Synecdoche, New York
For about an hour after leaving the theatre, I was in a complete daze. The fog that had descended upon the city was certainly no help.
I became acutely aware that I was not a real person; that I was actually just one of Charlie Kaufman's meta characters; that the fog I saw around me was a metaphorical one; that these streets were the pathways of my brain; that my struggle to find my way home was the cinematographic manifestation of my struggle to comprehend the film I had just seen; that my every step was being projected against a screen in a theatre somewhere far away, being reviewed, being applauded, being reviled.
Slowly, and with the help of less complicated popular entertainment, normalcy returned to my world. I stopped yielding to my invisible author, stopped acting for my invisible audience. But my brief moment as a character in a Kaufman screenplay will not soon be forgotten. This is the kind of effect great cinema should have on us, no?