I’M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS and the Jarring Fatalism of Charlie Kaufman (Patreon)

Over twenty years ago, Charlie Kaufman emerged into the scene as the rarest of figures: a screenwriter savant who also somehow also became an industry darling. 

He achieved this feat through the wickedly devilish Being John Malkovich, the triple-backflip narrative theatrics of Adaptation, and the more empathetic Oscar-winning turn of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Looking back, there was something alchemy-like about these creative collaborations. It was as if you could see Kaufman’s hyper-cerebral storytelling get filtered through impish humor of a director like Spike Jonze, or the playful humanism of Michel Gondry, or even the lighter-than-light touch of George Clooney. But ever since Kaufman took over directorial duties of his own work with 2008’s Synecdoche, New York, there has been marked change in tone. Kaufman’s direction could easily be regarded as more stilted in presentation, more emotionally detached, or even outright macabre. Which should perhaps give rise to a simple realization: we’ve been directing his scripts as these head-scratching comedies, but maybe they’ve always been fatalistic horror stories all along. 

The difference in public response has also been noticeable. To be clear, I like his recent directorial work, but there’s no doubt that I have a different kind of relationship with it, as do many others. For whenever I talk about Synecdoche, New York or Anomalisa or even his newest work, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, you there seems to be a lessened passion from the collective response (but like everything, it has its devotees). More importantly, I don’t think Kaufman gives a fuck. After all, it’s that same disregard for “supposed to’s” that brings about works like Adaptation in the first place (which really was supposed to be a straight adaptation of The Orchid Thief). And much more importantly, Kaufman’s new work is just as daring, if not infinitely more so. He seems utterly unafraid to dip into the existential, the academic, and the absurd with reckless abandon, often crafting a thematic labyrinth so deep that you can get lost in it. Still, there’s an exacting method to this madness.

That’s right! Your boy is going to talk about Bertolt Brecht!

That sound you just heard is the audible sigh of theater kids who have had to deal with Brechtian discussions for far, far too long. But the quick explanation of Brecht so you don’t have to click on a boring Wikipedia article is that he’s was a famous war-time playwright who fled Germany before Hitler took power and helped usher in the notion of “epic drama,” which basically means he made a lot of work that didn’t air on the side of naturalism. Instead, he created plays with more abstract presentations and relies “on the audience's reflective detachment rather than emotional involvement.” In other words, it’s work that directly prods your cerebral side by aggressively presenting ideas in artificial ways. It’s not after your empathy or your heartstrings, but your open-minded lack of those feelings completely. Heck, it regards narrative is almost an obstacle in thematic communication. If you want to imagine a play of his at its most stereotypical, imagine three characters each representing different ideas shouting at the audience with picture frames around them. It’s making it clear: THIS IS A PLAY! THESE ARE IDEAS! For better and / or worse, that’s Brechtian art.

But like all words that center around a singular artist, it’s also a washy-washy term. I mean, we often call things “Lynchian,” but it’s ultimately vague. In the end, only David Lynch can do “Lynchian" things because everything else just feels pale imitation. Because of that, I’m only concerned with “Brechtian” cinema in the way that Kaufman is Brechtian (or Kaufmanian? Sorry, I’m making it too complicated already). 

So let’s put it like this: in prior work, Kaufman would be narratively playful, but was also still guiding the audience through an emotional journey with logic you could pretty much follow. But since Synecdoche, there’s no more hand holding. The characters are far less your surrogate in journeys into the weird and wild, but instead they often get lost themselves. Likewise, his latest films give less and less of a shit about logic and coherency. They are also increasingly interested in the issues encroaching death and the lack of ability to find meaningful connections and relationships during our brief time in this mortal coil.

All of these things form the backbone of the aptly-named I’m Thinking of Ending Things. 

