Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Dreams, Psychoanalysis of I'm Thinking of Ending Things, Psychology of I'm Thinking of Ending Things
Charlie
Kaufman’s new movie, “I’m Thinking of Ending Things”, is not just structured
like a dream – in the way that, as a psychoanalyst, I think most movies are –
it is a dream. I don’t know how else to
understand it – and I think understanding it this way helps make sense of what
otherwise might appear to be an odd, disjointed and creepy film. OK, it is still quite creepy when seen as a
dream – maybe even more so than when seen in whatever other way you might try
to make sense of it – but when seen as a dream, the creepiness is the
creepiness of being exposed to the internal workings of a mind that we both admire
and also, I think – and here I may be speaking quite personally – pity, but
also, again speaking personally, identify with (as uncomfortable as that might
be).
I cannot help you make sense of this film without staying
very close to the plot – so if you have not seen it, be forewarned, this will
spoil it for you. Or perhaps help you
see it more clearly on a first viewing than I was able to. You will be the judge of that, if you choose
to keep reading…
This film starts with a woman standing on a small town
street waiting for her boyfriend to pick her up to drive her to visit his
parents who live on a farm. We hear her
in voice-over explaining who she is and who her boyfriend is and the quality of
their relationship – and that she is thinking of ending things – and she notes
that it is odd, when she is thinking of this, to be going to meet his parents. This lends a certain dreamy quality to the
beginning, but I am calling that quality dreamy only in retrospect. The first time through, it felt more that the
character was off-balance. And we feel
off-balance. We are about to meet
someone about whose relationship with this woman we know more than he does. And they are driving off on a trip that feels
doomed from the start. Why are they
bothering to go?
We think that the character waiting for her boyfriend is a
person and this is a movie about going to meet her boyfriend’s parents. In fact, she is a character in a dream – and
weirdly it isn’t her boyfriend’s dream, but the dream of a janitor in a High
School in a small town in Oklahoma. And
the janitor is dreaming – or daydreaming – or fantasizing – about being an
idealized version of himself that would allow himself to be her boyfriend, and he
has created both she and her boyfriend out of the contents of his own psyche –
as we all do whenever we create characters that we dream about. But the genius and disorienting quality of
this movie is that it is told from the perspective of a character in the
dream. In a dream, we generally view the
dream either from an all knowing position or from ourselves. In this dream we are disoriented because we
are identified not with the dreamer, but with his creation.
So, a bit about Freudian Dream Theory. Freud’s great insight was that dreams are
about fulfilling wishes- by fulfilling wishes, they keep us asleep. When we are
kids, we are hungry, so we dream of eating fudge – or whatever we love – and
this allows us to stay asleep. As we
age, our needs become more complicated and frequently need to be disguised –
because if the person watching the dream were to see what we are really wanting
– or really worried about, they would wake in terror or wake to fix the problem
in them. So our dreams become
complicated. We represent things
symbolically. We condense many things
into one thing. And one of the
complications is that we frequently represent aspects of ourselves as
characters in our dreams.
The uncanny part of this movie is that we discover, along
with the girlfriend, that she is just such a character in someone’s dream right
along with her. She starts to realize
that she is not who she imagines herself to be – and her character starts to have
cracks in it that we see – sometimes just a minute before she does. In fact, she sometimes seems not to notice
some of these cracks – and we can join her in ignoring the parts of the film
that don’t hold together until they can no longer be ignored. We forgive the minor discrepancies – not
realizing that they are leading to major discrepancies until much later – one
of the reasons that watching this movie twice is satisfying. We can see what we worked to miss the first
time when we see it a second time (or just go back over it in our mind,
savoring it like a good meal – or maybe, more aptly, chewing a fruit we are eating
that is overripe and tastes both really good and suspect).
One of the things that didn’t make sense early on but that I
let go by is that this woman is from an Urban environment and unfamiliar with
driving in the country – yet she is picked up from a small town – not a busy
Oklahoma City place – and she lives blocks from farm country. She is a research scientist – before she is a
poet and a painter and a variety of other things – researching rabies, but then
working in astrophysics? These things
that don’t hang together are held together by our mind as we work to sustain a
sense of continuity – in large measure, it seems – for her. The writer and director – the equivalent of
the dream creator in our own mind, has us in his thrall. But as the anxieties that the dreamer is
trying to hide from himself and from us begin to break through the narrative of
the dream, the movie (or the dream – I am thinking of them as the same thing)
starts to fall apart.
