'I'm Thinking of Ending Things' - What's Happening? Plot Summary, Analysis, and Ending Explained
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 24 ก.ค. 2024
- David breaks down the plot of Charlie Kaufman's enigmatic and brilliant new film 'I'm Thinking of Ending Things.'
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Indiewire's interview with Charlie Kaufman:
www.indiewire.com/2020/09/cha...
Joanna Robinson's breakdown of the film:
www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/...
#netflix #charliekaufman #imthinkingofendingthings - ภาพยนตร์และแอนิเมชัน
Dude, you're spot on with your analysis. In fact, i've never heard a more lucid, tighter explanation of anything. Great job.
My favorite aspect of the movie is the fact that the Young Woman is Jake. As much as there are times where she clearly talks and acts like his idealized vision of a girlfriend, there are also moments where she is clearly talking in Jake's voice, and her narration is in fact, his narration. This also means that she is not only his perfect vission of his perfect girlfriend, but also his perfect vision of himself, something that many men do, but is never acknowledged or embraced.
That expains why they are confused when the are looking at the child's photo: Jake says It's him, and the woman thinks It's her. in the end they are both right :-)
I was close to writing off this movie, but this explanation helped convince me to give it another try. Really appreciated your take
I’ve literally watched multiple explanations of this movie and yours is the one I most agree with. Well done!
Well Dave, you're wrong about Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. She's not the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. She doesn't make everything better for the protagonist, but instead she's as complex. She even tells Joel twice in the film that "I'm just a fucked-up girl who's lookin' for my own peace of mind." It's frustrating that she gets placed into that category when she's almost the anthesis of it.
As for A Beautiful Mind, I think the inclusion of it is that a life with mental illness is made bearable by love. That's what Jake in I'm Thinking of Ending Things has told himself. And what he sorely has lacked. He sees romantic love as a stabilizing factor, to make the struggle of life worthwhile. But he has no love in his life and seems unwilling to continue living without it.
He even admits that he watches too many movies and unrealistic ideas about the real world. Also it's a nod that Jake might have have dealt with mental illness in his life.
It's a great movie that's rewatchable despite the depressing subject matter.
I really enjoyed this film (watched it by myself and then again with my son and his friend) I enjoyed your take on it, I had not thought of it like that, but now it makes so much more sense. Thanks!
This analysis has completely changed my mind about this film. Thank you.
Great video, Dave. I really appreciated your compilation of all the analysis on this movie. I absolutely loved the first half of the movie but found the second half, post the parents' house, to be extremely impenetrable. This explanation 100% clears that second half up for me, and almost makes me want to watch the movie again entirely. Almost.
I knew I wasn't losing it when I caught the A Beautiful Mind reference. The final speech was happening and I looked over to my wife and said, "this is EXACTLY the same speech from the end of A Beautiful Mind," and expressed that I had no clue why the speech was in the movie but found it interesting. Part of me afterwards wondered if it truly was the same speech or just something similar. Good to know it was the same thing! I guess that makes me a Huge Ron Howard Fan, haha.
#RonHowardHive ACTIVATE
I’ll be honest with you Dave, I only gave this film a go because I saw you tweet about it. I’ve gotta tell you, I struggled with it. So glad you made this vid though. Thankyou.
Analysis was spot-on. The fact that Jake never left his house somehow makes it even more tragic- the flashbacks at the end, where Jake is hallucinating from hypothermia, were powerful as hell.
100% agree the film takes place in his mind and the young woman is a projection of Jake's desires or alternative sense of self in some way. Fantastic analysis Dave. One read I had was that Jake's mind was potentially failing in a way similar to how his parents seem to be kind of losing their own wits with age, and the young woman is a part of his mind trying to comprehend and reject the collapsing surroundings of his psyche until she slowly accepts the finality of it at the end. The examples of young Jake comprehending arts and sciences start strong but begin to be a struggle for him as the film goes on, and so the motivation for his suicide stems from his sadness knowing he will no longer have that mind he cherished to himself that was never really embraced by his parents. There's obviously a ton more to dissect but still, love your take on it. Very well constructed as always.
