I'm Thinking of I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020)

Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things was released in the United States and Canada back on September 3, 2020, the same weekend as Christopher Nolan’s time inversion blockbuster, Tenet, was released in the States. Kaufman’s film, based on the novel by Canadian writer Iain Reid, went straight to Netflix, while also opening in a few scarce theatres across the United States. Nolan’s film attempted (and failed) to reinvigorate the theatrical box office in the midst of a pandemic. The two films are not ones you’d immediately draw connections between due to their difference in scale, genre, and distribution, but both films are puzzles that the viewer is meant to solve. 

Tenet plays with the direction of temporal flow in its science-fiction narrative of shadowy operators working to save the world. It is labyrinthine in its plotting, but like any maze, there is a clear beginning and end—and a means of making your way through. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is more slippery, with less of a clear narrative solution to its puzzle. Where Tenet plays with narrative, Kaufman’s film plays with character. Although typically, in conventional Hollywood pictures, characters are expected to change over the course of a film—to “satisfy” an arc—they are relatively fixed objects. We meet them, learn about their backstories, desires, and motivations, and follow them through the journey of the narrative. The world changes around them, but even if they follow an arc, they are something solid that the viewer can latch onto to carry them through the narrative. Even in Nolan’s time inversion thriller, John David Washington’s Protagonist is an unchangeable, steady fixture in the midst of constant change. The temporal context that surrounds the character shifts and pivots dramatically, but the character himself is dependable. Not so in Kaufman’s film.

At the start of I’m Thinking of Ending Things, we meet Jessie Buckley’s young woman (who is apparently called Lucy, or Louisa, or Lucia, or Amy) in a car with her boyfriend, Jesse Plemons’ Jake, whom she’s been seeing for six weeks. In voiceover, we hear her voice her misgivings about their relationship, even though Jake is smart and considerate, if a bit clingy. We hear a common refrain from her: “I’m thinking of ending things,” which is the title of the film, but also a clue to how tenuous what we’re being presented with is. The fixed nature of what we’re seeing could change at any time. The young woman and Jake are on the road on their way to meet Jake’s parents at their farmhouse in the country. It’s snowing and the young woman is worried whether they’ll be able to make it back to town after dinner. At every turn of the simple narrative, she is hedging against the context. But in these early moments, the viewer is on relatively firm ground.

Once they arrive at the farm, that firm ground rapidly turns to quicksand. Kaufman uses jump cuts to disorient us. We see the car turn off the road into a seeming white nothingness, but Kaufman then cuts to a startling shot of the farmhouse in front of them, as if it has materialized from out of nowhere. Shortly thereafter, he cuts from a shot of them inside the car to a shot of them suddenly standing outside it in the driveway. But even with these editorial decisions, the narrative seems to be moving along normally. And in a certain general sense of term, that narrative does keep progressing on a straight line, a train track, to borrow a metaphor the characters use within the film. But once Jake’s parents (Toni Collette and David Thewlis) appear from upstairs (where they are delayed for an uncomfortably long amount of time before greeting the visitors), we realize that it’s not the narrative that is going to constantly shift, but the presentation of the characters.

Conversations move in circles in I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Characters appear to latch onto stray comments from earlier moments to inform their context. At one moment, Jake mentions that he has a dog and the dog suddenly appears, shaking itself furiously to get rid of wetness from outdoors. But soon the dog disappears and the only time we see it again, it is still shaking itself, but in a different position in the home. At dinner, Jake mentions that the young woman is a quantum physicist—like Marie Curie, Jake’s father says—but earlier, she was a poet, reciting a new poem she wrote to Jake in the car. But it turns out she did not write that poem. That poem is in fact “Bonedog” by Eva H.D.

It’s not only the young woman who changes while in the farmhouse. Jake’s parent’s change too. His father appears to be noticeably older each time we see him. When the young woman finally enters Jake’s childhood room, his father has white hair and frail skin. He mentions that he has early onset dementia, but forgets the word “dementia” momentarily. When we come back downstairs, Jake is feeding his bedridden mother, who seems so crippled with age, she’s on the verge of death.

The film continues to morph and shift, but never as drastically as during these moments in the farmhouse. Like Tenet, it is a bewildering experience, but it does offer a method to comprehending the madness. In Tenet, the film offers a cipher to its code in the middle action sequence as the Protagonist enters a dock warehouse in Tallinn, Estonia, and learns how to operate a time turnstile. In I’m Thinking of Ending Things, we follow the young woman into the basement of the farmhouse where she discovers some paintings by Ralph Albert Blakelock on the wall. But the paintings are the same as ones the young woman had shown on her phone earlier, claiming them as her own. Finally, we are seeing evidence of what can only be inferred in earlier moments.

