I’m Thinking of Ending Things - in the Claustrophobia of the Coronavirus

 

In this disaster of a year, probably the last thing anyone’s gentle psyche needs is a psychological thriller. And yet, Charlie Kaufman gave us just that. His latest film, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, based on Iain Reid’s 2016 novel of the same name, was released in select theaters on August 28 before being added to Netflix on September 4, a fate that many new and upcoming movies have decided to embrace, particularly this past year as theaters have been forced to shut their doors.  

The chilling mood is set from the first shots of wallpaper. A quiet, grim narration precedes the physical arrival of the narrator. “I’m thinking of ending things,” the female voice mumbles.  

THE CAR RIDE 

The first glimpse of the narrator is of a curly-haired young woman in yellow gloves and a matching scarf, smiling up at a flurry of snowflakes, waving happily as she gets into her boyfriend’s car to embark on their first trip together. The destination: his parents’ home in the country.  

Despite a pleasant beginning to the drive, once they are on the road the bright sounds of flutes cease, the flurries increase to squalls, and the seemingly happy young woman takes on the melancholic tone of the narrator. 

The dull, lethargic narrative continues: she doesn’t see this as an exciting step forward in their relationship – rather, it’s a lateral move indicating not just her own complacency but his too. The inescapable discomfort of watching the narrator, “Lucy” (for the time being), and Jake attempt to pass the time borders on nauseating. The narrator admits they haven’t been dating long, only “six weeks, maybe seven,” and the awkwardness between them makes this excruciatingly clear.  

Kaufman is unforgiving. The further the car travels into obscurity, farther from the city, the more claustrophobic the car ride gets, the snow squalls turning into a blizzard, placing Lucy and Jake in a vacuum as they make stilted attempts at conversation. Despite the discomfort, Jake professes to like road trips: “It’s good to remind yourself that the world is larger than the inside of your own...Perspective,” and thinks that seeing his home and meeting his parents will provide Lucy with a “window into his origins.” 

The silence of the interminable car ride begs for disruption, anything other than the monotonous clicking of the windshield wipers, but the radio picks up only static and slivers of “Many a New Day” from Oklahoma! Lucy laughs at the song and Jake takes offense, revealing himself to be a huge fan of musicals, especially Oklahoma! - his hometown puts it on every few years. Lucy is startled as she realizes how little she must know about him.

 

The first confusion of the film concerns the narration. Is the narrator is expressing her doubts out loud or can Jake hear her thoughts? They are both equally uncertain - after all, Lucy admits, her brain has been foggy lately. The narrator continues musing about ending things as she stares out the window and considers that Jake is a nice guy, but the relationship isn’t going anywhere. Lucy pulls down the passenger sun visor and glances into a cracked mirror, silently weighing the merit of decisiveness versus complacency: "What's the point in carrying on like this? I know what is it, where it's going."

 

To pass the time, Jake insists that she recite her latest poem she has been working on, “Bonedog,” the crux of which is that “coming home is terrible.” The poem goes on far too long, and it’s hard not to feel bad for Jake, who was looking forward to going home, especially as Lucy describes how “everything’s worse once you’re home.” However, he genuinely seems to love her poem and says, “it’s like you wrote it about me.” 

When Jake and Lucy’s conversation turns to rabies, he says, “Viruses are monstrous.” The film was produced pre-pandemic, so the word “virus” inevitably packs more significance than could have ever been anticipated during production. “Everything wants to live, Jake," Lucy says. "Viruses are just one more example of everything. Even fake crappy movie ideas want to live.” The duality of both the virus and proverbial "crappy movie ideas" produces a near-breaking of the fourth wall that is at once striking and almost meta. 

“So not everything wants to live, right?” Jake says. He suggests perhaps everyone is programmed to want certain things. Lucy, then, must believe to some extent that she is programmed by both society and biology to want a relationship, however, she has spent the entire car ride considering this demise. Even as they finally arrive at their destination, there is no relief for Lucy or the audience. She and Jake are only marching closer to their inevitable end. 

