I'm Thinking of Ending Things (Charlie Kaufman, 2020) Movie • Page 7

okay yeah, I def missed that Jake and the janitor were the same person. I was about to say "the movie could've made that explicit" but then I remembered this is Kaufman lol. but yeah I did not understand that from a first watch not having read the book

there's a lot of good points being raised, but honestly, none of them really address my main problem that I have no connection to the Janitor as a character. even though he's Jake, we still spent most of the movie watching Jake have conversations that didn't really happen and so we know almost nothing about the real world, older, Janitor Jake. he's just kind of a cipher to me.

re: the creepy stuff, while I'm sure the novel was making a point about falsifying relationships and all that, it didn't really translate into the movie if that was the intention. what we're left with is a guy delusionally recreating an imaginary relationship with a girl he saw in a bar like, decades before? that is 100% creepy to me. not to mention his interactions with the students or the imaginary scene at the ice cream place seemed to heavily imply that he was weird around women. at least to me - curious if anyone has other interpretations of those, the ice cream place in particular
as much as this was perfectly constructed as a movie - the editing, cinematography, acting was all flawless without a doubt- it's also just constructed around a reveal I don't care for at all personally, and that totally diminishes it for me. it doesn't approach Synecdoche or Anomalisa imo, though everything in the farmhouse in a vacuum probably could

 

For those of you who don't feel like reading the book, here is a summary of things Kaufman left out that might tie up some loose ends. I'm gonna use the Young Woman/YW/narrator interchangeably in here:

As I said before, the huuuge thing is that the janitor is not really mentioned until they get to the school to throw out their melting frozen treats.

The first third of the book is them in the car driving to Jake's parents, and the narrator describing the early stages of their relationship. Everything is basically the same: they met at a bar during trivia. The YW noticed Jake and struck up a brief conversation. She likes him, and when she gets home she realizes he slipped his phone number into her purse. They have only known each other for 6 weeks or so, Jake works in a Lab and uses big words and has heady conversations and she really likes him and finds him attractive, yet she still has this nagging urge that she should end things with him. At times throughout their drive he is rude or dismissive, but nothing like aggressive or super out of the ordinary...more arrogant.

The Young Woman goes into great detail about "The Caller", a person who she thinks is a man but with a higher pitched, womanly voice, that keeps calling her and saying the same thing over and over again. The calls are all coming from her own cell phone number, and after a while she just doesn't pick up. The Caller keeps leaving the same message, which ends in him stating that "There is only one question". She goes off on a tangent about how when she was a kid, she remembers a very tall man standing outside of her window, and she felt that he was staring at her even though he was so tall that she couldn't see his face. (Major Slenderman vibes here, took me out of the book with out forced creepy this part was...but whatever.)

Throughout the book, there are about five single-page interludes in italics of two people talking to each other. The discussion starts off vague but gets more specific: a person they work with, a janitor in their school, has committed suicide in a super violent way in the closet of the school. He was a loner who really didn't talk to anyone and had anti-social tendencies. He left behind some personal writing.

They get to the house and the same barn scene takes place as it does in the film. Jake's parents take forever to get downstairs, but other than that there are only a few weird things during the dinner scene. The picture scene happens as it does in the film: YW sees a picture that Jake says is him but she is sure is of her. Kaufman really takes his time with the dinner, while the book only stays on it for a chapter or so. Jake's mom is missing a toenail and smiles incessantly. She speaks about her tinnitus and says that she hears voices. Jake's dad has a bandaid above his eye and is very dismissive of his wife's claims that she hears voices. Jake is super quiet and leaves the Young Woman hanging as his dad asks a bunch of questions. The dinner seems super unappetizing and the narrator keeps talking about a chemical smell.

She gets up from the table and goes to the bathroom and gets a nosebleed. Then, she gets curious and goes down the basement. There are scratches on the door, but the family doesn't have a living dog in the book. Jake writes it off as the family's old dog. Anyway, and I can't really do this part justice, she gets in the basement and there's the usual washer and dryer and then a machine that is not described in detail and an easel (I think?) with a painting of the basement on it. In the painting, there's a person standing where the machine is , but the person is described in a way that is not really human. And in the same painting, there is a child. The Young Woman sees stacks and stacks of papers that have the same painting, except the person in front of the machine is different in each, and the child is in different places. In some, the person has claws or two heads or a tail etc. Very creepy scene. There's also a lock on the back of the door, meaning that a person could lock themselves down in the basement, away from whatever is upstairs. She goes upstairs into Jake's room and sees a picture of a woman that she recognizes but cannot place, and a man behind her that she does not recognize at all.

They get ready to leave and the mom is super weird. She clings to the narrator as she gives her a hug, and then slips her a folded piece of paper that she tells her not to open.

In the book, it's Jake that has work the next day. They leave and she is weirded out by how outdated the house is and how weird his parents were and how quiet he was, and he doesn't even ask her about how she felt. Jake explains that he has a brother who has mental illness and dropped out of whatever program he was in and began to stalk Jake. The stress of the situation drove his mother to act the way that she does.

