Why watch Charlie Kaufman’s new film streaming now on Netflix, I’m Thinking of Ending Things? Why watch any of Kaufman’s deliberately difficult, occasionally hilarious, often harrowing, always unpredictable films? Or maybe the better question is, why watch any of the films associated with Kaufman, who is best known for his screenplays—for example Being John Malkovich (1999), Adaptation (2002), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)—while living through a pandemic in the first tenuous weeks of distance learning at Ithaca High School?
Surprisingly, Kaufman’s odd little film about a young woman who plans to break up with her boyfriend but nevertheless visits his parents during a long, strange, cold, winter night is garnering a large audience on Netflix and is being reviewed favorably by critics. This may be because it is sensitive to big themes—aging, time, love, relationships, loneliness. Or maybe it’s because the two lead actors are brilliant—Jessie Buckley in the role of the Young Woman and her controlling, consistently creepy boyfriend, Jake, played by Jesse Plemons. But I suspect that one reason it is getting such a positive response is that people feel like it speaks directly to our current situation. Rolling Stone critic David Fear says “Kaufman’s personal blend of seismic uncertainty, vulnerability and absurdity is exactly the destination you needed to end up at right now.” I don’t know why feeling uncertain and vulnerable—as so many of us now do—encourages us to embrace the absurd, and how “absurdity” became a desirable destination, but Fear’s statement offers us a way to start looking closely at I’m Thinking of Ending Things, examining both Fear’s classification of the film and the film itself.
The Young Woman whose interior monologue we hear throughout the film feels trustworthy, insightful, and honest, if sad. That vision is troubled by inconsistencies that emerge about her character—she is called Lucy, Louisa, Lucia; she wears a pink peacoat, then a blue one; she is a poet, a waitress, a physicist. When she and Jake are arguing about a film, 1974’s A Woman Under the Influence, the disparaging review she gives is verbatim the analysis published by film critic Pauline Kael. When Jake pressures her to recite one of her own poems, the piece she finally recites—a haunting, moving poem about loneliness—turns out to be written by the poet Eva H.D. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t have been able to recognize these ventriloquisms if not for a peek into Jake’s childhood bedroom, helpfully labeled “Jake’s Childhood Bedroom” in trembling print on a piece of paper taped to the door. On his crammed bookshelf is a compilation of film reviews by Pauline Kael. Open-faced on the bed is a collection of poems by H.D., including “Bonedog,” the poem we heard in the car.
It might begin to dawn on watchers of the film that our protagonist may not be real at all—that she may just be an amalgam of what Jake has read and thought and dreamed about. The idea that the whole encounter, the drive, the relationship, is a memory or a projection by a lonely man at the end of his life is reinforced by the other main narrative of the film, an elderly man who lives alone and works as a janitor at the local high school. There are hints throughout the film that Jake and the Janitor are one and the same person—or, at least, that the visions of the parents (who are middle aged when we meet them but flit in and out of different periods in their lives, solidifying the dream-scape conceit), the Young Woman, the farm, have come from the Janitor’s own memory or imagination.
If it is true that the Young Woman whose thoughts we’ve been following, as she thinks about breaking up with her boyfriend, who we see with and through her eyes, is in fact a person imagined by Jake who is himself a memory and/or fictional construction by an older Jake, then the film is not what we thought it was and the characters are not fully-formed characters in the usual sense. There is a class of viewers who find this possibility thrilling. The ground shifts under our feet. Everything is not what we thought it was. But there is another class of viewers—and I am among them—who find the implication that Jake and the Young Woman are one and the same not only disorienting but annoying. Instead of feeling thrilled by the prospect of the bait-and-switch, I begin to doubt Kaufman’s artistry.
The annoyance springs from the fact that viewers are compelled by these characters, especially the Young Woman—someone whose claustrophobia and mild confusion mirror our own as we watch the film. We share her occasional shudder of revulsion induced by some Jake-ism. How can Kaufman give us a character that we connect with and then rob us of the assumption that she is real? He takes advantage of our susceptibility as humans to connect with characters, see aspects of ourselves within them, and feel their emotions by some empathic property of human power.
