Individual Mortality in I'm Thinking of Ending Things

[SPOILER ALERT for I’m Thinking of Ending Things, BoJack Horseman & Synecdoche, New York]

Death is a concept recognisable to all humans. Throughout history, people across all cultures have developed mechanisms to help individuals in society cope with death. This coping mechanism comes in two types. The first is to deal with the fear of one’s own mortality. This might come in the form of religious beliefs and the notion of spirits and the nether world. The point here may be to portray death not as an ending, but a continuation. The second type of coping mechanism deals with the death of others. The loss of a member of one’s community can become a disruption of social functioning, a source of collective grief, and a reminder of the uncertainty of life.

In 2021, mortality has nestled itself quietly in our mind. Part of this is because we have had more time to sit around and contemplate life, inevitably leading us to ponder more about death. But more importantly, the COVID-19 pandemic has killed millions across the world. Grief becomes more deeply entangled into the lives of many, but so did the images of coping with loss and tragedies. We see humans working through the most difficult of times, finding humanity in the darkest of hours. What this tells us is that while death is inevitably heartbreaking, it also highlights the strength and humanity of society. Although forward development and progression may be halted, we still see our strength and compassion through the new ways we have adopted to cope or deal with the uncertainty of the present.

It's difficult to imagine how cinema could play a role in such collective coping. After all the experiences of watching movies have been individualized to computer screens and Netflix accounts. Still, we think the collective experience of watching movies exist even during these times. Films, composed of images and sounds, are after all social and cultural practices based around commonly shared symbols. In this sense, they are examples of the coping mechanisms mentioned above.

In light of that, we will be reviewing a few movies that tackle to issue of death from three different angles. The first angle is death from the perspective of the individual. The second is death from the perspective of society or inter-personal relationships. The final is death from the perspective of homogenous, empty time. This will be released in a series of three articles, of which this is the first.

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The first film we’re looking at – one which deals with individual mortality – is the 2020 masterpiece by Charlie Kaufman, I’m Thinking of Ending Things. This was our favourite film of 2020, and for good reasons. It is one of the oddest, ambitious but undeniably creative arthouse films we have ever seen in a long time. This movie follows a young woman who’s travelling with her boyfriend, Jake, to meet his parents for the first time. The young woman is planning to end the relationship with Jake but chooses to join him on the journey anyway. The first part of the film consists of them driving to the parent’s place. They have conversations; they recite poems; they argue. When they get to the house, they met the parents who seem nice. But things quickly became strange. For instance, the parents became young and old at different points.

Eventually, Jake and the girl left. On their drive back, they went through a snowstorm, stopped for some drinks and finally parked at Jake’s old high school. And then things got really weird. There are musical numbers, a dance number, and a cartoon pig.

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So… it’s a Charlie Kaufman movie. It’s not surprising that this movie is so weird. The more important question is what are the purposes of these strange elements. Now, most people recognise quite quickly that this movie is about death. Specifically, the film is taking place inside the mind of an old Jake, who is in fact a janitor, as he is about to freeze to death in the car outside the high school. The actual concealed plot aside, the film’s elements highlight the theme of death. The title implies this: the emphasis on the word ending and the vague reference to things supported the conclusion that this is probably about someone’s consciousness disappearing. Other than that, the poem recited in the first act has the word “immortality” in the title. The house sequence shows the parents getting old and one of them on their death bed. The final sequences saw the notion of death being brought up even more explicitly. Characters appear to warn the couple not to move forward, as if a consciousness struggling to fight an inevitable end.

If you contextualise this within Kaufman’s filmography, it does feel like a spiritual sequel to Synecdoche, New York. The final scene of that movie illustrates the existential dread that mortality can bring. Accepting mortality is the same as saying that all those things you’ve done to create meanings to your existence, is going to disappear eventually. The lack of a meaningful conclusion challenges the necessity of living a good life. If you want an even stronger illustration of death as a dark and meaningless void, BoJack Horseman’s penultimate episode, The View from Halfway Down, gives it a literal embodiment. The dark void is portrayed quite literally. When it’s time for them to go, the characters are consumed by the dark void. More importantly, they are erased! The erasing of a character’s form evokes the complete destruction of the self that death signifies. You don’t just go to a different place; you cease to exist.

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The cessation of existence is scarier than destruction, at least from the viewpoint of an individual At least destruction implies the breaking down of physical form into different materials. But the loss of oneself is an essential loss. It feels permanent and irreversible. Films that are influenced by western-oriented philosophies are quite adept at showing this since the central tenet of existence is always the individual self. Death is more often portrayed as an individual affair, a loss of an internal existence. The BoJack episode we talk about has the same premise as I’m Thinking of Ending Things, it’s someone looking back at their lives as they die. In our interpretation, the Things in the title refer to the consciousness, to the self, to individuality, embodied in life about to be irreversibly lost. Within this life is contained the memory of the family, a girlfriend (?), the high school friends, the acquaintances. The characters in the film are not people in Jake’s life but the memory of those people. They exist in Jake’s mind as memories, caricatures and perceptual forms.

