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.
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Male writers have garnered a reputation for being not very good at pretending to be women. I say this based not only on the evidence of the entire subreddits and Twitter accounts set up to catalogue such instances, but also on the attestations of generations of male writers themselves. Men have canonically found it so difficult to engage empathetically with women’s humanity that you can find stories stretching from Sir Gawain to that 2000 Mel Gibson movie centered around the question, “What do women want?” Despite the fact that the answer always seems to be, “to be treated like a human being,” this continues to be posed as some kind of existential question.
Women have spent equally long resisting such narratives, and attempting to undermine and overthrow the paper cutout versions of ourselves that we see represented in art. When we talk about the way women are drawn in movies, the solution – or the deficiency – often presents itself as a question of interiority. Do these women have thoughts and feelings that are represented within the narrative? Do they seem to have “lives” outside of the male protagonists? Think of the famous Bechdel test: a movie can only pass if it has at least two named women who talk to each other about something other than a man. The test itself is, of course, tongue-in-cheek – the surprise is meant to come in when you realize how many movies fail on these criteria. The underlying assumption is that personhood, as it can be possibly depicted on screen, relies on a cohesive definition of character, that for a fictional person to be recognizably real, they must have a name and they must have independent thought. A woman should not be defined by a man. But in a work of fiction, she may necessarily be. In that case, can we grant her personhood through, perhaps, sheer force of will?
Charlie Kaufman has the talent, rare even among artists. of the ability to surprise. His films often reveal the assumptions we as filmgoers have about the nature of movies – for instance, the assumed 1:1 relationship between character and actor. Subversions of this have taken place throughout film history, with a single actor playing multiple characters, or multiple actors playing a single character. But what about a character who not only has multiple identities but perhaps no fixed identity? Can a coherent character, who seems like a person in all the important ways, be created out of many people, many personalities?
This question was raised by I’m Thinking of Ending Things, Kaufman’s latest film, released on Netflix in September 2020. The movie, written and directed by Kaufman, is an adaptation of the debut novel by Canadian writer Iain Reid – a novel categorized as a “psychological thriller,” though in Kaufman’s hands it takes on a certain ponderous discursiveness that makes it less about thrills and more about the low-lying creep of steadily engulfing dread.
The protagonist is Lucy (Jessie Buckley), who we meet first in voice-over, and then standing on the sidewalk, catching snowflakes on her tongue, waiting for her new boyfriend, Jake (Jesse Plemons), to pick her up and take her to meet his parents for the first time. Or at least, she seems to be the protagonist. We are introduced into her world, after all, with the ultimate tool of interiority, the voice-over. As she enters the car, even as she and Jake converse sparingly over the desolate winter drive, we hear a running monologue of her thoughts.
But Jake seems to hear it too. He interrupts, annoyed, with attempts to make conversation. Each time she thinks about her desire to end the relationship, his brow knits in frustration. The movie begins to dole out the requisite facts that we are used to collecting in order to construct a person out of a few minutes of dialogue and an actor’s face: we learn that Lucy is in school, that she has a paper due on the rabies infection. Then we learn that she’s also a poet.
As early as this car ride, Lucy’s identity begins its slow unraveling. She gets a call on her cell phone; she says it’s from a friend, but the call display shows her own name. Jake asks her to recite her newest poem. It’s a beautiful poem, but from the beginning it doesn’t seem to fit with the persona of the character, or the biographical details of her life. “Coming home is terrible,” it begins, “whether the dog licks your face or not;/whether you have a wife,/or just a wife-shaped loneliness waiting for you.” That’s because the poem is “Bonedog,” by Eva H. D., from her book Rotten Perfect Mouth (which Lucy will later find in Jake’s childhood bedroom). As she recites, tears slide silently down her cheek. When she reaches the final stanza, her eyes flip up, meeting the camera.
“I love it. It’s amazing. It’s like you wrote it about me,” Jake says. Lucy takes this compliment – “I guess that’s what one hopes for when writing a poem […] some universality in the specific.” As a writer, I read her response as a little unfelt – it seemed canned, a stock line. Perhaps because a reader is often reading in search of self-recognition, and a writer writing in an attempt at self-expression. As gratifying as it might be to hear that someone sees themselves in your work, wouldn’t it be more gratifying if they could pierce through that, and truly see you?
Jake, wide-eyed, with a shake of his head, insists: “It’s like you wrote it about me.”