As the movie started to fall apart – and become interesting
– because we were watching the film at home, the reluctant wife and I were able
to discuss it without bothering people around us. It felt to us a bit like a Woody
Allen Movie, but the dominant feeling was of watching a
horror film. And, as in a horror
film, what started to occur was that boundaries started to be
transgressed. This started in the car,
when Jake, the boyfriend, would offer a comment that would be related to
thoughts that the woman had been voice-overing.
But the pace of transgression picked up when they arrived at his
farmhouse and met his parents.
The director used horror film tropes to let us know that
transgressions were about to occur – there was tape covering the door to the
basement and Jake said it was scary to go down there. This served to brace us for the kinds of gory
transgressions that can occur in horror.
And so we were a bit relieved – and perhaps more tolerant – when the
transgressions started to be about time and space. Jake’s parents, goofy and embarrassing, were
the parents of a rural kid who dreamed of something bigger than the farm he grew
up on. When the woman – who is called
and answers to a variety of names in the movie – goes up to his childhood bedroom,
she discovers some of the elements that would have fueled these dreams. Videotapes and books, including a book of
poetry that contains the poem that she recited in the car as one of her own. And she, and we, realize that the poem she
thought she wrote was one that Jake had read as a teenager – and likely
memorized.
We are now in the realm of the uncanny. This character, Lucy or Lucia, or whatever
she is being called at the moment begins to realize that she is a version of
Jake – she notices that in one of the pictures on the wall that Jake claims is
a picture of him when he was a kid, it is she who is there. And she says, Jake, that’s not you, that’s me. But then our attention is drawn away and this
discrepancy is not resolved. In addition
to being an idealized version of what a girlfriend would be, this unnamed
character is also an idealized version of Jake.
Now this, if we step out of the film for a moment, is a very
creepy moment that should give us pause.
In the #METOO movement period, we are rightly objecting to men’s
objectification of women. This art
suggests a psychological mechanism that might underlie part of that
objectification. The woman is not just
an object of desire – the ideal that we would like to possess – she is the
ideal that we would like to be. We (and
here I am channeling my most creepy self) want to be an object of desire. We want to show off what we know – and to be
something even greater than we are.
Jake is embarrassed that his mom doesn’t know that the Genus
edition of Trivial Pursuit is not the Genius edition, and that she doesn’t know
that he is not a genius just because he knows all the answers. He is, he insists, one who puts in the effort
– not one who is inspired. He did not
construct himself as an act of self-creation, he glommed himself together from
bits and pieces of what other creators have come up with (like most of
us). His psyche is a Frankenstinian monster
(and a derivative of the dreamers mind at that) and he, in turn, has dreamed up
an ideal version of himself – biologist, chemist, artist, poet, big city person – whom he can
admire, be in love with, possess, bring home to his parents; but who,
herself, is not real – but the object of his imagination, and she is someone who,
like he himself, is made up of bits and pieces of things that he has studied
and made his own and possessed along the way.
This is, if we buy into it, a very sad state of
affairs. We want to be something
desirable. We fear that we are not. We construct ourselves as something desirable
– and this Jake, btw, has done an admirable job of doing that – the poetry, the
art, the knowledge that he chooses and integrates in this beautiful dream (and
surely by now we know that this is Charlie Kaufman’s dream) are lovely. But they are not his own. If someone were to love him, how could they
not be thinking of ending things? They
would be not in love with the artist, not in love with the poet, but in love
with the guy who puts in the effort – and that guy does not value the effort,
but the act of creation. And that guy
feels that he, with all the creativity that it takes to craft this beautiful
dream, is not, in fact, the artist, but just the grade school guy putting
together a collage of other people’s work.
He is a fake and a failure.