Again, this is an exact parallel to what BoJack Horseman did in its penultimate episode. Characters from BoJack’s past appears as figments of his imagination. While Synecdoche never portrays a disappearing consciousness, the main character tries to write a play that centres on his own life. He brings to life his own perceptions of the people around him. And towards the end of the movie, as the theatre set is destroyed, it is played as the loss of the character’s own self, represented by the play he has concocted. The approach of these stories is to subsume the social into the individual. And it is these social relationships that give one’s self meaning. Once left alone, there is no meaning to life. No character embodies this better than Jake’s girlfriend. A lot of analyses already highlight how Jake’s girlfriend is probably an amalgamation of many people in Jake’s life. And most interestingly, the girl’s decision to leave Jake is symbolic of his life-ending. Seen through that lens, this girl is somehow the embodiment of the meaning of life. Specifically, the meaning of Jake’s own life. Jake projects the disappointment with his own life into this fictional circumstance of a girlfriend breaking up with him. Jake’s conversation with his girlfriend is thus a representation of his own internal dialogue: it’s him asking himself, what have you done in this wasted life?

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This is reinforced in the fact that Jake and his girlfriend at a point argued about the identity of the child in a photo frame. The girl said it was her. Jake said it was him. In fact, the picture was Jake, but the girlfriend was also Jake, a figment of Jake’s imagination. Bring the girl back to his parent is certainly representative of Jake’s attempt to come to term with his family. But more importantly, it seems to embody Jake’s dissatisfaction with his family life. After all, his mother and father acted so weirdly throughout the film, suggesting that Jake sees his family through a distorted lens. Is he disappointed to leave his father’s death bed? An interesting conflict appears when Jake is adamant about staying with his father and mother, taking care of them, while his girlfriend begs that they leave. If his girlfriend is representative of a better life for Jake, does this mean he saw his family as holding him back? And afterwards, when he’s at the high school, is that an expression of his dissatisfaction with how his life ended up as a janitor? Is he embarrassed about how other people – like those two girls as the shop – look and perceive him?

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Regardless of what Kaufman meant by these scenes and events, what is achieved is an oddly voyeuristic film. What we mean by this is Jake and many of the characters are obsessed with perception and self-perception. Jake is afraid of the gaze of the girls and the shop. His girlfriend is always looking at the parents from various angles. The distortion of space and time is done through the viewpoints of the characters, suggesting that these changes are not external, they are internal. When the blizzard gets worse, we don’t get an omniscient shot showing this, it just seems to have happened from the viewpoint of the girl. The effect of this is an odd sense of claustrophobia, one that evokes the sense of psychologically tunnelling one might feel in night terrors. It seems that Kaufman sees this psychological tunnelling as evocative of death and a disappearing consciousness. We agree. Being slowly trapped by a distorted memory of our own past life – that is probably what death feels like from an individual perspective.

But then, things open up. Brightness returns to the screen, when Jake disappears and the girl ventures into the brightly lid high school. Here it is suggested that she meets the real Jake. Jungian psychologists might consider this symbolic of a kind of self-actualization – Jake coming to term with who he really is. But our interpretation is going to go in another direction. While one might read the musical and dance scenes towards the end as Kaufman being fucking weird as per usual, we see it as a continuation of the psychological tunnelling that began earlier. But here, the tunnelling results in Jake lying to himself. So as Jake drifts into death, he imagines dancing with this girl. Kaufman specifically changes the actors, using ones that are more beautiful/ handsome. This is Jake imagining a perfect version of a relationship he likely never had. Then there’s Jake performing a musical, once again ending with the girl’s approval. These moments are evocative of a part of Jake’s own self thrashing and fighting to create meaning to an existence that is rapidly and inevitably ending.

This is the struggle of death from the viewpoint of Kaufman. It is horror at the highest degree because it threatens the meaning of our lives, of existence. Death is scary because it robs us of any figments of meanings we have created for our lives. We aren’t scared of death so much as it implies. That is a single moment, everything we’ve been working for would disappear.

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As a result, we keep fighting to create meaning for our existence, so that when we die, we won’t feel like it’s all for nothing. Just as the minister in Synecdoche, New York said:

…and even though the world goes on for eons and eons, you are only here for a fraction of a fraction of a second. Most of your time is spent being dead or not yet born. But while alive, you wait in vain, wasting years, for a phone call or a letter or a look from someone or something to make it all right. And it never comes or it seems to but it doesn’t really. And so you spend your time in vague regret or vaguer hope that something good will come along. Something to make you feel connected, something to make you feel whole, something to make you feel loved…

This is why Jake tries so hard in his last moments to experience what he has always wanted: a victory on stage, a standing ovation, a perfect relationship. It is not important to know if these are actually what Jake’s character wanted. Because if we strip the personal aspect of his characters, these images still represent what we as people universally want. We all want a perfect relationship, a good family and social recognition. Kaufman recognises this desire and forces us to look at how distorted and meaningless they could become in retrospect or at least from the vantage point of a dying consciousness.

The worse part is that these experiences Kaufman shows are things we and perhaps Jake have experienced before. And because experiences are ephemeral, it has to be recreated. But once recreated, it won't ever be the same as the first time. While meaningful experiences don't last, death does. The negation of meaning is eternal. That is the horror Kaufman is trying to get at. And for us, that’s the true kind of existential horror.