It goes without saying that if you haven't seen Charlie Kaufman's latest film, the Netflix original I'm Thinking of Ending Things, this piece of writing will completely spoil it for you. Not only will it give you details about what happens in the film, but it will take away your ability to interpret the film for yourself, taking away one of the most important parts of it. I'm Thinking of Ending Things is an important film, it's an incredible film and it's a film that needs to be approached with no prior knowledge. So, I urge you, if you haven't seen the film, do yourself a favour and find the time to watch it and then come back. Thank you.
To fully understand I’m Thinking of Ending Things, it must first be accepted that the narrative is not at all what it seems. It’s unconventional from the audience’s perspective, utilising many experimental storytelling techniques, but, narratively and structurally, this film is also slightly strange. The story, as a concept, lies to us, presenting us with the young woman, who we are lead to believe is the main character. We are aligned with the young woman from the very start through voiceovers, long shots of her face and even moments in which she looks directly at the viewer. Whilst, in standard practice, this would be a very telling sign of a main character, the central character of this piece is actually Jake, who is never given as much focus as the young woman, though the story revolves around him strongly and confidently.
It is in Jake’s mind that most of the film takes place, a jumbled and cryptic safe-space for the mind of a frightened and confused man. Every location in the film has some bearing on Jake, whether that be the farm, Tulsey Town, or the school, which may not initially have much importance, other than the fact that we are lead to believe Jake attended the school as a child, which he may well have done, but, the second step to understanding the film is accepting that Jake is, in fact, the janitor. So many clues are placed throughout the film, getting more and more obvious as the plot progresses. The first noticeable clue is that Jake recounts having met the woman in a burger restaurant, despite having previously established that they met at a trivia night. Shortly before Jake makes this statement, the janitor is seen in a seemingly random sequence watching something on television involving a red-headed woman, Yvonne, who works at a burger restaurant, finding love in the most peculiar way with a man who gets her fired from her job. I see the similarity between the two events being directly linked, as I believe the trip to visit Jake’s parents is happening in the mind of the janitor, or old Jake. At a later point in the film, the woman goes down into Jake’s basement to was his mother’s nightgown, only to find janitors uniforms, another pointer to that link. The film even reveals itself as a deception many times, with one-off lines that go right under the noses of first-time viewers, the first instance being in the first five minutes, when Jake’s back is seen looking out of a window down on the woman, which is intercut with a reverse shot of the woman looking up, sensing she is being watched. The film briefly returns to where Jake was, only to show the janitor now looking out of the window, old and tired and establishing the idea that the film is about a man looking back on his past, even if it gets muddled along the way. Jake even says to the woman "Sometimes I feel much younger than I actually am." And on the way to the school, he lists every room in the building, before telling her "I know this school like the back of my hand."A hand on the steering wheel which Kaufman generously treats us to a glimpse of, a hand that is old and worn out, covered in wrinkles.
When you’ve accepted that Jake and the janitor are one and the same, the film starts to make so much more sense, as long as you remember that the film is told from the perspective of an unreliable narrator, a dying narrator whose mind is expiring, a mind whose memory is escaping and becoming jumbled after a long, hard life. The woman is only a part of that, a being who floats through the mind, merely a face with a name that is just out of reach. Lucy, Louisa and Luccia are all names given to her at some point or another, all accepted without query, not even from the woman in question, a clue that she may not be thinking for herself, a clue that she may be an invention, an invention that is aware of the inconsistencies, perhaps Jake’s subconscious scrabbling for the fine details that have become lost to him. Even the face of the woman is confused at one point, with Yvonne, the character from the fictional Robert Zemeckis film that the janitor watches, inexplicably taking the place of the young woman we are familiar with and delivering a short amount of dialogue, which does not phase Jake at all. The only way someone could not be at all affected by someone’s appearance changing drastically in the space of a second is that they believe the new appearance is how they have always looked, something only a truly exhausted mind could accept.
Old Jake is ill and dying, he is hallucinating and reliving his past, reminiscing on the things that mattered to him most. He remembers going to see his parents with his new girlfriend, though he is never sure of what that girl’s name was, never sure of what she did for a living or what she studied, not sure of when this trip took place, explaining the rapidly changing ages and ailments of his parents. He sees his mother on her deathbed and his father suffering from advanced degenerative disease. Perhaps these two states never affected his parents, perhaps this was Jake confusing the ailments of himself with his parents, which would account for his death and for his inability to remember so many seemingly obvious and important details.
It seems to me that Jake is hiding from his illness, he is hiding from his impending death, aware of its arrival. I see the reason for the escaping to the past being the fear of death, and the unwillingness to leave life so unsatisfied. Jake and the woman constantly reflect on death, having philosophical discussions and debates about it and referencing it in their conversations casually and formally, always revealing Jake’s fear, whether obvious or not.
