My favorite movie of all time is the surrealist psychological thriller movie I’m Thinking of Ending Things, written and directed by Charlie Kaufman and based on the book of the same name by Iain Reed. I find it inspiring as a filmmaker, writer, and actor. It’s on Netflix, and everyone I’ve recommended it to has come away saying “that was boring” or “that was weird.” Sometimes it’s both. I’m great at selling stuff. A real wolf of wallstreet
So I’m going to do that thing video essays do where I briefly summarize what happens in the movie, its style, and why I think Wikipedia has its genre wrong. I need lay that ground work before I can get around to queering the film. That’s where I’m going to argue for a reading of a film that says: A trans woman lives out her life as a cis man because she fails the existential crisis.
The Film
Alright: Here’s the plot.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things follows Jake and a young woman played by Jessie Plemons and Jessie Buckley respectively in excellent turns that I’m still upset didn’t lend them award season buzz. The couple is on the way to have dinner with Jake’s parents. The young woman, currently named Lucy, wants to breakup. She’s been thinking of ending things. On the long drive into the countryside, they talk about science, aging, and art. The woman performs a poem called “Bonedog” that she wrote. Whenever the conversation lulls, her voice over returns. She’s thinking about ending things. They arrive at Jake’s parents’ house. It’s snowing. He shows her to the barn and they talk about dead and dying animals. They go inside and she meets his dog. His basement scares her. His parents come down, and they have a feast. The young woman recounts how she and Jake met at a trivia night. Jake’s parents talk about his past. Lucy is a physicist. No, she’s a painter. Her name is different. It keeps changing. All the while, a Janitor cleans a school. He takes a break and watches a rom com where a woman is fired from a diner. At the dinner, Lucy clears away the plates like a waitress. They have dessert. The young woman worries about the snow and wants to leave. The parents talk of aging. Aging. Aging. She wants to leave. The young woman is alone. She goes upstairs to find Jake but instead, in his room, finds the poem Bonedog by Eva H.D., the same one she thought she wrote earlier. The father comes in. He’s old now and has trouble with memory. She finds Jake feeding his old and dying mother food. Downstairs, the mother is young, younger than at dinner, talking as though Jake is a toddler. She sends the young woman to put laundry in the basement where she finds the paintings she showed off earlier, copies Jake had done of other artists. They leave. On the way home, they stop for a treat and fight. Despite the young woman’s protests, Jake drives them to his high school to throw away their ice cream. He senses they’re being watched and abandons the young woman in his car. She laments their relationship before following him. She reveals they never dated. A dream ballet where the Janitor kills Jake. Jake and the young woman vanish. The janitor strips in his truck to kill himself. A hallucinatory pig takes him inside the school, ushering him into the afterlife. Or, more likely, he dies in his truck, and the rest is the cooked up imagination of his dream.
So, there it is. It turns out the young woman was never real. She was thinking of ending things because Jake, the Janitor, is suicidal. This is the night he dies, and his life flashes before his eyes. There’s philosophy and art and science and the disappointment of his parents, the overbearance, home, home, home. The memories collide into each other. His failures show up. Reality takes him, and he sings in the afterlife.
Or maybe he doesn’t die. It’s a little open ended.
Style
I’m Thinking of Ending Things doesn’t so much thrill, as psychological thriller might have you believe, as it dreadens you. It makes you uncomfortable. The main character’s name keeps changing and no one acknowledges it but you. At one point, Jesse Buckley looks directly into the camera. It only happens the once. She sees you. Her gaze is knowing, condemning.
The film is shot in 4:3 aspect ratio. It’s when things look like this. The frame forces you into a sort of claustrophobia. What’s outside of it?
A video I really enjoyed is Thomas Flight’s “When the Movie has Bad Editing on Purpose,” an essay about I’m Thinking of Ending Things. Flight discusses how the editing of the film breaks contemporary convention to put the audience on edge. There aren’t transition shots that cue you into a passage of time. You jump. The characters jump. Continuity is broken again and again.
