I'm Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman, 2020) (Patreon)

This review will contain spoilers.

At first I found myself in a rather bothersome predicament. I was left cold by Charlie Kaufman's latest effort, and I suppose I could replace the word "cold" with the phrase "emotionally unmoved," so as to avoid the necessity of appending the phrase "no pun intended" to the sentence, which admittedly weakens the force of the judgment. But cold is indeed how I felt, and the material fact that much of the film takes place in a blizzard does not alter the chilly emotional distance between me and the film.

I suppose the fact that so much of Kaufman's film does take place in the midst of a blizzard could suggest that this icy disengagement is a feature of the object, and not, as they say, a bug. After all, the cold, chilly, icy response was intimately connected with a substantial aesthetic admiration. We should recall that the French word for "director" is réalisateur and I'm Thinking of Ending Things is nothing if not expertly realized. There's no question that Kaufman made precisely the film he wanted to. So the fact that as the credits rolled, I felt a bit like I'd been cooped up in an old sedan, in a snowstorm, without the heat on, after consuming half an Oreo Blizzard (or a "Brrr"), cannot be entirely coincidental.

So why was I nonplussed by my non-response? It wasn't really a semantic matter, a desire to avoid that irritating pun about the frozen mise-en-scène. And it certainly wasn't because I expect movies to transport me to some hypothetical emotional zone, the sort that Kaufman himself semi-parodies within I'm Thinking of Ending Things when he shows his protagonist (at least one facet of him/her) watching a goofy faux Robert Zemeckis rom-com. 

No, it was because at first I was afraid that my response really boiled down to something utterly pedestrian: "Kaufman's only good when he's funny." I do think that Kaufman's work has provided diminishing returns of late, and I really didn't want to find myself down in the crowd, shouting up at the stage for the artist at mid-career to "play the hits." Had it come to this? 

In fact, Kaufman's work has become more refined, not less comedic per se. And as it has become more refined, his underlying fascinations have emerged. Given that I'm Thinking of Ending Things is an adaptation (of a novel by Iain Reid), we don't see this to the degree that we see it in Synecdoche, New York and especially Anomalisa. But it's certainly there. Kaufman is most interested in using cinema as a way of exploring the philosophy of mind, in particular where said philosophy intersects with neuroscience. And it appears that his studies in this area are leading him to conclusions that I find rather ugly.

If we think about the premise of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, it is rather simple. Loss and forgetting (whether deliberate or inevitable) does not mitigate our basic need for happiness. Even if we are essentially doomed, we owe it to ourselves and more importantly each other to "do it anyway," to forge ahead and commit to our imperfect lives. By contrast, I'm Thinking of Ending Things is, in part, a portrait of dementia. The scrambled chronology, the interpenetration of self and other, the expansion of single moments into false, hypothetical lifetimes, all point to Jake the elderly janitor (Guy Boyd) losing his faculties.

But this fact of mental deterioration is mapped onto a life of utter failure. As we gradually perceive everything and everyone we see as various facets of "Jake," what do we discover? That he dabbled in this and that, but amounted to nothing. That we watched young people come and go, and saw some of them end up living lives as meaningless as his. That he felt shortchanged, as though he was smarter and more entitled than his lot in life had indicated. That his well-meaning parents were hopelessly provincial and could not provide him the intellectual guidance he craved. And that in fact, he was little more than a compendium of all the things he read, saw, watched, listened to -- in short, a third-rate copy of true talent.

Of course, we are all "composed" of the texts that form our consciousness. The idea of ex nihilo originality has long since been dispelled. But Kaufman fails to distinguish this "anxiety of influence," on the one hand, from the fragile ego boundaries of dementia, on the other. I'm Thinking of Ending Things pathologizes our Derridean condition -- "there is nothing outside the text" -- first as the mark of mediocrity, and finally as the sad infirmity into which we all eventually slide. So when Old (Fantasy) Jake (Jesse Plemmons) takes the stage to receive his Nobel Prize, and quotes A Beautiful Mind and sings "Lonely Room," Oklahoma's tragic plaint of the pathetic, misunderstood Jud Fry, how are we to take this?

It's as if the postmodern condition, and the limitations of human neurobiology, are conspiring to rob the American white male of his just deserts. (He even seems to resent that David Foster Wallace is held in higher esteem than him, because he killed himself and fulfilled a "mythology.") What a bitter, misanthropic person Kaufman has become. Brrr, indeed.

UPDATE: I just read Adam Nayman's piece on Kaufman. And, to quote the philosopher D.J. Khaled, I played myself.