The Ash Twins Blog

From William Safire’s On Language:

[M]etonymy, pronounced muh-TAHN-uh mee, identifies a person or thing by something closely associated with it — like “the brass” for high military officers, “the crown” for royalty and “the suits” for executives, usually male, and other stiffs in traditional business garb. “Metonymy is not to be confused with synecdoche,” I wrote in a display of trope-a-dope, “which is pronounced correctly only in Schenectady and uses the part to refer to the whole” like “wheels” for automobiles and “head” for cattle.

Noone is a somebody who correctly notes the re-emergence of the synecdoche (sih-NECK-doe-key) in the punning title of a new movie directed by the Oscar-winning surrealist screenwriter Charlie Kaufman: “Synecdoche, New York.” Though panned in The Washington Times as “art-house pomposity,” Kaufman’s new work — whose hero is described as a narcissist haunted by the thought of death — is hailed as one of the best films of the decade by Philip Kennicott of The Washington Post. That reviewer notes that “my death is your death is her death is our death — possibly accounting for the title, which isn’t just a phonetic play on Schenectady but a speech form in which a part of something can stand for the whole.”

I would have said it differently. The life story presented in “Synecdoche, New York” is representative of the life of all humankind. The only constant in human existence is death, so humans are defined by death. Thus the entire movie illustrate’s one character’s quixotic efforts to gain immortality, but at bottom his life is just one slow process of dying.