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

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TheKieslowskiHaze
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Re: I'm Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman, 2020)

#51 Post by TheKieslowskiHaze » Sat Sep 05, 2020 1:10 pm

The Curious Sofa wrote:
Sat Sep 05, 2020 11:55 am
There was a volume of Pauline Kael's For Keeps in Jake's room and Buckley's character quotes much of Kael's review of A Woman Under the Influence verbatim,
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essentially becoming Kael at that point. I think it confirms, as you said, that the film isn't necessarily about "mansplaining". Jake argues with the review, he fantasises about discussing art with a partner on that level. It's another instance where this clearly means something personal to Kaufman but it won't for many viewers. Then it becomes tiresome when the characters keep imitating Rowland's mannerisms in the film.
I wondered if much of that spiel was quoted from Kael, as I noticed the book too. Thanks for confirming.
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Jake's fantasy woman alternates between an intellectual who one-ups him in a movie discussion, to a poet, to a scientist, to a painter, to a starry-eyed fan of his trivia prowess, and to a kinda rube who needs books and words explained to her. In any case, Jake's fantasy of himself as a smart person is intertwined with his fantasy of himself as a boyfriend. She exists to (maybe among other things) stroke his ego about his own intellect.
Appreciate this explanation. From what I gather, the movie seems to work better as a companion piece to the book. It doesn't seem to make much sense otherwise.
I'm actually a little bit jealous of people who saw the movie without reading the book. Viewed through the lens of the book, everything in the movie makes sense. I'm not sure that's what Kaufman intended.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: I'm Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman, 2020)

#52 Post by therewillbeblus » Sat Sep 05, 2020 1:26 pm

TheKieslowskiHaze wrote:
Sat Sep 05, 2020 7:06 am
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Buckley's character is Jake's projection; she exists only for him to imagine that he has pleased his parents and for him to have someone to brag about his intellect to. In the book, he says things like, "What if I told you I was the smartest person in the world?" In the movie, he's constantly correcting her and his mom on pedantic points. He's aways asking if she's read things. When he brought up David Foster Wallace, the ultimate mansplainer's, lit-bro idol, I laughed out loud. Jake's pretentious, but he's had no one in his life to be pretentious to, so he made one up. Her breakdown, her thinking of ending things, is that fantasy's unsustainability.

It's more than just mansplaining, obviously; he created someone so he could feel like he mattered. But a big part of that creation is that he wanted a woman who saw him as smart, a woman to whom he could explain stuff.
All this said, I don't know what the deal was with that Women Under the Influence bit. Also, for the record, I love David Foster Wallace.
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I agree with this reading (the more I think about the film, I can't see it any other way- I mean, she literally glitches), though as I mentioned in my initial post I do think where Kaufman excels (and makes the film anything but 'having nowhere to go' after it reveals itself) is by showing how we cannot even have control over our projections/thoughts/internal parts. There's something very interesting, scary, and oddly true about how Buckley's projection is an actual character, and believes she has consciousness. She thinks, feels, becomes confused, and is afraid. I agree that in part this resembles that "fantasy's unsustainability" yet it also shows how there is disconnection even between our internal parts and ourselves.

The Cassavetes and DFW stuff is great, the former because of how many people -myself included, much of the time- see Cassavetes work as 'authentic' and raw truth, but for another perspective to come in and invalidate that subjective reading and declare the characters as self-pitying and undeserving of our sympathies directly assaults Jake's own wishes for himself (in the exact moment that he talks about "sympathy," which is one of the most direct thematic nods of what he's craving in the movie). Wallace, also, with the 'suicide defines you' lamenting- that definitely makes more sense read through the understanding that he killed himself and is stuck in a perpetual mental DMT trip before death, which I was also wondering while watching and seems to be the case!

I wouldn't say "everything makes sense" or that Kaufman is intending to be too-dense-to-piece-through, but he gives some very obvious clues while hiding others, just like we do from ourselves in our minds, and per usual he takes opaque existential horrors and translates them using cinematic means. Like our own internal psyches, how I interpret a variety of what I've seen (the women serving ice cream, are the parents just parts as well and if so what function are they serving, etc.) is going to be affected by my own unique perspective of how I see the world, just as yours will. There are some elements we can agree on conceptually but the film is metaphysical enough to be largely impenetrable beyond subjective analysis, at least regarding a connection to the 'soul' of the material.

