Charlie Kaufman’s I’m Thinking of Ending Things and American metamodernism
The USA has given the Humankind not only Coca-Cola, jeans, and rock music, but also metamodernism. It was there that it was born and from there it spread widely and massively around the world. The three most significant pillars of metamodernism in popular cinema — Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman — today just before our eyes create the main features and stylistic markers of this aesthetics. If you doubt your understanding of what metamodernism is, you should just watch their films to get a clear idea.
Charlie Kaufman’s recent movie I’m Thinking of Ending Things is based on the novel of the same name by Iain Reid, whose sister Eliza Reid is the current First Lady of Iceland and his brother-in-law is Guðni Th. Jóhannesson, the current President of Iceland., who paid a state visit with her in 2018 to Stockholm in an elegant carriage accompanied by three female coach women, whose fur hats were much larger than their heads, and one even had a tall yellow-red feather at least a meter long.
It would seem that these details about the writer’s sister (and especially about coach women) are completely redundant in this text, but no. The first rule of metamodernism is that there is nothing superfluous. All the details play a role, and the more of them — the better. As a result, the screen space turns into a chaotic accumulation of details, and the plot disappears in small and optional branches. You see all this chaos and ask yourself, “Why is this? Why couldn’t everything be done simply and logically?” — “Because there is no simplicity and logic in the world,” the artist of the metamodern era answers. “Everything is confusing, illogical and meaningless, the world is moving towards the maximum entropy, and the efforts of people who resist it are doomed to failure.” This extremely pessimistic view should upset the viewer, if not for the fact that the confusion of the world has its consequence and the emergence of temporary centers of order, where the Hollywood happy ending may well be the result of the destruction of huge structures that are not inferior in size to the dead giants of the International Trade Center. .
Excessive detail is reminiscent of the perception of the world by patients with Asperger’s syndrome. These people see and immediately remember the world around them in the smallest detail at the same time. By looking at a scene only once, they are able to reproduce it in the smallest detail, they can memorize the number Pi to the hundredth decimal place, and so on. Unfortunately, such a focus on details leads to the fact that patients with this syndrome are not able to focus on what they see: do not understand the emotions on their faces, can not find their way home. Something similar happens with a metamodern work, so for at least some organization and ease of perception, the authors of the metamodern era resort to the use of so-called snippets. This term came into the art of programming and means a piece of program code borrowed from another program or from a depository, which stores similar useful passages that are suitable for many. Snippets in metamodernism are of two types: imaginary and real. We can find the largest number of imaginary snippets in Wes Anderson, for example, in his film “Kingdom of the Full Moon”. The heroine of the picture, Susie Bishop, has the most snippets.
She carries them with her in a suitcase. These are six books that she took to read in the library, but never returned. Here is their list:
1. Shelly and the Secret Universe.
2. The Francine Odysseys.
3. The Girl from Jupiter.
4. Disappearance of the 6th Grade.
5. The Light of Seven Matchsticks.
6. The Return of Auntie Lorraine.
None of these books really exist. Anderson came up with all these names and wrote excerpts from these books to quote aloud in the film. The artist (the director’s brother) painted the covers at the director’s request. All of these books are genre fantasy novels for teenage girls. Such novels occupy a significant place in English-language culture, so much so that they have already begun to go beyond their traditional existence. For example, the British singer and leader of the band The Cure Robert Smith used the figurative structure and title of a fantasy novel for girls Penelope Farmer Charlotte Sometimes for one of his songs with the same name. Of course, snippets have existed in art for a long time, but only in metamodernism they are always simulated by the author, are available in large quantities and are excessively detailed.
Kaufman’s new film I’m Thinking of Ending Things is full of snippets. The collection of poems “Perfect Rotten Mouth” by the American poet Eva Haralambidis-Doherty appears at the most tense moment and the audience immediately goes to Goodreads to check if such a poet really exists. And she really exists, and has already managed to report on its website that her poem was quoted in the film.
Going back, the protagonists of Kaufman’s painting quote a long critical article about the play of Gina Rowlands in John Cassavetes’ film A Woman Under the Influence, and this moment is one of the most boring, because it looks completely unnecessary and protracted.
In addition, it is hard to believe that the characters actually quote in detail the film critics. But metamodernism does not pursue the goal of achieving realistic images or entertaining the viewer. Why should we discuss this film with the participation of characters who do not look like film critics and are clearly not suitable for this discussion? Here it is necessary to specify that the role of snippets consists in the sewerage of allegedly superfluous, but actually necessary details. A metamodern work is a kind of piggy bank with small coins that form artistic capital. Or, if the monetary comparison here seems too bourgeois, you can still remember the hourglass, where each grain of sand can be superfluous, but, if you remove a certain number of them, the clock loses its accuracy. Cassavetes’s film “Woman Under the Influence” is a classic American picture about the alienation of man and the fine line between mental health and illness, and this is what Kaufman is so worried about, this is what his picture is about, so it would be unwise not to quote Cassavetes here.
But there are also imaginary snippets in I’m Thinking of Ending Things. The brightest of them has already caused a resonance among moviegoers, so the company Netflix, which has the rights to show Kaufman’s film, made a separate explanation on Twitter.