And the person who embodies all that he aspires to be – the person
that would be his ideal – is but a collage herself. Of course, the intriguing thing is that we
don’t experience her as such – oh, we realize her to be that, and so does she,
and it is an uncanny realization, but she continues to have integrity – to be a
character – someone that we admire and believe to have her own integrity
despite what we are coming to learn about her.
Here, I think the dream is imitating life. When we fall in love, we partly fall in love
with a projection – an idealized other who is a bit of who we, in fact, are, but also a massive amount of who we would imagine ourselves to
ideally be – which we project onto the one we would love. This means that they will inevitably fail us
just as this character must fail Jake.
But thankfully the person we fall in love with also turns out to have an
internal life of her (or his) own. And
as this person asserts her or himself, we are frustrated that they are not all
we imagined them to be, but also intrigued that they turn out to be much more
interesting than anyone we would have created on our own – they have depths and
unexplored areas that are part of their real selves and that this is part of what has drawn us to
them in the first place.
The character in this dream is not just a figment of Jake’s –
or the janitor’s – imagination. She is
not just made up of Jake’s videos and books and poems. She is also made up of the kids that the
janitor sees in the halls every day. The
girls who snicker at him and are creeped out by him, and this year’s girl who
will be in Oklahoma, which is being produced for the umpteenth time. And as much as these girls disdain and
disregard him, and as much as he avoids them and feels ashamed in their
presence, he is drawn to them and learns something about what it means to be
human from them. And even if he can’t
use that to inform the way that he forms himself, he can use it to form the
creature in his dreams, and she, therefore, has an oddly autonomous
quality. She is greater than the sum of
his idiosyncratic collage work.
To put that more concretely, the actress, Jessie Buckley, embodies
the character that Charlie Kaufman has dreamed up. No matter that she is reading his lines, no
matter that she is being told how to act by him, she also brings herself to the
movie. In an interview, she states that
she decides, in the odd and spooky dinner scene, to play the waitress and clear
the dinner table. We are never – whether
we are director, screenwriter, dreamer, or psychoanalyst stuck in his home for
months during a pandemic – devoid of the powerful impact of living breathing
people who, in all of their own individuality, surprise and enliven us –
creating new perspectives from which to view the world and ourselves.
The ending of the movie relies on a metaphor told when Jake
and the girl who is thinking of ending things arrive at the farmhouse and,
rather than going directly into the house to meet the mother who is waving to
them from the window, go around back to the barn. There they meet the sheep – perhaps a
metaphor, I am now wondering, for Jake’s parents – and for all of the people who
don’t think about their lives. And then
they go to where the pigs used to be. Pigs are thoughtful creatures who eat the leftovers from the farmhouse table. They are no longer there, though.
The family did not check on them for a few days, and maggots had started
to eat through their bellies as they lay in the slop at the bottom of the barn.
The janitor, when we finally get to him, after a long and now very dreamy trip, meets up with the pig and it is clear that he, like the pig, has maggots in his belly. As he nakedly follows the pig through the school while a blizzard swirls outside, we are left to meditate on the self-loathing, the sense of inner rot, that this immensely talented man – Charlie Kaufman – feels for himself. I am thankful that he has a creative outlet, as we all do, in his dreams – and that there is an additional layer of that in the films, though I am as uncertain about his fate as I have been about Woody Allen’s. We are fascinated by the exposure of what underlies our being apparently cogent people in a world that our dreams reveal to be far more convoluted than we might appear, and we resonate with this. But we also wonder about the existential cry that is at the heart of this work of art that reveals so much.
Does Charlie Kaufman, like
Woody Allen’s alter ego in Midnight
in Paris, believe himself to be little more than the collector of the
detritus of the former greats? If so,
what chance do those of us from the Midwest have of feeling ourselves to be
children of God? But doesn’t this film,
like Woody Allen’s oeuvre, demonstrate that there is a solidly beating creative
heart within that chest? Would that
Kaufman comes to know that more viscerally and therefore lives a life that is less
interpersonally destructive than the one Allen has. Both men are able to project their inner lives onto a different dream screen than most of us, they project it onto a movie screen. In the process of becoming auteur do they lose something of the correction that comes from being open to others in their lives?
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