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senseabove
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Re: I'm Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman, 2020)

#53 Post by senseabove » Sat Sep 05, 2020 1:43 pm

I'm struggling to put into words why I think the movie is, on the whole, a failure, but I think the use of Kael and Cassavetes and Rowlands is pretty brilliant, actually, and it's an example of what I do still admire about Kaufman's ability to build a house of ideological cards out of cultural scraps. In this instance he concisely presents the evolution of someone's aesthetic interests over time, how the art we find moving at different stages changes with our emotional needs, as well as how those stages can be in conflict with each other. One manifestation of that is a throughline of feminism/anti-masculinism Jake uses as guard against his own insufficiently toxic masculinity, which is doubly insufficient because of course it is itself an outdated paradigm for masculinity (cf. the DSM-on-homosexuality bit). To invert one of Kael's points about Mabel (that I don't think gets quoted in the movie but I stumbled on when confirming it was Kael last night),"It's [always] suggested that there's something wrong with [Jake] for not getting [him]self together." Jake wants the sympathy Mabel gets from an audience, but he isn't able to understand or express that's his point of entry into the movie, so he mutters his own tepidly vague admiration and uses Kael's highly articulated cudgel to pummel his own reasons for liking it because Kael can say things about (his) femininity that he can't. Jake completely uproots Kael, incorporating parts of her argument into his own neuroses without regard for Kael's own context, just as Buckley lifts Mabel's neurotic tic, seemingly as a dismissive mockery of Mabel and of Rowland herself (and further, in much the same way the movie's apparent dig at Zemeckis is eventually more about the self-assessment of intellectual bankruptcy that watching a Zemeckis movie would seem to admit to than whether a Zemeckis movie is itself vapid).

Which twbb managed to summarize in about three sentences while I was taffy-pulling my thoughts and eventually excising everything but the much narrower bit above. *sigh*

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therewillbeblus
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Re: I'm Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman, 2020)

#54 Post by therewillbeblus » Sat Sep 05, 2020 2:00 pm

Great post, your deep introspection of the scene is spot-on and necessary to parse apart like that. Unfortunately if I tried to do that with every part of this movie that deserved attention, which is basically all of it (again, divorced from enjoyment or personalized assessments of 'success' v 'failure') I'd have an exhaustive nebulous novel burning out in circles while trying to grasp at incorporeal straws, and wind up obsessively lost like PSH in Synecdoche, New York or hopelessly distraught like Jake here. Though part of the point seems to be that some of us can't help but to go to those places anyways.

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Roger Ryan
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Re: I'm Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman, 2020)

#55 Post by Roger Ryan » Sat Sep 05, 2020 2:05 pm

Not having read the book, it appears from some of these posts that Kaufman has improved a concept relying heavily on a twist ending (something his "brother" Donald would have appreciated) by stressing more universal existentialist anxieties throughout while not being too bothered about hiding the reality of the situation from the viewer. Kaufman's great talent, in my eyes, is in concocting scenarios that, no matter how surreal or exaggerated, feel instantly relatable and reflective of real life. I'm Thinking of Ending Things continues this fine tradition. The appeal of how the concept plays out is not just preparing for a reveal, but by exploring all of the implications of that endpoint on everything that happens before. In other words, I guess I'm impressed enough with all the shit Kaufman throws at the wall that I less bothered by it's inability to stick.
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For me, the film gets its mileage by all of the humor in Jake's inability to create a satisfying and airtight fantasy. I love how the girlfriend is consistently exposing the inconsistencies of his world and has enough autonomy to suspect she's not a real person after realizing her own paintings and poem are the work of someone else (I'm thinking Kaufman might have included a self-referencing moment when the girlfriend lowers the visor in the car to discover a shattered mirror - this reminded me of how the character of Donald Kaufman in Adaptation intends to use a broken mirror motif in his screenplay to emphasize his character's split personality!).

I'm certainly glad that Kaufman didn't present his version of the story as the last thoughts of a man committing suicide. Obviously, the title of the book and film imply a suicide plan first and foremost with only the opening voice-over of the girlfriend suggesting the second meaning of "ending a relationship". By the end of the film, I interpreted the title as having a third meaning: "I'm thinking of all the ways things come to an end". In Kaufman's vision, Jake's crisis is all of our crises which gives the film a richer resonance. I'm definitely going to read the book, but I suspect I will probably like this adaptation better.

