There's a good essay up on Bright Lights After Dark, wherein
Synecdoche appeals to me because I don't think there's an answer to the subjective riddle in the same way there was with, say, Jacob's Ladder, or the bland Vanilla Sky, or any other film where we follow the protagonist down a mindfuck rodent hole only to find an illuminating pot o gold at the very bottom (arguably even Mulholland Drive). You can intellectualize a method for understanding the bizarre sequence of events in the film (as I'll try to do in this blog post, paradoxically) but you don't get the impression that the story was intended to be understood this way. Not that Kaufman has made the “uninterpretable” holy grail of films, impervious to all brain-fart criticism. Quite the contrary. Synecdoche is a stylized Humpty Dumpty, and all the King's horses and men (Rex Reed is probably in the former category) can try with all their might to reassemble its shattered shell: all efforts will likely be in vain. But Kaufman may internally note with an impish grin that Synecdoche came to life as a disassembled husk; there was never any whole egg (or other metaphorical body) to destroy. (Source)
