Title: I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Rating: 4 Stars
Charlie Kaufman just wrote and released a film for Netflix. There was no way that I wasn’t going to watch it. In fact, I’m surprised that I waited an entire week before finally viewing it. If anyone is going to watch it but hasn’t yet, spoilers are ahead. It’s really hard to write about a Kaufman mind fuck without going into details.
Jake and his girlfriend (sometimes called Lucy, sometime called Lucia, sometimes called Ames) are on a long road trip to meet his parents for the first time. As they drive, she is thinking of breaking up with him. When he interrupts her reverie, he seems to somehow be strangely aware of her thoughts. They engage in philosophical discussions. She recites a poem that she has written.
They arrive at his parent’s house. They sit down and have dinner. Jake’s mother seems strangely on edge and is nervously frantic, much to Jake’s disgust. Jake’s father seems to be somewhat befuddled.
Jake’s girlfriend wants to go home because she has work that needs to be done. Along with her name, her job also changes. She is, at various times, described as a painter, a physicist, and a gerontologist. Even though she’s in a hurry, she ends up upstairs, downstairs, and in the basement doing various activities. Jake’s mother and father change as well. Sometimes they are relatively young, sometimes they seem closer to older middle aged, and sometimes they are positively geriatric.
All along, as this plays out, there are scenes with a high school janitor interwoven. You see him clean the hallways, watch a musical rehearsal, and, while having lunch, watching a scene from a movie.
Jake and his girlfriend finally leave the house. On the way home, they stop to get some ice cream. They stop at the high school to throw away their uneaten ice cream. Jake goes in to talk to the janitor. He takes such a long time that his girlfriend goes in to look for him. Instead of him, she meets the janitor. There is a sequence where an idealized version of Jack and his girlfriend interpretively dance a version of a beautiful, romantic relationship. At the end of the dance, an idealized version of the janitor kills the Jack dancer.
The janitor finishes his shift and appears to have some kind of breakdown. He seems to have visions. One of the final visions is Jake, late in his life, accepting a Nobel Prize and then breaking into a song. At the end of the song, the crowd jumps up and gives him a standing ovation.
As this is happening, Jack and his girlfriend both seem to be quite erudite. This appears to be misleading. We discover that the poem that the girlfriend supposedly wrote is actually from a poetry anthology. They have an extended discussion of the Cassavetes film A Woman Under the Influence. The girlfriend gives an extended critical analysis of Gena Rowland’s performance. I don’t know where I heard this, but apparently it’s a full quotation from a Pauline Kael review of the film. One of the scenes with Jake and his girlfriend is a pretty exact copy of the scene that the janitor was watching on his break.
What does all of this mean? My interpretation is that Jake is the janitor. From the looks that high school students give him, it appears that the janitor is considered to be a bit of a creep. He probably lives alone. This is not a knock on the job of being a janitor, but I imagine that Jake once had more ambitious dreams for himself.
Jake (the janitor) is now dying. In his dying moments, he’s trying to realize an alternative life for himself. Naturally he’s visualizing a woman that he could have fallen in love with. Since this woman is not real, she can have various names and various occupations. There could be a couple of different stories of how they met. Since he is alone, even in his imagination he has trouble picturing how to have a successful relationship. The fact that the girlfriend, even in his fantasy, is somewhat dissatisfied is proof of that. He probably lived with and tended to his parents for their entire lives, thus leading to the confusing and conflicted relationship that he has with both of them. All of this is Jake the janitor trying to make sense of his final living moments.
Of course, with Kaufman, I could be totally wrong. In a previous blog post, I’d written about Kaufman’s mind fuckery. Where does this rate on that scale? It seems to be a different kind of mind fuckery. This seemed to me to be more David Lynch territory than Charlie Kaufman. I still think that Adaptation wins the Kaufman mind fuckery award.
Regarding the blog post title, one of my favorite podcasts is How Did This Get Made. It stars Paul Scheer, June Diane Raphael, and Jason Mantzoukas. Every other week they deconstruct some poorly or awkwardly made film. They ‘posit’ theories all of the time. One of the favorite theories that they like to posit is called Jacob Ladder’s scenarios. For those that haven’t seen Jacob’s Ladder, that film’s great reveal is that the entire film are the dying thoughts of the main character.
In my humble opinion, I’d like to posit that I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a classic Jacob’s Ladder scenario.
dorkenstein 