A review of Charlie Kaufman’s i’m thinking of ending things

A story about loneliness and ageing in an uncaring world.

I went into i’m thinking of ending things cold. I expected surrealism, seeing as it was a Charlie Kaufman flick, but I was taken completely by surprise by just what the movie turned out to be. I highly recommend watching it, with the caveat that those suffering from serious mental illness should avoid it. What follows is my analysis of the movie, with a focus on its story and its key themes. If you haven’t watched it (here’s a link to the trailer, here’s a link to the film), I wouldn’t read beyond this point. For those who have seen it, go on and see if you picked up on the same themes as I did.

An introduction to Jake: real and imagined

On the surface, this story’s protagonist is Lucy, a scientist in her late twenties / early thirties considering ending a seven-week-old relationship with Jake, a teacher in his thirties, while on their first visit to his parents’ rural farmhouse. However, over the course of its two-hour-long run time, through surreal turns of plot and character breaks, the story reveals itself to be a hauntingly sad portrayal of loneliness, age, and the passing of time. Its protagonist is Jake, an old, desperately lonely high-school janitor with no family, no friends, no evidence of ever having any close relationships in his life but for his parents, now deceased. As he spends an average day at work seriously contemplating suicide, he builds an elaborate fantasy involving a younger version of himself driving a girlfriend from the city to visit his parents for the first at their rural farmhouse. While in reality, Jake has spent his whole life in this farmhouse, he imagines himself having left it for the city and having built a successful career. While there, he imagines, he’d met Lucy at a trivia night in a pub, that they’d hit it off and that they’d started dating.

His imagination feeds him an alternate reality where life turned out differently from how it really had. One where he completed college, took a tweed-and-white-collar job instead of a life spent doing custodial work, which he finds dreary and embarrassing, and where he feels mocked and overlooked.

Theme 1: An uncaring world

A key theme of this story is how society treats its most vulnerable members. In a key moment of the film, younger Jake confides in the imagined Lucy. ‘sometimes it feels like no one sees the good things you do’ to which she suitably replies ‘I see it.’ 

Jake sees society as being cruel to people like him: people he casts as fundamentally kind (despite the denouement alluding to Jake’s proclivity for voyeurism) but socially incompetent. Plus, as an old, lonely person who has suffered from a lifetime of undiagnosed mental illness, Jake sees himself as particularly vulnerable. Yet, as he goes about doing his work diligently every day, he is mocked by students he sees as being at the peak of the social pyramid: young and well-adjusted. In his mind, he’s been left behind by a society that thrives on celebrating winners and humiliating losers, and one that supports those left behind with nothing more than empty platitudes. This exchange between the younger Jake and his fantasy girlfriend sums up his thoughts.

I feel like maybe our society lacks a certain kindness, a certain willingness to take in the struggles of others struggling with issues caused by an alienating society. It seems hopeless. Like feeling old, like your body is going, your hearing, your sight. You can't see, and you're invisible. And you've made so many wrong turns. 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. That it's always darkest before dawn. That every cloud has a fucking silver lining. That there's someone for everyone. And God never gives us more than we can bear.

By the second half of the movie, when this exchange takes place, the movie has already spent a significant chunk of its runtime dealing with its second major theme: ageing. 

Theme 2: Ageing

The story of i’m thinking of ending things has four parts. In part 1, a younger Jake and his imagined girlfriend, currently named Lucy, drive to his parents’ place. In part 2, Jake and his imaginary girlfriend, now named everything from Lucy to Yvonne, have dinner with his imagined parents, who are portrayed as exaggerations of his real parents as Jake remembers them: as middle-aged parents worried about his finding a suitable partner, as young parents dealing with a challenging child, as nonagenarians suffering from ailments like Lewy Body Dementia and tinnitus. In part 3, the protagonists drive back from younger Jake’s parents’ place after dinner, with the imagined girlfriend’s identity now completely fragmenting, going from the protagonist of a Robert Zemeckis movie to the famous film critic Pauline Kehl to the Lucy to whom we were introduced in part 1. Part 4, the denouement, takes place at Jake’s high school, where fantasy collides with reality. 

It’s in part 2 where we’re introduced to the story’s thesis on ageing. This thought Lucy has when they leave Jake’s parents’ place is pretty representative. 

People like to think of themselves as points moving through time. But I think it's probably the opposite. We're stationary, and time passes through us, blowing like cold wind, stealing our heat, leaving us chapped and frozen.

The movie paints ageing as being an inevitable part of life, one over which we have no control. Moreover, it questions our agency as we move through life, and sees age as being just another thing over which we have no power. Worse, it robs us of our youth, replacing it with something worse, old age, as we make several mistakes and miss many opportunities. This is shown to be particularly true for the three people Jake knows best: himself and his parents. 