I have acquired this scorn of bait-and-switch endings from another of Kaufman’s films, Adaptation (2002), written by Kaufman, directed by Spike Jonze. I think of Adaptation as the most successful and intellectually satisfying of Kaufman’s films. Adaptation tells the story of a writer who is given the job of adapting to the screen a book by New Yorker staff writer Susan Orlean. The writer’s name is Charlie Kaufman. The job he is doing is the job that Kaufman was given. That is not where the comparison ends. The real Charlie Kaufman, struggles himself with the idea of how to end a film and how to make a good and true film while still pleasing and retaining his audience. But of course, the whole work is a piece of fiction and is, at its heart, an examination of what it means to write well and how to construct and end a story.
One of the more clever ways the writer of Adaptation, Charlie Kaufman, helps watchers to experience the debate in a writer’s mind is by introducing us to characters who embody two sides of any writer’s internal conflict. In the film this split is manifested in the form of twins Charlie and Donald Kaufman: the clever, self-loathing writer and his stupid, self-loving brother. They show two possible directions in which writers could go: Do I follow pre-recorded rules (as the character Donald Kaufman does) or do I create something new (as Charlie Kaufman’s character attempts to do)? Adaptation makes fun of aspiring screenwriter Donald’s trite, formulaic, pre-established, and genre-conforming writing ideas. Donald makes free use of cliché, religiously attends workshops by screen-writing guru Robert McKee, and gleefully relies on a “big payoff” ending to tie together his flawed and illogical script. Charlie, on the other hand, thinks of writing as a “journey into the unknown.” When Donald solemnly intones the principles of good writing he’s learned from Mckee’s workshops (“Stories must have a beginning, a middle and an end;” “there hasn’t been a new genre of film since Fellini invented the mockumentary”), Charlie tries to introduce his own, much more creative vision of a writer’s life: “Look, my point is, my point is, those teachers are dangerous if your goal is to do something new. And a writer should always have that goal. Writing is a journey into the unknown, not building a model airplane.” It is clear to us that Charlie is the better writer, and yet Donald rejects his advice when crafting his exquisitely stupid screenplay, “The 3”. The “wow ‘em in the end” big reveal of Donald’s thriller is that the cop, the criminal, and the victim in the story turn out to be the very same person. Appalled, frustrated, Charlie asks Donald how that will work, logically, on screen and Donald responds nonchalantly: “trick photography.” Kaufman goes out of his way to prove that this formulaic structure is what is generally accepted and revered by audiences by ending his own film in a typical “big ending.” The guy gets the girl, the brother dies after delivering a life-changing speech, and the antagonist is eaten by an alligator. While Adaptation makes fun of Donald’s sacrifice of logic for a thrilling ending, I’m Thinking of Ending Things employs the silly ‘same person’ conceit but hesitates and leaves us with an unsatisfying and puzzling ending.
I’d like to now return to our motivating question: Why do we watch Kaufman films and why do we watch them now? Kaufman remains one of the few screenwriters who wants his audience to think, be engaged, and discuss his work. When we watch his films, we think about and discuss the difficulty of writing and how we end things, as it were. He even alludes to this in the title of the film—I’m Thinking of Ending Things is purposely ambiguous. It could refer to the Young Woman’s doubts about her boyfriend, the lonely Janitor pondering suicide, or Kaufman’s own dilemma of not really knowing how to end his film. We don’t watch his films because they capture some essence of the current era. Or because quarantine feels like an I’m Thinking of Ending Things-esque dreamscape where the days all blur together. We watch his films because figuring things out (or trying to), and talking to people you love (actual people who say surprising, reorienting things, rather than recite previously published passages and poems) makes every day interesting. Aging is real. Conversation should be stimulating. Time is precious.