 

THE HOUSE 

Looking onto Jake's childhood home, Lucy sees a figure waving excitedly from the second-floor window, presumably Jake's mother. Instead of heading into the house to greet her, Jake insists he must stretch his legs, and gives Lucy a tour of the barn, littered with the frozen carcasses of lambs and pigs. Despite her disturbance, Jake is indifferent and even irritated by her concern. “Life can be brutal sometimes,” Jake says as Lucy stares at their lifeless bodies. 

Inside the house, Lucy meets Jake’s bizarre parents. His father is foul-mouthed and British, his appearance is dirty and disheveled: the camera focuses on his bloody toes and a grimy Band-Aid on his forehead. The mother is nothing short of hysterical. She struggles to articulate words, makes unwarranted sex jokes, and claims to have tinnitus (which is not helped by the ringing of Lucy’s phone). They are distinctly uncultured, a sharp contrast from Lucy and Jake who have already established themselves as intellectuals. 

At dinner, Jake tells his parents that Lucy is an artist, although this is one of many alterations to the young woman’s identity – she is a biologist, painter, quantum physicist, gerontology student, waitress, film student, poet – and her name changes from Lucy to Lucia, Yvonne, Louisa, Amy, Ames. 

"Lucy" shows pictures of her work to his parents but the father struggles to grasp the concept of her landscape paintings because she hasn’t painted in a figure reacting to the scene. Without the obvious emotion, he doesn't know how he is supposed to feel. Lucy tries to make him understand that “the feeling is inherent to the place,” and that the father should try to imagine himself as the person viewing the scene. Lucy's misgivings about returning home from her “Bonedog” poem are reflected in this statement and Jake’s overt shame of both his parents and his past. 

 

THE JANITOR

  

Meanwhile, scenes of a day in the life of an elderly high school janitor are interspersed throughout the film, also overlaid by the young woman’s narrative. He is depicted as a lonely, quiet old man, shown being taunted by students, and gazing nervously as the kids rehearse Oklahoma!  In a scene following, Lucy (Lucia at this point), discusses her studies in gerontology with Jake’s parents: “Life is unkind to the elderly.” 

During his lunch break, the janitor watches a romantic comedy starring a couple that resembles Jake and Lucy. This is a turning point in the plot as the following scenes pick up pieces from the janitor’s romantic comedy, including the female protagonist’s name (Yvonne) and profession (waitress).  

The collision of the two worlds of the movie, Lucy and Jake’s trip and the janitor’s day at work, draw nearer and nearer until the couple finds themselves at Jake’s old high school. Jake leaves the car and disappears into the snowy night. In a panic, Lucy gets out to find him and ventures into the vacant high school. She meets the janitor in the hallway and goes on a tirade about her uncomfortable first encounter with Jake. She grows increasingly upset and asks the janitor if he has seen him. He says, “I haven’t seen anyone- I mean, except you. I see you.” His reply evokes the father’s reaction to Lucy’s work: “I don’t see how it’s supposed to make me feel something if there’s not a person in them feeling something.”  

Lucy hugs the janitor and waves goodbye with a satisfied smile, as if she knows that this interaction, his first of the day and the first time anyone has truly seen him, is the catalyst for his final unraveling.  

A bizarre ballet scene follows, in which Jake and Lucy are substituted for dancers. The plot has become so odd and nonsensical that the dreamy sequence seems almost inevitable, especially the jarring interruption of the janitor stabbing Jake’s body double. The violent and abrupt action is his way of rescuing Lucy. 

Up until this point, pigs have been peppered throughout the film. On the road, Lucy and Jake pass a Tulsey Town Dairy billboard with a pig saying, “Come- join me,” the same pig that reappears later amid a feverish hallucination of the singsong black and white Tulsey Town Dairy commercial. The country home is laden with pig figurines, including pig salt and pepper shakers. The mother even serves ham for dinner, meanwhile, the janitor eats a ham sandwich during his lunch break.  