They drive and the DQ scene happens (Complete with the loner girl with the rash telling the YW that she is worried for her) and they get to the school. He gets out and the same trash scene happens where he goes around back to throw it out and it takes forever. YW opens the glove compartment and sees a bunch of bloody tissues. She also finds a copy of The Loser. Jake gets back, turns off the car like in the movie and they start making out. He stops suddenly and says that he sees a guy watching them. Freaks out (the first and only real sign of an anger issue...the movie gives him a few freakouts. He is much nicer or at least more submissive to his parents in the book. Comes as a real shock when it happens in the book), and charges out of the car to confront this guy. YW thinks about how sad it must be to be a school janitor there on holiday...really the first instance of a janitor being mentioned. She also mentions this really traumatizing memory about a woman named Ms. Veal. Veal was a neighbor who would trade her mom leftover bacon fat for cookies. She was a mean old scold and one day when YW was a kid, Veal was over and YW was left alone in the kitchen with her. Veal, the first time that she ever spoke to the YW, turns to her and asks if she is "Good or bad". This freaks the YW out and later, her mom gets really sick and she thinks that Ms. Veal poisoned the cookies. It is also hinted at that the YW had to live with Ms. Veal for a period of time.

So after a long time, she gets out and goes in. It gets wild from this point on. She peaks her head into the door and sees the janitor dancing with his mop and broom. She is terrified that he is going to see her, and describes his appearance as very tall, similar to the man that watched her in her window as a kid. She looks in and he has vanished. She looks closer and he apparently dropped to the ground and slithers like a snake into the darkness. That freaks her out, so she goes in to look for Jake. Everything is dark and she goes into a few rooms and it is all described in a cliche slasher way: she hears footsteps and a song keeps repeating over the loudspeakers (earlier in the story, she mentions that a song played three times in an hour on the local radio...this is apparently the same song). She goes to leave, realizes the door is locked and there is a threatening note in the chain on the door. The YW looks out a window and Jake's car is gone. She runs upstairs into an artroom to hide, and sees the same message that she gets on her phone painted on the floor.

From this point, it devolves. The YW sees a shirt she used to wear as a child in the room. She sees Jake's clothes strewn about the school, watches a video on one of the TVs that appears to be Jake sitting in an abandoned truck outside. She finally opens the slip of paper that Jake's mother gave her and sees...a "self portrait", but of Jake. The narrator is Jake, and has been Jake the whole time. The narration switches from "I" to "we". They crawl into a school closet. The man (janitor we are to assume) in rubber shoes that has been chasing the YW throughout the school is approaching. Jake (who is now the narrator) unfolds a wire hanger and stabs himself multiple times in the neck and under his chin and bleeds out. He has finally answered the "question" (the thing that The Caller keeps saying to the woman): "Are you good or are you bad?" (the thing that Ms. Veal apparently asked the YW).

We realize that Jake is also the "brother" who had a mental illness. The illnesses of the other characters (his mom's hearing issues, YW's lactose intolerance, the girl at the ice cream shop's rash) are all his own. He had a job at the lab; however, due to whatever issues he had was never able to connect to anyone there. He quit, dropped out of his program and got a job at this school. He never asked the YW for her number while at the bar. This entire story has been Jake, now an old man working as a janitor in a school who has lived a super lonely life and watched his parents die, imagining what that first visit to his parents with a girlfriend might have been. The interludes between chapters are the people who found the old janitor's body, attempting to piece together why he did it. The story that we read is the diary he wrote.
It's....a lot. I might have left out some important stuff, so anyone who read the book feel free to correct me.

EDIT:
Lol had to edit this post because I called it a "brief" summary at first.

 

Combining the film and the novel, my analysis is this:
This is a story about aging and watching the people around you age. The narrator of the story, Jake, revisits a pivotal moment in his life in which he could have made a connection with a person other than his immediate family, and he doesn't. He spends his life alone, living with parents that he is embarrassed or ashamed of, yet obligated to care for. They worry about him and he hears their arguments about his life choices and how he is ruining his potential, and this makes him even more isolated. He eventually leaves his job due to how alienated he is, and he proceeds to "torture" himself by getting a job as a janitor in one of the most viciously social places in society: a high school. He works this job and hates himself every single day as he watches the kids be cruel to each other (The DQ scene comes to mind, with the two girls mocking the third). He stays at the school over winter break as it is being varnished (again, the DQ scene and many references to a chemical smell or metallic taste), and is driven mad or poisoned by whatever chemicals are cleaning the school. As he slowly slips into the darkness, he has this fantasy of what might have been if he had really gave his number to the girl at bar trivia 30+ years ago. The fantasy quickly turns into this horror story that we have watched. The girl is not impressed with his intelligence, she is put off by it. She wants to end things even in this dream that he has created. Even his fantasy girl doesn't want him. His parents' quirks are magnified and offputting and the childhood home he grew up in is a haunted house. The scene of Jake and YW in the car, about to be intimate, is interrupted by the specter of Jake as an old man: an image so haunting that it completely ruins any intimacy. This woman, once real and now imaginary, is terrified of what he has become. She hides from him. He answers the question he remembers from childhood: "Are you good or are you bad?"