As a schoolboy, Jake is shown to have been hard-working and earnest, so much so that he won a Diligence Award in school, something of which his mother is shown to have been very proud. She even hoped that he’d one day use this diligence to get out of their rural farmstead and into a better life in the city. When thinking of himself and age, all Jake sees is the opportunities he’s missed, and how badly he wishes to be younger and have those opportunities in front of him rather than behind him. To him, age is regret. He escapes to a world in which a younger him had perhaps gone to a pub trivia night and seen a girl, one of the many women he’s wanted to approach through a long and lonely life, that he had gathered the courage to speak with her, and that she’d found his quirks charming.

In his parents, Jake sees the degenerative effects of age. His mother is shown to have gone from being a charming, witty woman, to one who needed handfeeding in her old age. Someone whose sense of humour had faded, only to be replaced with tinnitus and other ailments. The script also insinuates that his mother might have struggled with undiagnosed mental illness, something Jake worries he might have inherited, before he corrects himself for his internalised misogyny. 

Mothers are people with their own pain, their own history of neglect and abuse. Yet, at one time or another, during the 20th century, every fucking childhood trait was blamed on them: schizophrenia, autism, narcissism, homosexuality.

His father too is shown as suffering from Lewy Body Dementia as he ages, with the rooms of the house needing labeling as his condition worsens. I find the movie’s portrait of ageing both insightful and moving. The world’s developed societies are now predominantly aged. And the aged members of those societies are often lonely. As developing societies evolve from being predominantly young to being predominantly middle-aged to being predominantly aged over the next couple of generations, I see no reason why they won’t follow the trend of today’s developed societies in neglecting their elderly. The movie shows Jake both as being in direct contrast to this global trend and as being its victim. As a son, Jake cares for his parents until their final days, despite their wish that he move out and start building his life. But once they pass, Jake enters his own old age without support, without companionship, both alone and lonely. Which brings me to the third theme of the story: mental illness, loneliness, and suicide.

Theme 3: Suicide and depression

i’m thinking of ending things is a portrait of a man who has dedicated his life to the accumulation of bookish knowledge, and has filled his brain with movies and fantasies, but has spent no time cultivating meaningful human relationships. With his own life settling into a dreary rhythm, and having seen his parents’ decline with age, growing older seems to have exacerbated Jake’s undiagnosed mental illness. Through glimpses of his youth, we see a person with no friends, with no ability to socialise, and with an overwhelming need to control the smallest details of his life. This suggests that Jake might suffer from undiagnosed autism. In fact, Jake is a candidate for each of the three conditions mentioned in the previous quote: schizophrenia, autism, and narcissism. It’s no coincidence that his fantasy names these three. 

Rotten Perfect Mouth by Eva. H.D.

While being undiagnosed at a young age is shown to have presented Jake with an uneven playing field, he’s shown to believe that it’s the opportunities that he hasn’t taken that have made matters worse, resulting in a suffocating depression. His feelings are best represented by a poem initially claimed to have been written by his imagined girlfriend, but later revealed to be Bonedog, a poem by Eva H.D. (a real-life friend of Kaufman’s). This is how the poem begins.

Coming home is terrible
whether the dogs lick your face or not;
whether you have a wife
or just a wife-shaped loneliness waiting for you.
Coming home is terribly lonely,
so that you think
of the oppressive barometric pressure
back where you have just come from
with fondness,
because everything’s worse
once you’re home.

In his fantasy, Jake says he feels like it’s been written about him. I’ll take a moment’s break from this analysis to reflect on how sad this story is. Even in his fantasy, Jake can't imagine an idealised version of a younger him in anything resembling a normal, happy relationship that lasts more than seven weeks. He has no template for it. He reaches around for what a relationship might look like, how his imaginary girlfriend might react to the only people he ever really knew, his parents. Loneliness is a sad thing. And needless to say, all social indicators point to it becoming an epidemic as millennials grow older. It's nightmares like this movie that scares humans into making all sorts of human connections; lest they land up like Jake, godforbid. 

It’s a lifelong sequence of events, from undiagnosed mental illness through bad decision-making to old age that brings Jake to the sombre conclusion best represented by the voicemail message his imagined girlfriend keeps getting from herself. 

There's only one question to resolve. I'm scared. I feel a little crazy. I'm not lucid. The assumptions are right. I can feel my fear growing. Now is the time for the answer. Just one question, one question to answer.

The question is suggested to be this: why go on?

This is an opportune moment for me to ask the same question about the movie itself. Why go on? Why watch this movie? After all, it seems like at worst, it’s depression porn, and at best, it’s a depressing story about a very sad man. First, like most Kaufman films, it’s an interesting take on the art of storytelling in cinema. There isn’t another movie like this, even in the Kaufman universe, and it tackles a remarkably difficult subject in a remarkably unique way. I think there’s merit in that. Second, I’ve found that it’s forced me to be more empathetic. To really think of how difficult life must be for a certain type of person I don’t spend any time thinking about whatsoever. And third, I don’t think of art as escape. To me, good art serves to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Good art shakes us, changes us, moulds us, as it should.

Which brings me to the fourth and final theme of this story, a Charlie Kaufman favourite: the impact of popular media on the psyche.

