I’m Thinking of Ending Straight White Masculine Things
/Note: This essay is not intended to review or spoil the film; the analysis offers one method to read the story, for first-time viewers or someone still processing a discombobulating film.
This article originally appeared in F Newsmagazine.
I’m could stand for Time. I’m could be nothing. Or everything. Or very literally — I’m is Me, as in the speaker/protagonist/narrator/host/individual observer of all that I see. I’m could be God. A god. A collective godliness bursting forth from a bottlenecked hose. I’m is the soul walking a Robert Frostian divergence where a new I am is forming. I’m thinking of ending things.
Charlie Kaufman’s new psychological horror-comedy "I’m Thinking of Ending Things" is as much horror for its palpable anxiety of a Young Woman meeting her boyfriend’s parents as it is horror for the philosophical gymnastics needed to craft Kaufman’s psychoanalytical surrealism into a chosen emotional response. It’s Jungian in its approach, exploring the repressed desires that one may shove into the closets and basements of the mind. It will terrify you at the prospect of the unknown, and make you laugh at its arrival. And it’s a story that uncomfortably asks itself — and by meta-extension, the entire film industry — if depictions of conservative straight white masculinity can still have a useful role in a changing America.
The Young Woman (Jessie Buckley, "Wild Rose") serves as our narrator; her opening voiceover is spoken in despondent whispers, underscored with melancholic harps and moaning woodwinds that mimic a creaking, nostalgia-trapped farmhouse. It would be melodramatic if it weren’t so damn depressing. But she begins by reiterating the title, “I’m thinking of ending things,” and from there coldly but honestly assessing the prospect of a future with Jake (Jesse Plemons, "Game Night"), a man she describes as a “nice guy,” educated, sweet, sensitive, cute in an awkward way . . . except there is “something ineffably, profoundly, utterably, un-fixably wrong.” As they drive past snow-washed Oklahoma farmland, she muses about why she is even bothering to meet Jake’s parents; her analysis points to a slightly morbid desire to discover Jake’s roots. She concludes where she begins: “I’m thinking of ending things.”
Illustration by Justine Guzman
The opening is a harrowing 20-minute conversation that traps the audience in the car, but it establishes the tension of the Young Woman's knowledge that their relationship is over while not knowing if Jake knows it too. Their conversation threads follow:
— Jake’s love for musicals, specifically "Oklahoma."
— A poem written and recited by the Young Woman, about the relentless dread associated with returning home.
— Jarring cuts to a janitor cleaning a high school where they are rehearsing "Oklahoma."
— How the “bad” movies that Jake enjoys are like intellectual “suicide bombers,” destroying originality and individuality until we become caricatures of the art we absorb.
— An abandoned swing set.
But the beginning also establishes Jake at his most comfortable — philosophical debate, poetry and film discussion, critically thinking about the larger role of storytelling. Some might see his body language as contentious, but I read it as someone who is anxious about the future. And his immediate future is returning to his family home which, as this analysis proposes, reminds him of his background as a conservative straight white man. We understand that everyone in this film has a considerable amount of depression — it’s classic Kaufmanian atmospheric horror — and for Jake it has to do with his roots.
The moment Jake sets foot on his family homestead, his personality shifts. He becomes more hostile, confrontational — more of the “something wrong” expressed by the Young Woman. At one point, when he gives the Young Woman a tour of the barn, he seems personally offended at the Young Woman’s concern when they find a dead lamb frozen in the snow. “They’re already dead,” he says, “so what else can happen to them?”
And inside the house, Jake despises everything about it — the gummy floral wallpaper, the hand-carved furniture, the old-fashioned walls photographs — but nothing irritates him more than his own parents (played by Toni Collette and David Thewlis).
The Mother refuses to engage in conversation with the Young Woman that does not involve her adhering to some level of traditional gender roles. Anything else is met with labored laughter and side expressions of disdain.
The Father undermines the Young Woman’s validity as a landscape painter, remarking that it’s impossible to show emotion in a painting if there’s no person in the artwork “to feel it for you.” Therefore, according to him, the Young Woman cannot be a good artist.
But Jake’s reaction to his parents is equally distressing as all levels of defensiveness, paranoia, and control are amplified, exaggerated. If we think about the contrast between these two Jakes — and if you’ve seen the film, think about the non-chronological convention of the story and how that increases that tension — we realize Kaufman is using internal monologues about art’s role in society and emphasizing it with nostalgia-driven imagery to reframe it as a moment of harsh reckoning.
The reckoning is this: models of conservative straight white masculinity are not only detrimental, but they’re also unsustainable.
Jake is somebody who believes that art shapes our personal identity. We know that Jake has an artist’s soul; he is interested in philosophy, photography, poetry, and painting — everything that the Young Woman represents. Because Jake believes he is a caricature of specifically film influences, his perspective on masculine roles is similar to the various name-dropped film references he mentions. Films that value bold, audacious proclamations of love and assured confidence in one’s righteousness that border on emotional abuse, and concrete expectations of gender roles, reinforced by the microaggressive patterns visible in his parents.
We see this in his angry outbursts at his parents; we see it in the very fact that he’s in a romantic relationship where it’s obvious (to the audience) that the Young Woman literally and metaphorically embodies everything he would like to be. And if we accept this essay’s premise, we are asked to wonder how much is his depression a direct reflection on depictions like "Oklahoma"’s Curly, which value emotionally stunted man-among-men outward displays of masculinity, acting in sharp contrast to how Jake is, or at least, views himself.
Because Jake is a caricature of everything the institution of American cinema has thus far led us to believe is true about straight white masculinity, Jake has been raised to view his life as the representative standard. Therefore, he does not have to work or think hard about his own identity. However, as American cinema is growing further away from this standard, it forces Jake to also reconsider his social status. As soon as he does, though, his worldview crumbles apart; time itself is in disarray as the assumptions in his life are used as the very evidence to reveal why he feels depressed about his status.
Illustration by Justine Guzman
The question becomes how much is Jake aware of this himself or how much are we, as the audience, aware on his behalf?
The hallmark of any dark comedy or Shakespearean dramatic irony is that the audience knows what the characters do not. Jake’s inability to recognize and identify the things feeding into his depression is what causes him to act how he does; as the story is told from the Young Woman’s perspective, our horror for her is thus an extended fear of an American future where straight white masculinity is unable to constructively involve itself in conversations of diversity.
As a story that heavily discusses the role of storytelling in society, there’s an additional layer of Kaufman wondering where straight white male artists belong in the film industry now. Kaufman recognizes the onus is on straight white males themselves to figure it out, but part of the despair of the story is what happens when someone isn’t willing to do the work to figure it out.
On a pure story level, these things deteriorate Jake’s relationship and are a major detriment to his mental health. On the macro level, it’s a philosophical argument about the value of straight white men in representative media. As the Young Woman says, “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.” And like an abandoned swing set in front of a burned down house, time is leaving Jake behind.
The interpretation of "I’m Thinking of Ending Things" is all about perspective. If we believe that Jake is aware that he is an emulation of conservative straight white masculinity, which he is both complicit in and a victim of, constantly struggling with feeling an expectation to be something he is not, then we view it as a sign that he can change. Grow. Heal. And by extension, America. If not, an uncertain American future becomes even more uncertain.