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

#56 Post by therewillbeblus » Sat Sep 05, 2020 2:13 pm

Roger Ryan wrote:
Sat Sep 05, 2020 2:05 pm
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Obviously, the title of the book and film imply a suicide plan first and foremost with only the opening voice-over of the girlfriend suggesting the second meaning of "ending a relationship". By the end of the film, I interpreted the title as having a third meaning: "I'm thinking of all the ways things come to an end". In Kaufman's vision, Jake's crisis is all of our crises which gives the film a richer resonance.
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I like that interpretation, yet I think the philosophical key is in the phrasing, which supposes the ultimate conundrum of agency: How can we have control, initiate, finalize, or simply actualize the processes in our lives. What the film communicates so well is that this Sisyphean attempt is futile in many ways, as life has more control over us than we have over it. Sometimes all one can do is "think" of ending things instead of actually providing oneself with the conclusiveness we crave, that must come from elsewhere. So in those thoughts, which are prisons of momentary and fleeting liberations before recurrent dips into horror, we are trapped for better or worse.

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Roger Ryan
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Re: I'm Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman, 2020)

#57 Post by Roger Ryan » Sat Sep 05, 2020 2:26 pm

therewillbeblus wrote:
Sat Sep 05, 2020 2:13 pm
Roger Ryan wrote:
Sat Sep 05, 2020 2:05 pm
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Obviously, the title of the book and film imply a suicide plan first and foremost with only the opening voice-over of the girlfriend suggesting the second meaning of "ending a relationship". By the end of the film, I interpreted the title as having a third meaning: "I'm thinking of all the ways things come to an end". In Kaufman's vision, Jake's crisis is all of our crises which gives the film a richer resonance.
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I like that interpretation, yet I think the philosophical key is in the phrasing, which supposes the ultimate conundrum of agency: How can we have control, initiate, finalize, or simply actualize the processes in our lives. What the film communicates so well is that this Sisyphean attempt is futile in many ways, as life has more control over us than we have over it. Sometimes all one can do is "think" of ending things instead of actually providing oneself with the conclusiveness we crave, that must come from elsewhere. So in those thoughts, which are prisons of momentary and fleeting liberations before recurrent dips into horror, we are trapped for better or worse.
Yes, very eloquently-stated. Yours is a much better "third interpretation" of the title! I'm thinking the film's parade of things coming to a end exposes and, in many cases, satirizes our inability to control those outcomes.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: I'm Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman, 2020)

#58 Post by therewillbeblus » Sat Sep 05, 2020 2:48 pm

I think your interpretation is critical as a counter though, and really helps to inform Jake’s existential crisis
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Understanding, and more importantly ‘accepting’ life as a series of things that come to ends/beginnings is a more Eastern-Buddhist way of phrasing, embracing a lack of control and impermanence. Jake is a manifestation of the plights of the Western man who has internalized ‘agency’ as the vital tool to accessing his misperception of grace, and is uncomfortable with letting things ‘be’ in intangible form. A good example we usually use when talking about this in the therapeutic field is how in America, for example, people say, “I am sad” defining themselves by this feeling which assumes inescapable permanent branding and feeds negative core beliefs (‘I am a sad person’ blends this negative emotion into our identities), while in some Eastern cultures children grow up phrasing their emotions passivity like, “I am experiencing sadness.” The latter internalizes that it’s a fleeting feeling and initiates a conditioned practice of becoming comfortable with the nature of our limitations in agency through an attitude of acceptance. These seemingly simple differences in upbringing and developed worldviews impact psychologies very differently, and awareness unfortunately isn’t the key ingredient to unlocking access (many of us ‘know’ logically that we are not ‘sad people’ but try to tell our engrained emotional parts that!) so the fact that Jake can’t accept your phrasing as a truth to practice is the critical pathos of the film and of many of our lives.

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

#59 Post by Nasir007 » Sat Sep 05, 2020 11:43 pm

This film is funny, I certainly laughed out loud, but I ultimately did not get as much out of it as let's say Synecdoche, NY which this has been compared to. Maybe due to the fact that perhaps while a shorter film, S, NY is way more elaborate in the number of settings and number of characters and the nearly decades the story spans. This film by comparison ostensibly has 2 characters, occurs in a single night, has essentially 3 settings and is yet longer and you definitely feel the length.

