What Just Happened?

Last night, my husband and I went to see the latest creation to roll out of Charlie Kaufman's mind and onto the big screen: Synecdoche New York (please don't ask me how to pronounce that. Trying to convey to the box office worker what movie tickets I wanted was challenging enough). The movie started at 7:30. Two hours later, the credits started rolling and I had no idea what I had just seen.


I knew going in that it was a Charlie Kaufman movie, so I certainly wasn't expecting a straightforward romantic comedy. I love Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (confession: I still haven't seen Adaptation or Being John Malkovich), so I thought I could handle this movie. I thought very, very wrong.


Here's what I did gather (don't worry, there aren't any spoilers because honestly I wouldn't know what to spoil):

- The movie was about being your truest self (what that has to do with warehouses within warehouses within cities, I'm not sure), and that's something that resonates not only with me, but with everyone I think. We spend our whole lives being ourselves, but how often do we really know who we are?

- It had to do with theater, and representations of life.

There is one line from the movie that I absolutely loved though, something that the main character, Caden, said:

"There are millions of people in the world--and none of those people is an extra."