Over its century of life, cinema has given people a way to enjoy escapism without having to risk life and limb. It’s made us capable of being heroes in fantasy films, going out into space, or fighting dragons. So many opportunities continue to exist on the screen, and there’s no wonder that it remains such a valuable medium. These stories age very well in the public’s consciousness, making the next generation dream of something bigger and bolder. Sure, books can achieve similar goals, but not like the power of film, hitting you on a visceral note, making you get lost in an image so swiftly that you don’t have time to think about it.
Then again, cinema also has the gift of making you realize the harsh realities of life. More than picturing the supernatural tools of other worlds, it gives us an abstract psychiatrist who is there to look inside our brain and understand just what’s wrong with ourselves. Among those who have made this into a career is writer-director Charlie Kaufman. Over the course of 25 years, he’s continued to become more cerebral, finding the reason that emotions eat at us and fill our lives with rich anxiety and depression. He did this best with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), where he took sci-fi to explore how certain loves are difficult to ignore. More lately, he’s used Anomalisa (2015) to explore loneliness in a hotel full of people voiced by only three people.
But with I’m Thinking of Ending Things (2020), he pushes the boundaries even further by forcing the audience to live in this existential dread, stuck in a car with a couple named Jake and Young Woman (yes, that’s her listed name on IMDb). They are going on a journey to visit Mother and Father (again, yes), who live in Middle America. Among a snowstorm, they travel through the empty plains, commenting on everything around them. Young Woman sees a new swing set in front of an abandoned house and she wonders why there’s such a dichotomy. Jake chooses to write it off, believing that it was being refurbished.
The film is full of these small cryptic markers that don’t fully make sense. They all tie in some ways to death or misery. As Young Woman explores this with an interior monologue, the audience tries to piece together just what she means. What is she ending? The key idea is to believe that it’s a suicide, but it could be a handful of things including their relationship. In a scene that goes on for 20 minutes, she drives with Jake and has these conversations that seem to lack any depth besides collegiate conversations about things dying. None of them are connected, but there’s this humdrum quality to things that make the audience want to jump ship.
Why are we stuck in this car for 20 minutes? It feels interminable, though it’s Kaufman playing with his audience. The bigger point isn’t any exchange of dialogue, but more the idea that some things are inescapable, that depression can be caused by a lack of excitement. She could jump out of the car, but then she would be in a barren wasteland of snow, more likely to freeze than find safety. Even when Kaufman gets to the destination, he keeps narrative satisfaction from immediately happening as he takes a trip to a barn where Jake reveals that two sheep died and maggots are eating the floorboards. To him, this is all just a part of life.
Considering their intellect, it’s amazing how Mother and Father seem so simple-minded, like idiots with no taste. While Young Woman observes this with discomfort, he personally doesn’t notice it in himself. He is passive, mostly taking in information but never wanting to change the course of things. Why are things a bit surreal, recalling a David Lynch style in a dog who dry-shakes in a monotonous blur? It doesn’t make sense and it’s all so alien. In anyone else’s hands, this would be the start of a horror movie, maybe with murder. Instead, this is just one detour in Kaufman’s bigger journey. Father and Mother will never fully disappear from the narrative, but their screen time is fleeting.
Seeing as Kaufman’s strengths are in writing, he largely uses dialogue as this meticulous sign of time passing. Even for conversations that are innocuous, he manages to give the audience the sense that they want everything to end. Let this boring car ride end. Let this family get together end. Let this conversation end. Then, as you walk out the door, you have to ask why these moments overwhelmed you, needing space from eccentric parents and a dog who never felt quite right. Why is there an underlying sense of death in everything? Kaufman may use cringe humor to reflect this, but it may also be a point where the tapestry begins to fall apart and reveal that this isn’t the journey of Young Woman, but of Jake trying to understand something else.
A film that takes this interminable punishment more literally and brutally is Darren Aronofksy’s mother! (2017), which was considered a disaster upon release. While it has received somewhat of a cultural shift in the years since people were turned off by the film’s inability to be straightforward with its plot. The only advantage that mother! has over I’m Thinking of Ending Things is that its wait doesn’t feel as subdued. If anything, the chaos continues to move faster and faster until the world is burning down and the symbolism is coming rich in a giant fire, an unbraced sink falling to the ground. Whereas Kaufman uses the snow to reflect an emptiness, Aronofsky uses claustrophobia to reflect a similar kind of hopelessness.