The conceit that this movie advances, I have perhaps seen in one other movie - Pablo Larrain's Neruda.
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There are any number of films with imagined characters - Fight Club, A Beautiful Mind etc. But the "lead character"/audience surrogate is almost always real. Neruda essentially muddies the waters by making an imagined character your narrator. So you have basically a non-existent point of view from which you are telling the story which is an interesting choice. This film does that too. We realize that the young woman is perhaps an imagined character though she is the audience surrogate and the audience has access to her thoughts. As a side note, she should have received top billing. You could argue giving Plemmons top billing telegraphs the film's conceit and/or doesn't fully embrace it.
The movie is deliberate to a fault and could reveal what it has to say much sooner. Is it maybe a function of Netflix? Is it making directors lazy because they are liberated from time constraints? This isn't the only unnecessarily long prestige film by Netflix.

I have to question the premise of the film and whether it really works. It CAN work and has worked in other instances, but has it worked in this instance? I am not sure.
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So basically you could say the entire or much of the film is imagined. Again not a conceit we haven't seen before. Mulholland Drive, Mysteries Of Lisbon (though not everyone buys this one), Atonement etc are other examples and all of them mostly work because you to some extent see the imagined story of essentially a sympathetic or relatable character, the story seems rooted in a very specific trauma or ache which gives poignancy to the imagined tale. We can see exactly the heartache that is being worked out through a pathetically imagined tale. It is human and heartbreaking and eventually stunning. I don't quite think that is the case here. The Plemmons/janitor character seems anonymous, not very likable and there doesn't seem to be a tragedy that has to be gotten over or imagined away. I mean sure there is the generalized tragedy of perhaps thinking life hasn't been all that it could have been. No shit son, 100 billion other people felt the same way.
So overall I think the work lacks the specificity of his best work, and seeks to paint a rather anonymous portrait of malaise in broad strokes.

The film is intriguing for sure. There is some visual invention. There is a reasonable variety of shots in the lengthy car scenes to keep them interesting - perhaps a giveaway from Kaufman that the dialog itself wasn't interesting on its own so he had to keep changing angles and perspectives to keep those scenes at least visually engaging. (As a contrast, for example, Kiarostami might have filmed them in static long takes.)

Not one of his best films or scripts for sure but a fascinating watch nonetheless - a play on themes he has dabbled in before - as a miniature - on a smaller, limited, restricted scale.
Last edited by Nasir007 on Sun Sep 06, 2020 10:50 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Persona
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Re: I'm Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman, 2020)

#60 Post by Persona » Sun Sep 06, 2020 8:41 am

The Curious Sofa wrote:
Sat Sep 05, 2020 5:05 am
Persona wrote:
Wed May 13, 2020 6:23 pm
Quite excited for this. I liked the book but also it is the perfect sort of material for Kaufman to play around with. I think my only concern with him adapting it would be whether the horror aspects get neutered because I think the story needs those to stay fully engaging.
Good call. The horror aspects got neutered and I didn't find the film engaging at all. It may be too obvious a comparison, but Lynch has done a few of these type of head trip films and they chilled me to the bone without being conventional horror. This just irritated me.

It's clear early on what is happening and then the film has nowhere to go, apart from repeating the same trick over and over. I didn't find the dilemma of the lead character compelling, basically the self-pitying wallow of someone who didn't live up to his hopes and expectations. I suppose that's Kaufman's main theme but he's managed to make this more compelling in the past.
Well, yeah, I called that, but personally I ended up loving this regardless and think it the best thing with Kaufman's name on it. Went earnest on it for Paste:

https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/ch ... ix-review/

Looking through this thread now, I see some simpatico between myself and TWBB's reading, if perhaps there's a bit more positive ardor on my part.

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

#61 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Sep 06, 2020 9:56 am

What a terrific appreciation! The more I reflect on it, I believe this is Kaufman’s greatest achievement, and it’s fittingly his most esoteric and challenging to appreciate or enjoy. A few films have come close to capturing the experience of IFS therapeutic language externalized, but none as pure as this- and as someone who’s been receiving and practicing this modality and completely engrained its (at times frustratingly abstract) ideas into my methods of seeing the world over my lifetime, I can say that this film never falls short of succeeding in its aims.

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

#62 Post by Nasir007 » Sun Sep 06, 2020 10:45 am

I came across this piece from Eric Kohn of Indiewire where Kaufman pretty much offers up a straight forward interpretation of his movie. Happy to see the A Beautiful Mind connection that I mentioned in there though I didn't realize the specific connection.