The editing and claustrophobia together build this sense of dread. Are the things that appear out of nowhere hovering just out of frame? What else is there? Or do they appear from the ether? Does time pass as usual or does it, in this world, splice together the way it does for us watching it? Lucy’s name changes. Her career changes. Her past changes. Time doesn’t flow the way it should. When a teenage girl working at Tulsey Town warns the young woman that she doesn’t have to go forward in time, we know that’s true. Time didn’t move in a linear way at the house.
There’s a dream ballet. Film and art and writings bleed into the dialogue and actions like they’re made by the characters, but we always learn they weren’t. Men are not made up of themselves. We’re made of the things we’ve consumed. By consuming those things, they consume us. We’re consuming this movie at the same time that it’s eating us. We are food.
The first time I watched the movie, I thought the reveal at the end would be that the young woman was a ghost constantly reliving the night Jake killed her. She bounces through time in the house because she’s haunting it. At the high school, she finds a bin filled with discarded milkshakes, like she’s done this a million times. Like this is all an endless loop she can never escape. The growing dread led me to believe something of that nature would be behind it all. I was wrong.
Speaking of being wrong:
Wikipedia’s wrong genre
The Wikipedia entry for the film calls it a surrealist psychological thriller. And it’s wrong. Okay, that’s incendiary language and, hearing that, you would expect me to tear them apart and prove myself with facts and logic. But that’s a clickbaity way of getting to the actual point I’m making, which is that’s not necessarily the only correct genre to give the film.
Let’s set aside psychological thriller. I agree with that. The thing I take issue with is “surrealist.” Surrealism as an art movement is typicized by the dream. Things don’t necessarily make sense. They’re disjointed and absurd. The point of surrealism is to use dreams and absurdism to mine the subconscious, to gain further clues to the psyche and the human condition. Automatic poetry is an exercise I remember doing in college. Perhaps an artist would set an alarm for when they’d be in the midst of sleep. They’d jot down some idea of what they dreamt of, and then they would sleep again to confer with their notes in the morning.
Now, at first glance, I’m Thinking of Ending Things is surrealist. There’s the animated pig near the end of the film and the dream ballet inspired by the dream ballet in the musical Oklahoma! The odd flow of time creates a dreamlike structure. The way the characters flow through things they read and saw once upon a time also conjures up an idea of how the subconscious works. When you realize this is all the wandering imagination of a suicidal man, you realize this was all a sort of dream. Line after line talks about mortality and wonders if creatures are hardwired for survival. What is it that creates us? What led Jake to this life of misery? It’s mining his psyche.
But. I think labelling the film surrealist ignores the central flaw with Jake as a character: He defines himself through other people: the jeers of students, the pride of his mother, the insults of his father. When he feels as though those in his life might embarrass him, he gets angry because of the effect it might have on how others perceive him. In the dream ballet, Janitor Jake and Young Jake fight each other. The Janitor kills the youth. But this isn’t time winning out. The Janitor in the dance is skeevy and horrid. He’s how Jake believes the sneering teenagers view him. Jake finds meaning through others’ perception. When the art he likes is critiqued, he feels personally attacked. He has placed his identity here. He cares deeply about the words others use to describe him. He won a diligence pin as a child and it has bothered him ever since: this is how others view him. Jake’s flaw is that he cannot exist outside of others.
This becomes even clearer when you realize that Jake is the person actually thinking about ending things. That puts the young woman as a sort of insert for him. She’s the one sharing his thoughts. She is literally defined by others. Her name is the one given to her by everyone else. Her career is chosen by the words of those around her. Her interests. Her past. The world goes out of whack because she is changed by the perceptions pushed on her about her.
Therefore, in my opinion, the fundamental lens of this film is existentialist. When people think of existentialism, the first instinct is to think of a bunch of college students sitting around and getting high off dirty bongs and going, “What if we’re in a simulation, man?” But it isn’t endless questions about the nature of reality. Those questions might get you there, though, by inducing an existential crisis. An existential crisis occurs when you run into the absurdity of the universe. “What if there is no order to it? What if it means nothing? What if there is no after life and no cosmic purpose?” Absurd doesn’t mean comical. It means chaotic. Meaningless.
