What might Charlie Kaufman have left to say about himself after writing about himself and his screenwriter ego personified as his identical twin (Adaptation, 2002), or guiding an actor through his own brain (Inside John Malkovich, 1999), or instructing his theatre director double to instruct an avatar of himself who is instructing an avatar of himself in turn (Synecdoche, New York, 2008) – all beleaguered misfit-narcissists flailing against deflating loves? What might Charlie Kaufman have left to tell us about men living in internal torment, agonising, for the most part, over idealised but ultimately disappointing women? According to his latest film, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, distributed by Netflix, the answer is “not much”. Kaufman, however, is determined to revel in those old ideas, and the film’s first long section reminds us what they are by means of the literal vehicle of a drawn-out car journey through the snowy countryside. Lucy/Louisa/Lucia/‘Young Woman’ (Jessie Buckley) and Jake (Jesse Plemons), in a young but already sagging relationship, are on their way to Jake’s rural childhood home where Lucy will meet his parents for the first time. For the next 25 minutes we listen to their forcedly enthusiastic conversation, which alternates with dense, compulsive discussions broaching subjects as broad as philosophy, gerontology, film criticism and the nature of time that serve to demonstrate the fact that this couple doesn’t exist in the world but against it, with every stimulus prompting them to agonise over their tortured ontologies and relentless self-sabotage. Over the ensuing family visit, Jake and Lucy’s musings turn literal (a Kaufman signature). Everybody experiences a sequence of slippages: as Lucy introduces herself, she nonchalantly career jumps from a teacher to a painter to a poet; she grew up in an apartment, then on a farm. Her attitude towards Jake is similarly unstable; her voiceovers tell us that the two have an “intense connection”, then that they’re going nowhere, both statements delivered with the same ambivalence. Meanwhile, Jake’s parents, an insecure Toni Collette and David Thewlis, careen in and out of middle and old age. Lucy is the only person who acknowledges this, though only through distressed stares. Jake, too, is distressed, but only over his lack of control over family dynamics; he turns violent, slamming his fists down on the table, when his father embarrasses him with malapropisms. Sequences of familial nonsense are regularly interrupted by intervals in which we follow a seemingly unrelated janitor through a high school while the students he passes giggle, cringe, or just move out of his way. As their environment grows increasingly fraught, Lucy begs for Jake to take her home, as she has work the next day… somewhere. When they finally leave, driving through a now fully-fledged snowstorm, Jake leads Lucy to places from his past – an out-of-place ice cream shop and his high school – which are abandoned and anachronistic enough to seem like memories. The latter is where the three characters are brought together and the two central narratives finally join.
Like the majority of Kaufman’s scripts, this one has much to say about solipsism, failure, and the embarrassing weakness that drives our attempts to couple up. Kaufman is probably aware that he bores some, but this time he has tried to incorporate more self-criticism into his work, as though meta-textual self-reflection can counteract audience burnout. Regularly, dialogue seems to cut channels to siphon away potential accusations of indulgence that could be, and have been, levied against a creative professional who seems to want to wring out the agony it causes him to write stories about people very much like himself. If we’re bored of Charlie Kaufman it isn’t because, as the Kaufman written into Adaptation frets, he’s “self-indulgent, narcissistic, solipsistic”, or “pathetic”, but because it’s difficult to empathise with somebody whose insistence on being all of the above is continuously rewarded. Like many wealthy, cis, straight, white men, Kaufman will claim he’s miserable in his position until the bitter end, bludgeoning us with endless requests for permission to exist. “I see you”, once delivered by Lucy, is positioned as the most cathartic sentiment one might receive. It’s begun to feel like we can’t stop seeing Kaufman, though his version of “seeing” seems tokenistic, divorcing the power of the gaze, made famous by hooks and Fanon, from productive engagement. The critical gaze can be seen around us, now: the proliferating stances of non-Black America are iterations of “I see you, I hear you, I stand with you,” and the same three promises begin the letter, signed by over 200 members of the UK literary community and sent to JK Rowling, that stands in support with the trans and non-binary community whom she’s attacked and alienated. The kind of seeing theorised by Black scholars and currently practiced by activists, is thus all the more distasteful in Kaufman’s mouth.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things turns a gaze, though a neutered one, on men who create a shell out of their pain and rejection, building a bridge of empathy for those who consistently fail to engage honestly with the women in their lives. Jake’s father awkwardly corners Lucy to talk about sex; he claims to appreciate Lucy’s “poet’s soul” but can’t handle her intellect when it’s coupled with opinions, while Jake ignores or patronises Lucy’s worries about making it home in time for a good night’s sleep. Kaufman tries to make us like his characters by insisting that they do it out of self-loathing, and that this endless idealisation does not bring joy. But this self-loathing, of course, is self-imposed; Jake and Kaufman seem to share a fear of women smarter than themselves. Jake owns an anthology by the late film critic Pauline Kael, whom Kaufman read as a child, but lovingly defends John Cassavettes’s A Woman Under the Influence, which Kael savaged. Jake may be pitiable or even foolish, but he is a noble victim of his own enthusiasm. Kael’s review is channelled through Lucy as if it were her own rebuke, complete with the critic’s Northern California accent: Gena Rowlands is conceivably a “great actress”, “but nothing she does is memorable, because she does so much”. By airing Kael’s complaint, and a following one about A Woman Under the Influence’s runtime, (which I’m Thinking of Ending Things approaches), Kaufman gives us a self-effacing wink, acknowledging that the ever-transient characters and their canned lectures make finding a footing in the film difficult, but forcing the point that an acute predilection for ideas is the burden of the artist. In the end, Jake shuts down, sulking, and ends the conversation by saying that Lucy knows better. As Kaufman put it in an interview with IndieWire, having an opinion and being successfully countered is tantamount to having “failed”.