"It seems hopeless" Jake tells the confused woman as they make their way back home. She asks him what he is talking about, to which he responds: "Feeling old; your body is going, your hearing is going, your sight, you can’t see. You’re invisible. You’ve made so many wrong turns." Taking this quote from Jake as the janitor reveals so much about his character, telling us that he is depressed and feeling lost because of his age. He feels pushed away and disgusting because of who he is, hence why he has made himself young in his memories, coincidentally, the only person whose face stays exactly the same and in one place in his memories. Ageing scares him because it means degeneration. His mother asks him whether he remembers his fiftieth birthday, to which he very insistently responds that it was his twentieth, with a face that looks thirty-five at the oldest, a face most likely chosen for security and confidence.
Towards the end of the film and the end of Jake’s life, his construction becomes more and more skewed, almost desperate, clinging onto the life, or imagined life, that it has built for itself. Jake explains he sees the faces of the kids at school elsewhere, he sees them carrying the same baggage that he does after having lived a life of being the underdog, the rejected, the one awarded for effort and diligence. Jake’s life as a janitor overlaps with his dreamed life as he sees one of these faces, a face belonging to a nervous girl covered in a rash and riddled with physically manifested insecurity. Pulling the linchpin from the already uncomfortable Jake’s mind, she reassures him, saying "You don’t have to go forward in time, you can stay here." From this point on, the film descends into a controlled madness, where deceptions start to melt away and the truth begins to shine through.
After young Jake enters the school, the young woman is left by herself in the car. After being left there for an undisclosed amount of time, she decides to enter the school herself. It is important to realise that this is where the imagined world ends completely. Everything that happens after that is the real world, but still from Jake’s perspective, this is evident when old Jake finds the woman, who explains to Jake what she is doing. This woman is a completely different entity to the one who was left in the car, recounting how she was at the pub where a trivia night was taking place with her girlfriend, implied this time to be a sexual relationship. The woman tells the janitor about how Jake kept looking at her, how he was a nuisance and how he was a creeper. She hated him and his image at that moment as he loved it and would never forget it. To Jake, the woman was someone who ingrained herself into his mind, love at first sight that never got to go anywhere but had a great effect on him, so much so that his dying mind chose her image to replace another woman who had slipped away, while the woman says that she can’t even what Jake, the guy, even looked like. "It’s like you’ve asked me to describe a mosquito that bit me forty years ago."
This version of the woman is a hallucination, just like the maggot-infested pig that arrives later. The woman appears to Jake in his final hours as a painful reminder to him that he didn’t get what he wanted out of life, such as a happy marriage. He blames himself for this, blames his appearance and his personality, shown in the ballet dance. We see a marriage between two people who resemble the woman and Jake, representing an alternate timeline, a wish or fantasy, we see their happiness and their dynamic. The couple works, they are happy, but, time progresses and the representation of Jake is replaced by another dancer who is dressed as a janitor, a janitor who stabs Jake’s dancer, and scares the woman’s dancer away. The janitor is left by himself with the corpse of the person he used to be, looking down at his past, irretrievable, only accessible through memory. After this the pig arrives, another hallucination derived from a past event that was recounted earlier in the film. This pig tells Jake that he and his ideas are one and the same, reaffirming that what happened in the previous two hours was all Jake’s imagined world.
"Someone has to be the pig infested with maggots" is the other important thing that the pig states. Jake was eaten alive by the people around him, he was infested with grief and anger and sorrow because he didn’t get along with his parents, seemingly never got married and never felt he fit in. As his father’s pigs were, Jake was left alone by the world, with food being tossed over the side of his pen half-heartedly once too often, left to rot by a society that didn’t care for him.
Finally, Jake reaches his final moments, represented by his performance of 'Lonely Room' from Oklahoma!, Jake sees all the faces from his life, all the same, obscured by stage makeup making them look as old as he looks, also at this point only looking old due to makeup. He sees his parents, previous students and the woman. Everyone is happy to see him and everyone is smiling. Jake is given a Nobel prize, an award for real achievement, not diligence, and proceeds to perform.
The floor creaks,The door squeaks,There's a fieldmouse a-nibblin' on a broom.And I set by myselfLike a cobweb on a shelf,By myself in a lonely room.But when there's a moon in my winderAnd it slants down a beam 'cros my bedThen the shadow of a tree starts a-dancin' on the wallAnd a dream starts a-dancin' in my head.And all the things that I wish forTurn out like I want them to be,And I'm better than that Smart Aleck cowhandWho thinks he is better'n me!And the girl I wantAin't afraid of my armsAnd her own soft arms keep me warm.And her long, yeller hairFalls across my faceJust like the rain in a storm!The floor creaks,The door squeaks,And the mouse starts a-nibblin' on the broom.And the sun flicks my eyes-It was all a pack o' lies!I'm awake in a lonely room...I ain't gonna dream about her arms no more!I ain't gonna leave her alone!Goin' outsideGet myself a brideGet me a woman to callMy own.
Jake states, in the form of song, how he exists in a miserable place, left dreaming about a woman, only to realise that everything was in his head. His performance finishes and his audience stand up to applaud him, a final ‘well done’ on what he gave to them in his show, one of the only things he ever wanted; appreciation. Jake raises his hand as if to wave farewell and then everything fades into one colour and the final image we are left with is Jake’s car covered in snow, only a suggestion that something is there, something covered with the pristine and inescapable blanket of time.