Normally there are four responses to the run-in with that crisis: 1) you ignore or deny it, 2) you become an existentialist, 3) you become an absurdist, 4) you become a nihilist. Most people choose the first option. You’re probably familiar with nihilism: the universe is chaotic and has no inherent meaning, therefore there is no meaning and the pursuit of anything is futile. Nihilism is a deadend. The difference between absurdism and existentialism lies mostly in where meaning is conjured. Both say that the universe is chaotic. There is no inherent meaning to it all. The absurdist says: so therefore meaning is a human creation, and the pursuit of meaning, choosing to believe things matter, is what matters. The existentialist says meaning, instead, must come from the self. It is following the one thing you know to be true: you. Thelema: do as thou wilt, but don’t impose your will onto others.
One of the most famous phases to ever come out of theatre comes from Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit. “Hell is other people,” wrote the French philosopher. Sartre himself was an existentialist. A lot of times people use that quote to mean, “Ugh, people, am I right? They suck.” But… that’s not the real message of the show. In the play, there are no reflective surfaces in the hotel. The denizens of hell have to way of physically perceiving themselves in whole outside of the ways in which the others might define them. Therefore, their self-concepts become bound by how the others see them. “Hell is other people,” because when our inner meaning comes from others, we are wholly at their mercy. We can never be whole. We can never be complete or happy. We are tortured for eternity.
Jake’s issue is that he cannot define himself. He finds meaning in the arts others make. In the thoughts others have. No one is truly himself. We are made up of the thoughts of others. In only being defined by others, he brings himself to hell. When he performs on stage, he is finally celebrated. It seems like a happy ending… but if that’s the afterlife, he has to keep performing. He can never be. He must always act. He is always watched. He is placed inside hell. As Eric Kohn says in an article on IndieWire, “Sitting on a set built from the fragments that define his life, Jake has become the star of his own story and simultaneously confined by it.”
As such, I argue this is an existentialist film with surrealist imagery.
What is Queering
Before I can get around to queering the film, we’ve got to be on the same page about what that means.
To paraphrase an article from the Brown Daily Herald, Aalia Jagwani sums it up as this: to queer something, as queer theory is concerned, is to look at the ways it plays around gender and sexuality outside strict heteronormativity. It isn’t wholescale invention. It’s reading text and looking for the ways in which queerness plays a role, unintentionally or not.
I had a professor in college who discussed how queering was an important part of her academic journey. We once briefly talked about it in regards to the musical Wicked and the queer readings of Elphaba and Galinda’s friendship.
Queering also isn’t forcing a reading. It is not to say “this is the only way to read the text.” It says “This is a way to read the text.”
For a quick example, take the song “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy” by Big & Rich. The chorus goes:
“And the girls say, ‘Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy.
Everybody says, ‘Save a horse, ride a cowboy.’”
So, the line is a euphemism. Riding here means intercourse. I don’t need to go into much detail there. But let’s look at those lines. First, it’s the girls saying it. Then the singer goes, “Well, actually, everyone said it.” It’s not only girls who want to ride the cowboy. The boys and theys do, too. “But!” you might say. “What if the non-girls say because they’re cowboys trying to turn into rides?” Well, in the second verse, the singer says, “I’m the only John Wayne left in this town.” John Wayne was an actor known for western films. A cowboy. The singer is making clear he’s the only cowboy in the city. So when everyone longs to ride a cowboy, he’s the only option. Though the singer sleeps with a woman, it’s clear that he’s entered a town of open queerness, one he is aware of and is willing to brag about. Everyone wants him.
Queering I’m Thinking of Ending Things
Let’s examine how I’m Thinking of Ending Things touches on gender.
