I’M THINKING OF ENDING THINGS

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(streaming on Netflix)
A movie from the house of Charlie Kaufman, the man who gave us such gems as Being John Malkovich and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. So yes, in this movie too, the canvas is the human mind and the dominant colour is the one that’s Kaufman’s favourite: human connection. What’s different though are the brush strokes, i.e., the treatment of the movie. So different is the treatment, and so different is the experience it leaves you with, that it becomes futile for a reviewer to parse the plot or to prise open the characters.
As a character says in the movie, “People like to think of themselves as points moving through time, but I think it’s probably the opposite. We’re stationary and time passes through us.”
I guess the ITOET experience is much the same. We don’t wade through the various sections of the movie. The movie as a whole wades through us. It leaves you not with the memory of a sequence of events but with amorphous impressions of them. Impressions that at a later time come to life on their own and invite their own trains of thought.
Take for example these musings by a key character, “I think what I want is for someone to know me. Really know me. Know me better than anyone else, maybe even me. Isn't that why we commit to another? It's not for sex......This kind of relationship is harder to achieve than one built on biology and shared genetic.”
The question that arises is, WHY this desire? Why so pronounced this need to be understood? Is it merely for the basking in the comfort of someone’s empathy? Or could it be more? Could it be that when someone understands us well, we begin to understand ourselves even better? And since understanding and knowing oneself is usually a prerequisite for spiritual evolvement, the need to be understood may well be a genetically programmed one.
In another part of the movie the protagonist ruminates about Newton’s first law of emotion. Just like a body in motion tends to stay in motion, she asserts, we tend to stay in relationships even when they’re way past their expiry date.
But wait......let me expound no further. I mean, why impose my own impressions and thoughts upon the would-be movie goer. Instead, let me just spill the climax to you.
The climax is a surreal dream sequence. This dream embodies all that the protagonist has ever aspired for. Hence, not only does our man receive the Physics Nobel, he also gets to use Russel Crowe’s acceptance speech from ‘A beautiful mind.’ But that’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is the audience. Seated among them are our guy’s wife, his mother, AND, the three girls from the neighbourhood ice-cream parlour who used to be mean to him. This trio that routinely mocked him is now applauding him and looking up at him with awe.
Hell, the sort of people our subconscious wants to get even with !