Spoilers: there is no meaningful way to write about Charlie Kaufman's I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020, Netflix Original) without revealing the film's morose conclusion and its occult structure. The attentive viewer will readily grasp that the film is not set in the real world but a domain of fantasy and remembrance within the first ten minutes. Accordingly, telling you how the film ends and explaining some of its structure shouldn't be too damaging to the reader's enjoyment of the movie. (In fact, the movie isn't made to be "enjoyable" in the conventional sense and so there's probably no harm in disclosing its secrets. But each reader will need to make his or her decision as to whether to proceed.)
I'm Thinking about Ending Things is probably the most elaborate move ever made about the death of a school janitor in the Midwest. Kaufman combines two antithetical ideas in the film. People are fundamentally inauthentic and contrive their lives from things that other people have said as well as quotations from books, poets, and films that they have seen. We live in a blizzard of cultural references that we don't control; rather, they inhabit us and guide our actions. Second, life is a macabre journey in which we are the playthings of time -- time blows through us like a gale and everyone exists in a transient world of appearances that fade away as we age and die. Time makes life a tissue of regrets and sorrow -- what we love passes away. The two themes are probably related on some religious level: there is a Buddhist sense that no one really exists authentically and that all pleasures (and pains) experienced by this inauthentic being are, in effect, illusory. (Certain aspects of Christian mysticism and modern existentialism may also be in play -- Heidegger says that human beings lead lives that are inauthentic and that the essence of living is a relationship with time and death --the gale that sweeps through us. The fundamental problem with these concepts, which Kaufman navigates skillfully, is that, if we are mere puppets trapped in a web of lies that we tell to one another and ourselves, then, why should anyone care about our sorrows and joys? There is no real entity that suffers. No one is home in the haunted house whispering quotations to us.
These premises are dramatized by a dream-like road trip taken by a young man named Jake (Jesse Plemons) and his girlfriend whose name is never exactly established -- it may be Lucy, Lucia, or, even, Louise. The film begins with the woman's monologue in which she says that "(she) is thinking of ending things." Of course, this phrase suggests suicide, but, soon, enough we are relieved to discover that she is probably alluding to ending her relationship with Jake. She and Jake drive through a snowy landscape that becomes, as he says, increasingly "farmy". They are traveling to visit this parents. There are several immediate clues that the surface narration is deceptive. Jake picks up the woman on a street in the "big city" -- but the street doesn't look urban: it's more like Main Street in a rural town in the Midwest. Second, Jake seems to sometimes know what the girl is thinking and can complete her sentences and, even, unspoken musings. Although the young woman is our access to the film and represents the movie's perspective (and consciousness) we don't learn too much about her -- and what we do learn is unclear: she is either a medical student of some kind or an artist or taking a film course that requires that she write an essay on John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence. (At one point, we're told that she studying quantum physics, but, then, these studies seem to be attributed to Jake.) We don't know anything about her life before she met Jake, either when she was out with her girlfriend at a bar where there was a trivia contest or a "meet cute" at a restaurant called The Red Line Cafe (where she serves hamburgers but is revealed to be a Vegan. (The Red Line Cafe biography is extracted from a movie that Jake is seen to be watching directed ostensibly by Robert Zemeckis.) After an increasingly eerie trip through an empty and desolate frozen countryside, the couple reach Jake's parents' place, an isolated farmhouse in the heart of the heart of the country. The encounter at the home is filmed like an extended sequence from a horror film -- there are gothic touches involving a story about a pig devoured alive by maggots, a locked door to the basement marred by nasty-looking scratches in the wood, and strange sealed rooms. Jake's parents beckon from an upstairs bedroom but, then, don't come down for a long time. When they appear, Jake's mother is strangely animated -- Jake has told the young woman that she is unwell and, possibly, dying but, at first, she seems vehemently alive -- and his father (played by David Thewlis) seems somehow deranged: his British accent seems oddly out of place and he makes strange jokes that seem somehow aggressively sarcastic. As the meal in the house progresses (it's farm-raised pork, of course) time slips out of joint. Jake's parents leave the room 50 years old and return in their eighties. His father, now, is senile and makes inappropriate sexually suggestive remarks to the girl. Jake seems to be attending to his elderly mother, feeding her soup, as she dies. At one point, the girl has said that she is an artist and shows pictures of her landscape paintings to Jake's father who acts obtuse about them -- "How can a landscape be sad without someone who is sad in it?" he asks. When the girl goes into Jake's boyhood room, she sees a big volume of Wordsworth and a book of movie reviews by Pauline Kael. Someone forces the young woman to go into the haunted basement. There, she finds a washing machine full of sudsy janitor uniforms and a little room filled with paintings -- but these are mysteriously the paintings that she has shown to Jake's father on her cell-phone, that is, her paintings but all signed "Jake." The blizzard is now in full spate. The couple leave the home and drive to a soft-serve ice-cream place called Tulsy Town (obviously a Dairy Queen) -- there they order milk shakes called Brrr! (again, the Dairy Queen Blizzard). Some pretty girls make fun of Jake who they claim to know from High School. Jake is now becoming increasingly agitated and menacing -- he starts to look more than a little like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Obsessed with finding a dumpster to throw away the uneaten milk shakes, Jake drives through the terrifying storm to a huge silent high school -- it looks like The Overlook Hotel in The Shining. When he tries to make out with the young woman, Jake says that someone is spying on them and vanishes into the storm. The girl follows him into the High School where a beautiful young couple are performing in the hallways the ballet from Oklahoma. (Jake has said that he acted in Oklahoma in High School, knows all about musical theater, and can sing songs from the Rodgers and Hammerstein score to the famous musical.)
