asunder. They speak at each other but never access each other’s understanding of what occurred. There is no “closure” . Mutual recognition is rare and, counter to our current cultural obsession with therapy-as-salvation, sometimes impossible.
What, then, can we make of this film today, some 15 years after it was released? 2008 was, if anything, a premature time to release a film about the metafictional nature of modern life. Facebook had just become popular among students, most news was still received from mainstream channels, and it would be eight years before Trump the reality TV star became a viable presidential candidate. Today, Facebook has become the metaverse, Trump is the model for a whole host of parasocial political relationships, and TikTok determines what music we listen to. We have willingly embraced the constructed media world as real more than ever before, and it in turn determines much about how we live. The same dislocation of signifiers that made for a trippy art film on the human condition in 2008 has now become a shared societal unreality. Today, Putin’s lie that “it’s not a war, it’s a special military operation” is an almost eerie inversion of what happened during the Gulf War (where a one-sided special military operation was portrayed as a full-on war). It will certainly appear true to most people in Russia, given the media they can see. So too in Israel. So too wherever the next big conflict erupts. More than in 2008, far more than in 1991, we are facing a radical untethering of a shared social vision. There have always been lies about wars, but now one can choose which ones to read, distribute, and believe.
Today we are so immersed in intentional performative fictions that the film, which is meant to unsettle us, at moments seems still naive and hopeful. I want to suggest, however, that it does have one important insight to offer that is not found in other films, and specifically not in the most famous pop representation of Baudirillard’s philosophy, which is, of course, The Matrix, that film that not only spawned several blockbusting sequels, but also a significant political legacy. In that film, humans being farmed for energy by machines are placed in a simulation and must break out, famously by choosing between the blue pill and the red pill. Today, on the simulation-field of the internet, The Matrix is continuously used as a metaphor for our current political life. It is interpreted by conspiracy theorists as a metaphor for what it means to “wake up” from media lies about, say, vaccines or the shape of the earth. It is used by incels to suggest that men need to wake up to a particular understanding of the sexual marketplace. (Andrew Tate notably said the movie was part of his own radicalisation, and still talks about being trapped in the Matrix). Ironically, given how frequently it is used by right-wing causes, the filmmakers themselves, two trans women, likely saw the parallel to the difficult awakening to one’s own gender identity.
For all its immense cultural capital, however, The Matrix does not even begin to do Baudrillard’s underlying point justice. There is, in other words, a fundamental point it misses that Synecdoche New York “gets”. This point is that for Baudrillard, we are not simply mistaking the false for the real. Rather: we are making the real through our fictions. "The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory." The nature of the construction is, as I have suggested above, that of a Mobius strip. There is no true outside to our hyperfictional hyperreality. Caden really does become his wife’s cleaning lady once he starts to play that role. He really does pursue romance based on his fictions. We do this too, in all senses of the term romance. We choose our friends and lovers, role models, purchases, personal health decisions and political votes, off mediated realities, and these become non-mediated realities that then feed back into mediated reality. In these ways and others we are forced to consider the problems caused by a looping slippage of signifiers in an increasingly frenetic and indecipherable mediasphere, one endlessly more fraught than it was in 1991.
The Wachowski sisters loved Baudrillard’s work and explicitly based their film off it. They apparently required the whole cast to read his book (I would love to see images of this!), and they invited the man himself to work on further films, an offer he turned down. He eventually broke his silence to explain that he felt they had not captured the idea of a simulation well. For Baudrillard, we are collectively doing the simulation to ourselves--and there is no “outside”. This may be part of the appeal of the Matrix to those across the political spectrum: compared to the complexities of the modern world, it is actually reassuring to think we can take a pill and just “wake up” and “break out” of a simulation. But the political challenge we face is therefore much harder. There is no outside to break into.
Instead, we have to create good fictions that can then become real, so to speak. For Baudrillard, every first kiss is necessarily, at some level, a performative reenactment of the millions we have viewed and read about. So too is every revolution. To do better than previous kisses and revolutions, we’d have to choose to perform something different, somehow, and knowingly do so towards a particular end. This, of course, is playing with a kind of metafictional dynamite. But to pretend the situation is any simpler is to eschew responsibility, at our own peril. We cannot go back and refix the signifiers, nor should we want to, not least since they were generally fixed via empire, a false sense of “the end of history”, forced secularization, religious orthodoxies and so on. It might feel like this task is hopeless, like trying to choose up and down while being on a roller coaster in outer space. Yet it might be possible to reach forward and construct what some art theorists and political theorists term a “metamodern” way of thinking, one that can juggle both the insights of modernism and the sliding of signifiers that often-termed-postmodernist Baudrillard is pointing to. In other words, to choose playfully, bravely, and intentionally to take responsibility and build, in the face of a civilizational meta-crisis, a new sense of what is good, beautiful and true.
In the niche world of political theory that I was trained in, critical theory, there is a way of talking about what is “bad” that goes beyond the usual frameworks of injustice or illegitimacy. Some unhappy outcomes are not exactly “unjust” in the usual sense nor are they “illegitimate”, instead they can be seen as social pathologies. As the theorist Neal Harris puts it, consider a world where people have democratically chosen the government, and are granted equal access to international flights and vacations. That specific arrangement is not exactly obviously illegitimate or unjust (although there may well be injustices and illegitimate states of affairs bound up in the realities of climate change). And yet, on a planet on fire, something is still very wrong. While there may be any number of injustices or illegitimacies associated with climate change, simply describing these doesn't fully account for the harms created by climate change, or our lack of collective agency over climate outcomes - these are systemic properties that aren't inherently connected to the individually unjust or illegitimate features that comprise the system. Even if we cannot point to a single fixed signifier for right or wrong, it seems to me, even if we cannot find grounds to say something is unjust or illegitimate, even if time is slipping around us and we are living in our own created mediasphere, there are still cases where it is obvious that the current state of affairs is not preferable to alternatives, and indeed is pathological in some significant sense: causing a spiral of harm. Climate change is perhaps our most clear-cut example of this (though there are many others): the simulacra that is currently public life simply does not appear to have the capacity to deliver us the urgent solutions we need to save our own future lives from harm. It seems to me that the last shots of Synecdoche New York, where people have either died or possibly left the warehouse, make clear that the attempt to live life through this particular series of Russian-doll-like fictions has proved similarly pathological.
We are going to have to try to notice these social-pathological elements of our fiction-reality Mobius strip and rework them; we are going to have to pick our way through the rubble even as we face death (as Caden does in the last moments of the film). We need to take note of what seems likely to doom us, and try new fictions that might generate better realities, whether these are utopian visions, science fiction stories or social media spectacles. We have to try, even if we do not know for certain that - to use Caden’s phrase - something honest will emerge.