Overt Freudianism in Film: The George W. Bush Years

Because we do not understand ourselves, our attempts to repair our lives are apt to make them increasingly worse.

The only experience we humans have in common is our desperate loneliness.

The most honest an artist is willing to be, the more artificial his/her art will become.

--themes observed in the 2008 film Synecdoche, New York


Insecure men with daddy issues, who attempt to mask their insecurity by swaggering around and refusing to see life's inherent complexity, deserve our sympathy. That does not mean, however, that we have to elect them president.

--theme observed in the 2008 film W.


Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York and Oliver Stone's W. are both exercises in Freudian psychology; both, that is, attempt to understand human motives with reference to Freud's mapping of the psyche. Neither filmmaker is particularly coy about this fact; for example, Synecdoche is full of Freudian slips (which are referred to by that term at least once), and just about every review of W. remarked on its interpretation of George W. Bush as someone still dealing, in his 60s, with a deep Oedipus complex.

Both are pretty good movies, in my opinion. But here's a difference: Stone's movie is straightforward in a way that would seem implausible from a Freudian standpoint. As David Denby said in a review in The New Yorker, "Even if the real Bush is as simple as that (which I doubt), he’s still a lousy movie character—an inadequate protagonist in his own life story." The success of Kaufman's movie, on the other hand, depends on its more-than-a-little bewildering plotline: if, in other words, someone claims to understand Synecdoche, New York completely, either that person is lying or else the movie failed (for him or her).

The first third or so of Synecdoche is fairly unadorned realism, a portrait of a family that looks like many families, and that (like many families) is in the midst of a crisis composed of many small problems with the potential to become large ones. The middle third is less realistic, and "reads" like a Coen brothers movie, with increasingly quirky characters and lapses from the plausible that seem to serve a realist end (such as the house one character contemplates buying despite its being on fire--homage to Barton Fink?--which seems a metaphor for her forced optimism despite a sense of impending doom). The last third of the movie, however, is full-out David Lynch territory, in which the lines between the real and the surreal (conscious and unconscious) are so blurry that they can't really be sorted out; the only option is to watch the interesting, blurry patterns. At some point, Synecdoche, New York becomes an account of its protagonist's dream, but it's not easy to say at exactly what point this occurs.

The protagonist of W., on the other hand, like that of Synecdoche, New York, doesn't really understand what is happening to or around him, or why, and (like his counterpart in Synecdoche) makes a mess of things in trying to wrestle his life into a plot he can make sense of. But his issues, as Stone interprets them, are half an inch below the surface. I enjoyed the movie, and I have a feeling it will help future viewers make some sense out of this moment in history, but it's less persuasive (and also less interesting) as a psychological portrait.

So it may be that Synecdoche, New York will end up being the more definitive account of the cultural moment known as the George W. Bush years. In fact, I couldn't help wondering what kind of movie would result from Stone and Kaufman collaborating somehow to blend the two, incorporating Stone's research and insistence on speaking plainly with Kaufman's disturbing analytical weirdness. What if, instead of a play-by-play enactment of what journalists and historians have concluded really happened behind the scenes, Stone and Kaufman concocted a version of the 43rd president who (like Synecdoche's Caden Cotard) hires actors to play himself and his cabinet members, each day acting out their most recent experiences while W. directs? Would that have more aptly captured the weird mixture of manipulation and sycophancy that Cheney et al. directed at their boss? What if, instead of Caden's attempt to construct an exact replica of part of New York City inside a warehouse, Stone/Kaufman's W. character built a scale model of Baghdad on the White House lawn, then slowly and unintentionally wrecked it? That would at least offer the possibility that, as an artwork rather than an actual nation, it can be torn down and forgotten about once its maker moves on--which, I guess, would serve as wish fulfillment for the audience.