 

I think the most explicit that it gets re: the janitor and Jake is the speech that Lucy (?) gives. She can't describe the man she is looking for to the janitor because she never really met him. He never gave her his number, these things never happened. Then she rips into him. This is the Jake thinking about what this woman might be thinking about him 30 years later. The sadder (maybe?) thing is that she is not thinking about him at all.

EDIT:
And yeah, lol, I'd probably call the Janitor a "creep" as well. But I feel for him. His own anxiety and self isolation has caused him to never have a true connection with any person outside of his parents, who are now dead. He wasn't a predator or an abuser, he just fantasizes about a woman that he could potentially have had a conversation with 30 years ago. That's more sad than creepy.

 

Just to add to this, from the Kaufman interview:

He’s pretty explicit that he does not view the Janitor/Jake reveal as a twist. He doesn’t really like twists and feels they’re kind of unnecessary.

The makeup thing at the end wasn’t knocking ABM. Apparently there’s a deleted scene where the janitor finds a kids book on how to do makeup while he’s cleaning the restroom, so his perspective on how to do makeup is very elementary and broad, as seen.

He thought it was just funny to add Zemekis in there, even though the movie was closer in tone to Nancy Myers. He got Zemekis’s approval to use his name. He didn’t get Ron Howard’s to use the ABM speech.

The Janitor is definitely dead at the end, despite the noises from the car during the credits and the engine starting up as the credits end.

 

i think i like the ending of this more. it feels more fitting. the janitor’s life is one defined by apathy. him passing by sheer inaction instead of the violent choice in the book seems more in line with the character

 

I agree
And after reading the Kaufman interview, the Beautiful Mind speech at the end makes more sense. Hollywood tends to give these characters a sympathetic or powerful ending, when in reality they may just sadly pass away alone

 

This is an ugly page. I look forward to open discussion when more people see it

 

I know they played father and son and that's part of the connection here but man, every time I watch Jesse Plemons I can't help but think of Phil Hoffman.

 

dude seems a lot happier irl but i see it

 

I loved this and I am excited to watch it again. might pick up the book too

 

I need to watch Synecdoche again. Been a couple years.

 

we watched it two weeks ago. holds up

 

Oh, yeah, I know. It’s perfect. It has gestated in my mind since it came out and only gets better and better. It’s mind boggling how good it is.

 

Walking out of the theater after Synecdoche, I felt shaken in a way I never have before or since. It is such a bold, uncompromising vision and a person trying to deal with their own questions about human relationships and the way they intersect with a world that is largely indifferent. I have seen other profound movies since then, but I was young and only really starting to get into arthouse cinema. Kaufman made an intensely personal work, the kind that would never get financed today. He paid for it dearly with a long stint in director jail and a severe cut in budget.

 

Sammy’s audition scene is so good.

 

Also I took all the characters in the audience at the end as a reference to the quote earlier in the movie about everyone being an amalgamation of choices and people they've known. Can't remember exactly how it went

 

I got a stomach ache just looking at those Blizzards

 

Man. I can see why someone that hasn’t read the book might have a tough time this haha. This picked up and ran with all of the thematic and emotional beats from the book and basically none of the narrative. Like @OhTheWater said, this was a fantastic companion piece to the book, I’m just not personally sold on how it works on its own.

BUT. I did like it. As everyone has said, all of the acting was incredible and a lot of the technical aspects were flawless. The transition into the dance number was wild. And I loved how the movie really accentuated the oddities and uneasiness of the farm by subbing the thriller energy for more of a disorienting feel. I do wish the third act had been more faithful, but I get that it would’ve felt out of left field given how Kaufman handled the first two.

 

I honestly loved the "wtf is happening?" aspect of going in blind, I'm actually really happy I didn't read the book first (I did just order it, I'd like to see how they differ) because this was one of the crazier watching experiences I've had.

 

The animated talking pig was a bit of a shark jump for me, but it was close enough to the end that it didn’t have much to take away from

 

I think I would have enjoyed this way more had I read the book first. All of @OhTheWater posts helped flesh things out more. The acting and everything at the farm was great though.

 

I’m usually glad that I don’t read the book before the movie it’s based on. It sets up expectations that I don’t think it could achieve what a book can.

I felt like knowing the twist in “Gone Girl” from the book obviously took the surprise out of the movie. I can see it really coloring someone’s experience watching this.

 

Never read or heard of the book, only Kaufman I’ve seen is Eternal Sunshine (I like it), enjoyed the first 3/4ths of this, wound up not liking it at all. Bummer