In Charlie Kaufman’s 2008 film
Synecdoche, New York Caden Cotard, the main character played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, is a theatre director working on a grandiose production that will capture life as it really is. Cotard’s project, autobiographical in its essence, would aim to represent each and every important moment in the life of its creator, Cotard himself, by painstakingly recreating it to be performed on stage in all its details. The theatrical performance would, thus, be a kind of detailed commentary on its director’s life, a narrative within a narrative, a
meta-narrative of sorts, that would reveal the true essence of something.