I'd add one more thing to what I said above. Kaufman's approach also perhaps lays open another shortcoming - though this one is a bit iffy.
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Basically - when say an unsatisfied person is imagining what life could be - it would perhaps be more expansive than a single romantic relationship. Meaning for a person who feels unappreciated, if they imagine life, they would perhaps imagine validation from multiple sources - friends, romantic partners, family, co-workers, acquaintances etc. People tend to live their lives fulsomely. A person who has been denied social pleasures might imagine some of that in their imagined life. Here the imagined life is limited to just one romantic partner - or perhaps that is all Kaufman wanted to show us.
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Taking the premise as a given, it could yet have been better handled - since the imagined tale is constructed on such a narrow plane - a single girl that got away that he's now imagining back into his life - that single encounter with her should have been something haunting. It would have helped the conceit of the film to perhaps show us that encounter - or refer to it in more concrete terms. That would lend gravity to the encounter - that he liked this girl so much in that one encounter - that he imagined her into existence. But all we get is the description of a regular bar encounter - perhaps unlikely to trigger a life long regret of missed chances.
So while I understand what Kaufman was trying to do, some fleshing out of the key underlying structural blocks would have made the film that much more hard-hitting and satisfying and poignant. It is still an interesting film.

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

#63 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Sep 06, 2020 11:09 am

*assuming that everyone’s psychological schemas are exactly like yours, which I hate to break it to ya..

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

#64 Post by TheKieslowskiHaze » Sun Sep 06, 2020 11:17 am

Nasir007 wrote:
Sun Sep 06, 2020 10:45 am
I'd add one more thing to what I said above. Kaufman's approach also perhaps lays open another shortcoming - though this one is a bit iffy.
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Basically - when say an unsatisfied person is imagining what life could be - it would perhaps be more expansive than a single romantic relationship. Meaning for a person who feels unappreciated, if they imagine life, they would perhaps imagine validation from multiple sources - friends, romantic partners, family, co-workers, acquaintances etc. People tend to live their lives fulsomely. A person who has been denied social pleasures might imagine some of that in their imagined life. Here the imagined life is limited to just one romantic partner - or perhaps that is all Kaufman wanted to show us.
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There is, I'd argue, a feminist reading of that aspect of the movie, the fact that the imagined woman is expected to validate so much about Jake's ego--his intellect, his care for his parents, his "diligence," etc. His whole life, basically. I think he wanted validation more-so than romance (as the "romance" is hardly romantic), and his need to create a woman in order to achieve that validation speaks to a tincture of misogyny on his part.

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

#65 Post by Nasir007 » Sun Sep 06, 2020 12:01 pm

TheKieslowskiHaze wrote:
Sun Sep 06, 2020 11:17 am
Nasir007 wrote:
Sun Sep 06, 2020 10:45 am
I'd add one more thing to what I said above. Kaufman's approach also perhaps lays open another shortcoming - though this one is a bit iffy.
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Basically - when say an unsatisfied person is imagining what life could be - it would perhaps be more expansive than a single romantic relationship. Meaning for a person who feels unappreciated, if they imagine life, they would perhaps imagine validation from multiple sources - friends, romantic partners, family, co-workers, acquaintances etc. People tend to live their lives fulsomely. A person who has been denied social pleasures might imagine some of that in their imagined life. Here the imagined life is limited to just one romantic partner - or perhaps that is all Kaufman wanted to show us.
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There is, I'd argue, a feminist reading of that aspect of the movie, the fact that the imagined woman is expected to validate so much about Jake's ego--his intellect, his care for his parents, his "diligence," etc. His whole life, basically. I think he wanted validation more-so than romance (as the "romance" is hardly romantic), and his need to create a woman in order to achieve that validation speaks to a tincture of misogyny on his part.
That's a keen observation. Though I'd challenge any readings of misogyny or mansplaining -
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on the janitor/jesse plemons's part. As Kaufman himself says in the IW piece, for better or for worse, the character of the woman finally presented to us on screen that the janitor/jesse plemmons imagined has enormous agency, is a sensible intelligent serious person, with varied interests and talents.

I would argue if a misogynist imagined a girlfriend, he would imagine her very differently - with less agency, more servile, a more unflattering portrait of a young woman. I see none of that. Also a truly misogynist man would imagine validation from other men because he simply would not consider the validation of a woman worthwhile.

