The Absurdist Philosophy Of Synecdoche, New York 

Your sensitive, gentle yet sharply inquisitive approach, to even the darkest of themes, still surprises me. I`m glad that this planet has spawned a creative and humane person like you: ). Thanks for another meaningful feast for thought.

Do Magonolia!

I think people are thinking too deep into it about it have no meaning, the very last scene pretty much explains everything that its about. "What was once before you - an exciting, mysterious future - is now behind you. Lived; understood; disappointing. You realize you are not special. You have struggled into existence, and are now slipping silently out of it. This is everyone's experience. Every single one. The specifics hardly matter. Everyone's everyone. So you are Adele, Hazel, Claire, Olive. You are Ellen. All her meager sadnesses are yours; all her loneliness; the gray, straw-like hair; her red raw hands. It's yours. It is time for you to understand this. " We all have the same general experience, the same general anxieties, worries, the same "existence". That last line about "it is time for you to understand this" is a clarifying message imo about the purpose and intent of the movie. We arnt anybody, we are everybody.

Also then biggest reason "people" didn't enjoy it. So cool he followed 3 badass, over the top films with a more muted, nuanced, and truthful look at one man's life and being so truthful is what draws us fans towards it. This film is like Jennifer Jason Lee in "Anomlisa". .... Finally something that you truly resonate. Absurdism is the only "ism" that rings true to me.

What tf is it about ? The last minutes ?

@@dzungphan2665Just watch it. The less you know about it, the better. Trust me.

Exactly! Sitting with those thoughts is important, but we can't let them control us. Revel in the absurdity of life :)

Indeed, existentialism seems like a rather soothing philosophy - which is not seen often.

Eerie. I have almost identical aspirations. I fee less alone. Thank you for your comment!

What if they lose their meaning? Celebrating or beauty or joy or human connection...Not why but how do you exist in a world without meaning?

This is exactly the point I've now reached. Glad to see someone else has the exact same thoughts :)

Mauro Vargas me too 😞

Mauro Vargas He definitely played more than his share of fucked up roles.

Caden Cotard was his best role

I think that’s an understatement

Me as well

I agree :) Thanks!

Yap This guy is something else

@@LikeStoriesofOld wow in 3 years you have gained exactly 400K followers!! so inspiring to never stop never give up because you never know where you’ll be ✨ thanks for everything man

It took three years, but I found this comment, and I agree.

​@@InuranusBrokoffand here I am 2 years later at the end of the same journey

@@PKL-868and I am here 4 days later eating a lovely eggplant parmigiana.

Nice catch! :)

Keanu Clark The Myth of Sisyphus has one of the greatest openings, “there is but one true philosophical issue, and that is the question of suicide” (paraphrasing) . What a way to suck you in

You mean to the Camus text or to the Myth of Sisyphus ?

The bombs going off outside his apartment buildings is a hallucination/scene meant to represent his own anxieties on his own mortality, the zeppelins with spotlights are probably his dream of him and his work being recognized while it happens even though his only original work goes unfinished when he dies 50 years later, and the "13 million people" remark of his is the amount of actor's he has in his play, with his play essentially being his "world" as he is subsumed and consumed by it.

Colin Woods if you believe YOLO. And that we are separate. Another way of looking at it is we are everyone. The collective consciousness collects all experience, all memory, all lives lived as the cycles turn and we incarnate as everyone eventually.

Mate there's no evidence either way on what happens after we die ... Or before we are born either. If by nothing you mean that which is foundational and noumenal then sure, if you mean it all absences and disappears ... Then meh, that's as much an article of faith as saying it all stays and remains.

Fabián Pino beautifully said my brother.

Not everyone feels what you had felt. There are legions of individuals who are utterly ignorant of things beyond their present pursuits and goals. They look no further at life than what it can do for them, and where I'd once considered them fools, I now think of their abject blindness as a blessing to their soul. And I'm truly envious of that simpler way of being.

The universal fact of life is that everyone has to deal with existence in one way or another. Most ways are seemingly valid and have reasons to be so, from joining a religion or following some metaphysical answer to ease the pain and rejoin with your spiritual side, to following materialistic gains and an easier wellbeing, to devoting your life to an artistic pursuit. Thing is (in my interpretation), the movie points to the idea that no matter what you do or who you are, there's no blessing or curse, everyone will walk some of the same steps, from feeling lost because you question your identity, to longing for a love that wasn't meant to be or maybe questioning your fatherhood/motherhood or the lack of it. No matter the culture, wealth, education or gender. The legions of people that don't really care about existence also have to put up with the weight of these questions, maybe not in same words of Camus, Nietzsche or Kierkegaard, but in their own lens with their own answers, some being better and some being worse, but trying like everyone else.

This movie freaked me out a bit, def thought about it and felt a bit uneasy for a few days after seeing it for the first time back in 2011. Good movie tho i own it now. Rest in peace Philip Seymour Hoffman

His message is to suppress the truth of reality in order to preserve a false sense of joy and happiness. This type of message energizes you?

well you clearly misinterpreted his thesis. glad to see you here!! it means his audience is growing , the more the merrier , even vapid haters are showing up! welcome to the community seriously though , are you comparing his videos to this? ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-T-2YuPGYabw.html film essayers aren't WatchMojo

ze - Really confused on why you referred to me as a vapid hater, but I won't sink that low. It is what it is. Are you sure I misinterpreted his thesis or did I just unmask what he's saying underneath? The point of the video is that we live in a godless and meaningless universe where we are basically born to die, "the ending built in the beginning." But like the tragic figure destined to push a rock up the hill for all eternity, we can choose to acknowledge the absurdity of our existence and not allow it to drive us to despair. Instead, we can enjoy the temporary lives we have and attempt to savor the small amounts of joy that pop up in between the tragic destination of ultimate and final death. This is his thesis, friend. It's explicit. Underneath this stoic façade of happiness is pure suppression of truth, which is the edifice that holds the façade together, which can't be held back, no matter how much mental gymnastics a person can perform. This type of worldview is, as Camus rightly observed, absurd.

