Call it confirmation bias or just a coping mechanism for dealing with a universe built from, um, chaos: we’re all suckers for a story. Editing our lives into coherent chapters, we add a new page every day with preternatural certainty; peek behind that comforting curtain, though, and you might start thinking of ending things.
(This piece contains spoilers )
ArrayThis. Is. A. Film.
Scene: a car wends its way down snowy roads, cutting a path through an impossibly blank landscape. Occupants: two. Behold, The Young Woman (Lucy, or is it Louise? played by Jessie Buckley) and her uninspiring boyfriend, Jake (Jesse Plemons). They’re on their way to Oklahoma to meet his family, a prospect which plunges the couple – and us along with them – into the high-stakes conviviality which must be summoned as worlds collide. How did it come to this? How long have they been together anyway? But first things first – there’s a lot of road to cover.
Kaufman’s oeuvre is comprised of films which know they’re films, and i’m thinking of ending things is no exception.
Kaufman’s latest project, i’m thinking of ending things, is adapted from a 2016 novel by Canadian author Iain Reid. The writer-director’s movies are notoriously knotty, beloved and dismissed for their flagrant disregard of boring things like chronology or narrative coherence, but they’re also aware of their medium. Kaufman’s oeuvre is comprised of films which know they’re films, and i’m thinking of ending things is no exception.
Drawing all that self-awareness into sophisticated cross pollination with cinematic conventions, we watch Buckley watch a bleak snowy landscape pass by through the car window. Her inner voice breaks the white noise of wheels whirring: “I’m thinking of ending things.” Smack. That’s the sound of the medium’s artifice thunking into view, like banging your knee on a coffee table. This is a film. This is its title. Lest we forget.
ArrayUnreliable narrators
It’s a warning worth flagging; after all, cinema is calibrated to command suspension of disbelief – luckily for filmmakers, that’s something human beings are practically falling over themselves to do. Much like The Young Woman, and often without realising, everyone is guilty of using hindsight to explain their present circumstances.
En route, the couple skip through myriad topics and texts, ticking off on our reading lists everyone from Wordsworth to David Foster Wallace and Guy Debord. She reluctantly recites a poem she’s written; he enthusiastically explains how perfectly it describes his experience. It’s a claustrophobic space, that little car, and the drive affords them plenty of time (if not much room) to contemplate the approaching collision of partner-and-parents, what-they-hope vs what-will-be – oh, and for Jake to read his girlfriend’s mind.
Whose head is this anyway?
At least, that’s how it looks. As we hear The Young Woman’s voiceover, it seems that he does too – that being said, he didn’t quite catch it: ‘Did you say something?’ asks Jake. Suddenly, it is unclear whose head we’re in – and things only get weirder. Arriving at his parents’ house, Jake wants to stretch his legs before going in; that would be fine, but it’s pitch dark and snowing.
Something you should know’, says Jake. ‘Life can be brutal, on a farm.’
After a bit of cajoling – and don’t we know that feeling, being on someone else’s home turf and the back foot? – The Young Woman agrees and they take a whistle-stop tour of the farm. Pigs have left stains on the barn floor where they lay infested with maggots. Dead lambs are frozen stiff in a heap, to be thawed in spring. ‘Life isn’t always pretty on a farm. Something you should know’, says Jake. ‘Life can be brutal, on a farm.’
ArrayHold on tight
At last, it’s time to head inside. Calling upstairs, Jake announces their arrival; it takes an unbearably long time for his parents to appear, during which he-and-she wander through the ground floor rooms. Jake lights a fire, taking the hearth from frigid to roaring instantaneously. His girlfriend asks about a door covered in scratch marks (a bad sign, I think we could all agree) and he says something about the family dog.
Well, where is this dog? What kind is he? The Young Woman would love to meet him! Jake’s off-beat answers – a border collie… called Jimmy – seem to summon the hound from thin air. There’s something of the lucid dream about this sequence; conjured from the speech act of his owner’s description, the pet appears and shakes himself dry. Only, he never stops; Jimmy’s a blur, vibrating and unnerving. This dog is the idea of a dog: can’t you picture him?
Wash your hands
Time for dinner! Here are mum and dad, gloriously rendered by Toni Collette and David Thewlis! Everyone’s laughing too loudly! From awkward conversation about their guest’s amateur painting (‘How can a picture of a field be sad without a sad person looking sad in the field?’) and her academic interest in ‘quantum psychics’ to the story of how she met their son – trivia night in a student bar, wasn’t it? – the family meal is excruciating. It’s also pivotal, because we’re ostensibly establishing facts: we’ll need those later in order to throw them off a proverbial cliff. Cut away, cut back, and the parents have aged.
As the film unfolds, Mum and Dad arrive full decades older or younger every time they re-enter the room. Outfits and scenery keep changing – imperceptibly, then jarringly – and, as night draws in, The Young Woman needs to go. She’s got a shift in the morning, and her pleas become less and less polite as reality caves in on all sides. Jake hears her, he totally does, but he’s a little preoccupied? Like, leading his suddenly infirm father upstairs, or spoon-feeding his dying mother, thanks very much? And doesn’t she study gerontology? Is she a poet, a painter, or…? This film isn’t behaving at all!
ArrayGirl of your dreams
Meanwhile, we’re cutting with increasing frequency to an old man in an empty high school: a janitor. In a break room, he catches the end of a rom com on TV; its meet-cute involves a vegan waitress getting caught out by recommending a beef burger. Later, on the stairs in the farmhouse and with accelerated parental aging in full swing, The Young Woman recaps her own first encounter with Jake. She was a waitress, and he ordered the burger, and the rest is history… isn’t it? What was that about a trivia night?
She was a waitress, and he ordered the burger, and the rest is history… isn’t it?
“People like to think of themselves as points moving through time, but I think it’s probably the opposite”, says The Young Woman. “We’re stationary and time passes through us. Blowing like cold wind, stealing our heat”; frighteningly prescient, until you remember she’s a figment of no less than three imaginations: Reid’s, Kaufman’s – and Janitor-Jake’s.
The imaginary landscape we’re inhabiting, in the film at least, is the janitor’s – who is Jake, thinking back and also sideways about what could have been. Cobbled together from other cultural references (at one point she spouts whole paragraphs from an infamous 1974 Pauline Kael review and eviscerates Jake’s favourite film) The Young Woman is racked with the inconsistencies of her creators’ subconscious. Copy-pasting her into versions of a life he never lived, the exercise is a bit like trying on a pair of shoes that you know you’ll never buy – painful, irresistible.
ArrayKaufman’s Uroboros
i’m thinking of ending things is unspeakably sad. For all his surreal ducking and diving, Kaufman has a way of mirroring the experience of real life with an exquisite acuity – somehow, it’s the opposite of realism. Stripping away touchstones, those we place carefully and others we don’t know we’re clinging to, this is a film that rings truer than truth.
Kaufman has a way of mirroring the experience of real life with an exquisite acuity…
Think about how you ended up where you’re sitting right now, and observe your brain automatically aligning random events into a coherent whole; sense-seeking is part of our essential make up, and the stories we tell on screen or page are exemplary of that wiring. We know how they work, what they should mean, how they should end. We depend on them – Kaufman knows that better than anyone, which is why he insists on pulling them from beneath our feet.
Stitched together from snatches of texts, memories of his ageing parents and composite family pets, the janitor’s (day)dream revolves around a high school, once attended as a student and now tended in old age. You’ll have your own version; one cannot invent anything – only absorb, or twist. Even in your wildest fantasies, she’s thinking of ending things.
