Knowing Your Own Death in “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”

I’m thinking of writing about Charlie Kaufman. This has been a mantra of mine for years. It appears every time I rewatch his films.

He has been one of my favorite directors and screenwriters ever since my first exposure to his work with Eternal Sunshine of The Spotless Mind during my dramatic teenage years. While there is no end to the movies I profess to love, and truly do, Kaufman’s work resounds through my being.

Despite this, I have never actually managed to write about him. The parallels between this failure of mine and the language within Kaufman’s newest film, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, are perhaps what finally brought my mantra to fruition.

Here I am, writing about Charlie Kaufman. The fears, doubts, and insecurities that stayed my hand before are still there, but even with them present, I am sitting down to write about this film.

Synopsis

Based on a book by Iain Reid of the same name, I’m Thinking of Ending Things was released on Netflix in September of 2020. I immediately devoured it.

The film follows an unnamed woman (Jessie Buckley) taking a trip with her boyfriend, Jake (Jessie Plemens), to meet his parents. They discuss a number of different topics and the unnamed woman gives a haunting full read of Eva H.D’s poem “Bonedog”, as they drive to his parents’ farmhouse. Jake’s parents (Father played by David Thewlis and Mother by Toni Collete) ask her probing, uncomfortable questions over dinner before they begin to waver through time; appearing as various versions of themselves throughout their lives.

The couple leaves in the middle of a blizzard and stops at a local ice creamery before heading to Jake’s old high school. There is a confrontation with the school janitor (Guy Boyd) before the ending erupts in a surreal cacophony. Finally, it is revealed that Jake and his girlfriend are figments created by the janitor while he contemplates his identity and suicide before dying at the film’s conclusion.

Kaufman and Women

Many have seen the role of women in Kaufman’s films as that of objects; constructs for the men to use as fuel for their own self-improvement and growth. And they’re undoubtedly correct.

In movies like Anomalisa and Synecdoche, New York the male characters’ engagement with women revolves around a belief that these women will somehow change the man’s life for the better. They are a means to an end.

However, a feminist critique of Kaufman shouldn’t stop abruptly on this point; it ought to question the film's representation of these characters’ actions and where this flawed assumption leads them.

That is nowhere more evident than in I’m Thinking of Ending Things.

The main character, ostensibly, is the unnamed woman, who I will call Lucy from now on; both to keep things clear and also because the character demands a name. Unlike the aforementioned examples, the audience is encouraged to form an intimate, identifying relationship with Lucy. We hear her thoughts, view the world through her perspective, and learn about Jake and his family as she does.

Yet, she is a fantasy. She is a character forged by Jake’s loneliness and shattered aspirations.

It is almost comical how appropriately this describes the failure of Kaufman’s male characters throughout his work. In Anomalisa, Michael sees the same face on every other person because he treats other people as products, and once the novelty of Lisa’s personality wears off (which was always a fantasy version of her actual personality) she becomes just another indistinguishable product in his eyes. In Synechdoche, New York, Caden dismisses his wife, Adele, for a younger woman because he sees himself as a failure in her shadow and desires someone who will feel the same way about him.

This film has many of the same connotations. Lucy fills a hole in Jake’s life. She is designed to fulfill him. Yet, underlying this familiar Kaufman dynamic is an understanding that it is a fantasy; a coping mechanism to ease Jake’s loneliness.

One might assume Lucy would be Kaufman’s most male-humoring version of a woman because of this. Instead, Lucy is the most rebellious.

Her first line, the title of the film even, is a rebellion against Jake’s placement of her in his fantasy. No matter how Jake alters her profession, appearance, or name, Lucy disrupts and struggles to escape back “home” despite having none.

Lucy is a condemnation of the behavior of Kaufman’s male characters. If she, an ideal of a woman without a real-world counterpart, struggles against Jake’s consignment into his fantasy, then how could real women like Lisa and Adele not?

Ipseity Means Selfhood

From this stems a confounding question left dangling in my mind since my first viewing; does a character have personhood, even if they aren’t founded upon flesh and blood?

And from this grows another. Do our self-conceptions possess more validity than that of a fictional character?

As Lucy struggles with her contorting reality and shifting backstory in the film, the question is turned onto the viewer. Are you an independent creature or, like Lucy, a character contrived by an outside force?

Control over one’s identity, reality, and personality is questioned continuously; from Lucy’s monologue at its start to the assertions (or is it assertations?) of the phantom pig at its close. No scene serves as a better example than the film’s arguable climax; Lucy’s descent into the basement.

After a harrowing trek through the house, Jake’s mom asks Lucy to take a filthy nightgown down to the basement. Here she finds a hole in Jake’s construct, an unfinished portion of the fantasy. The reality of her existence, and Jake’s, is revealed. His janitor uniform churns in the washer and Jake’s failed painting ambitions lie next to professional works which Lucy had earlier claimed as her own.

In this moment she reflects, “‘Nothing is more rare in any man,’ says Emerson, ‘than an act of his own.’ And it’s quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions. Their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. That’s an Oscar Wilde quote.” Even her ruminations on her lack of self-origin are expressed through quotes made by other people.