By this point, the alert viewer will have deduced that the reason we know nothing about the young woman's background is because, notwithstanding the cunningly misleading voice-overs, she doesn't really exist. The entire film is taking place as an increasingly delirious fantasy, apparently imagined by the janitor in the ghostly deserted high school. The Janitor is Jake as an old man -- this fact explains the weird scramble of periods that the film shows: the decor looks like the fifties or early sixties, but people have cell-phones and discuss reasonably current events. Apparently, Jake broke up with the girl (or she abandoned him) and, ultimately, returned to the home place to care for his aging parents. They have now died and he is working as the night janitor at the high school. But he has decided to "end things" -- in this case, not a relationship but his life. The janitor goes out into the storm, sits in his pickup and takes off his janitor uniform (we have seen this in the washer at the parents' farmhouse.) It's a "paradoxical reaction" to hypothermia, feeling intense heat and stripping off his clothes. The dying man has several visions: he is led back into the school by the pig that the maggots have been eating alive. In the school, he is awarded the Nobel Prize for physics -- this takes place in the High School auditorium. Jake's lost girlfriend rises to applaud when he is given the prize. Snow covers the pickup and the janitor, presumably, dies. Thus, the whole film is revealed to be the dying fantasies of the school janitor, apparently, Jake as an old man.
Kaufman's point seems to be that Jake was never real to begin with and the girl, therefore, is doubly unreal -- although we have been tricked by the voice-over (which is presumably also Jake's fantasy) that the young woman is, in fact, the film's center-of-consciousness. In fact, Jake can complete her sentences and knows her thoughts because she doesn't exist outside of his increasingly feeble memories -- although the young woman may be based on a lost girlfriend, for the purpose of the film she's just a figment of the dying janitor's imagination. (This is why the girl's paintings, for instance, are pictures that Jake, in fact, made; the girl is a "woman under the influence" -- that is, wholly imagined -- in the blizzard, she quotes Pauline Kael, at length, from a famous review of the Cassavetes' movie but this is just something that Jake once read that he now recalls as he freezes to death. Kaufman is playing a metafictional game -- Jake imagines an adventure with the girl, but Jake isn't real: he's just a collage of quotations from Wordsworth, Pauline Kael, and Goethe (among others) -- in other words, Jake isn't real because he's made up by Charlie Kaufman, someone who has read the poet, the film critic, and the author of Faust. The entire film is compounded from quotations -- there are elements from Strindberg's A Dream Play and Kaufman reprises the surreal memories of the old professor in Bergman's Wild Strawberries, particularly in the scene in which the old Jake imagines that he has received the Nobel Prize for physics. (He wears the medal around his neck like the old man in the Bergman film). The picture also cites various horror movies, most notably The Shining. (Jake's mother is played by the actress who appeared in Hereditary, the celebrated recent horror film, and the family home has some of noisome atmosphere of the house in that movie.) Everyone wants to imagine that they are the hero of a musical, specifically, the handsome from Oklahoma, but we have misremembered our role in that show -- we weren't the hero, Curly McLain but instead the hired man Jud Fry who tries to rape the heroine and ends up dead. (Of course, the burly rough-hewn Jesse Plemons who plays Jake would be cast as the villain in Oklahoma.) Poor Jud is dead. Poor Jake is dead, frozen to death. Kaufman's film is impressive but almost too sad to bear.
No comments:
Post a Comment