Aronofsky’s direction is also more accentuated than Kaufman’s. It comes first and foremost in the calm before the storm, where Mother and Him live in a house in a secluded part of town. Many interpret this story as being about the environment or religion. In the latter case, Him is a God-like figure who writes books for his fervent fans. They all begin piling into the house, drawing symbolism from Adam and Eve. Then again, it’s all just something on a bigger journey. These characters fade as more and more enter the picture. This is ostensibly the only place that the story takes place, and it becomes clear how nerve-racking that is.
Mother is the protagonist of sorts, watching the world around her change. No time frame is given, though it’s clear that maybe years and centuries will. In that time everything piles in, featuring references to Jihads and destroying the environment. Him doesn’t care about Mother all that much by the end, and lets her fend for herself as this landscape is on the verge of an inferno. The house, itself treated as a living being, begins to suffer as more people enter and the smoke and decay begin to appear. It’s here that it begins to become cryptic just what this film is about. Based on Aronofsky’s news that he wrote the screenplay in a weekend, it does come across with an unpolished glee.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things has a similar feel in spite of its quiet calm. Again, most of it takes place in conversations in cars, on roads to somewhere that isn’t well-defined. When is it? There is a sense of purgatory to this story, where locations slowly begin to symbolize ideas more than actual places. They visit a random food stop that feels like Jake’s old stomping ground in school than a place that’s ever served anyone else. At one point the server turns over a drink to reveal that they made it “extra thick.” It’s a moment so small that you don’t even question its use of gravity.
This leads to arguments, the feeling of being trapped together as they disagree about the mental health of Mother and Father. However, by the third act, one has to wonder if these people were real. Given that the story is about to pivot almost entirely into a strange mix of fantasy and heartbreaking revelations, one can’t help but feel that they symbolize something else in Jake’s life. Maybe he thinks that Young Woman worries that they will become them, wasting their intelligence on hacky Robert Zemeckis movies. It sounds like hell, and Jake’s inability to recognize it makes things all the more tragic. He just takes things for granted, and maybe in some ways, he was looking into a future that could’ve been, where they were stuck together, unable to escape each other in a state of madness.
It’s not a loud one, but this quiet depression, eating at them inside. As the story reveals that Jake was the real narrator, it’s clear that he’s using this all as some self-reflection on life. He consults imaginary animals, reflecting on past dates and happier times. As he walks around as the janitor of a high school, he feels out of place watching a production of Oklahoma! happen. He claims to not know much about musicals yet can recite these songs from memory. Is it because he’s an old man looking back on his life, having watched the rehearsals for Oklahoma everyday?
It’s best understood in I’m Thinking of Ending Things’ best moment, where Young Woman begins to perform a Rodgers & Hammerstein-esque dance down the hallway. It’s straight out of Oklahoma!, and it covers the plot in these broad strokes, finding a brilliant choreography revealing something inexplicable about these characters. It’s the moment where the film begins to make sense, and there’s not a line of recognizable dialogue in it. It’s beautiful, balletic, and reflects how the world of Jake, becoming an old man, sees the world. Everything is informing each other, eventually forcing him to face regret.
It’s a quiet finale while mother! can’t help but go out on the biggest note. Mother becomes a symbol of Mother Mary, giving birth to a baby. As she passes the baby around, it ends horribly. Is it a way of symbolizing the abuse that Jesus faced on Earth? Again, it’s never outright said, but given that she is brutally assaulted and has her heart ripped from her chest, it’s all so visceral and finds her disfigured and unrecognizable, waiting to be reincarnated for the same horrifying journey all over again.
Both of these can be read like horror stories, reflective of lives that are trapped in a negative pattern. How do you possibly escape something so cyclical? It’s impossible. Life will continue to get you. Neither film seeks to make for a convenient answer, though Kaufman feels like he is closer to a clear thesis by the end, reflecting on how regret and inability to notice how we treat each other can end up hurting ourselves long term. We all live in this ambiguous limbo that is powerful. It’s those small moments where things could’ve changed for the better, and yet Jake did nothing about it. Mother was even more helpless, mostly screaming for help and never getting it. Young Woman was screaming internally, but even then it’s one that feels like reincarnation into another part of her life.
These are films designed to be frustrating, requiring a mature mind who will be able to look past the emotional intensity that it’s designed to give you and appreciate the subtext. It’s the passive-aggression that exists underneath that informs why it gives you chills, making you feel like the world is going to collapse around you. Time and reason have disappeared and all that’s left is some idea of what humanity should be. Things are collapsing in these ways. For Kaufman, it’s understated. For Aronofsky, it’s overstated. Everything will continue to eat at us, but it’s important to feel like we learned from it, to become better people and not just live in the same sick pattern over and over. At the end of the day, Jake may be the only one to have gotten anywhere, but even then it’s too late. Life has passed him by and all he can do is share his cautionary tale with everyone else, hoping that they’ll listen.
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