It all starts simple enough with that titular sentence, really: we join a young woman (an incredible Jessie Buckley), who muses in her head that she’s thinking of ending things with her boyfriend, Jake, who has picked her up in order to visit his parents house. So much of the early film operates within her head space, whether it’s her apprehensions with the depths of his growing attachment, the worry of the trip happening too soon, and the worrying of not being able to get back home in time for work tomorrow. Then things start shifting in small, unnerving ways: a perfectly new swing-set appears outside a dilapidated house, there’s haunting scratch marks on a door, a dog constantly shaking off water, and even a mortifying story about a pig and maggots. “Life is brutal on a farm,” Jake tells us, but these moments are like classic horror movie warning signs. But this is more of an existential horror film and thus, all these things are entryways into the conceit.

To cut to the chase: the entire film is basically a meditation on Jessie Buckley’s character being uncomfortably stuck in a relationship, or even certain relationship patterns. Everything about being driven to the home makes her feel worried, trapped, and off-kilter. We meet Jake’s parents, who hyper over-react to every moment (remember, we’re in epic drama Brechtian territory here, so it’s on purpose). Toni Collette’s mother character screeches and hides and cries at a moment’s notice. It’s as if everything about her demeanor evokes the sentiment, “If I had a dime for every time I laughed when I wanted to scream.” 

Meanwhile, David Thewlis’ father character is always staring airily like a vulture, prodding with a wicked tongue pressed firmly in cheek. They’re both performing with that absurdist, exaggerated, jarring, whip-lashing pantomime, wholly meant to unnerve us to our deepest core (I genuinely had to hit pause on the scene several times as anxiety skyrocketed). But Jessie Buckley’s character keeps trying to push through it, to make it normal, to ground in what she feels is her own reality. But things keep shifting, from the stories of how they met, to even the name they call her. What exactly is happening here?

Well, we’re seeing Jessie Buckley essentially play different versions of women that Jake has dated. In one way, it captures how she is getting lost in different versions of his exes. In another way, it’s how he’s literally railroading these women into the same role. I mean, there’s a reason her character is literally named, “Young Woman,” in the credits. So it all keeps shifting: her name, the story of how they met, the various ways she felt about him, all while constantly moving toward the more destructive ends of the painful stories. But there’s no real point to searching out who “she” is and when and why. Because not only is there absolutely zero baseline reality to this film, it’s not a puzzle, either. Instead, it’s a sweeping tide of emotions and symbols and abstractions. Thus, the way into is through familiarity of feeling.

And I’m Thinking of Ending Things manages to capture certain feelings so succinctly. Whether it’s the anxiety of visiting parents or the seeing of a person’s whole secret familial world. These are the sorts of visits that lay history before your feet, making you feel both in and out of time. Thus, the film is constantly making that feeling literal and showing us the parents at different stages of their lives. But it just further traps her character within the arc and pressure of time. She’s going to get trapped in this relationship. She’s going to get trapped by the weather. And trapped from her own agency. At one point there’s even a small, hovering snow cloud that is solely above her car, as if an act of fantastical cruelty. Once again, the realism of these scenes is just a roadblock. Whereas these sudden, jarring abstract sequences are a way of getting at the truth of the feeling more clearly.  

Their visit to his parents finally ends and it should feel like instant relief, but of course the root troubles linger on. At first it’s in the forms of niceties and denial as two proclaim trite, disingenuous statements like “I liked them” and “they liked you too!” But she keeps getting more and more lost in her various identities from the evening (even at one point showing a completely different actress). She increasingly fits Jake’s viewpoint and his history, particularly as she word-for-word copies the text from items in his room. And it’s not just that she’s losing her own agency, it’s the way one can always keep “sliding into” someone’s life or patterns. Making matters worse is the way that Jake keeps trapping the “young woman” in their travels, whether it’s a trip to the ice cream store, or, finally, by visiting the old high school he went to. But this where the movie also crests into a crescendo because it’s where two disparate threads finally come together.

The whole film we’ve been seeing clips of an old janitor man, who is really just Jake when he’s older (if you’re looking carefully, you can know this from the onset because we see the actors switch as he’s looking from the window, along with a vast number of other hints). Again, it’s not about the logic of this transition, it’s the metaphor. Because the film is about Jake looking at this situation / dynamic with a mixture of both regret and yearning. He wants to hold onto everything, while simultaneously hiding the reality of himself (or his future), in which he is the literal “custodian” of his teenage self. But the notion of her “staying with Jake” is directly equated with atrophy and death. To her, it’s the feeling of horror. To him, it’s recognizing her feeling of horror and getting trapped in the nostalgic yearning anyway. Now, within this depiction there’s plenty of room for nuance in the emotions of both of them (and I’ll get into the finer points in a minute), and I acknowledge the film is still so effective in capturing the feeling of these situations.  