I think a charge of misogyny bears a very heavy burden and the movie does not come close to clearing it. Jesse Plemmons/janitor as shown is perhaps an unsuccessful man but I did not detect misogyny. I would sooner attribute any lapses to awkwardness or a lack of social graces or what not.

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

#66 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Sep 06, 2020 12:20 pm

I co-sign the point on validation over romance, but don’t think it’s fair to label that “misogyny” or sourced in feminist theory. Rather it’s him grasping at straws to service his solipsistic needs, which are both problematic and legitimate in various ways, yet cannot be reduced to a simplistic term that undermines such validation to the complex experience. Reading the article Nasir posted, Kaufman quite clearly talks about the experience of expressing himself and being invalidated (which he cites as fair but debilitating) so whether it’s categorically defined that way is beside the point. That’s just us or him or others putting this into a neat little box, when the crux of the scene is emitting the dense struggle of how our agency is emasculated, whether perpetuated by ourselves or others, in action or in our minds, consciously or subconsciously. It’s all a swirl, but the perceived misogyny seems to be more abstract flaws which Kaufman does not shy away from skewering himself for, and is only a fraction of how one’s thoughts, actions, or needs can be defined, equally placed on a playing field with the drives that elicit such a rigid interpretation from others.

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

#67 Post by TheKieslowskiHaze » Sun Sep 06, 2020 12:37 pm

Nasir007 wrote:
Sun Sep 06, 2020 12:01 pm
That's a keen observation. Though I'd challenge any readings of misogyny or mansplaining -
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on the janitor/jesse plemons's part. As Kaufman himself says in the IW piece, for better or for worse, the character of the woman finally presented to us on screen that the janitor/jesse plemmons imagined has enormous agency, is a sensible intelligent serious person, with varied interests and talents.

I would argue if a misogynist imagined a girlfriend, he would imagine her very differently - with less agency, more servile, a more unflattering portrait of a young woman. I see none of that. Also a truly misogynist man would imagine validation from other men because he simply would not consider the validation of a woman worthwhile.

I think a charge of misogyny bears a very heavy burden and the movie does not come close to clearing it. Jesse Plemmons/janitor as shown is perhaps an unsuccessful man but I did not detect misogyny. I would sooner attribute any lapses to awkwardness or a lack of social graces or what not.
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I think a strength of the movie is that Jake is not one-dimensional. His imagined girlfriend's agency and growing discontent for him can be read as his own understanding of the problems with such a fantasy.

It's like he's sexist enough to have the need to create a girlfriend in order to feel validated (as it is sexist to believe or behave like a woman's central function is to exist for or validate you), but he's not so sexist as to deny her agency and dimension. I think this is central to the conflict of the movie, creating a girlfriend and then having that girlfriend want to break up with you. To me, that's what makes the movie's concept so interesting and weird.

I see this mirrored in the scene where the custodian Jake watches the female student perform in the play, and then she seems uncomfortable with his gaze and so he quickly looks away. He has a not-super-healthy relationship with women (see too the ice cream scene), but he also seems aware, and a little ashamed, of it.

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

#68 Post by Luke M » Sun Sep 06, 2020 5:55 pm

TheKieslowskiHaze wrote:
The Curious Sofa wrote:
Sat Sep 05, 2020 11:55 am
There was a volume of Pauline Kael's For Keeps in Jake's room and Buckley's character quotes much of Kael's review of A Woman Under the Influence verbatim,
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essentially becoming Kael at that point. I think it confirms, as you said, that the film isn't necessarily about "mansplaining". Jake argues with the review, he fantasises about discussing art with a partner on that level. It's another instance where this clearly means something personal to Kaufman but it won't for many viewers. Then it becomes tiresome when the characters keep imitating Rowland's mannerisms in the film.
I wondered if much of that spiel was quoted from Kael, as I noticed the book too. Thanks for confirming.
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Jake's fantasy woman alternates between an intellectual who one-ups him in a movie discussion, to a poet, to a scientist, to a painter, to a starry-eyed fan of his trivia prowess, and to a kinda rube who needs books and words explained to her. In any case, Jake's fantasy of himself as a smart person is intertwined with his fantasy of himself as a boyfriend. She exists to (maybe among other things) stroke his ego about his own intellect.
Appreciate this explanation. From what I gather, the movie seems to work better as a companion piece to the book. It doesn't seem to make much sense otherwise.
I'm actually a little bit jealous of people who saw the movie without reading the book. Viewed through the lens of the book, everything in the movie makes sense. I'm not sure that's what Kaufman intended.
I can definitely see that. Having no knowledge of the book beforehand, I really thought I was watching a movie about a man with dementia. Much to my surprise that interpretation was way off!

