Can you die in a synecdoche and would it be a good thing if you could? Would it be like dying in a parenthesis, as Mrs Ramsay does in To The Lighthouse, or would it be entirely different? At the end of Synecdoche, New York, Charlie Kaufman's first film as a director, Caden Cotard seems to die as a theatrical version of himself inside a replica of Manhattan in a warehouse in Manhattan. A voice that reaches him by wire and microphone has for some time been telling him what to do and what to say. Now it says quite gently, 'Die,' and he does. Or does he? Perhaps this is the dream death he awards himself. The voice is that of the actor playing Cotard as the director of his vast autobiographical extravaganza, a woman who has sought out the part and taken over. Is there another Cotard somewhere writing these lines for her? All this comes after most of Cotard's friends and associates have seen themselves represented by actors in his ongoing work, and after the actor who used to play Cotard, tiring of subterfuge or failing to understand the nature of artifice, has flung himself from a parapet to his death.

LRB 11 June 2009 | PDF Download