I’m Thinking of Ending Things is acclaimed writer-director Charlie Kaufman’s first film since 2015’s Oscar-nominated stop-motion romance Anomalisa. Certainly fans of his earlier work like Synecdoche, New York; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; Adaptation; and Being John Malkovich have been eagerly anticipating his return. I’m Thinking of Ending Things, which landed on Netflix on Friday, plays around with many familiar Kaufman concepts like dual identities, dream-like realities, and frustrated, lonely men and the women they hope will save them. But even though one would never call any one of Kaufman’s films simple or direct, I’m Thinking of Ending Things might be his most purposefully inscrutable work. Thankfully, there’s help in the form of the novel that the film is based on. Iain Reid’s novel of the same name—though plenty complicated in its own right—clarifies the central premise of Kaufman’s adaptation and illuminates its abstract ending.
What follows is an attempt to unpack Kaufman’s film with the help of both Reid’s book and one very famous Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. Spoilers, obviously, to follow.
The biggest hint about what, exactly, is going on in both the book and the film comes in the title. “I’m thinking of ending things” is a phrase repeated both by the female narrator of the book and the film’s central character, played by Jessie Buckley. We take it to mean that she’s thinking of breaking up with her newish boyfriend, Jake (Jesse Plemons), while they’re on their way to meet his parents. But this is a phrase that can also mean “I’m thinking of committing suicide,” and by the end of the book it becomes clear that’s the truer meaning of the title of the book. Everything we see with Jake, his parents, and this unnamed woman is taking place inside the head of an older man, a high school janitor (Guy Boyd), who is contemplating taking his own life. “Jake” is an idealized version of his younger self, and the woman is a fantastical version of a person he met once long ago. Jake, the custodian, appears to suffer from some mental health issues exacerbated by a lifetime of extreme loneliness. He spends the novel and film daydreaming a scenario that maybe could have changed his life and set him down a happier path.
This revelation isn’t very obvious in the film, but the book’s narration—which up until the final pages had been taking place inside this woman’s head and in the first person—very clearly switches from “I” to “we.” “It’s Jake. It was Jake,” Reid writes. “We’re in here together. All of us…And the girl. She. He. We. Me.” There are clues that this was coming throughout both the book and the film, if you know what to look for, including the moment when the woman sees a photo of Jake as a kid and it looks just like her.
In both the final pages of the book and the conclusion of the movie, we get something approximating the truth of Jake’s relationship with this young woman. When speaking with Boyd’s janitor character in the high school hallway, Buckley’s kindly demeanor hardens as Older Jake listens to her describe his worst fears about what this woman, who was really a stranger to him, thought of him: “He was a creeper, you know? It’s like asking me to describe a mosquito that bit me on an evening 40 years ago.”
The book version of events is a little gentler. Jake, as a cripplingly socially awkward young man who rarely leaves his house, meets a young woman during a game of trivia in a bar one night and she smiles at him. But he doesn’t have the courage to give her his number. “Would anything be different if she had had his number?” he wonders in the novel during the final minutes of his life. “If things had gone well, would she have visited the house where he was raised? Would any of it have made a difference? Yes. No. Maybe. It doesn’t matter now.”
Because he knows so little about this young woman he never really got to know all those years ago, Older Jake has created a fantasy girl largely made up of books he’s read and films he’s seen. She keeps shifting throughout the film as he tries out different versions of her, hoping he can land on a version where it all works out for them, for him. That’s why in the film her name changes from Lucy to Lucia to Louisa, etc. It’s also why at one point she’s played by Colby Minifie, the actress from the fake Robert Zemeckis film that the janitor is watching on his break. It’s why one minute she’s a physicist and the next she’s a poet. It’s why the poem she claims to have written (and recites in the car) is actually from Rotten Perfect Mouth by Eva H.D.—one of the books we see her pick up in Jake’s childhood bedroom. It’s there alongside a physics textbook and a copy of film critic Pauline Kael’s For Keeps.
Later, on the drive away from the house, Buckley transforms her young woman character into a cigarette-smoking impression of the unflinchingly tough Kael. In one of the film’s best sequences, she tears into 1974’s A Woman Under the Influence. (Just as Kael did herself.) This is just another one of Older Jake’s fantasies. In his dreams he’s not only dating a cute, redheaded version of Kael, but can also keep up with her intellectually.
The Calls Are Coming From Inside the House
One clue that the young woman is a fantasy created by older janitor Jake is a series of mysterious phone calls that she receives throughout the story. In the book, these creepy calls, which are from an unidentified older man, are coming from her own number. For the film, Kaufman modifies the clue somewhat: The woman’s constantly ringing cell phone displays calls coming from “Lucy” or “Lucia” or “Louisa” or even “Yvonne.” The caller ID switches as the woman’s name switches. In both the book and film, the voicemails are almost always the same. An older man says: “There’s only one question to resolve. I’m scared. I feel a little crazy. I’m not lucid.” These are older Jake’s real, suicidal thoughts intruding on his fantasy.
Isn’t This All a Little Creepy?
Aside from the creeping dread of the whole journey and intentionally ghoulish atmosphere of Jake’s childhood home, isn’t the premise of a fantasy woman being created by an older man rather gross? Isn’t the notion that she might have been the one to “save” him fairly retrograde? Yes and no. Clever films like 2012’s Ruby Sparks have done a much more direct job of dissecting the worn-out premise of a manic pixie dream girl that exists entirely to save our conflicted or depressed male hero. But I’m Thinking of Ending Things satirizes this more directly than Kaufman’s filmography—which has previously fallen prey to this cliché—ever has.
