Cartesian Theater

This week we will be screening Synecdoche New York, the directorial debut of Charlie Kaufman, famous as the screenwriter who penned Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Synecdoche New York centers around a paranoid playwright who receives the MacArthur genius grant, which he uses to produce a piece of “brutal realism”, an autobiographical play that recreates his live in duplicate, even hiring an actor to portray the actor that portrays himself. Synecdoche New York is paired with The Violence of the Letter by Jacques Derrida which we will use to analyze this film through the lens of deconstruction, which will provide us the tools to crack into the structuralist motifs and symbolism in the film as well as provide critical analysis for the motivation to include these motifs in the first place