Thanks David and crew !
This was fascinating. Thanks Dave.
Dave, I’m in line with most of your reading of the film but re: the car in the final shot - it seemingly starts up again after the end credits. Subtitles only read “[clunking]” and “[whirring]”, but it’s enough whirring to shake a bit of snow from off the tree. It’s also possible that it’s young Jake’s car instead of old Jake’s truck. My only interpretation of that is Jake never left with the pig and reconsidered ending things.
Anyway, I just wanted to point that out in case you missed it, and if that is the case how it might change your take of the end. Looking forward to the /Filmcast episode on this one.
Interesting ,I read somewhere that the sound at the end was the sound of a snow plow.
@@aditi3333 Yes, you can clearly hear the plow scraping. The clicking and whirring subtitles were the plow being put in reverse at the very end. It's the next day. He didn't sit or sleep all night in the truck without the engine running with no heat. My take is that the plow is starting to clear the lot out of frame, but will eventually get to the truck.
I believe the back and forth with him shutting off the car engine and eventually taking the keys in front of the school was his final struggle with his decision. He eventually decided he couldn't go back home again, shown in her insistence that they don't go back to the ranch whenever he mistakes it for her home (although they were both one and the same). Ultimately he shut off the truck and froze to death in the parking lot. I think the hypothermia take of him stripping was the right one. Snow, cold, and the sound of the wind outside permeate every scene of this movie.
Dave believes he didn't leave the school, but I believe he made it to the truck, and is still there in the final scene.
So, it shook snow off the tree, but not the truck? No snow blowing away from the exhaust? I appreciate your optimism, but not for one second did this story feel like it was headed toward a happy ending, or any sort of reprieve for that matter.
Loved this take ... new subscriber ☺️
I can tell you appreciated it and were impacted by it as you said: it shows in your attention to the finer details of this movie. unlike other you tubers I have seen (only briefly talk about it because their interpretations seemed heavily biased) I feel like I was able to fully grasp your understanding of this film and it made me watch it a second time.
Thank you!
I think I mostly understood what was happening by the end of the movie but I found this video quite moving and it gave me a much bigger appreciation for the film. Thanks Dave
Well done. Thanks.
For the varnish explanation alone, this video is a thumbs up. That one bugged me the most, after multiple views, I still couldn’t figure it out.
Best review and interpretation I've read yet. Very sensitive.
Watching this video was my 'aha' moment, filling in the pieces that wouldn't fit with my crazy interpretation. You'd never believe the wool that I was gathering about this movie's hidden meaning, never. I ventured into the supernatural and murder, lol. The instant you suggested that everything and everyone were all in Jake's mind I thought, thank you yes, that's it! That and your word for 'filling-in-the-blanks', tetrisizing', got you 'my' sub anyway.
Thanks!
Agree with your analysis 100%..well put
👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿
Tour de force work sir, absolutely marvelous. Time to upgrade my patreon
Thanks for this great breakdown, Dave. I just saw this film this morning and boy, what to do after that? I’m not going to get much done today but your breakdown here has been real helpful, thanks again!
Thanks for the great video, Dave. Could this movie be like "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", or "Jacob's Ladder?" Did it all take place in his head, in the last seconds of his life? Fascinating film.
Thank you David
Wow thanks for your analysis. It made the movie more interesting and meaningful.
That was a way better interpretation than what I had.
My interpretation was pretty on the nose, in that it's a young woman thinking about her future with Jake and pondering how humdrum and depressing it would be. She would meet his parents only for those relationships to be sunken costs with them being ill for the majority of her theoretical time in knowing them. She would first meet them only for them to fall ill not long after. Jake isn't much of a catch either. A future with Jake is depressing to think about.
The young woman feels more and more trapped in that relationship as she tries to tell Jake she wants to end the relationship but cannot, and the nightmare of having to spend her life with him becomes more and more real.
