The new film from writer/director Charlie Kaufman, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, is
the kind of movie that's sure to linger in your mind for quite a while after the credits
finish rolling.
In it, a young woman heads out on a snowy road trip with her boyfriend to meet his parents.
But despite that simple premise, nothing in the movie is truly simple.
What follows is a strange journey through the heart of a blizzard, a deeply uncomfortable
dinner, and a spooky final trip to a high school…along with an ending that seems to
raise more questions than answers.
But what exactly that ending means might not be super clear, especially if you're not completely
brushed up on your Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals.
Confused?
That's not surprising.
Put chains on the tires and ride along with us as we attempt to explain the ending of
I'm Thinking of Ending Things.
Spoilers ahead.
It doesn't take long for I'm Thinking of Ending Things to make the viewer begin to suspect
that all is not as it seems.
Early in the film, there's ample evidence that Jake can hear what his girlfriend is
thinking, either asking her to repeat herself, or just looking at her whenever she thinks
something that she wants to keep secret from him.
"I'm thinking of ending things."
"Huh?"
"What?"
"Did you say something?"
"No, I don't think so."
Additionally, the girlfriend's name changes over the course of the film, it starts as
"Lucy" but soon she's answering to "Louisa."
Stranger still, even though she's called these names, she receives phone calls from contacts
with those very same names on her phone, calls she pointedly ignores.
Additionally, very early in the drive, the girlfriend pulls down the passenger seat mirror
and we see that it's broken, a clear symbol for her fractured, broken identity.
We also get glimpses of an old man intercut with Jake and his girlfriend driving, while
we hear the girlfriend's internal monologue.
We see the old man starting his day in the morning, looking out the window at an old
swing set, and working as a janitor in a high school.
Often, these cuts occur right after Jake speaks, which heavily implies that the janitor and
Jake are somehow connected.
Throughout I'm Thinking of Ending Things, we're confronted with yet more symbols that,
not only is Jake connected with the janitor, but the girlfriend is too.
For example: She recites one of her poems on the car-ride to dinner...
"Coming home is terrible, whether the dogs lick your face or not…"
...and she later reads the exact same poem she thought she'd composed out of a book of
poetry by author Eva H.D. in Jake's childhood bedroom.
"Coming home is terrible, whether the dogs lick your face or not…"
During the drive, the girlfriend glimpses the same swing set the old man spied out his
window, only now it's standing in front of a dilapidated house.
The basic events of the story blur and change from scene to scene, like the age of Jake's
parents, the outfits everyone wears, and the story of how she and Jake first met.
Even more telling, Jake adamantly works to keep her out of the house's basement.
"He's hiding in there!"
"Who?"
"What?
I dunno."
When she finally goes in, she discovers the washing machine is full of identical janitor
uniforms.
Like the broken mirror telling us that the girlfriend's identity and self-image is broken
in some significant way, the house's basement is a frequent symbol for a character's subconscious,
and the fact that these uniforms seem to lurk in Jake's "basement" seems pretty significant.
Eventually, enough of these kinds of clues stack up to indicate that the girlfriend isn't
really there at all, none of the events of the film's main story are happening in what
you'd call "reality."
They're all happening in the mind of that old man, the janitor.
The revelation that the movie is unfolding inside the janitor's mind becomes more explicit
by the end.
Early in the film, while driving to his parents' house, Jake describes watching the "kids"
practice and perform the musical Oklahoma!, though he doesn't specify which kids he's
talking about, and immediately after that, we cut again to the janitor, watching high
school students rehearsing the show.
Later on, when the girlfriend has followed Jake into the supposedly abandoned high school,
she runs into the janitor.
After they chat, we see a rendition of the "Dream Ballet" sequence from Oklahoma!, but
the actors are instead dressed as Jake, the girlfriend, and the janitor.
When the ballet ends, Jake and his girlfriend are gone, and the janitor's left all alone.
He changes out of his uniform and back into his clothes, trudges to his pickup truck in
the snowy school parking lot and promptly starts freaking out.
All the while, scenes related to the events of Jake and his girlfriend's story play out,
seemingly in his mind.
He strips naked, then follows the ghost of a dead, maggot-ridden pig back into the school.
That's a clear reference to a moment earlier in the film, when Jake tells his girlfriend
about how his father had to kill maggot-ridden pigs on the farm many years earlier.
And after the janitor follows the ghost pig, that's the last we see of him.
The film hard-cuts to Jake, wearing high school theater production-level old man makeup, accepting
a Nobel Prize, and then singing the song "Lonely Room" from Oklahoma!
So...what does all that mean?
Time for some context: The antagonist In Oklahoma! is a guy named Jud, a creep who lives alone
in a dirty smokehouse and who's infatuated with the musical's heroine, Laurey.
His rival for Laurey's affections is Curley, a handsome cowboy.
To make a long musical short, no one really likes Jud, and Curley and Laurey toy with
him during the course of their own courtship.
Along the way, Curley literally tells Jud he should kill himself, because no one likes
him, and that's the only way anyone will finally realize how much they should've appreciated
him.
"Oh, you never know how many people like ya, till you're dead!
Heh heh heh."
Needless to say, it's no fun to be Jud.
And that's basically Jake in this film.
To quote Oklahoma!, Jud is a dud, and to that end, so is Jake the janitor.
In the musical, "Lonely Room" is Jud's vow to make Laurey his wife and finally get out
of his dingy smokehouse, to go from dud to stud.
It's a song of hope and longing from a character who is detested by everyone around him.
And by the end of the musical, spoilers, Jud dies, falling on his own knife after he tries
and fails to attack Curley on the day of his wedding to Laurey.
The questions the film asks are troubling to ponder: how does it feel to be unloved
and unlovable?
What's it like to be Jud?
What are the lies we tell ourselves to keep from the brutal realization that we might
be the dud of someone else's story?
Ultimately, the film's theme is pretty succinctly summed up during the disturbing scene where
the janitor follows the ghost pig through the school's halls, presumably on his way
to end things.
The pig tells him:
"It's not bad, once you stop feeling sorry for yourself because you're just a pig, or,
even worse, a pig infested with maggots."
"Someone has to be a pig infested with maggots, right?
It might as well be you.
It's the luck of the draw."
This is a movie about a hero who's actually a pig infested with maggots.
This person is alone and has always been alone.
The janitor has never had love, and he's always imagined it from afar, hoping against hope
he might someday find a Laurey, or Lucy, or Louisa, of his own, even if he has no real
idea as to how that might happen.
His life isn't like a romantic comedy, like the fictional rom-com called Order Up! that
he watches during his break about one-third through the film.
I'm Thinking of Ending Things explores what life is like from the perspective of a non-heroic
protagonist.
We're all the heroes of our own stories.
But what if our stories don't go anywhere?
What if instead of living happily ever after with your soulmate, you simply get old in
your crappy job… and then, well, you start thinking of ending things?
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