I have never before been so baffled by people’s responses to a movie. From the “it’s unbelievably weird” response to the “it’s relentlessly depressing” response to the “it’s so superficial” response, all the negative reactions make no sense at all to me. It’s not very weird: its basic story and themes are easy to follow. It’s not relentlessly depressing: it’s enormously funny (I was laughing pretty consistently throughout it) while remaining deeply sympathetic toward its protagonist’s unhappiness. And it’s not at all superficial: its endless self-reference and narrative contortions are not simply cute postmodern playfulness; they are woven together to create a very meaningful portrait of art and common human problems.
Of what does that portrait consist? The protagonist suffers from the same fundamental problems as most people, but he and the film focus relentlessly on them, trying to capture and refine them in art. Like all of us, he knows he is dying, but that fact is always in front of him, always prominent and defining (his name, Cotard, refers to Cotard Syndrome, a psychological disorder in which the sufferer believes himself to be decaying or dead); he is in a stasis because of this, losing his sense of time, always trying to capture life to avoid its end, always surprised by its movement forward. Like all of us, he knows that he exists as a corporeal body, that he acts in and as his body, but that his body is fundamentally beyond his control; this is emphasized by the pustules, raised veins, the other maladies that he suffers from, and the sycosis/psychosis pun that he tells his daughter about (the movie seems obsessed with medical terminology). Like all of us, he sees others as having fixed characters/characteristics, based on their relationship with us and on their previous behavior, and hence wishes them to have certain fixed, meaningful roles in his life story; but like all of us, he realizes that each person has a radically subjective existence, distinct from his view of them. Sometimes the realization of this is jarring, as when he sees the strange path that his daughter has taken in life. He tries to capture this radical subjectivity, this fact that every person is the center of their own life story, in his play, but of course this attempt to recreate true, intersubjective experience in his art also emphasizes his objectification of others, since he is casting people into their roles.
But furthermore, like all of us, he is self-aware, he sees even himself in certain terms, as having a certain well defined character, and he sees his experience as forming an evolving story. But he sees this in higher contrast than most people do: he sees himself on television and in ads, he is surrounded by the notion of himself as protagonist, and with each discontinuous jump in time, he is surprised by what has happened to his story (and hence made doubly aware of it as a story). Furthermore, he is followed by a double, someone always watching him and eventually recreating him. Thus, his life has an audience. But that audience is his double: it is him, a layer of his self-consciousness, while at the same time it is only a simulacrum of him, just as our self-conscious selves are always existentially displaced from the “selves” we are aware of, the selves-as-characters. So he tries to capture even this aspect of life in his art: he is a character in his play, a character that creates another such creator-character. And from that we get the most exhilarating scenes in the movie, the suggestions of an infinite recursion as each layer of the play creates another, each one slightly displaced from the last. For me, those scenes had the beauty of a Borges story, the sense of reality being stripped down in front of me.
The ending, while going a bit overboard in its sentimentality, carries these ideas to to their extreme, as Cotard gives up his role as creator and adopts a completely distinct role within his creation. In this sense he ends the recursion, ends the endless displacement of himself from himself, and takes up a fixed, well-defined role under somebody else’s direction. (Note that the apartment he cleans is being sublet from somebody named Capgras, which is the name of a syndrome in which the sufferer believes that somebody has been replaced by an impostor.)
Now what of the charges against the film? Perhaps the most puzzling criticism of the film is that it is just littered with oddities for oddness’ sake. But all the oddities, besides being humorous, have meaningful roles. Take Tom Noonan’s character, a bizarre not-quite-double who has been following Hoffman for years. In one sense, he serves the standard purpose of the double (see, e.g., Dostoevsky’s The Double), accomplishing what the original cannot. He acts as an emblem of Hoffman’s self-awareness as well as the limits of selfhood. But in the film’s structure, this takes on additional meaning, in that he also exemplifies the relationship between the audience and the artist, with Noonan studying Hoffman the way an audience studies an artist. But Noonan is not just any audience member: he is a stand-in for Hoffman’s own role as self-critic. Hoffman as creator and Hoffman as self-critic are at a distance from each other, they cannot be identified. And Noonan’s actions, his divergences from Hoffman, act as a constant reminder of Hoffman’s inability to control his creation, even insomuch as he is a part of it.
Take another example: the burning house that one of the key characters lives in. It is largely played for laughs, the characters behaving perfectly normally even as their house is on fire. But it also works with the film’s themes. Hoffman, despite his relentless self-analysis, is always shocked by the events of life. Time passes him by without him really knowing what’s going on. The film presents all of life as something that is on fire, something obscure, always changing and uncertain (a very old idea: compare with Heraclitus and The Fire Sermon from Buddhism). The fire in the house exemplifies that: everything is always uncertain and decaying, and the characters cannot help but live in this burning world. But the fire also plays a dual role: there’s a scene where the fire takes on an almost comforting, romantic aspect, playing on the traditional iconography of the warm fireplace. That too, works with the film’s approach, which sees the warmth and comfort people can provide amidst the main character’s uncertainty and slow demise.
Lastly, consider the odd lesbian relationship between Hoffman’s daughter and Jennifer Jason Leigh. It’s not just an oddity, but the final exemplifier of how Hoffman experiences life, always surprised by what happens to him and the paths that others take. The fact that his daughter takes the strangest path is only fitting: even the person closest to him is completely alien to him. He cannot understand her, nor she him. That also plays into one of the film’s central themes, which is how people view others as supporting players in their life story. For Hoffman’s daughter, his identity is completely different, his story is completely different than the way he himself has experienced it.
Another criticism is that it is too depressing. Well, the film is filled with sympathetic humor, so that charge seems off-base. But I also don’t see a problem with the film’s focus on a depressed character. Why shouldn’t the film deal with a chronically unhappy individual? People often are lonely and depressed, sometimes chronically so; loneliness and depression are extremely common experiences, feelings that almost all people experience at some point and sometimes continuously throughout their lives. More importantly, for many people, art is a way of understanding their own unhappiness, of finding meaning in it, of placing it in a larger context of life, and of feeling commiseration or solidarity in its presentation of other people’s similar feelings. The movie allows the audience to accomplish this, but it simultaneously explores their desire to do so.
Other people have criticized the film by simply characterizing its meaning as “art mirrors life”, which is absurdly reductive. Art doesn’t simply mirror life; it is a means of purposely constructing a mirror of life. But the mirror is always incomplete: all of life cannot be contained within art, which captures only fleeting images of life. That’s the most basic aspect of the film: the lead wants to capture all of life, he wants to move outside of himself and his own unhappiness to capture reality qua reality in his art. But he can’t really do that; he can only capture bits and pieces. At least, he can’t do that while he attempts to control the art–but when he abandons control, when he becomes a part of his creation, then the difference between art and life becomes somewhat ambiguous. But even then, as you say, he still ends up lonely and depressed. Art does not allow him to escape himself.
Also, life mirrors art, not just vice versa: it influences what it attempts to mirror. It becomes a lens through which one sees one’s own life, until one cannot tell which feelings and thoughts are “original” and which are derived from art. For example, when I first read Dostoevsky, I related to his depictions of psychology to the point where I felt that he could be describing my own mind: but now, it’s sometimes hard to tell how much of my view of the world he described and how much of it was actually inspired by his writings. This melding of art and reality goes well beyond mirroring—it is an endless recursion—and the film’s depiction of it is superb.
existentialism is a film 