I am not a Kaufman fan to be honest. But his movies are always an experience regardless of whether I like them or not. Plus, I like the fact that he does not care whether anyone likes his movies at all. And as he makes movies so sparsely, I always find myself awaiting all of his releases eagerly.
I remember watching the trailer for A Rainy Day in New York and thinking to myself that the period of Woody Allen movies is over. This is not the social environment where those films can be enjoyed and to be honest, the came critique can be used for Kaufman with his inherently white characters and their inherently white lives. But I think Kaufman can be forgiven, at least in this instance, mainly because of how deeply personal the movie is. It’s just one person’s thoughts, feelings and the movie looks inwards rather than examining the exterior lives we live.
I’m thinking of ending things. Just the title itself is very powerful and poetic. I’ve watched this movie over two months ago, but I’m only just taking the time to write a review because it has taken me a while to process the whole movie. This was a movie that I could not get out of my head for days so much so that I decided to read the original book by Ian Reid before writing this review mainly to see how much of the changes in the movies were made by Kaufman. Despite being similar to the book plot-wise, the major additions that Kaufman made were all related to pop-cultural references. And these additions do make a large impact on what the movie is trying to convey about loneliness.
There are so many movies, books, musicals, and other forms of arts directly mentioned in the movie even without counting any of the influential works that it borrows from or pays homage to. The additions can be seen as a social commentary that Kaufman is making on our current society where our lives are so laced up with the media we consume. I mean it’s very deeply tied to our identities and how we want to be perceived by others. Millennials introducing themselves with their Hogwarts house and people on Tinder looking for the Jim to their Pams.
The only cultural reference that you find in the book is the whole dialogue about Jung and his ideologies but the rest of the conversations between the main character and the young Jake is mostly about ideas. Granted that those are interesting conversations to have but I have to admit that it’s not recurring for me and my circle of friends and acquaintances to just have discussions about ideas with no referencing of someone else’s ideas. The media is how we make sense of the world and how we connect with the world. A chilling experience is described as something right out of a Stephen King novel, tell someone about a deeply spiritual revelation you have had and they will refer some Tibetan Buddhism book to you.
In her Youtube video about Cringe, ContraPoints argues that we feel the deepest cringe for things that bring very closely resemble our own experiences and highlight our insecurities. This probably is why the discussion about David Foster Wallace and the main character re-enacting the Pauline Kael movie review felt so cringe.
By adding the media and pop culture to the book Jake’s loneliness, I wonder if Kaufman is even making a diagnosis not just of Jake but of all of us whom he represents. Maybe the existence of media and how closely we attach ourselves to it and identify ourselves with it is both a balm that we use to cover up our loneliness as well as the cause of it in the first place. “But isn’t that the whole point of art?”, all of us who feel represented by Jake might retort. The poem recited by the main character in the movie did such a perfect job of expressing absolute despair and loneliness that the movie might have otherwise lacked. Art makes us feel understood, you read a book that touches you so profoundly and it’s popularity just means that there are a lot of other people like you and that you are not alone in the world. So, you feel like you belong somewhere, – a subreddit for your favourite game, online forums to discuss your favourite book – isn’t art also not bringing you close to people who are more like you.
But maybe there is some truth in what Kaufman is trying to point out. The way we connect and relate to the media is not the same thing as connecting and relating to human beings. It might feel like a short-term solution to a much deeper problem.
Moreover, by finding and connecting with people who are very much similar to us or have similar interests, are we not creating an echo chamber that in some way prevents us from growing deeper connections that challenge us. It might even be fair to compare our online crowds with other echo chambers such as those of flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, and Redpillers who have found a support system that agrees and sympathizes with them and in doing so prevents them from any critical self-exploration. Additionally, if we look at things from a Jungian point of view and look at the symbolism of finding our crowds, it might be very much interpreted as us wanting to surround ourselves with ourselves. So in a sense, we are lonely even when we’re not.
Besides we might argue that this inclination towards constant consumption of art especially while one is dealing with loneliness and alienation might exacerbate mental issues that we are already facing. What Jake goes through as he thinks of ending things seems pretty much like maladaptive dreaming where people create situations and fantasies that they go through over and over again, perfecting and modifying the situation and characters as time goes on. Moreover, for some of us who suffer from disassociation, this constant identification with the books and the movies that we watch and consume might even be worsening our tendency to see the world from a third-person point of view.
Another interpretation might be to see the constant consumption of media as one of the main reasons why the young Jake strives to be someone special or the chosen one through his academics and paintings. Our media, albeit it is changing, in general, does not glamorize a normal life instead it encourages us to strive towards greatness. Maybe even encourages us as the main characters in our stories. Some people might see this as motivational but what happens when we are not able to stand up to the high standards we set ourselves like Jake did. There is nothing wrong with being a Janitor, is there? But Jake does feel like he has failed because he is always comparing himself to the person he thinks he is supposed to be. The ending is drastically different in the book and the movie. In the movie, even as he is ending his life, Jake has to take the crutch of media to represent his ending.
Along with references to media, art, and literature, Jake talks about seeing the ads for Tulsey Town when he was younger. In this capitalistic world that we live in, the media we consume is never free from advertisement or just the constant shelling of products towards us. And just as Jake manages to include the ice cream parlour in his own fantasy and give it his own personal meaning, we too, interpret and give meaning not just everything we consume either consciously or unconsciously. To quote Kaufman,“And we’re starving, all of us, and we’re killing each other, and we’re hating each other, and we’re calling each other liars and evil because it’s all become marketing and we want to win because we’re lonely and empty and scared and we’re led to believe winning will change all that. But there is no winning.”
So to end this review, most of use are deeply lonely and we have this deep-seated need to be loved and understood but we want this to happen without bringing our true selves in the open. I don’t know, Kaufman is not really big on tying things up with a bow. But there must be some point to this right and I honestly think there is. I think Kaufman just wants us to be honest with ourselves and to know ourselves like really know ourselves. What we want, what we pretend to want, why we pretend to want it and what do we want to do about it.
