I'M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS

(also includes spoilers for Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind, Not Synechoche New York (I really gotta watch that), and Anomalisa)

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I have seen a lot of mixed feelings about this movie. I understand, to some degree, where people are coming from. It’s not an easy film, had I not lucked out and caught the DVD case for A Beautiful Mind sitting on Jake’s childhood bedroom shelf, I may not have put together what was happening until the end, or not at all. Both would have been frustrating. Because this is a bit of a ‘puzzle-box’, it eschews emotional connection for form and thought. It’s Kaufman’s Tenet to some degree, but this one has so much more on its mind. I think because I caught on what was happening, again just by luck, I felt the rest of the movie a little differently. I spent less time trying to wrap my head around what was happening and was able to soak in it instead.

Kaufman’s works seem to deal primarily with ‘smart’ men whose arrogance and self-aggrandizement sets them up for pain. In Being John Malkovich, Craig thinks he can outsmart everyone and have everything. He thinks Malkovich is a shortcut to what he always thought he should be. He is punished by being stuck as a passenger Malkovich’s daughter. In Human Nature, the least of his films, Dr. Bronfmann makes his career ‘correcting’ the lives of others with what he believes is important. He is killed for his efforts.

His punishments stop being so cut and dry after that, and the men begin to prosper despite their humbling. In Adaptation, Kaufman’s insistence on being ‘authentic’ leads him down a path of destruction where he loses his brother but succeeds on his own ‘authentic’ terms. But this is only because he created so much conflict in his life that it resembles the heightened drama of a Hollywood film. In Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Barris is a failed ladies-man who dreams of being a TV giant. He becomes a CIA assassin, but finds out it isn’t anything special about him, but it’s his brokenness being exploited. He lives, and can be happy, but is trapped with his deeds because no one will believe him. In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Joel is cursed to forget the beauty of what happened, and then likely relive it, negatives, memory wipe, and all. IN SYNECHDOCHE, NEW YORK ______ MAYBE DOES SOMETHING IN LINE WITH THIS THEME. I really should watch that movie. I bought it years ago. I’ve watched so much garbage since then. Like it’s the length of two WWE Studios movies, and I’ve seen like six, and they’re so bad! In Anomalisa, Michael Stone sees and treats people as disposable, and his arrogance curses him to that pain.

In I’m Thinking of Ending Things, we see a similar pattern. Jake kind of exemplifies the kind of videogame gratification attitude towards life that seems to doom so many (primarily white men). The logic of ‘if I do A) I will be rewarded with B)’ just isn’t reality, and that attitude makes, men primarily, mad because the game isn’t working. He’s doing the what he was told he was supposed to do, where is his reward? This is where the film, reads kind of like ‘The Ballad of the Lonesome Incel’. For Jake, he is so smart, so well read, why wouldn’t any girl want him? Nevermind that he lashes out at his fictional partner when she says she’s aware David Foster Wallace committed suicide but doesn’t know a book of essays he wrote. How dare she not value the artists he values? The ones he has been told to value. When Buckley morphs into Pauline Kael, cigarette, and all, he is frustrated by her disagreement with him. But ultimately accepts her critique, because she is an authority, he has been told to value her. But he knows so much! Knows some physics, some biology, some gerontology, he’s so well read. But he has replaced his personality with trivia. His opinions are copied from those with authority, they are “correct”. He has cut himself off from the world and retreated into his own version that he can control. When his fantasy doesn’t go right and his mother mentions his painting, a trait he gave to his erstwhile date, he gets upset. When she gets confused between genus and genius, he has a violent outburst.

That’s why I don’t think this is a lament for Jake as much as it is just a presentation of this man, laid bare, with coerced naïf there to usher us through his mind. When he freaks out, we fear for Buckley, and we ask, ‘why is she dating him?’, even he doesn’t know deep down. Even in his deepest fantasies the self-loathing breaks through in her constant mulling over ending their relationship.

I’m still not sure how much I like the film. The lack of emotional engagement makes it hard to love. He has been able to tell these stories with much more pathos before. The film looks wonderful, inventive staging and production design give it an otherworldly, stuck-out-of-time look. I was surprised to see an iPhone in the film, the first few minutes gave me the impression it was a period piece. But that’s part of the fantasy, Jake’s fantasy world is in his prime. The film seems to speak in horror, using that film language well in set-ups, but there is never a payoff in that particular vocabulary. All the tension is dissolved instead of broken. As much as I am interested in what the film is getting at, and how it chooses to get there, but it only ever has me at interested. In a way it’s like Jake, a lot of ideas but without the rest of the intangibles that make you a full person.

So that’ sit. That and I can’t explain the cuts or camera coverage in the car. Weird.

May we all have a maggoty pig cartoon voiced by Oliver Platt* to save us from reality and bring us back into our fantasy world when times get tough.

*Fun fact, Oliver Platt and I were born in the same hospital.