Synecdoche

io9 looks at neuro tourism in the films of Charlie Kaufman, and his upcoming directorial debut Synecdoche, New York.

The movie we're most eager to see this spring may well be 'Synecdoche, New York,' the directorial debut of Charlie Kaufman, who wrote 'Being John Malkovich' and 'Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind.' Will it be science fiction? We don't know yet. But we do know it'll be mind-bending, and judging from the synopses we've read, it'll explore a theme dear to Kaufman's heart: physical locations as reflections for places in the mind.

In a nutshell, Philip Seymour Hoffman plays Caden Cotard, a theater director who's directed Death of a Salesman in the small town of Schenectady, NY. He gets a MacArthur grant to do a Broadway production, and wants to create a work of "brutal realism and honesty." So he gathers a cast in a warehouse in New York's theater district and directs them in a "celebration of the mundane," living out their lives in a scale model of New York itself. (Hence "Synecdoche.") Read on.