Yeah that's closer to how I (as a woman about the same age as Lucy) was interpreting it also while watching it. I had never heard of the book so I had no clue about the real storyline. To me it's interesting that Lucy is supposed to just be some figment of older Jake's imagination, who is imagining the life he could have had if he had asked this random girl out. Yet from the very beginning Lucy is clearly not in love with him and secretly wanting out of the relationship the entire time. If she was an imagined "what could have been" for older Jake, you'd think these fake memories he's creating about when they were young would have been happy, smitten, but instead Jake imagines himself being controlling and the "dream girl" (as they critics say) to be someone really not that into him. Then suddenly she's a happy lifelong partner when he has his Nobel fantasy at the end, kind of weird. I guess maybe the idea is that although he's imagining what could have been with Lucy, while he's alive he's still pessimistic and he's in a way convincing himself even if he had talked to her, it still would have gone to shit because he wasn't a catch. When he finally decides to end his life he's free to give into the optimistic fantasy that such a woman could have loved him throughout life.
In your intro, I've never heard the word "ostensibly" used in a more perfect setting before.
I had never heard of the book before watching the movie. I had no clue what was happening toward the end, but in the scene where Lucy goes inside the school to look for Jake and the janitor finds her hiding, I started wondering if maybe it was Lucy who was imagining the entire thing and she kept returning to that school to deal with some past trauma she had with a guy who wasn't really her boyfriend, but who she once barely knew. That the whole movie was about not understanding her true identity or coping with where she came from -- that she believes it belonged some boyfriend instead of her. I know that's clearly not it now after doing research lol, but that was my way of making sense of things when watching it. I never guessed the actual storyline I think because the actress seemed to have such a strong presence and we got to know her thoughts and issues with her relationship so well, I didn't see the whole "she's just a figment of some guy's imagination" coming (it's kind of annoying and offensive in a way). She very much seemed like a real and dynamic character with a modern perspective, not an imaginary girlfriend of an aging man from another generation.
i'm late to this but i think the blizzard played an important roll too. when leaving the family house jakes girlfriend says something to the effect of "time blows through us like a cold wind, stealing our heat". she goes on to state that she felt like that cold wind but i think the omnipresent blizzard is the true subject of that quote, speciically it represents time relative to jacks life. in all the driving scenes the blizzard blows against the car head on, regardless of the changing orientation of the car, particularly when they turn off the main road towards the school, the blizzard ignores the 90 degree right turn. however when they are stationary. the wind blows perpendicular to the car most times, I.E the farmhouse, tulsey town, and the school. this suggests the characters are temporarily stationary in time. my two cents
Good movie, great review and analysis. For me I just wish with those kinda movies the "twist" would have been revealed earlier to the audience, like midway through, so you'd get more out of the first viewing experience.
If anyone enjoyed even part of the movie, I highly, highly recommend the novella, and specifically the audiobook adaptation. The book is subtler than the movie, I feel, but also emphasizes a kind of melancholy dread, rather than the movie's melancholy whimsy. The movie emphasizes the despair of aging, while the book emphasizes the horror of failure. Really, seeing where each deviates will help with an understanding of the other in turn.
And the audiobook just does some really beautiful/ haunting stuff with the moment of revelation, the moment where you fully understanding who and what the narrator is.
i do tend to do the research after movies i feel like i didn't understand the subtext to (which happens a lot, I'm not the best metaphor detective) to piece it together. I got that the older guy was most likely Jake but outside of that I had no clue.
My best guess was that she was thinking of ending the relationship for a very long time and we see all the moments where that has happened around his family and she is processing her life with him and his family and how despite wanting to, the idea of doing it while he has all this family trouble in his mind would leave him too broken for her to feel okay with, something I think a lot of people have to wrestle with, but that wasn't the perfect fit obviously.