Theme 4: The media and what it does to our play-doh minds

One of my favourite moments in i’m thinking of ending things is when the real Jake watches the climax of a fictional Robert Zemeckis film during lunch break at school. In it, the film’s male protagonist professes his love for the female protagonist, a vegan waitress in a burger joint, by announcing that he loves her and knows that she’s only working there to put herself through college to become an animal rights’ activist. This action leads to her firing, but as the two sit on the pavement outside the restaurant, she seems to reciprocate his feelings, as the movie ends. This movie leaks into Jake’s fantasy when he tells his now aged father about how he met Lucy (now called Lucia). 

She's a waitress. We met when she was serving me. I asked her about the Santa Fe burger.

This is one of the more telling moments in the film, where we finally begin to realise that everything we’re seeing is most likely playing out in the imagination of the janitor, who we assume is the older Jake. 

The story’s thesis regarding the role of media is simple, and expressed perfectly by the imaginary characters on their car ride from Jake’s parents’ home. Jake quotes an essay about television from David Foster Wallace’s essay collection, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again. 

Pretty people tend to appeal. Pretty people tend to be more pleasing to look at than non-pretty people. But when we're talking about television, the combination of sheer audience size and quiet psychic intercourse between images and oglers starts a cycle that both enhances pretty images' appeal and erodes us viewers' own sense of security.

Which is to say that pop culture feeds us idealised narratives of the lives of pretty people. And these narratives hugely impact how we see our own world, how we measure our own lives. The more we watch movies and television, the more these picture-perfect lives get idealised, the more insecure we get about our own lives, because they fall so short of what we’re seeing. By adding the Robert Zemeckis movie narrative to his fantasy, Jake reveals how much of his life has been influenced by things he’s seen. Because his real interaction with people is so limited, his imagined girlfriend is an agglomeration of the women he’s read or seen on screen: Pauline Kael, the film critic, Eva H.D., the poet, etc. In a way, these pop culture constructions allow Jake to fantasise about a better life, but in another way, does it not make his own seem that much more desolate? If all you see is the world telling you how much more fun they’re having, wouldn’t you feel left behind? 

A sequential retelling of the events of the movie

The sum of these themes means that stripped of every storytelling device, every bit of Kaufman’s artistic sleight-of-hand, every reference to a movie or a play or a book or a poem, the sequential set of events in this story paint a bitterly depressing portrait of a lonely old man fantasizing about a life that could have been. If only he’d completed college. If only he’d escaped the clutches of his mental illness and the womblike safety of his childhood home, if only he had gone out to a pub and met a girl and had the courage to ask her for her number, if only he had embarked on a relationship with her, if only he had taken up a white-collar college-educated job instead of doing the custodial work that brings him so much shame. Maybe, he imagines, he’d have been a Nobel laureate, maybe a Broadway star, maybe a professor, maybe a teacher living in the big city. But he didn’t do any of those things, and looking back, his life seems like a series of missed opportunities and bad decisions, all leading up to this elaborate fantasy overlaid on a day he spends cleaning up the school building with nothing to look forward to once he returns home. Which is why he ends things. 

To me, the movie’s end was a letdown, with its more fantastical elements distracting from what we now know is the real crux of the movie, the life of the older Jake. There’s an elaborate reference to Oklahoma!, an elaborate Nobel Prize acceptance speech, an interpretive dance sequence, and the appearance of animated pigs; it all feels a bit much. That said, the movie does such a masterful job of bringing home its themes that I wasn’t so concerned about the failings of its denouement. All I was left with was the memory of this one thing Jake says in his final imagined car-drive, which really sums up a lot of what the movie is about.

It's despicable how we label people and categorize them and dismiss them. I look at the kids I see at school every day. I see the ones who are ostracized. They're different. They're out of step. And I see the lives they'll have because of that. Sometimes I see them years later, in town, at the supermarket. I see, I can tell that they still carry that stuff around with them. Like a black aura. Like a millstone. Like an oozing wound.

In conclusion

This is a desolate movie about a desolate life. Every frame within it oozes with desolation. I've started to shy away from mood movies like these. I’ve concluded that life is so much richer than a single mood. I suppose that is true for everyone except the desperately suicidal. You may conclude, perhaps wisely, that you don’t need to be part of the audience for a movie about the desperately suicidal. But if you don’t feel that way, and you do feel like watching a moving portrait of a lonely man, I highly recommend this film. 

P.S. Since I’m obsessed with the art of storytelling and not the art of cinema, I haven’t dissected the great performances of Jessie Buckley and Toni Collette as the female lead and Jake’s mother. Jessie Buckley’s performance as the part of Jake’s psyche that’s first thinking of ending things, and later ‘just wants to go home to the city’ is pitch-perfect. But the scene-stealer is Toni Collette as Jake’s exaggerated memory of his coddling mother. If you don’t care about stories at all, and just care about acting, you could write a similarly massive tome on the intricacy of their performances.