But there are two issues of approach that I would argue are less successful.

The first is in the construction. Remember how I stated at the beginning that it’s not about what does and doesn’t “work,” but the barometer of accessibility? Even with a film like Eternal Sunshine, for all the tricks, it is still a straightforward and emotionally driven story. But I’m Thinking of Ending Things is not only Kaufman’s most abstract work, it’s the most stilted in performance. Where his collaborative work could express moments through the lens of comedy, or find certain lines that cut to the bone, instead we opt for the detached and surreal. And as such, almost everything in this movie just exists in this constant rhythmless game of stopping and starting. Which means the conversations often feel eternal. And not in that ”still-functional-but-just-long” way. It’s not the Coen-esque treatment of “no exit,” nor any of Tarantino’s high-wire scenes of dramatic tension. Instead, it’s trying to be purposefully obtuse. You not only get lost in the length of them, it wants the stop and start every two seconds to create the constant stasis of death and frustration. 

Is it effective in this goal? Yup! But often in a way that can feel like a test. Or at least certainly a barrier with a big part of the audience that just wants to be able to gel along with the film’s intent. But again, it just comes down to being a choice of inclusion for the artist’s goal. So I will say the warning I usually do on whether or not you’ll jibe with it: “mileage may vary.”

The second area of approach is the film’s expression of pop culture. Some of which pops with this cackling glee, whether it’s the sublime Forget Paris reference or the meta Robert Zemeckis beat (which is one of the weirdest potshots I’ve seen in a film?). But more specifically I’m talking about the “word for word” essays that show up in dialogue, like the Pauline Kael review or the conversation on David Foster Wallace book of essays. It’s all part of the way characters start lecturing each other in a list memorized, rattled-off facts. 

Granted, there is a push-pull to the insufferableness of this. For it is at once aware of it, yet knows it is exemplifying it. And it best it captures that icky feeling that sometimes comes in intellectual families, where there’s this unspoken, insane pressure to keep up; often to get attention / brownie points / the only form of validation that kids can obtain (which is all something I know look back now at and see as a certain kind of hell). But I also feel like Kaufman is sometimes getting lost in it, too. The film is constantly straying too close to the My Dinner With Andre-ness (which is fucked up movie in retrospect), or god forbid, exemplifying the hagiographical instinct for the way Life Itself talked about art. It’s all part of the inherent contradiction: dramatizing the problems of getting lectured to is also BEING the problem. And even the film is aware of that, it echoes the exact line that Kael said about A Woman Under The Influence, “it’s exhausting, nothing she does is memorable because she does so much.” 

In that way, the same is true for the movie (even if it’s aware of it).

Which brings us to the problem of many “anti-movies” in that they are sort of the start and end of their own reflexive conversations. I mean, when you have a film where it is constantly calling out its own problems and leaving catharsis at the door? Or when you have a story where the characters are never, ever say what they are thinking and yet movies inherently depend on characters doing just that? Then you are going to wrestle with a constant state of narrative death. Likewise, since there’s endless space to reflect in the art, there’s no meaningful limits to that reflection either. I could take just about any scene or moment from I’m Thinking of Ending Things and expand it into thousands of words of analysis (don’t worry, I won’t). You see these whole slabs of insights that could go off in a million directions and in certain narratives, I’d find this endearing. In others, I’d find it boring. But the trouble is this film has all the insight, but doesn’t send me off. Instead, it makes me feel like I’m grinding against a certain issue and how it always fits into Kaufman’s oeuvre: the preoccupation with selfhood.

Which means, yes, I’m talking about slow, seemingly-intentional, and perhaps purposeful “narrative switch” from the Young Woman’s headspace to Jake’s headspace. 