In the middle of the film, the young woman takes a looping journey down the staircase in Jake’s house and we hear inner thoughts: “I don’t even know who I am in this thing anymore. Where I stop and Jake starts…Jake needs to see me as someone who sees him. He needs to be seen, and he needs to be seen with approval. Like that’s my purpose in all this, in life. To approve of Jake, to keep him going…‘Look at my girlfriend, look at what I won. She’s smart, she’s talented, she’s sensitive.’” It’s a poignant enough monologue on its own, but once you realize that Jake has literally created this woman out of whole cloth, it’s even more chilling.
The fake Zemeckis film set in a diner with Minifie and Jason Ralph playing out a toxic version of the big cinematic romantic gesture is also a clue that this is a film as interested in the damaging impact of male ennui as it is the ennui itself.
Are We Sure Jake Is the Janitor?
Though the idea that the young woman, Jake, and the janitor are all the same person is made clear in the novel, it’s far from clear in the film. Are we sure Kaufman hasn’t changed that premise in his adaptation? Why would we see actor Jesse Plemons in old-age makeup at the end when they’ve already cast this older actor in the role? Well, we’ll get to the theme of aging in a bit, but if you watch the film again with the knowledge that Jake and the janitor are the same person, a number of things start to make more sense. Like why the young woman would find a bunch of janitor uniforms in the washing machine in Jake’s basement. (A truth he is desperate to hide from her.) Or why Jake occasionally says odd things like: “My high school where I spent every tortured day for so long. For so goddamn…long.” Why he’s intimately familiar with the cycle of high school musicals. Or why this rant doesn’t sound like something a relatively young man would say: “The lie of it all…That it’s going to get better, that it’s never too late, that God has a plan for you. That age is just a number.”
Age Is Just a Number
A theme that is much more prevalent in the film than in the book is this idea of aging, rot, and decay. The story of the pig with the maggot belly is directly out of the novel, but the reappearance of said pig in cartoon form (voiced by Oliver Platt) is pure Kaufman. So is the decline we see in Jake’s parents, played with nightmarish zeal by Toni Collette and David Thewlis. In the novel, as the young woman tries to navigate a very disorienting and frustrating visit to Jake’s parents’ house, she notices what seem like glitches in the Matrix. The mother’s dress changes color or the father materializes with an extra bandage on his head. All these small details are meant to alert us to the fact that something is decidedly off.
In the film, Kaufman takes these anomalies to an extreme and shows us Jake’s mother and father ping-ponging back and forth throughout the years. Their decay not only reflects older Jake confronting his own decline, but also serves as a kind of life-flashing-before-your-eyes experience for a man about to end it all. There’s also the nearly unbearable tension of the young woman—an extension of Jake, remember—desperately wanting to get out of the house and back to the city. Jake never did escape his claustrophobic childhood home. He watched his parents die, and he lives there still, washing his janitorial uniforms in the basement.
The old-age makeup in the finale is related to this theme. Jake has stayed in this small rural town his whole life and watched class after class of teenagers brimming with potential grow old along with him.
Between a recent Broadway revival and a showcase in last year’s Watchmen, Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma is having quite the pop cultural moment. I suppose we’re all rather obsessed with examining the myth of Americana. I wonder why.
At any rate, the use of Oklahoma in I’m Thinking of Ending Things is 100% pure, uncut Kaufman. It’s not in the book at all. But even on a very superficial level, Oklahoma’s inclusion makes sense. The janitor is observing some students rehearsing Oklahoma and he likes musicals, so their rehearsal is invading his reverie. One song in particular, “Many a New Day,” about the false optimism about a romance between a handsome cowhand Curly and spunky farm girl Laurey, is piped into the car at the beginning of his fantasy.
The movie takes a hard turn into Oklahoma-land in the final act starting with a dream ballet sequence in the high school hallway. Dream ballets are something of a signature of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musicals. Carousel has one. But the most famous by far, and the one being overtly referenced here, is from Oklahoma.
In Jake’s own mind, he has cast his younger self as Curly and the young woman is, of course, his Laurey. But just as he does in Oklahoma, the musical’s villainous farmhand, Jud Fry, breaks into the fantasy and ruins the romance. This role is filled by the janitor, a.k.a. Older Jake. In other words, in this moment, Jake is forced to reckon with the notion that he’s not the Curly of this or any story. He’s not the handsome leading man. He’s the frustrated, lonely, villain.
Which takes us to the film’s conclusion: Jesse Plemons, in old-age makeup, stands on a high school theater stage with an Oklahoma set behind him. Toni Collette is with him onstage, taking on the role of Aunt Eller, Laurey’s guardian. Jessie Buckley, David Thewlis, and a crowd of teens—all in stage-y old-age makeup—look on. After giving one last fantastical speech, Jake takes his spot in lonely Jud’s sad little shack, which is decorated with some items from real Jake’s room. (The Genus edition of Trivial Pursuit, for one.) Plemons then sings “Lonely Room,” Jud’s song from the stage version of Oklahoma, all about Jud’s fantasy that he, and not Curly, can get the girl:
“Lonely Room” won’t be a familiar song to folks who only know the film version of Oklahoma. But the song that immediately precedes it in the show might hold a clue as to why Kaufman zeroed in on Jud as a helpful pop cultural echo for Jake. Curly, in an attempt to keep his rival away from Laurey, visits the awkward, lonely Jud in his sad shack and the two duet on the famous “Pore Jud Is Daid,” all about the fantasy of being remembered fondly after death.
Yes, that’s right, in the middle of a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, the hero visits the villain and gently suggests that his romantic rival kill himself. You can view it as a joke if you like. It all depends on how the scene is played. But this may be one of the most famous pieces of light-hearted American pop culture about suicide. It’s a song that makes it clear that the Curlys of the world don’t think the Juds belong in it. And tragically, in the end, it would appear that Jake—after living a life of quiet, lonely desperation—agrees.
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