There’s a small exchange that’s stuck with me since the first time I saw the film. I’ve seen it ten times now, and it sticks out each time. The young woman is examining the pictures on the walls, as one does when visiting someone’s place. She spots a young red-headed child. It’s her. “Who is this?” she asks. “You can’t tell? It’s me,” he responds. And it is. “No,” she thinks, “it was me.”
That brief exchange is what clued me into the trans reading. If the young woman is simply an imagination of the dying Jake as his “dream girlfriend,” then there’d be no reason for them to share an existence in a childhood photo. They may share interests and thoughts, but they wouldn’t mean they share a self. A past. Jake and Lucy share a childhood. Importantly, they assert themselves over the other. Jake is adamant that it’s him, and it should be obvious. She thinks it’s her, but she’s less sure. Jake, the performer, tries to show confidence. Lucy, the dream, the narrator, the view from the janitor’s dying mind, is less sure.
The young woman is actually there for Jake’s childhood. Kaufman shows us that through the way time moves in the house after dessert. The young woman sees Jake’s parents in their old age. When I originally thought she might be a ghost, this made sense to me, especially having seen The Haunting of Hill House not too long beforehand. Ghosts often find themselves misplaced in time. But by the end we know she isn’t a ghost, so that can’t be it. It would make sense if the young woman was only an imagined perfect and unobtained love that she would see the future of Jake’s parents; he would have her through all the ups and downs of his life. She would see him take care of them in their aging. But time doesn’t only jump forward. The young woman runs into Jake’s mother when she’s picking up his toys. He’s not seen, but it’s clear Jake is a young child in this moment. It’s almost as if Kaufman is implying Lucy has always been with Jake. If we had seen him as a young one, would he be Jake or would he be Lucy?
Well, not Lucy. The Young Woman. We never settle on a permanent name for Jessie Buckley’s character besides “young woman.” If we were to approach this from a trans perspective, it’s almost like she’s trying on names. Does it feel better to be called Lucy or Yvonne? What name will she choose?
And there lies the horror. The young woman never choose a name to try. Everyone else puts them on her, and she never chooses. She never picks out who she is, and because of that, she’s unobtainable for Jake. He cannot accept the idea of finding meaning in his own identity. He must be defined by others, even in his fantasy of living life as the young woman.
You can see this from with how Lucy interacts with his parents. She shows off the art that he tried as a child. Jake discovers that he wouldn’t suddenly be treated better for being himself. His mother would still give superficial, superfluous responses. His father still wouldn’t understand, would still berate him, would find his passions useless. Because Jake cannot pass the existential dilemma, he traps himself. He cannot be Lucy. Lucy chooses to leave. If only Jake had given himself to her, they could both have chosen to be free.
That’s part of the title, reviewer Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com might say. In his review for the film, Tallerico writes, “Yes, of course, all days are identical, because we are the ones who bring meaning to them, sometimes falsely and sometimes because we have to in order to survive these identical days. The title starts to turn in on itself. You can’t end things. Nothing ends. It just goes on. And even thinking of ending things could actually break the world in front of you.”
Meaning is key here. We are the ones who provide meaning. Lucy is the only one who can end things. She’s the one who leaves in the end. To use Tallerico’s line of thinking, the only way of ending the onslaught, of finding real meaning, would be for Jake to choose to end things. It’s not to hurt himself, but instead to embrace the young woman. He couldn’t though. And that’s his downfall. He builds his meaning through others, and he can’t bring himself to end the performance he finds expected of him.
In her frustrated, excellently written review for Bright Lights Film Journal, Joelle Kidd says:
“I’m Thinking of Ending Things is, like so many stories, a story about a man masquerading as a story about a woman. Which ultimately makes me wonder why we need to spend so much time trying to figure out how to build a better mask. I was disappointed when Lucy disappeared for the final section of the film, not because there was no longer a female character on-screen but because it felt like the moment when the film ceased to grapple with the implications of what it means for a man to craft a fictionalized woman to suit his own narrative, his own purposes – the very thing, of course, that Kaufman is doing, the thing that male writers do, by necessity, all the time.