Because this movie is hard to "get into" it was difficult for me to engage with it and I stopped trying to figure it out and just let the movie hit me with whatever weird thing it wanted. I did enjoy the dance sequence, i thought that was rather clever and I wanted more of that kind of story telling. Thanks for breaking it down more clearly, I'm not sure I'd want to go back and watch it with that new context but it does piece things together more for me.
I feel like Jake sometimes. I’m not gonna explain my mind and “sound crazy” tho. Suffice to say, Charlie gets how dark depression goes; stealing any shred of hope. seems like this movie isn’t about people; but, how Dark, Cold, & alone depression feels. Oh, caring for his aging parents with the dementia. Knowing he may get sick. there’s absolutely no one to care for him. Inevitably of death. Great; I think I sound inane enough 👍
Charlie Kaufman's films often hit close to home in uncomfortable ways for me. I love his writing, but it hurts sometimes. I may just twist the knife and read the book if I'm feeling masochistic.
My own sadder take on this is: everything you said, except the girl is not his idealized romantic partner; it's _him_ . She is a trans woman, who lived her whole life without ever becoming Lucy/Louisa/Lucia/Amy. Kaufman has said that this film is not a literal interpretation of the novel. In the very end of said novel, it goes from first-person perspective, to referring to Jake/woman as 'we.' Kaufman ran with this and turned it into a tragic story of a trans woman that never got to live as herself. This is foreshadowed early on by the woman seeing herself as the childhood photo of Jake. We see his parents fall in love with the woman, as they certainly would have, had Jake come out to them. Her beautiful paintings _are_ his paintings, sadly relegated to being hid in his 'closet.' As we see old Jake wandering the halls, the longing we see when he looks at a young, talented, artistic female student is not of lost romance, but of lost _life_--of an actualization that was never achieved. Never, that is, until Jake is freezing to death in the car and, as portrayed by the musical sequence, 'marries' (i.e. accepts and loves unconditionally) her true nature before her passing. This film is a beautiful, tragic clarion-call, to live as and love your true self...before it's too late.
Fascinating. Thank you for sharing.
It's the first time I saw someone commenting on the transgender interpretation of the movie. Thank God, I though I was the only one that catched this way of understanding!
Wow, super interesting perspective! This is EXACTLY why I love Charlie Kaufman's movies -- like dreams, they're open to many interpretations and they can work on so many different levels. This is precisely why he doesn't like to tell viewers what his movies are about.
Since I read the title I kind of knew that someone would commit suicide but I couldn't realize who until the last minutes.
I ended up really frustrated after seeing this movie, so I've been watching different perspectives and videos about it.
Is there any explanation or interpretation of the dog? I just couldn't understand that, why if Jake and the girl are the same person sometimes one can see the dog and the other can't, or why we can only see him shaking in a loop.
Oh and also I didn't understand the warning of the girl at the ice cream place, it make me think that someone would be killed or at least in danger.
There is also the urn in Jake’s childhood bedroom that is labeled with ‘Jimmy’. That made me think the dog had since died. It’s right before the older version of his father walks in.
@@iamsylar24 I think them showing the urn with his dead dog's ashes is part of showing the disparity in timeframes. When would his fantasy GF have met his parents? Was it when they were younger and the dog was still around? or was it when his parents were older, in failing health and the dog had already died?
This was the funniest, most depressing film I've seen in a while.
. . . since Synecdoche New York, of course.
Thanks for the video. I appreciate the explainer. I ended up not liking the movie because if he wanted to say all these things then why not say it instead of making it a puzzle to put together. I don’t know just not for me
Charlie Kaufman is a genius but this movie and Anomalisa were too depressing for me to continue viewing
Great analysis, but this presents an issue I have with films like this. Should not any work of art stand alone without the need for outside interpretation. I realize this film is based on a literary source, but should the viewer be required to read the book or seek out explanations such as this one in order to comprehend it. Just something that has been puzzling my mind concerning all forms of expressive art.
Only basic girls like Charlie Kaufman films 💁♂️