film – paradoxography

I finished the annual viewing of It’s A Wonderful Life several weeks ago, of course (it’s a Christmas Eve tradition), but wanted to write a little on what I noticed this time around. One of my favorite things about this film is how many repeat viewings it can withstand; I literally don’t ever watch it without noticing some new moment or detail. It’s an incredibly fully-realized story-world.

This time, perhaps because I’ve been watching the working man’s rage draw closer and closer to a boiling point with recent events, I observed a thing or two about everyone’s favorite Grinch, Mr. Potter. Of course, he’s worse than just a Grinch; the film makes it clear that Mr. Potter’s domination of Bedford Falls’ economy is actually, materially dangerous to its citizens, which in turn increases the heroism of our man George Bailey. Watching them battle is one of the chief pleasures of the film, ever more gratifying the older I get and the more knowledgeable about worldly issues. Jimmy Stewart’s poignant pleas for just a little decency for the working man soothe a sense of complaint that still rankles, ever more so because it’s never directly addressed in contemporary society, squelched by the super-charged corporate behemoth. “Is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath?” is the barest, most honest of requests, one that any viewer would have trouble looking down on.

Mr. Potter, of course, remains obdurate. Lionel Barrymore perfects an expression of utter implacability, as though his body is a shield repelling George Bailey’s outflowing of emotion. (I tried to find the best picture to represent this.) At several points in the film, both George and his father Peter speculate on why Potter is such a “hard character.” The conclusion they come up with is that Potter is “sick in his mind, sick in his soul if he has one” and George adds, to Potter’s face, that Potter is “talking about something you can’t get your fingers on, and it’s galling you.” This seems to be the conclusion of the film as well: that Potter is missing something essential in his life, which the Baileys have in spades. That is, love and community.

This is all pretty clear from watching the film, but what struck me this time was that it’s not at all clear that any of that speculation about Potter is actually true. There is zero indication in the film that what Mr. Potter really wants is to be loved, like the Grinch or Ebeneezer Scrooge. Perhaps, you could argue, this is because Potter has never experienced anyone being loving toward him, and therefore doesn’t know what he’s missing out on; that could be a valid argument. I could easily imagine a spin-off movie about Potter which attempts to psychologize and locate his trauma, thereby “unlocking” his sense of kindness. Thankfully, the film doesn’t go anywhere in this direction (so there’s at least one way in which it is realistic and not overly sentimental).

Because of this personality difference (or whatever you want to call it), the on-screen ideological battles between George and Potter are massively one-sided. Only one of the parties in the argument really tries to make a case; the other side just folds his arms and frowns. Potter not only doesn’t care about George’s lofty ideas of decency and camaraderie, he doesn’t dignify them with any kind of response, let alone an equally impassioned one. The way Lionel Barrymore plays Potter, he is not a man without passion; his stony face is often animated with amusement or chagrin. He just doesn’t, for most of the film, care to engage in the verbal back-and-forth, except for the part when he calls George a “warped, frustrated young man.” His battle is not one of words; it’s one of pure, cold capital.

If what the Baileys believed was true, that Potter just needs love and community to make him less of a “hard character,” this would be a hopeful vision; in fact, it would seem to solve the vast majority of relationship problems. Throw love at someone, and watch them become kind. But I see no indication that this is the case with Potter. It looks more like the Baileys projecting their moral values onto a person who has nothing to do with them at all. In truth, Potter doesn’t care a whit about winning a moral victory. The only time he seems to have any feeling about the Baileys besides sneering dismissal and annoyance is when he sees George in real financial trouble near the end of the film. At this point, Potter comes alive with competitive fervor, like a shark activated by the hint of blood (“Happy New Year to you – in jail!”). Finally, his war might be won: George might be financially ruined and have no chance of interfering with Potter’s takeover of the economy.

The mischaracterization of Potter by the Baileys struck me as an important lesson, namely the futility of trying to fight a moral battle against a party whose priorities and values are not even in the same universe as yours. Many of us find ourselves drowning in outrage every time we open the news or social media, exposed to points of view that seem so abhorrent as to be impossible. We expect our own values to triumph, simply because they are our values and therefore self-evidently good. The result is that we give away too much energy to this outrage, or we twist ourselves into pretzels trying to understand and empathize, rather than simply dealing with the facts as they are. This emotional energy would be far better used to nurture and tend to our own moral values, and to extend them where they might meet an open recipient. Potter is not such a person.

As long as the Baileys can’t truly understand Potter’s lack of interest in anything but financial victory, and continue to consider him part of the same moral universe (albeit on the opposite side), he wins. The movie resolves with one of the most touching scenes of all time, a loving community coming together (one can only dream of such a thing happening these days!), and leaves us to assume that Potter is sitting, defeated and lonely, in his cold office. But Potter as he is portrayed in this film is immune to such “sentimental hogwash.” Rather, he’s probably being rolled around his cold office, planning his next move, invigorated by the new level of challenge before him.

image I blatantly stole off Google images

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.

Category: film

The Moral Universe of A Wonderful Life

I’m Thinking of Thinking: Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things