“Other animals live in the present. Humans cannot, so they invented hope.”
I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020, Charlie Kaufman) is a comedy about a YOUNG WOMAN meeting her boyfriend’s parents. Okay, but the movie itself is really a dance between:
· The interior sadness of the JANITOR
· His object of hope, the young woman
And it is through the process of simultaneously depicting these two ideas as art in which we move through a narrative relentlessly shifting its perspective instinctively and intellectually. The fun comes from how neither of these two inventions are straightforward. And thus, we get to explore this fictionalized psyche thinking of ending things for our own edification as audience.
Maybe the best symbol of this quality can be seen as represented by the two Oreo Brrrs (a frozen treat akin to the Dairy Queen Blizzard). Early on as the couple are driving, they pass a billboard advertising the Tulsey Town ice cream stand. A disembodied voice says, “Come, join me.” The voice is creepy. One meaning that could be read into this is that of being lured into obtaining something through the suggestive thought implanted by advertising, here being code for a romantic relationship.
Much later when JAKE decides to indulge in stopping for a Brrr, along with the young woman, he suddenly realizes he doesn’t even want it. More than that, now as he drives it starts to melt and he has to stop somewhere and get rid of it. Then he becomes distraught over thinking about how it’ll leave a sticky residue, nothing can calm him until he disposes of the dessert.
In the dumpster where Jake’s thrown away his and the young woman’s Brrrs, there’s a shot of the two discarded confections still full, atop a heap of nothing but other empty Brrr cups. This image left me wondering what it meant long after the movie was over. Sure, there’s the link to nostalgia that comes with the Tulsey Town song, like this’s Jake’s “rosebud.” But that seems too easy. It’s more like the hope the Janitor’s invested in finding love with the right woman, then at the end of his life finally being disgusted by that desire, painfully desperate to rid himself of it and any trace of it entirely.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things is so full of endlessly enjoyable self-reflexive occurrences. And these are what are so effective at defining its artistic tone. Take the pigs that died from being underfed. The way Jake describes it, the neglect happened thoughtlessly. Like it’s at the same time horrific and inevitable. And there’s a poignancy to the way he refers to both of the pigs being eaten alive by maggots. He doesn’t say how many pigs there were, but “both” seems to imply two—as in a couple.
Somehow this film is still always a comedy. Kaufman’s novel Antkind (published last month) is full of comic wordplay, including several different vaudeville acts and their routines. And though his screenplays have often played around with this kind of schtick, Antkind and now I’m Thinking of Ending Things present a phase where it’s used more often, and consistently.
Also amped up more in Antkind and the as yet unfilmed Frank or Francis screenplay is Kaufman’s satirical contempt for Hollywood, which comprises a significant part of the comedy in I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Although on a lighter note, one comedic vignette that soars particularly high is when the young woman suddenly performs as both Gena Rowlands’ MABEL LONGHETTI (aided by a cigarette she smokes that appears out of nowhere) and recites by rote the infamous scathing Pauline Kael review of Rowlands performance of that role at the same time.
I don’t have any evidence to support this but, my final point I’ll end with is that I think the young woman met the janitor when he was around twenty, at the bar on trivia night. He asked for her number and she gave it to him. He called her and asked her out. And he never saw or heard from her again.
8/29/2020 Landmark Midtown Art Cinema
Atlanta, GA