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

#69 Post by Magic Hate Ball » Tue Sep 08, 2020 11:31 pm

This is the first time I've had to look up a movie plot explanation afterwards in a long while. Q for confirmation:
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When her face changes in the car, is that Pauline Kael?

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

#70 Post by Never Cursed » Tue Sep 08, 2020 11:35 pm

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No, it's Colby Minfie, the actress who played the female character in the Zemeckis clip

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

#71 Post by Magic Hate Ball » Wed Sep 09, 2020 11:51 am

Aha, thank you, that makes more sense.

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

#72 Post by ianthemovie » Wed Sep 09, 2020 8:24 pm

Count me in the "interesting failure" camp for this. I'm still puzzling over
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the numerous Oklahoma! references. Why? Is it simply that it's a play that's popularly performed in high schools, and it's filtering through Janitor Jake's unconscious mind because he's been watching the kids at the school rehearse it? I do grudgingly admire the perversity of having the movie end with Jesse Plemons perform what is arguably the least memorable/worst number in that show, "Lonely Room." Are we supposed to see Oklahoma as merely another pop culture love story, like A Woman Under the Influence and A Beautiful Mind, that Kaufman is quoting in order to comment on the story of Jake? Part of me wants an interpretation for this but like Luke M. but another part of me is too tired to care...

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

#73 Post by Magic Hate Ball » Wed Sep 09, 2020 9:12 pm

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The Oklahoma! references made sense to me. In the show, Laurie has a dream sequence in which she initially dances with the (questionably) heroic Curly, which is interrupted by the vicious, obsessive Jud, who murders Curly. In this film, Jake first imagines his younger self as Curly, and then his older self as Jud, invading and stabbing his younger self. After this, he imagines his younger self as having instead gone on to be successful, and his younger self performs Lonely Room, which is Jud's song, and is meant to complicate the audience's initial view of Jud as being merely villainous. It also comes after a song in which Curly tells Jud he should commit suicide because nobody likes him. And then everyone applauds him for singing Lonely Room. He wants to be a hero, like Curly, but he also wants to be a martyr, like Jud, and he wants everyone to love him for being both crushed and misunderstood, and for being successful and important.

Also, Lonely Room is one of the best numbers in the show imho, and is a great precursor to Carousel's mammoth Soliloquy.

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

#74 Post by Persona » Thu Sep 10, 2020 7:42 am

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Yeah, I thought the Oklahoma bit was a very inspired addition from Kaufman. I don't know, it worked for me, and brings a visual resolution to some of those car conversations.

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

#75 Post by ianthemovie » Thu Sep 10, 2020 10:40 am

Magic Hate Ball wrote:
Wed Sep 09, 2020 9:12 pm
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The Oklahoma! references made sense to me. In the show, Laurie has a dream sequence in which she initially dances with the (questionably) heroic Curly, which is interrupted by the vicious, obsessive Jud, who murders Curly. In this film, Jake first imagines his younger self as Curly, and then his older self as Jud, invading and stabbing his younger self. After this, he imagines his younger self as having instead gone on to be successful, and his younger self performs Lonely Room, which is Jud's song, and is meant to complicate the audience's initial view of Jud as being merely villainous. It also comes after a song in which Curly tells Jud he should commit suicide because nobody likes him. And then everyone applauds him for singing Lonely Room. He wants to be a hero, like Curly, but he also wants to be a martyr, like Jud, and he wants everyone to love him for being both crushed and misunderstood, and for being successful and important.

Also, Lonely Room is one of the best numbers in the show imho, and is a great precursor to Carousel's mammoth Soliloquy.
Thanks for weighing in; I think that's right and had gathered as much when I watched the film. I see the connections but Oklahoma just seems like such an unlikely point of reference and I wonder why Kaufman had chosen it, or whether it was already a part of the novel.

We will have to agree to disagree about "Lonely Room"! I've seen only one performance of the show in which the actor playing Jud was able to nail that song and it was electrifying. "Soliloquy" is in another league.

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