As we watch the janitor follow the Tulsey Town pig to his death, Lucy’s sentiments about the nature of animals to accept their inevitable end seem to ring truer than ever: “Other animals live in the present – humans cannot, so they invented hope.” Just as the pigs at Jake’s family farm are raised without expectations and therefore without hope, they march on to an ineludible death. The janitor can dream as much as he likes – in the end, he is still destined for the same fate. 

 

THE SPECTACLE 

From the outset, Jake and Lucy are depicted as exceptionally cultured young aduts. They both quote from a litany of sources, including Wordsworth (“Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”), Emerson, Wilde, and Tolstoy, and often object to or correct each other’s comments, like when Jake takes issue with Lucy’s joke about Bette Davis’ use of the word sissy. 

The camera pans across Jake’s childhood bedroom, pausing on the bookshelf, pausing over For Keeps by Pauline Kale, the highly lauded film critic for The New Yorker. Later, Lucy recites her review of "A Woman Under the Influence." 

They take turns referring to countless historical and cultural icons, including Anna Kavan (her novel, Ice), Leonid Brezhnev, David Foster Wallace (A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again), and Guy Debord, of whose essay, “The Society of the Spectacle,” Lucy (performed by a different actress) quotes: “The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual deception produced by mass media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized.”  

Jake interrupts to continue: “Watch the world through this glass pre-interpreted for us. And it infects our brains. We become it.” Lucy (back to the original actress): “Like a virus.” The narrative the janitor weaves together is not original – he relies on a wealth of material he has seen, heard, or read, in a way, these works are themselves a virus, a parasite that replicates itself in a host cell. The new iterations, as the janitor interposes them, expound upon themselves to create new life, new meaning. But this only leaves room for ambiguity: Debord sees the spectacle as an idea we are fed, however, the nuances of any given work are subject to interpretation by any person who consumes it. They become the master of their own interpretation, free to absorb and interpret the ideas presented by the spectacle and to formulate them in their own way. The janitor’s experiences with these books, poems, movies, essays, are colored by his own worldview.  

 

THE END 

Like the janitor constructing his reality and imagining a last victory in his empty life: Jake, in heavy makeup, stands on a stage and accepts an award with the speech from A Beautiful Mind in front of an audience, including Lucy and his parents: “You are the reasons I am – you are all my reasons.” Afterwards,  he sings “Lonely Room,” from Oklahoma!

 

His idealized lifetime achievement awards ceremony, and this entire film, his imagined life, have been created by references to literature, art, music, and film. Despite the life he has lived and the experiences that have shaped him, the way he looks back and chooses to paint that portrait is ultimately up to him.  

If all goes according to plan, someday, hopefully sooner rather than later, we will see an end to this global pandemic, as there have been ends to others. End being a relative term, as the repercussions and strains tend to last long after a vaccine is distributed. The timing of I’m Thinking of Ending Things, then, is more apt than Kaufman could have anticipated in that the depiction of a tortured janitor teetering on the edge of mortality isn’t so unrelatable as it might seem. In the coming years, the wake of the pandemic, we, like the janitor, will be tasked with constructing our own narratives of what the coronavirus meant for this period in our individual lives. For some, it will be remembered as a time of marked loneliness and impatience. For others, sheer agoraphobia.  

In a time when social isolation walks a fine line between being a mandate and an outright choice, a janitor contemplating his life in a vacant building isn’t so far removed. We all have been living in a “Lonely Room” in one way or another, shrouded in uncertainty as to when this isolation might end. Thanks to rampant media coverage and backlogs of minute-by-minute updates and infinite content that have invaded every corner of the internet, we will have no shortage of coronavirus narratives and substance to supplement our own narratives. Lucy was right when she said that humans invented hope because they cannot live solely in the present. The story we tell ourselves, however hopeful or hopeless, is the most important. While Kaufman's absurdity and plentiful literary, musical, and cultural references can be alienating, his core message - or lack thereof - is worth the two hours and fifteen minutes, if only as a welcome distraction.