The film lays its cards on the table here, showing that the characters are not truly individuals, but amalgamations of the world they observe around them, from conversations overheard, to poems read, to movies watched, to songs heard. Jake seems to be at the centre of it all, and it seems he is more real in a tangible sense than anyone else, even the young woman, but he is not “real” in the way that the narrator of Fight Club is real and Tyler Durden is not. He is simply less abstracted than the rest of the characters, allowing the viewer to treat him as an anchor, even as the viewer follows the young woman’s emotional journey of what’s happening on screen. Jake provides the context, but the young woman provides the emotional experience. It’s a delicate balance that drives the narrative of the film. Kaufman uses the conceit to show how much of what we believe is human experience is simply a feedback loop of observation.

***

In 2018, I filmed an episode of the webseries Walk in the Park, entitled “Cryptomnesia.” It was a simple scenario that only lasts a few minutes. We meet three individuals in a park: two men and a woman. The first man bids the woman farewell; she tells him to “stay strong” and leaves. The two men head for a stroll through the park and discuss the loss of a mutual friend. It seems they are coming from the friend’s funeral. They reminisce about him and how strange it is to know they’ll never see him again, but the first man refers to the friend as “Mark,” causing the second man to stop and do a double take. It seems that the second man is named Mark, and he wants to know why the first man is messing with him by calling their dead friend “Mark.” They argue and try to convince each other of their point-of-view, sharing anecdotes about the past that only they could know, but each one claims the other’s anecdote happened to him instead. Eventually, the first man comments that they came from Mark’s funeral, so none of this is possible, but the second man says that they came from Joseph’s funeral. In the final kicker, the first man says that’s not possible since his name is “Joseph.” The short ends with both men alone in the park, confused about themselves, about each other, and the nature of reality.

The term “cryptomnesia” refers to when a person has a thought or memory that they perceive to be original, but which is merely a recurrence of a previously encountered thought or memory. It’s a common occurrence, even if the word isn’t common; it’s sometimes referred to as “accidental plagiarism.” This has happened to all of us; we bring up a joke or an anecdote about something that happened to us and tell a friend or family member about it, only for the person you tell it to to remind you that it was they who told you the joke or anecdote in the first place. You think it is original but it’s not; yet, until they tell you the truth, it is as real a thought as any you have.

I could not help but think of “Cryptomnesia” while watching I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Kaufman’s film does not reduce to as nearly a simple concept as my own web series episode, but there are undeniable similarities in how the personalities of its characters bleed into each other. The concept is apparently present in Iain Reid’s novel as well, but I have never read the novel and didn’t even know of its existence until the release of Kaufman’s film. However, with cryptomnesia, you are never aware of having captured thoughts and reinterpreted them as your own. It’s unlikely that my work was accidentally inspired by Reid’s novel, but that doesn’t mean the works don’t share accidental parallels.

The moment in the basement where the young woman discovers the paintings of Ralph Albert Blakelock brought “Cryptomnesia” to my mind and from then on, the film made so much more emotional sense. Suddenly, the film’s confusing context made sense to me, like I was tapping into something I had forgotten. Now it was all coming back to the surface and clarifying the emotional experience of what was happening on screen. We are beings defined by the environment we observe. That can inevitably lead to confusion, but when we recognize the environment, it can also lead to moments of clarity.

***

In Douglas Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop, the Gödel, Escher, Bach author digs deep into the concept of the self, continuing a core theme of his surprising 1980 bestseller. He discusses how sentience is an ouroboros of perception, with an endless feedback of references and observations that come to define an individual’s consciousness, even if there is no true beginning or endpoint to that observation. Hofstadter calls this recurrence a “strange loop.” In some sense, it is a quantum understanding of an individual, as a person is both an observer and the observed, existing in two points within the realm of consciousness. I am Thinking of Ending Things demonstrates this referential conception of the self better than almost any film, save Kaufman’s previous works.

I am not the first person to reference Hofstadter when discussing the work of Kaufman. Both author and filmmaker are high-brow artists that have surprising crossover appeal in major markets. Based on the complexity of their works, it feels like they shouldn’t be as popular as they are. I supposed the fact that they often make audiences feel somewhat stupid is an ironic part of their appeal. But they’re both postmodernists through and through, with a quantum understanding of individuals.

In I’m Thinking of Ending Things, the young woman says she is a quantum physicist during the dinner table conversation with Jake’s parents. But her comments do not seem to have a mathematical focus, but a philosophical focus. In a conversation with Jake in the car, she discusses the concept of colour and how it only exists within the minds of observers. Human beings see colour to visually comprehend how light interacts with material objects, but the colour itself cannot be confirmed to exist unless observed.

In a sense, light is like the cat in the box of Schrödinger’s famous quantum thought experiment. The cat in the box is both dead and alive until someone opens the box and observes it. Until that moment, it exists in a quantum state of possibility—a “quantum superposition” to quote Schrödinger. Colour acts much the same way; the light contains all elements of the visual spectrum, but once light is observed falling on an object, it coalesces into a specific colour. The conversations within Kaufman’s film operate on a similar principle. The characters observe something and that observation changes the reality of what comes after. The act of observation is simultaneous to the act of creation.

When the young woman enters Jake’s childhood room, she sees a collection of the poems of William Wordsworth, essays by David Foster Wallace, and a book of criticism by Pauline Kael, among other artistic artifacts. Wordsworth and Wallace are name-checked in the film, while the young woman recites Kael’s review of John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence later in the film, presenting it as her own thought. (Interestingly, Kael’s review of Cassavetes’ film is not actually contained in the volume shown to be in Jake’s room.)