The moment when Lucy finds, in Jake’s bedroom, the composite parts of the world inside his head – the Ur-text of his personality: stacks of media, mostly books and DVDs. Eva H.D. is there, of course, and Pauline Kael. So is A Beautiful Mind, a speech from which is incorporated into the climax of the movie. These are the body parts from which Lucy has been Frankenstein-ed together. But this is treated as a revelation in itself. What I really wanted to know is: what does it mean that Jake has constructed himself – and her – this way?”
My answer for Kidd is a question: What if the young woman is constructed in the same way Jake is? He, too, is Frankenstein-ed together. He’s snippets of the art and thoughts he finds important in some way. What if it’s not a story about a man masquerading as a story about a woman but rather a story about a woman who masquerades as a man and, in doing so, fails to bring herself to life? Jake does craft a fictional woman to narrate this story. Lucy is Jake. If that’s the case, I think Kidd’s frustration might be answered through looking at the film through the lens I do: this is the story of a trans woman who could never allow herself to be herself because she fails the existential dilemma. She never determines meaning can come from the self.
Another creator who examined a trans reading of I’m Thinking of Ending Things is Julia Rhodes over at Crooked Marquee. She writes:
“I’m Thinking of Ending Things, viewed as a cautionary tale of trans regret, is an emotionally devastating experience– but it must take an axe to the face of the audience in order to communicate the seriousness of its tragedy. A large part of its devastation comes from Kaufman’s subtle suggestion that Lucy could not have chosen otherwise. A view of the self as the product of conditioning allows Kaufman to expand his usual theme of the inescapability of the self into the inescapability of one’s circumstances. We do not move through time, as Lucy says; rather, we are stationary and time moves through us. I’m Thinking of Ending Things is a meditation on regret, a fantasy of a path in life not taken which is itself a haunting reminder of its impossibility. Once more, the trans themes and the existential themes converge”
5. Why?
When I first thought about the queer reading of this film, that a failure to embrace one’s gender can result in harrowing tragedy, I wondered briefly why I connect to this film so much. I don’t really think about my own gender identity all that much. It doesn’t particularly matter to me. I’m not that masculine and I’m not that feminine. I’m not non-binary. In thinking about it, I’ve come to the conclusion that I am someone who wants to be loved by men as a man. Through queering this film over the years, I asked myself questions I never had before. In finding that answer, I know myself a little bit better.
Knowing is such an interesting thing. There’s a manga I love that has shaped my world view. Maybe I’ll talk about it in-depth at some point. Its title in English is Our Dreams at Dusk. To briefly go over one of the things I love about it, the main character at one point doesn’t understand several of the other queer characters. He wants to understand. He wants to ask questions and interrogate them until he gets it. Frank in It’s Always Sunny. But he comes to realize that he doesn’t need to know. He just has to love.
That’s stuck with me for much even outside of people in general. I’ve found there is a strong obsession in the zeitgeist with knowing. Knowledge is a good thing, of course, but there’s such a strong fear and distaste for the unknown. The unknowable. There are transphobic leftists who view trans identity as bourgeois decadence because it’s individualist, personal, and something they don’t understand. Because they don’t get it, it must be wrong and unreal and bad.
A lot of people don’t “get” this movie. They don’t “get” why I like it, either.
As a writer, many of the plays and stories I write are existentialist and absurdist. I like sad art. I like queer art. And I love this film. It’s my favorite one I’ve ever seen. When I started writing this, I thought maybe this would help people enjoy and appreciate the film. I’d get less responses of “It’s boring” and “weird.” But that was me falling into the same trap Jake was: finding meaning through the ways others interact with the art I have taken as part of me. It was meant to make me feel better. By getting others to examine the film through this lens and potentially enjoy it more, I was defending myself against other people not liking something. How stupid is that? I love this film. You don’t need to. You can hate it. That’s fine.
But maybe give it a watch with the idea that this is a trans story, and see what happens.
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