Make no mistake, we start the film firmly within the head of Jessie Buckley. Heck, the opening shot and V.O. seems a direct reference to “The Yellow Wallpaper,” which is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s early feminist anthem about the way women get trapped in the prisons of patriarchal society. Given the events that unfold within I’m Thinking of Ending Things, it’s a prophetic reference to how the Young Woman will get trapped. And at first the film pays so much attention to interiority and her yearning to escape. It then dramatizes the problems of how he’s been taught of how “it’s easier to just say yes,” or to normalize that which is abnormal. And soon she loses her very identity to his headspace (or maybe just his dreams). I fully understand how it captures the feeling of this so succinctly, but the thing it makes me ask is, “so what’s really going on with him?”

Better yet, why is he doing it? How does he feel about this process?

I’ll at least say this: Kaufman can rarely be tagged for a lack of awareness. Every single hateful, ugly flaw of Jake is sprawled out clearly. And as much as I can say that a lot of her characterization feels “off” in that way when certain men write certain women, it is aware of that. But awareness can only get you so far. And Jake’s fear of losing her can’t help but take center stage. From the very onset, Jake seems to almost hear the things she’s saying. But the more he becomes aware of it, the more everything about Jake slowly seeps into this manipulative slide. Even as she’s getting lost in her various identities, he goes to the reflexive space to hand wave it away saying “Most people are other people,” as if it’s some kind of justification. For all the clarity in the depiction of her fears, it all disappears and crashes up against his own insecurities.

First and foremost, there’s Jake’s fixation on the horror of aging. The old man body of his later self is displayed openly and with a kind sterile sadness, best exemplified by his maggot-infested pig of a partner. This is the thing he seems to be hiding from the “young woman” and yet also wanting to trap her in. And don’t get me wrong, there’s a conversation worth having about the decay of our bodies, but if we’re trying to talk about two-way empathy in this relationship, then it’s worth noting the unreferenced double standard here. Because the gauntlet of aging and being deemed as “unworthy” by our messed-up society is something women face as early as 19 years of age. And it’s not that I don’t think Kaufman wouldn’t have sympathy for this. But in terms of what we see in the narrative, he can only see the horror of what is happening to himself.

Which unfortunately gets coupled with the belief that he is inherently unlovable, a feeling we’ve seen time and time again. After all, the “happy” ending of Anomalisa is essentially that she got away from him and his bullcrap. Similarly, here the narrative of I’m Thinking of Ending Things all leads to a moment, a tearful goodbye between Older Janitor Jake and the young woman. Perhaps it’s just the power of the performances and that the film is finally going to a deeply emotional place, but the goodbye is incredibly effective, if not healing in some way when it comes to the core problem. But then comes yet another shift into the surreal.

I mean, it’s not that realism has had ANY place in this film, but suddenly we see the Young Woman and Young Jake connect again in this beautiful dance sequence. But once again, it becomes fleeting as a dance version of his “old janitor self” shows up again and she runs as if he’s a storybook villain or monster. It’s as if even the dream can’t last, as it all gives way as we come back to old janitor, now naked and exposed with his maggot infested pig friend (I feel insane describing this sequence as if it was a logical plot). This is his fate, but even as it meanders, it once again gives way to one last fantastical moment.

One where Jake stands up and gives a speech on stage in fake old age make-up. He tells us “he accepts it all” and expresses all the platitudes of thanks and that his partner stuck by him and owing “the mysterious equations of love” and “you are the reason I am,” but there’s this inescapable hollowness and insincerity to what he says. Nothing about any of this feels real, right down to the pantomime of the audience. It’s all Kaufman’s feelings on the emptiness of “the stage,” and his role as an artist within his career (yikes). Finally, he lays down and sings “Lonely Room” from Oklahoma, but in this perfunctory nature. Sure, it’s all a dream sequence, but also perhaps the most tired and empty one. Fittingly, it ends with the car outside still just covered in snow… the inclination being clear: he (or even they) stayed trapped in the dreams of his head.

And thus, it is the jarring fatalism of Charlie Kaufman that has come to light once again.