But is the self dependent on originality? Independence?

Alongside Lucy’s fight for identity, for proof of original existence, is Jake’s. Whereas Lucy struggles for ipseity outside of Jake’s construction, Jake fights for it outside the circumstances of his reality.

For there is a fantasy Jake as well. The character first presented to the audience is one unburdened by the limitations of real life. He is a physicist with a girlfriend, still full of youth and possibility. This idealized character is credited as “Jake” at the film’s end, whereas the real Jake holds a minor character title; “Janitor”. The question becomes, which of these identities is Jake’s real self? Or is he both?

What Happened to the Lambs?

Other than selfhood, the only concern the film devotes as much, if not more, time to is death, or more so, the state of dying. This can be seen best in the fates of the lambs and the pigs.

On a tour of the farm, Lucy asks about the dead lambs frozen at the door of the barn. Jake callously dismisses her concerns as “they’re already dead. What else can happen to them… they’re frozen solid for now, so they’re fine. No worries.”

Yet, in the next moment, he shows her the empty pigpen. The story behind it is a horrifying tale, one Jake hesitates to tell her. Some time ago, Jake’s father didn’t check on the pigs for a few days. When he finally did, he found them huddled in the corner of the pen. Turning them over revealed an infestation of maggots on their bellies; eating the pigs alive.

The film is preoccupied with death in these two forms. There is death — final, certain, and admirably stripping the dead of their concerns. There is dying — disgusting, unknowable, and pitiable.

Jake’s parents are dying. As Jake attempts to introduce his fantasy girlfriend to them, his parents age and regain their youth seemingly at random. In this is a twofold death, they are dying both physically and as people.

Selfhood is again represented as something beyond control. The complications that arise in old age (tinnitus, dementia, Alzheimer’s, physical and mental deterioration) reshape Jake’s parents and their behaviors. We, Lucy, are able to see them as elderly and defined by their ailments in one moment then youthfully free of them the next. Jake’s parents connect the continual death of living with the continual death of the self. Both become unknowable, both disgusting and pitiable.

Lucy directly points to this as she remarks:

“People like to think of themselves as points moving through time. But I think it’s probably the opposite. We’re stationary, and time passes through us; blowing like cold wind, stealing our heat, leaving us chapped and frozen. I don’t know, dead. I feel like I was that wind tonight, blowing through Jake’s parents. Seeing them as they were, seeing them as they will be. Seeing them after they’re gone.”

It is the inevitable dying that comes from living. Inescapable. Unknowable. A subtle deterioration of both our bodies and who we are that only becomes clear when seen holistically.

Knowing Your Own Death

There is an answer to dying. It is presented to us even without viewing the film. I’m thinking of ending things.

The answer is death. Suicide.

As we learn at the end of the film, the phrase “I’m thinking of ending things” serves not only as Lucy’s affirmation of existence, but Jake’s contemplation of ending it. It is a death you know; finite and unchanging.

Jake has constructed the fantasy of Lucy, the trip to his parents’ house, and the final scenes in order to escape the unknown dying that has plagued his life. Despite his hard work, despite his dreams, he has ended up an old, puttering janitor at his former high school. He lives in the farmhouse he grew up in, unable to change his life and stuck wasting away in both body and mind. Alone.

Albert Camus, another person whose works resound through my being, argued “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”

Older Jake calls Lucy while they are visiting his parents’ house, saying, “Now is the time for the answer, just one question. One question to answer.” These questions are the same.

In the end, Jake decides that suicide is better than dying. The final moments of the movie reflect this answer. As Jake kills himself in his truck, he abandons the dying that has afflicted him over the course of his life.

He is no longer a janitor, he is a Nobel Prize winning physicist. He is adored by everyone he knew in life, wearing elderly make-up, but suffering none of the reality of old age. He performs a musical piece, “Lonely Room” from Oklahoma! (an almost unbelievably applicable number), to a standing ovation. He is able to bask in the joy of a life fulfilled, dreams achieved, happiness, success, family, love, and goals completed.

Till the fantasy fades and the reality of his suicide plays behind the film’s end credits. It is haunting.

Jake chose to know his death, to forget his dying, and create a version of himself he could be happy with. The audience, however, is left with the tragic reality of his death.

Much like incorrect interpretations of Camus’ argument, some viewers might see this consideration of suicide in I’m Thinking of Ending Things as a harmful inspiration. I have personally dealt with the fallout of suicide and seen the damage it can have on those left behind. So at first, I was concerned about this through line in the film; suicide as an acceptable alternative.

However, the effect of the final shot shows the true ramifications of such a choice. Kaufman even remarked in an interview with Eric Kohn of Indiewire, “There’s actually a lot of stuff in the end credits that’s important to me… It’s an intentional thing, the way it plays out.”

By leaving us with the snow-covered truck and sickening realization that his body could be discovered by schoolchildren, Kaufman shows death isn’t an admirable balm to the problem of dying. The fantasy of Jake’s life dies with him, leaving the audience with nothing more to watch except soft, shrunken credits.