what do you preach?

i mean what is your ideology and what religion do your believe in that is clashing with NOT ONLY this video's atheist subject matter but also the FILM'S theme , which also was't very after-lifely , how else can i get the context to assure you that his "perfection" is nothing but a subjective compliment not on his VIDEO'S TOPIC , but the presentation of his essay , which could've been about anything if presented like this just because you disagree with him , does't make his video bad, but this last line im typing is an assumption

What was the wisdom you took from this video?

mortality and our stagnant schedules that we inherit from the ones before us that we pass down to the ones who come after us. this is the very vanity of our existence (or so we make it so)

mercy - That's empirical information.

how so bob

mercy - Based on your initial answer to my question, he just stated the obvious for you. If that's wisdom, then saying, "When it rains, people get wet", makes me a wise man if I point that out for you

- - very true

When you're young (in these types of societies anyway) you are in league with a consciousness that doesn't want you looking at anything that reminds of any truth of what kind of reality this is. Then for example, you would be bearing in mind that likes of the superhero stuff is your own stolen truth being sold back to you as plastic and fiction.

I think I watched this too early (kid)...like I understood everything, but that’s the thing. I understand now. Whats to come, what’s to pass, what’s to happen, like I see the truth. I see it now. And the truth hurts it really does. Though, I’m going to try my best not to be a victim of the game like Caden. But no matter how different I try to be, our fate is still to be the same. So in the end, I’m just going to try to live life in the now doing what I love with the people I love

I think experience brings appreciation. You just can't understand certain things without having seen or experienced other things. Very few children are watching this film and saying "Ah, and so at the end of her life, the daughter provokes her father into admitting to being a homosexual. How droll. Truly this moment stands as an analogue for all human communication."

Hopefully you enjoyed

exactly my feelings

Orson Welles LSD

I watched this and didn't understand it. But boy did I feel depressed and not know why. I think my subconscious understood.

@@Daelion164 it's a an existential clusterfuck and I love it.

@@bennielopez4981 best way to put it

That you begin your comment with the word "God" is such a lovely irony, and reading the rest of your comment as a prayer made it more true to me than most any prayer I've ever heard. I read a fantastic article by a physicist who has spent his entire life studying, researching, and writing about Time. It was remarkable because the nihilistic reaction to inevitable death exists only because of time--and, as the article describes, time is essentially a human illusion, created to make sense of all the stimuli coming at us. It goes on to say that in actuality, there is neither time nor objects. It says, "there are no things," and that past or future do not exist either. In that light, it may be easier to see that we all live all at once, expressed frozen in a cosmic amber, features of infinity that neither arrived nor departed. I've wallowed for years in the thoughts and feelings you describe, but for myself have come to see that there is a magick in this multiverse, and that all being and awareness belong to infinity, they grow, reach to awaken, and yet remain eternally unchanged. We float in a grand mystery, which is the whole of the delight. The film "The Tree of Life" expresses all this beautifully for me (including the remedy to personal death sorrow, in the life Malik describes as the path of grace), a film LSOO has also done a great video on.

Love this! Do you know the name of that article? :)

I love Sorrentino! Definitely hope to tackle one of his films at some point :)

I love that film, so I second your request! But I would also enjoy your thoughts on it, given your study; how's the essay coming along?

Spaz: The Spastic Colonel It was just a short essay, but I borrowed thoughts from David Foster Wallace regarding sincerity and analyzed three scenes, the one on the balcony with Jep and his friends, the flamingo scene and the end- and tried to argue for something hinting at a progression towards sincerity :) It was a lot of fun!

Emma K It does sound like an interesting lens to view the film through - it immediately made me think of the funeral scene, where Jep breaks down despite his instructions against crying to his protégé. Always gets to me. I have read a lot of Wallace, but I'm curious if you referenced a particular passage or work regarding sincerity; I can't think of one specifically, off the top of my head. I'm also curious about how you've enjoyed Sorrentino's other work: I started with This Must Be The Place, which was like a wacky miracle, then saw both Great Beauty and Youth shortly after, and I really couldn't pick between them; I was gobsmacked by both. I've gone through Young Pope a couple times now, and whilst fascinating, I confess I really don't understand it (though I could say that about a lot of art!). I seem to recall other films being out there, but I haven't got a hold of them yet. Something to look forward to! Cheers, Spaz.

Spaz: The Spastic Colonel Spaz: The Spastic Colonel I mainly used his essay E Unibus Pluram regarding television and US fiction (especially the parts where one goes into some sort of hyper awareness and the attitude towards television and watching it cynically was I thought very interesting). I have never actually seen The Pope, but I find that sometimes the most confusing ones are also the most interesting!

jay folk if he ever finishes it

The Film Freak beauty being its a project about the passage of time, futility, and procrastination.

jay folk I agree completely, but come on so we can hear his thoughts on the ending

The Film Freak a better wait than that album hes been working on. or shit, anything he isnt cynical of.

I love how meta those videos became once time started slipping through his fingers and YEARS passed by without him finishing it.

Nutbeam Boo

what kind of alternative to you refer to?

I am just trying to connect the dots, I just saw the movie and still not satisfied with any explanations so far

Subbed 👍

Camus wasn't a Nihilist at all and basically argued what you are arguing, that the answer to life's meaningless is to continue on living, enjoying life's simple pleasures even though it's ultimately meaningless.

that movie is brilliant. the whole trilogy.