This moment in Jake’s childhood room clarifies some of the earlier references in the film, but it does not directly shape the actions that follow in the way that other conversations do within Kaufman’s fim. For instance, later in the film the young woman and Jake stop in the parking lot outside Jake’s old high school to throw away some ice cream cups that are melting. Jake gets amorous in the car while the snow is blowing outside. He references “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” and the young woman gets upset. They argue about whether the lyrics glamourize sexual assault. Their argument rehashes the familiar talking points that surface on Twitter every December. But it’s not the argument that’s important, but rather that its reference changes the interpretation of the proceeding actions.

Jake quickly turns from amorous to paranoid, thinking that someone is watching them from inside the school. It’s as if he channels the distrust that the young woman says is present in the song. He flees the car and takes the keys with him, leaving the young woman alone. It gets too cold in the car and she leaves, but the door locks itself behind her. She’s stuck in the freezing cold and takes refuge in the school, as the woman in the song takes refuge in the man’s home. She wants to find Jake and go home, but every moment she delays, the weather outside grows more treacherous. Every moment of delay makes escape more unlikely, just as each drink in the song does the same.

In a sense, the entirety of I’m Thinking of Ending Things resembles the central narrative of the Christmas song. In the song, a woman wants to leave. A man wants her to stay. She has misgivings, he plies her with drinks and charms her. She grows comfortable and stays. Eventually, the weather is too harsh and finalizes the decision for the woman. 

In the film, the young woman wants to go home, but Jake wants her to meet his parents. They arrive at the farm house, he extends the visit with his parents, and the weather grows more treacherous outside. When they hit the road, he stops off at an ice cream parlour and gets them ice cream cups; the presence of drinks extends the encounter. They continue on the way home, but the weather upends their plans, and they detour. She is trapped inside with him in the blizzard. The weather ends up making her decision for her. Is Frank Loesser’s controversial Christmas tune an example of a strange loop, where the context the woman observes makes her decisions for her? Does she have free will or is she simply playing out the reality that she observes? Clearly, Kaufman has some thoughts on the matter.

***

Early in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, the young woman mentions that life is a train track that you cannot get off. Jake says that you can jump off a train, but she says that you cannot without killing yourself. She says he watches too many movies if he thinks you can. She is convinced that life is a programmatic script that you are doomed to follow. You cannot reverse its direction. All you can do is look around as you travel onward, observing the world on your fixed track.

Both Tenet and I’m Thinking of Ending Things conceive of reality as a linear progression. Tenet imagines the possibility of experiencing this progression in the reverse direction. I’m Thinking of Ending Things ponders how the direction of observation changes the reality of that progression. In a sense, both films are about filmmaking. Christopher Nolan uses the ability to reverse the projection of footage to control the presentation of time in his film. Kaufman uses the malleability of presentation to shift reality while progressing on a linear track.

At the beginning of I’m Thinking of Ending Things, the title cards appear in a tiny Courier font in the middle of the screen. It’s notable for how small the title is, but there doesn’t seem to be anything instructive about the font choice. At the end of the film, the closing credits scroll over the image of a janitor’s truck buried in snow in the high school parking lot. They too are in Courier font. They cover most of the full-frame screen as they scroll and resemble the page of a screenplay. Courier is the default font in Final Draft, the screenwriting program that is the Hollywood standard. This is a final clarification that Kaufman’s film is also about the artistic process and filmmaking itself.

While the linear progression of life can be compared to riding a train track, it can also be compared to writing a script beginning to end. Scripts are an assemblage of artistic references, personal anecdotes and observations, and borrowed events rearranged into a new whole. They come from the mind of the author, but the author is influenced by a million different observations, both consciously and unconsciously. The events of I’m Thinking of Ending Things are similarly drawn from artistic references, half-remembered memories, borrowed thoughts, and other moments of cryptomnesia.

Like past Kaufman films, I’m Thinking of Ending Things shows how art is not only a reflection of life, but a totalizing reflection of life. It shows how individuals interact like they are composing the script of their own life at the same time they are playing it out. They constantly infer the structure from what they observe, and then determine the construction of what comes after from the inferred relationship to what comes before. They pay off small interactions and continue moving forward in an attempt to coalesce into a whole, but without a conscious understanding of how the conception and performance of such actions are impossible to distinguish from each other. Both actions occur simultaneously.

Thus, the film’s title is ever appropriate. It is not just referring to the young woman’s desire to end her relationship with Jake, but the human predilection to shape actions around a desired or expected endpoint. A person thinks of how they want to end things, and that imagined ending shapes everything that comes before it. Like a filmmaker writing a screenplay, a human being always acts with the perfect ending in mind.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020, USA)

Directed by Charlie Kaufman; written by Charlie Kaufman, based on the novel by Iain Reid; starring Jesse Plemons, Jessie Buckley, Toni Collette, David Thewlis.

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