The fact is that in the course of the movie Charlie Kaufman created and inserted an excerpt from another film by an unknown author, which the school janitor is watching at the work. The editor of Kaufman’s film decided to sign the director of this fictional film and named it temporarily “Robert Zemeckis”. Kaufman noticed this, and he liked the idea. He then contacted Zemeckis and obtained permission to sign this non-existent film. The fake excerpt from Zemeckis’ film itself is an emotional representation of the inner state of the school janitor, which he broadcasts to Kaufman’s characters and paintings, which are the product of his imagination and the characters of the movie he allegedly watched. And here comes the third important phenomenon of metamodernism — supposedly seen. Everything we see, even absolutely fantastic events, is a reality, and we have to trust them, because they also happen, though not really. This paradox has a certain consequence: inflation of trust. The evolution of trust in reality over the last 200 years has been as follows:
Romantics and realists trust only what they see. Childe Harold went on his pilgrimage to touch everything with his own hands, and Mr. Pickwick with a suitcase in his hand, a spyglass in his coat pocket, and a notebook in his vest pocket, ready to accept any discovery worthy of attention is simply obsessed with observations. and fixing the available.
Modernists trust only what they do not see. Malevich and many of his colleagues and followers saw meaning only in the reproduction of non-existent reality, the symbol of which was the Black Square. Adolf Hitler believed in a non-existent Jewish conspiracy, and Joseph Stalin — in the mythical and bloody class struggle.
Postmodernists do not trust anything. Samuel Beckett, who hid from the Gestapo in Nathalie Sarraute’s house, wrote his novel “Watt” not about fascism and anti-fascism, but about the fact that reality has finally lost its meaning, and the language has turned into a babble. That is why now any words sound equally unconvincing.
Metamodernists trust everything. Everything that happens in Wes Anderson’s films is true. Dogs and foxes really talk, all events are connected by a complex scheme, and all objects move exclusively symmetrically and are stacked at an angle of ninety degrees in an exquisite nolling.
When you trust everything, reality turns into a fairy tale, that’s why Wes Anderson makes so many cartoons, the plots of which are often emphatically childish, and Kaufman’s previous picture was also cartoon animation. The same with Michel Gondry, whose cinematic reality is constantly collapsing under the onslaught of cartoon surrealism, although sometimes realism wins, as in his film The We and the I, where a real school bus crushes its toy copy with wheels.
However, we should not forget that a work of art is not a copy of reality, but only a collection of impressions of an artist, which he or she received by observing reality, and therefore metamodernist does not want his or her audience to believe in his or her works as reality, but only trusted all his or her impressions, not dividing them into more or less realistic.
Kaufman’s film is not a literal replication (or rendering) of Reid’s novel, but only an adaptation of it, on which the novelist himself worked. The idea of both the film and the book is that the audience perceives as a real story the rupture of relations between the two characters of the picture, although in reality it is a representation of the outside world in the mind of the school janitor, who is the real — and the only — character of this film.
Kaufman doesn’t worry for a second about whether the school janitor may have a mind that would include a detailed discussion on John Cassavetes’ film A Woman Under the Influence and Eva Haralambidis-Doherty’s poetry. Of course, this seems unreliable, but we have to believe it, because authenticity is not Kaufman’s goal. The fact is that the school janitor is not a part of reality, he himself is one of Kaufman-Reid’s impressions. It is, in fact, a kind of stand in which other impressions of both artists are preserved. And the next question — why did they choose such a stand? Obviously, they wanted to show the world from the point of view of a person who is far from active social life and completely focused on the observation caused by the specifics of his work. In general, the tradition of narration from the point of view of a “little” person is very old, and its advantage is not only in a certain view removed from the sharp class struggle, but in the fact that the author can afford to be “unreliable narrator” as true. And here we are faced with the fourth phenomenon of metamodernism, which is that all versions of reality are equivalent, and those who have greater potential win. But, even in the case of the victory of some particular variant of reality, the realities that are lost in this competition may temporarily take revenge. An illustration of this situation is an episode from the film, where Lucy Jake’s girlfriend sees a photo of him on the wall, but recognizes herself in it.
The lost reality also approaches the heroine in the form of constant phone calls from a friend, when a mysterious male voice speaks to her and asks to answer one question. And this, of course, is the inner voice of the janitor. Later, Lucy finds several uniforms of this janitor in Jake’s parents’ basement, which she is forbidden to enter, and again receives a “phone call” from a friend. And this is not the last warning from the losing reality. Soon the couple finds themselves in an area of Tulsa (Oklahoma) called Tulsey Town, where they decide to buy ice cream.
The booth employs three girls who study at the school where the janitor works. Because the janitor does not want to meet his fictional phantoms, he “forces” the girls to warn of the danger ahead and scare the phantoms, but he fails. Soon the janitor sees his phantoms directly in front of the school building. Everything that happens next is a very complex hallucination that the janitor sees in a fit of madness.
Each viewer of this picture will ask himself what it means and will encounter the fifth phenomenon of metamodernism, which consists in the multiplicity of interpretations and the constant switching and “oscillating” of content. Critic Karen Han praised the film, writing “The lack of clear answers and structure can be frustrating, but the strange way the story is told enhances just how real the exchanges between characters feel. The frustration that Lucy feels with Jake, that Jake feels with his mother, that his parents feel for each other, are all uncomfortably tangible, especially as tensions rise. The film’s 134-minute runtime is a long time to sit with that feeling, but Kaufman’s big divergence from the novel he’s adapting is in lending its ending a more buoyant note”.
An important feature of Kaufman’s film is also its genre affinity with the classic American horror, which takes place in a small provincial town, where the characters fall by chance, encounter strange, frightening events and finally can not get out of it. This was noticed by columnist Wendy Ide, who remarked: “This is not cinema that leaves you feeling good about things. Nor does it tread a familiar path. But I’m Thinking of Ending Things is one of the most daringly unexpected films of the year, a sinewy, unsettling psychological horror, saturated with a squirming dream logic that tips over into the domain of nightmares.”
However, Kaufman’s film is not a favorite thrilling film that someone would like to be happy to watch many times. This is a difficult and far from pleasant spectacle.