Lucy’s identity continues to fracture, ever more rapidly, as the pair arrive at Jake’s parents’ house and (after a disturbing tour of the farm and a foreboding warning about the blocked-off basement) sit down to dinner with them. Lucy, who says upon arriving that she grew up in a farmhouse just like this one, refers soon after to growing up in an apartment. Jake tells his parents she is a painter, though in the car she was a poet – yet she produces photos of her work. She has more missed phone calls, now from Louisa; Jake starts referring to her by the wrong name, Louisa – only it can’t be the wrong name, because she responds to it as normal.
In the sequence set around the dinner table, Lucy morphs through the kinds of identities one might dream up if one was tasked with writing twenty movies all with the plot, guy brings new girlfriend home to meet his parents. She’s an artist who gently prods at Jake’s father’s simplistic reading of the world – then she’s an erudite student of quantum physics – then she’s a mirror image of his mother, laughing uproariously and gesturing wildly.
These identity shifts only pick up steam, with the signpost details of Jake and Lucy’s relationship – Lucy’s job, the story of how they met, her name – morphing variously. The line of selves that make up Lucy, whose name becomes Yvonne by dessert, parade by like an ever-changing stock character in a sitcom, there to fill narrative space – all of Jerry Seinfeld’s girlfriends, condensed into one body.
Other things begin to change as well. As Lucy explores the house, she continually runs into different versions of Jake’s parents, at different ages – the young mother worrying over her antisocial son is at the next moment on her deathbed. In the way of memory, entire lifespans of time are collapsed, past, present, and future coexisting.
Clues to Jake’s life surface as Lucy wanders the house – the basement full of aborted landscape paintings, a childhood bedroom stuffed with the kinds of books, movies, and music that artistic, brooding men gravitate toward when they are young and feel full of promise. In the basement, the same uniform swirls endlessly around the washer’s cycle, coveralls bearing the insignia of a nearby high school.
Throughout the film there are snippets of Jake’s “real” life, scenes of an elderly custodian plodding through the halls of a high school, watching rehearsals of a production of Oklahoma! and a corny rom-com in the break room. The man we know as Jake, young Jake, drops strange clues – references to “his” high school in the present tense, to the production of Oklahoma! that “they” put on every year. For a brief moment late in the film, when Lucy’s identity is perhaps at its most unstable, she is for one scene played by the actress from the rom-com.
Earlier, upon first arriving at his parents’ farm, Jake gives Lucy a tour, and tells her a gruesome story about what happened to the pigs that used to live in the empty pig pen. “My dad hadn’t been in to check on the pigs in a few days – my parents were busy. He just tossed their food into the pen,” says Jake. “But after a few days he noticed that they were all lying in this corner all the time, so he went in to check on them.” When he moved one of the pigs, which looked healthy – normal – when lying down, its entire underside was filled with maggots. “Poor things were being eaten alive,” says Jake. He adds, “Life can be brutal on a farm.”
There is clearly something dark and rotted underneath Jake’s veneer, but whether Lucy can break free from it is unclear. When Jake insists that they stop at Tulsey Town, a roadside ice cream stand, on the way home, one of the teens working there tells Lucy she can escape. “You don’t have to go […] forward in time. You can stay here. […] I’m scared for you.”
On the way to his parents’ house, Jake says that he likes road trips because they remind you there’s a world out there, outside your own head. Yet road trips, this one being no exception, are also a cage match of conversation, a space to talk and talk until you run out of things to say, to push each other’s buttons, fight and have nowhere to storm off to. Much of the film takes place within the front seat of Jake’s car, and the conversation spirals continually from light-hearted to emotionally intense, amicable to combative and back again.
At times the two become embodiments of certain kinds of gender dynamics. As they drive, Lucy transforms again, at the mention of Woman Under the Influence, the 1974 John Cassavetes film. Jake has barely time to state that he likes the movie before Lucy rears up, launching into a pitch-perfect embodiment of the late film critic Pauline Kael, executing a full-throated, cigarette-waving recitation of Kael’s eviscerating review of the movie.
Jake seems defeated. “I do see what you’re saying. You’re certainly the expert on things cinematic,” he says, a little begrudgingly. But he pushes back, and the commentary instantly becomes personal, Jake revealing the depths of his own unhappiness. Lucy doesn’t comfort him; she yells at him to shut up. He seems closest to the edge at this moment, full of self-hatred, ready to break down.
Later, Lucy wonders about the value of a relationship where “you can’t even tell the other person what you’re thinking. That doesn’t bode well.” Though Jake seems to be able to hear her thoughts, he can’t cross this fundamental divide; it’s the action, the choosing, of sharing her thoughts that would make them close.