Look, there is no doubting the thematic mastery of any of this expression. It makes it known what it’s like to feel these particular things. To be the man terrified to be broken up with, to see oneself as unlovable, to see self-decay and outright declare, “a pig infested with maggots, it may as well be you.” It is to be trapped in those heaviest of emotions. There is a level of self-loathing that is so specific to what he does. And executed with a level of insight as to be masterful. But as an audience, how often we’re not really interested in mastery, but the notion of commiseration. Which brings to the central question that is always our crux…

Is this your worldview, too?

At one point Jake asks, “It seems hopeless, doesn’t it?” / “What does?” / “All of it.” And what’s funny is it’s not exactly that Kaufman is trying to rub our nose in some nihilistic point like Lebowski, he just gets caught in its orbit. And for films so mired in depressive feelings, I can’t help but wonder about the lack of therapeutic language around any of it. Especially given that we’ve seen the ways he’s wrestled with it time and time again, sometimes to beautiful or tragic results. But lately it’s gone on to feel like he keeps hitting those feelings harder and harder and I feel like there are two core problems that continue to be un-healed.

The first is that absolutely nothing in Kaufman’s work ever really seems to exist outside his own head. In one way, that’s always been the strength. He was always so great at bringing you into his (just as he longed to put himself in others), but in another way it creates an impossible gap to bridge. Because you don’t really know the vulnerability of any filmmaker until you know what they’re in awe of. But with Kaufman, awe always seems to take the form of existential terror and self-loathing, which puts us at the root of nihilism. Which brings us to the second problem. That would be specifically when Jake says, “animals can live in the present. Humans can not, so they invented hope.” And it fails to embrace a most singular of counterpoints…

Even if we invented it, it is still real.

And that’s the whole thing, isn’t it? Kaufman can’t grasp onto that as a reality. True, there are few storytellers who are so apt at capturing the sadness of this existential entropy, but he can seemingly never figure a way through that doesn’t seem insincere or ironic. Even when it comes to the “young woman,” his empathy for her character is less about her own wants and needs and more acknowledging the hell-scape of the fact that she has to be connected to him. And even when his art can recognize the endless reflexivity of different moralities, there is so little that speaks to core notions of decency anyway (at least on the page). So we already know how this goes on in fatalistic ad nauseam. And so does Kaufman. In Synecdoche, New York, his stand-in character proclaims: “I don’t know why I make things so complicated” and the response is “it’s what you do.” And now he keeps getting stuck in the same traps.

So perhaps, in the end, it comes to something simple.

There’s a point in I’m Thinking of Ending Things where they are discussing media and art and artifice and Jake calls it “the society of the spectacle,” and then “one of the beautiful lies to occupy time.” And there’s something evident in those statements that is getting lost (just like the invention of hope being real). We see all the kids dancing at the high school, getting ready for the play, and it’s like he secretly knows all this youthful art is a distraction, something done in the outright ignorance of quickly approaching death… But this dancing is not ignoring death. 

In fact, the inescapable reality of death is something most human beings can internalize very, very quickly. And thus, as trite as the explanation is…

Death is the reason we dance.

I wish I could leave the essay at that simple a statement, but it would be useless. Because the real obstacle is that Kaufman likely already has heard this expression before, probably a million times over. He can recognize that notion as one of the many possibilities of life, just as he can want to believe in it so badly. But he’s stuck in that place of not believing precisely because he sees the dancing as a distraction, or maybe just fleeting. He skips to the endpoint. And it is not as if I don’t understand the adult notions of regret, or loss, or self-loathing, in fact, I live in these spaces so often they’re suffocating. But I also know the alternative is not impossible, nor a trifle. And I’m lucky enough that sometimes, just sometimes I can feel it. 

But I don’t know if Kaufman can, nor do I know if he can take the stage of expression with passionate verve. And even though the failures to do so are something I have deep empathy for, there’s no feeling of futility like the pain of watching someone “be stuck.” Or worse, the pain of watching them try to make others be stuck in their stuck-ness. So for twenty years now, I can’t help but feel like this tragedy keeps playing out in slow time. Kaufman might even feel the same way, too. 

So sure, I can say: “it’s the reason we dance.”

But the problem is that I don’t know how to make someone else internalize that.

<3HULK