This kind of comment belongs to someone for whom everything is a reflection of them, what they are or are not. Jake’s ego is similarly unstoppable. He imagines his ideal “young woman” as a feminist, but when Lucy, on the drive home, recites opinions about ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’ – ones that have been debunked on Tumblr and Buzzfeed – Jake again goes cold. In fact, nothing Jake imagines for Lucy lasts and over the course of her visit, she slowly discovers her unoriginality. She finds ‘her’ work in the most disquieting corners of Jake’s family home: the collection of Eva H.D.’s which contains a poem, ‘Bonedog’, that Lucy had recited to him as her own, and the Ralph Albert Blakelock paintings she’d pulled up on her phone after offering to show Jake’s parents her landscape paintings. When talking about his love for acquiring knowledge, Kaufman says that learning takes him out of himself, making his “frame of reference larger and more complex than my concerns with my own issues.” Why, then, do all roads lead back to cis, straight, white men trapped in seemingly unnavigable situations and rigid gender roles? I’m Thinking of Ending Things creates a closed loop capable of neutralising any audience, parroting feminist critique and swallowing it immediately by reducing all ideas to a test of male intellect, precluding any actual ideas. Significantly, Kaufman fails to include the most relevant line of Kael’s review: she wrote that Cassavettes hooked his philosophical inspirations “on to his own specialty—the miseries of sexual union.” Is this because Kaufman himself has taken up this particular mantle? It’s not that his scripts leave his brand of middle class men, apparently socialised with plenty of coddling, off the hook. Whether through Susan from Adaptation (2002), Clementine from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), Adele, Claire, and Hazel from Synecdoche, New York (2008), Lisa from Anomalisa (2015), the writer constantly points out the projections of his men as they callously fly towards his women. It’s just that Kaufman’s depiction of the ego and its errors, which he seems to find endearing, grows tedious the nth time round.
While Ian Reid’s novel, of which this is an adaptation, includes a monologue from the perspective of Jake explaining that Lucy is an immortalised version of a stranger he didn’t have the courage to speak to (Linklater’s Before Sunrise trilogy is a prime example of the praise men receive when they abandon life for controllable fantasy), which is followed by the janitor/elderly Jake’s suicide, Kaufman writes a tender and opaque conclusion. His last tableau is of Jake, made-up as an old man, accepting an award for dramatic performance and declaring to a similarly costumed audience and Lucy that love precedes logical reasoning. Unlike the many other instances of artificial ageing in the film, this one is intentionally unconvincing, theatrical: the speech is taken from Ron Howard’s saccharine biopic of mathematician John Nash, A Beautiful Mind (2001). This scene is not, nor was that movie, real life, because in reality, as Kaufman loves to remind us, we lack the talent and the grace to love properly, and exist in a constant state of dissonance between expectation and experience of life. In the light of this fatalism, however, the thing-resembling-tenderness between the janitor and Lucy at the film’s end, along with ongoing references to Romantics like Wordsworth and Ralph Albert Blakelock, is lost, and Kaufman’s thoughts about idealisation deflate into a wan “that’s how things are” attitude. Even Jake’s wildest dreams for his life are humiliating, poisoned with fallibility. For Kaufman the only healthy way to relate to romance, to life in general, is finding profundity when, not if, it fails and scars. Showing us he knows better than the men who charge women with making life worth living (or enough at least to do anything but monetise their behaviour), over and over again, is both smug and boring, like a 12-year-old child who still boasts about knowing how to tie his shoes. Maybe Kaufman would appreciate this; he regularly bemoans and celebrates our sameness, as in the same-faced characters from Anomalisa, or the title of Synecdoche. Lucy and Jake speak about “the universality in the specific”, Lucy refers to situations, and Jake, as “just one more example of everything.” And yet what Kaufman seems to be refusing, looking at his collective body of work, is that universalising narcissism and ownership in love, or repeating the same lamentations of our capacity for harm, is speaking nothing into the abyss.
Bessie Rubinstein is one of Another Gaze‘s staff writers
