i'm thinking of ending things, Synecdoche, NY & Life

The only other Charlie Kaufman movie I've knowingly seen is Synecdoche, NY. I watched it for a paper I had to write at a point in my university experience where I had stopped really caring about getting the best grades possible. I did all the work but I don't think it was to the best of my ability. My plan for life had shifted but I felt that dropping out 2.5 years into my degree was just a waste so for the time I was basically waiting for my life to shift into its next phase.

I'm in the phase of transition from being a student to being able to grow up and figure out really who I am. The thing that has kept me going until now is my idea for how life will be when I get out from under the thumb of institutionalized education. Most if not all of these ideas are kept in my head, hidden away from the world. They're my secret's.

Synecdoche and i'm thinking of ending things are very personal movies about living out the thoughts that exist in one lonely man's head. [SPOILERS FROM NOW ON]. Synecdoche is about Caden, a playwright who uses his opportunity to create a large scale theatre experience to relive his experiences and figure in a way figure everything out before he dies, but he never gets there. I see his project in the same way I see laying awake at night trying to figure out how you got to that bed with the experiences and thoughts that you have even if it's the same bed you sleep in every night. It's not as much about love and hope as it is about loss and despair. Caden is obsessed with death thus making the movie about death.

i'm thinking of ending things feels to me like the flip side of that coin. Though the person who's thoughts we're seeing have the same fate, the Janitor's imagination is worried about finding the perfect time to fit love into a life that he's lived. It's quite obvious that Jake (Jesse Plemons) is the Janitor and that every other character is related to his memory of someone he knew. Lucy (Jesse Buckley) is called several different names similar to Lucy as well as Ames. I see her as a stand-in for the girlfriend that he's had in the past. Jake's mother (Toni Collette) and father (David Thewlis) rapidly change throughout their time at the farmhouse. They change ages, demeanour, and in health basically from shot to shot. Throughout the farmhouse scene, it feels like Jake is controlling them while he watches how they interact at these different points throughout his life. I think that Lucy represents the girlfriend that got away and whether rightfully or wrongfully that is attributed to that parents by the janitor so in his head while he mops the floors of his old high school he plays through the different points in time that may have been right to introduce his parents and his girlfriend.

There's a darker side to the Janitor and this is shown sparingly throughout the film. The place where it culminates for me is Tulsey Town Ice Cream. We see three different girls working at Tulsey Town, two of which are described as the mean kind of beautiful by the other girl with rashes. Part of me sees this as the center of the Janitor's guilt. I think the girl with the rash is the girl that loved him but he never reciprocated that love because he was always chasing the mean-pretty girls. (There are theories about a history of sexual assault with the janitor but I'm not completely convinced). Tulsey Town does seem to conjure up bad memories for Jake and thus the Janitor because he is obsessively fixated with getting the cups out of the car, so much so that they detour to Jake's old high school, the one that the Janitor is cleaning throughout the movie.

The high school is the Janitor's place of pure bliss. Through Jake, the Janitor expresses a deep interest in musicals and the arts as well as love stories and these interests bleed into the interactions we see between Lucy and Jake. Like in many movies about love, they end in a bang and everyone getting what they've always wanted. i'm thinking of ending things ends with a dance number that mimics Oklahoma and Jake performing a musical to an audience that includes Lucy. It's quite blissful until the animated pig comes to take the Janitor to where ever you go when you die.

So why start by telling you about my life and my experience being in stasis until I graduate university? It's because I feel a sort of kinship to the Janitor except he waiting to die and I'm waiting to live. I think about my future and my past, how I would change some things and how I managed to get to the place that I am. For me, it's filled with hope and optimism while Caden and the Janitor are filled with despair and pessimism. But about when my hopes and dreams for the future almost certainly don't go as planned? What if I get a divorce and my home life gets ripped apart like Caden or my love life never meshes with my family life like the Janitor?

I'm utterly confused by life but everyone else is too. I don't know that for sure but it's impossible to understand how seemingly innocuous choices have had such an effect on my life. I was pretty much told what high school I was going to when I was 13. I was one I had never heard of and that none of my friends had ever heard of but I was going there. Right now I'm sitting in the unfinished basement at my girlfriend's, who I met at that school, mom's house. If I protested going to that high school I probably would've gone to the public high school in my area and at this point in time I would be experiencing something completely different... maybe I wouldn't have seen i'm thinking of ending things and not started this site. I think about the possible parallel I could be going through right now and what that version of Calder would look like. I'll never know if I'm in the right place at the right time but all I can look at is right now.

I think that's what Kaufman's movies are trying to tell me right now, maybe in the future they'll be telling me something different but I won't know that until I get there.