YMMV / Synecdoche, New York

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Caden is gay and in severe denial. It's even occasionally alluded to In-Universe, such as several characters asking if he is, his dying daughter insisting he left her to be with a man named Eric (implying he may be repressing actual events), and all but one of his shown sexual encounters end either due to him ending it or due to interruption. Even when Tammy asks if he is gay, Caden responds "I only love women"^note Which could arguably be interpreted as "I'm not attracted to women, but I only love women", and the time when he has sex with Hazel a second time can be explained as a singular exception.
  • Caden has sex with several women throughout the film, several times, and the sex only ends prematurely twice, once because he starts crying, and once because he gets a call saying his father is dead.
  • There is also his marriage to Claire. Did they get married only for sex or did Claire actually love Caden at first? Her coldness towards him could mean either.
  • Alternatively, maybe the film follows Caden's realization that he is actually a transgender woman. That would explain the frequent suggestions that Caden is a woman, including when Clair says he smells like menstrual blood. Caden increasingly takes on the role of a woman named Ellen, and at the end of the film literally swaps roles with her.
    • Maybe Caden put on the performance to explore his identity and realized at the end of the film that once he took on the role of Ellen, his exploration was complete and he no longer needed the performance.
• Anvilicious: Charlie Kaufman does not let up on beating the audience over their heads about the concept of death. The ending credits song is especially blatant.
• Awesome Music: Something You Can't Return To, Still Can't Return (Still Trying), and Can't Return (For the Last Time) are all very simple and somehow still beautifully arranged songs that perfectly portray the existential dread and sorrow of the film. So much so, that it's enough to give a listener their own soul-crushing existential dread.
  • Ok.
• Epileptic Trees: The film opens itself up to this readily. One of the most popular ones is that it's an example of Dead All Along.
• Funny Moments: Around the time of Caden's diagnosis, little Olive yammers on about poop in the car.
  • "Fuck everybody. Amen." (also a Moment of Awesome and Tear Jerker)
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • In the opening of the film Caden reads a newspaper article and thinks Harold Pinter's died, then reads it again and notices he's actually won a Nobel Prize. This is a reference to a flub made by the reader on Sky News. Pinter then died for real less than two months after the film opened.
  • The entire film. Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman. A man who died young. Based entirely around death.
    Hoffman's character, Caden: Regardless of how this particular thing works itself out... I will be dying...
• Jerkass Woobie: Caden is not particularly likeable, being a solipsistic, morbid, arrogant character. And yet despite his unlikability, the audience can't help but feel some measure of sympathy for the misery that is his life.
• Strangled by the Red String: After a single night of sex, the movie cuts straight to Caden and Claire getting married despite the former's feelings for Hazel.
• Tear Jerker: The bedside goodbye to a dying character, doubles as Funny Moment, simply because the ludicrous amounts of schadenfreude that Kaufman throws at Caden.
  • Millicent's monologue about the daughter she promised her mother she'd have, but never did.
  • Caden's distraught reaction to seeing his daughter having become a tattooed erotic dancer.
  • Olive reminiscing on playing the fairy game with her father.
  • Caden and Hazel's last night together, especially when you know what happens next.
• Vindicated by History: When the film was released, it was met with deeply polarized reviews and financial failure. However, the film has been steadily picking up a cult following after its release, helped by people like Roger Ebert, an early defender of the film who named it his favorite film of the 2000s, and Your Movie Sucks, who dedicated a multi-part series towards analyzing the film.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Symbolic?: There's plenty of real symbolism, but it is possible to over-analyze the film. In Roger Ebert's essay on the film he suggested that the fact that people are in rooms is a metaphor for life.
• The Woobie: Hazel is the one character who doesn't have a single Jerkass trait and actually cares about Caden. Unfortunately, they never got to marry despite his true feelings, and after many years have passed, she ends up dying next to Caden in bed while smoke fills up her house.

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