Jake brings up A Supposedly Fun Thing That I’ll Never Do Again, the essay collection by David Foster Wallace. “Have you read that?”
Lucy says she hasn’t, releasing a sigh. Kael, by this point, is long gone; she’s glassy-eyed, checked out.
“It’s a book of essays,” Jake repeats. “No,” she says again, “I haven’t read it.” He begins quoting from an essay on television. Lucy leans against the headrest, looking bored. Even the camera strays, cutting to a shot from outside the car, muffling the audio. He transitions into a rant about Wallace’s oeuvre being eclipsed by his suicide, especially for “people who have never read his writing.”
“Man who lives David Foster Wallace” has become a sort of shorthand for a type of man, or maybe more accurately, something endemic to men that women find unsavory generally. “Overeducated, usually wealthy, extremely self-serious (mostly) men,” according to the New Republic; “bros” and “literary chauvinists” as per New York Magazine. Twitter abounds with jokes about faux-intellectual dudes who ceremoniously place unread copies of Infinite Jest on their bookshelf. Often the intimation extends to Wallace himself – an implication that his books, because they are long and full of pretentious footnotes and beloved by a certain type of annoying Tinder date, must carry the same level of vapidity and self-importance. Jake seems to be withdrawing into Wallace – it’s something to say, it’s a comfortable, well-worn opinion. It makes him feel better than other people, maybe just better. People “don’t know how to be human anymore,” Jake concludes.
“Have you ever read any Guy DuBois? Society of the Spectacle?” Lucy supplies, and Jake smiles at her – “Exactly. Yes.” His worry melting away, safe in the knowledge that it’s them against the world, he and this woman who recognizes his intellect.
In the end, Lucy (or Louisa, Yvonne, Amy …) is revealed to be literally what is typically the object of extra-textual criticism in other movies – a fictitious creation of a man, cobbled together from things he’s read, traits from his mother, style from the hot girl he leered at in the bar, qualities he thinks he would like in a mate, thinly characterized and brought to life to serve his purposes. She is literally that, but is that all she is?
In Reid’s novel, the twist ending is more explicitly stated – Jake and Lucy are revealed to be the same person, or rather, Lucy is revealed to be a creation of Jake’s, dreamed up as he goes about his janitorial duties.
Kaufman told Indiewire he resisted this in his adaptation, not by making Lucy any more “real” in the usual sense of the word, but by granting the character a certain amount of agency. “She is a device, but I wanted her to be able to separate herself from that,” he said. He also said it would have been “a misuse of any actress not to give them something to play that was real.”
Kaufman said he “needed her to have agency for it to work as a dramatic piece,” and that he didn’t want Lucy to be “responsible” for Jake’s ending. Underlying the choice is the question, what if even your own fictional creation had the strength to turn away from you? Kaufman said that he “really likes the idea that even within his fantasy, [Jake] cannot have what he wants. He’s going to imagine this thing, but then he’s going to also imagine how it won’t work, how she’s going to [get] bored with him, how she’s not going to think he’s smart enough or interesting enough.”
Within the bounds of the film, these choices perhaps make Lucy more “real” than ever. She is, after all, who we the viewers identify with. We hear her thoughts; we see from her perspective. We make discoveries as she makes them. Like the rashy teen at the ice cream stand, we urge her to escape the construction around her.
These are the things that are supposed to make for strong, fully realized female characters, we are always told. Representation with agency and interiority.
Yet as effective as these things were at making me care about Lucy as a character (and I suspect largely due to Jessie Buckley’s brilliant, layered performance), I think this movie uncovers a gap in this checklist – maybe a gap created by thinking of representation as a checklist.
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?
The impact of this kind of fantasy – particularly on people other than Jake himself – is not fully explored in the movie. The janitor seems to die at the end, in his truck caked with snow in the empty school parking lot, and his flights of fancy presumably die with him.
“Anything an environment makes you feel is about you, not the environment, right?” says Lucy earlier in the film, as she shows Jake’s parents her paintings. “If the feeling is inherent to the place.”
What was poised to probe intriguingly into the relationship between an author and his characters, particularly across a line of difference, collapses gently and silently, fading into the background like the falling snow. The movie seems uninterested in what Lucy deserves, or what her existence means.
For Jake, the sneering high school girls he encounters in the halls at work, and the general society they represent, are fundamentally flawed in their lack of empathy. Yet he doesn’t recognize the limitations of his own view on the world, or the limitations of his own fantasies. To confront this question might produce something in fact far more unsettling.
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Images are screenshots from the film’s trailers available on YouTube. See it on Netflix.
