Though I am the most devout of Charlie Kaufman fans, this film mostly escaped my attention until now, as a result of the craziness that was 2020. I also, like many during that time, subconsciously veered away from films and books that seemed too bleak and mood-altering; however, I was pleasantly surprised that the film managed to be both creepy and hilarious. The acting was uniformly fantastic, with Toni Collette nearly threatening to steal the film as the mother, and the casting of David Thewlis as a down-home Oklahoma farmer was, for me, a punchline in itself.
But as a long-time Kaufman fan, I was struck most this time by how his work has evolved for me over the approximately 20 years (shit I’m old) I’ve been following him. Back in grad school, we used to talk about the idea that a good experimental story would teach you how to read it. That is, it would give you the tools, conceptual or linguistic or both, that you needed to understand it. Like all dictums in art, this is not applicable in every single instance, but I noticed a remarkable example in Kaufman’s films of how a storyteller has taught me to read his work.
Kaufman’s films always take place at least partially inside the mind, which is where all purported “reality” takes place anyway – Kaufman is just being more upfront and honest about it. In earlier films he toyed with this concept in various ways. In Being John Malkovich there was literally a portal into someone else’s brain, of course, so large parts of the story took place inside John Malkovich’s brain. The resulting scenes could look like anything from first-person banality (experience being John Malkovich rehearsing lines for a Chekhov play!), or could escalate into an insanely original, dramatic sequence like the one where Lottie chases Maxine through John Malkovich’s subconscious.
When an author tinkers with reality, they typically want to let the viewer or reader know what the rules of this particular universe are. In films like BJM and Eternal Sunshine we had characters helpfully explaining, in brief lines, what was happening. In the sequence mentioned above, the rule of John Malkovich’s brain-portal has been violated: Lottie and Maxine have rushed into the portal when someone was already in there. Hence, they are booted to the subconscious. We might possibly have figured this out, but in case we didn’t, Lottie briefly explains to Maxine where they are. The two characters somehow escape John Malkovich’s subconscious by bursting out the door of a school bus, the logic of which is not explained, but at the time I didn’t much mind: the film had established enough of a conceptual rule (and even a rule for when that rule was violated) that I felt it had earned what happened. (I was not conscious of this thinking at the time; I simply didn’t get knocked out of the story, unlike how Maxine and Lottie were knocked out of John Malkovich’s brain.)
In Eternal Sunshine, the story took place partly in Joel’s brain, which was being altered (“it basically is brain damage”) so that he could forget Clementine – specifically, it took place in his memory. So the hippocampus, I suppose. (I like the idea of writing this into the script: “SETTING: JOEL’S HIPPOCAMPUS”.) In some of these scenes, Joel is a passive witness to his own past, narrating over his own memories. Another rule is that the characters in the memories can’t see him (similar to John Malkovich’s subconscious). Then this rule is bent, though not quite broken, when Clementine shows up in Joel’s memories and becomes aware, along with him, of what’s happening.
Once again, there is a dramatic sequence in which two characters are “awake” inside the mind, as they try to halt the erasing process from inside. Once again, the characters are helpful in letting the viewer know the rules of the process, and where they are, in this neurologically-generated universe: they explain where in Joel’s memory they are, and how they might escape the “eraser guys” by hiding out in a memory that the guys won’t get to, i.e. one without Clem.
Fast forward to 2020, and the new film, I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Kaufman has become so familiar and adept with his unique way of constructing story that he skips nearly all explanation to the viewer. The indeterminacy is just occurring in front of us, in many fascinating sequences: the main character’s name is indeterminate, the dog seems to blip in and out of reality (and when he’s there, is only seen shaking himself off, a perpetual blur), the bandage on Jake’s father’s head changes sides, etc. More tellingly, words and ideas once expressed by one character are shown to have originated somewhere else, authored by a completely different person. Whose words and ideas are they, then?
We know, from being assiduous Kaufman fans, that this story is taking place inside someone’s mind, or something like that – but whose mind?
Just the fact that this question popped into my head partway into the film shows you how well Kaufman has taught me to read his work. It also shows his progression as an artist. The switch from using characters to call out the concepts and conceits in his stories, to simply having them happen with no explanation, moves him from the rank of a highly talented magical realist, to that of a masterful artist like Gogol or Lynch or even Joyce, whose disruptions and reinventions of consensus reality are so complex and so thorough that they truly create a separate universe of their own which cannot be simply explained by some quirky “rules.”
But back to the actual question: whose POV is this? Because someone is warping the narrative; this is not objective reality, nor is it a universe in which all characters notice the strangeness – only Lucy notices. Normally, this would make Lucy the POV character. In addition, the narrative begins with her internal monologue, which also would seem to establish her as the POV character. However, her thoughts are inconsistent: she can’t be sure what her name is, and deeper into the movie she begins to slip in and out of other personalities, without seeming to be aware of it. So her control over the POV of the story has ebbed away. And so now who is the one whose mind we’re inside, as we were inside John Malkovich’s, and inside Joel’s?
The answer to this becomes clear midway through the film, and we realize that we have been watching a POV-within-a-POV, à la Craig going into John Malkovich’s mind through the portal (or actually, more like Malkovich going through his own portal). One character has, through some magic, managed to do the impossible, and actually enter another’s subjective reality – the dream, for a storyteller and fiction writer. But the trip is ultimately unsuccessful, and falls apart.
The novel thing about I’m Thinking of Ending Things is that this is done with hardly any explicit mention of the sleight-of-hand happening in front of us. It’s true that the characters do have some philosophical discussions which veer toward an answer, but it’s a far cry from lines in earlier movies which directly tell us whose subconscious we are in. We have to feel the answers intuitively, and even when we manage to see what’s going on, the narrative will not hold us steadily in a comfortable position. It keeps shifting, restlessly, not wanting to settle on any pat formation of what is truly chaotic and infinitely complex (the mind). Eventually, the story floats off into the ether, but even then there is consistency of character and at least some plausible explanation of what happens in the ending. However, there’s also a delightful amount of room for interpretation.
By doing this, Kaufman has shifted from making films about the question of point-of-view, to making a film which actually enacts the dilemma of point-of-view. (A discussion for another time would be how using another’s story, by Iain Reed, as a basis allowed him to do this.) What does it mean to be a character in someone else’s narrative? Earlier films posed this question in their own ways, and characters acted it out on screen; but in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, we see the question become part of the form of the film itself. The question is irreducible and inseparable from the form of the story: in other words, the film itself is the question. It poses other questions as well (how do we create the narratives that make up our identity? how do those narratives change over time? etc.), but those questions are dramatically portrayed, rather than actually altering the form of the story.
Perhaps Kaufman is no longer interested, as I am increasingly no longer interested, in setting up rules for a surrealistic narrative (no matter how wild and innovative that narrative is) and fulfilling them. Perhaps it becomes more interesting to see how lost you can get in the weeds, without completely losing sight of the original path. For some this results in a maddening indeterminacy (when you Google the title of the film, the auto-complete suggests “ending explained”). For others it’s a relief from predictability, and a celebration of the singularity of each creative mind.
paradoxography 