A review by smart_as_paint
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

5.0

The year is two-thousand and four and we open on Charlie Kaufman. He is old, bald, repulsive, and a Hollywood screenwriter. He stares at a blank page, pinned in place by the unyielding carriage of a mechanical typewriter. Kauffman wants to write a film about the privileged trauma of writing, the guilt of unfulfilled potential, and the mental shortcut of grappling with a representational subsection of reality rather than trying to face the whole thing. It's all very confusing. One day, it's a movie that makes me cry. But today, Kauffman has writer's block. And so he picks up his favorite book, a well worn copy of Slaughterhouse-Five, and flips through the pages until the word "author" catches his eye. He reads the following sentence:


The author of the monograph, a native of Schenectady, New York, was said by some to have had the highest I.Q. of all the war criminals who were made to face a death by hanging.

"I think Schenectady sounds a lot like Synecdoche," thinks Kauffman. And so he types "Synecdoche, New York" and the top of the blank page.

And so it goes.