I'm Still Thinking About: I'm Thinking of Ending Things
Content Warning: Suicide
“Suicide becomes the story, the mythology, the cautionary tale.” Like a lot of metaphor-heavy art, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is happy to sit down and tell you what it’s actually about. Charlie Kaufman’s latest abstract exploration of how the stories we tell ourselves shape who we are is the defeated antonym to Synecdoche, New York. Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Caden Cotard explores the highs and lows of human experience and expressing the story of oneself, whereas Jessie Buckley’s lead is shifting, unable to face herself, denied at every turn, and inevitably consumed by the narrative of another. Her identity is dissolved into nothing by the inability to literally be herself.
The point-of-view protagonist, credited as “young woman” and called many names over the film’s run, contemplates the title statement, which seems to be about ending her relationship with a kind but uncertain Jake (played by Jesse Plemons). The brief moments of narration are the only instances of true communication she ever accomplishes, as her life and personhood become defined by Jake from the moment they appear on screen together. It becomes clear through her many unsettling encounters with Jake’s family and past that they are actually the same person, a person who kills themself.
Jake, and by extension, Jake’s union with the un-Jake of Young Woman, is in a state of arrested development. He only wants to return to his parent’s home where it’s warm and there’s no snowstorm. He wants to stop for ice cream at a retro stomping ground they recognize and check out his old high school. He can only imagine a partner as an extension of himself, fashioned from his spare accomplishments and interests. The movie gradually reveals what was always true: Jake cannot discern between his cherished past and his lonely present. His paralytic fear courses through his life until it kills him. While the ending events could be read as ambiguous since it only depicts the old-young Jake singing the villainous showstopper from Oklahoma! where the bad guy gets fed up and decides to take what he feels he’s entitled to, there’s no doubt in my mind that Jake is dead in there. If the fade out on the snowed-in car isn’t Jake’s literal tomb, it’s proof that nothing and no one escapes his freezing orbit.
Young Woman is the fabrication that placates Jake. She’s the part of him that thinks of him kindly, engages with his art and intellect, and provides him with the approval he isn’t getting from his parents as portrayed by the wonderful and weird Toni Collette and David Thewlis. She’s not enough, however, to keep the reality of Jake’s frozen life from seeping in, and she can see it coming.
I’ve done most of The Full Jake before. I’ve done the gifted-kid coasting that turns to fear and the "taking it slow" routine that leads to stopping completely and the regurgitating of what real smart people are saying because it must be legitimate. Hell, I started writing this a couple months ago and discarded it since I didn’t think I had anything meaningful to say. But Jake’s trajectory is certain because he intentionally chooses it again and again. He won’t leave his parents house, he won’t skip the ice cream, he won’t save his high school tour for another day, he won’t get out of the parking lot. The best advice I’ve ever heard for the myopia of depression is “you’ve got to be uncomfortable enough to make a change.” Jake won’t make a change. Jake turns down every suggestion to get away, diving deeper and deeper into himself until he’s all that’s left. The tiniest deviations from his comfort zone are denied as a matter of course. He won’t ever help himself improve or expand. His moment of triumph at the end of the movie is really his death knell, so much so that all the other people in his life, including the part of himself that ever wanted to make a change, are cheering audience members and nothing more.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things is full of allusions that make people like me feel smart and tight abstract storytelling but it’s (literally, in the final scene) an act. Where before Kaufman would use this to reach above and beyond the literal for his characters, Jake piles it on as a substitution for real emotion. Jake doesn’t know anything except the artifice of it. Cutting through all the weird stuff leaves us with only the selfishness and the need to be recognized. I sympathize with Jake not just because Jesse Plemons is phenomenal or because I see myself in him but because there’s a scared, desperate guy at the center of it all. I hope all the other Jakes out there will get out of their old high schools, one step at a time, before they freeze to death.
The point-of-view protagonist, credited as “young woman” and called many names over the film’s run, contemplates the title statement, which seems to be about ending her relationship with a kind but uncertain Jake (played by Jesse Plemons). The brief moments of narration are the only instances of true communication she ever accomplishes, as her life and personhood become defined by Jake from the moment they appear on screen together. It becomes clear through her many unsettling encounters with Jake’s family and past that they are actually the same person, a person who kills themself.
Jake, and by extension, Jake’s union with the un-Jake of Young Woman, is in a state of arrested development. He only wants to return to his parent’s home where it’s warm and there’s no snowstorm. He wants to stop for ice cream at a retro stomping ground they recognize and check out his old high school. He can only imagine a partner as an extension of himself, fashioned from his spare accomplishments and interests. The movie gradually reveals what was always true: Jake cannot discern between his cherished past and his lonely present. His paralytic fear courses through his life until it kills him. While the ending events could be read as ambiguous since it only depicts the old-young Jake singing the villainous showstopper from Oklahoma! where the bad guy gets fed up and decides to take what he feels he’s entitled to, there’s no doubt in my mind that Jake is dead in there. If the fade out on the snowed-in car isn’t Jake’s literal tomb, it’s proof that nothing and no one escapes his freezing orbit.
Young Woman is the fabrication that placates Jake. She’s the part of him that thinks of him kindly, engages with his art and intellect, and provides him with the approval he isn’t getting from his parents as portrayed by the wonderful and weird Toni Collette and David Thewlis. She’s not enough, however, to keep the reality of Jake’s frozen life from seeping in, and she can see it coming.
I’ve done most of The Full Jake before. I’ve done the gifted-kid coasting that turns to fear and the "taking it slow" routine that leads to stopping completely and the regurgitating of what real smart people are saying because it must be legitimate. Hell, I started writing this a couple months ago and discarded it since I didn’t think I had anything meaningful to say. But Jake’s trajectory is certain because he intentionally chooses it again and again. He won’t leave his parents house, he won’t skip the ice cream, he won’t save his high school tour for another day, he won’t get out of the parking lot. The best advice I’ve ever heard for the myopia of depression is “you’ve got to be uncomfortable enough to make a change.” Jake won’t make a change. Jake turns down every suggestion to get away, diving deeper and deeper into himself until he’s all that’s left. The tiniest deviations from his comfort zone are denied as a matter of course. He won’t ever help himself improve or expand. His moment of triumph at the end of the movie is really his death knell, so much so that all the other people in his life, including the part of himself that ever wanted to make a change, are cheering audience members and nothing more.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things is full of allusions that make people like me feel smart and tight abstract storytelling but it’s (literally, in the final scene) an act. Where before Kaufman would use this to reach above and beyond the literal for his characters, Jake piles it on as a substitution for real emotion. Jake doesn’t know anything except the artifice of it. Cutting through all the weird stuff leaves us with only the selfishness and the need to be recognized. I sympathize with Jake not just because Jesse Plemons is phenomenal or because I see myself in him but because there’s a scared, desperate guy at the center of it all. I hope all the other Jakes out there will get out of their old high schools, one step at a time, before they freeze to death.
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