"I'm thinking of ending things"
we watched this weird movie
Charlie Kaufman’s Guide to ‘I’m Thinking of Ending Things’: The Director Explains Its Mysteries
If Kaufman's enigmatic Netflix drama has you scratching your head, fear not: The director has answers.
“I’m Thinking of Ending Things”
[Editor’s note: This article contains major spoilers about the plot of “I’m Thinking of Ending Things.”]
Charlie Kaufman is not a fan of solving movies for his audience. “I’m not really big on explaining what things are,” the writer-director said in a phone interview. “I let people have their experiences, so I don’t really have expectations about what people are going to think. I really do support anybody’s interpretation.”
Nevertheless, nothing in Kaufman’s head-spinning repertoire has begged for answers more than “I’m Thinking of Ending Things.” His scripts for “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation” took bizarre labyrinthine paths into the troubled male psyche, a journey he continued with directing efforts “Synecdoche, New York” and “Anomalisa.” In his new Netflix-produced feature, however, Kaufman has built a story steeped in the details of a single troubled mind, and littered it with so many references it practically demands a masterclass in semiotics to parse them all.
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The result is a dense, hypnotic narrative so overloaded with information that no first viewing can absorb it in total. While “I’m Thinking of Ending Things” may baffle or frustrate viewers trying to parse it from moment to moment, it also has a clear-cut sense of purpose: Jake, whose childhood room is loaded with books, DVDs, and other detritus from his youth, has so fully absorbed the media surrounding him that it seems to govern every aspect of his reality. It isn’t necessary to understand every reference to grasp this aspect of the movie, or even appreciate its intent, but these intellectual pathways enrich the nature of the enigma and reward repeat viewings.
A moment that changed me
from the Guardian:
A moment that changed me: born and raised in Kenya, I yearned for Croydon
I grew up surrounded by souvenirs of my family’s time in southern England. Years later I finally visited that fabled land
In most of the children’s books I browsed through as a last-born child, there was an address in southern England handwritten in the inside cover. I vaguely knew my parents and two siblings lived there at some point, and I grew up surrounded by minor monuments to that life in England: Dad’s records, the faux-Victorian framed mirror above the fireplace, and – Mum’s holy grail – a bedside Teasmade with an integrated lamp and clock. And I was fascinated by the pictures of my two older siblings hosting a birthday party, making a snowman, and posing in front of Buckingham Palace in our family albums. They seemed so removed from my reality of growing up in a small town in Kenya’s Rift Valley. I promised myself that I would one day visit Coulsdon, in the London borough of Croydon, then outgrew my fascination.
In 1981, my father had left Kenya to study psychiatry in the UK, and, one year later, my mother, brother and sister had joined him. As a resident doctor on rotation, he worked in many hospitals, including Cane Hill in Coulsdon, while my mother made a busy life for herself, often rushing from typist training to pick up my siblings from school in her beloved sky-blue Mini Cooper.
But Dad was eager to go back to Kenya when he finished his studies, and when he was admitted to the Royal College of Psychiatrists in early 1986, they left and settled in Nairobi. He took a job at the University of Nairobi and I was born there in 1989. But then from 1991 he headed to the Department of Mental Health at Moi University in Eldoret, where I grew up. On my dad’s final trip to the UK in 1997, he sent me a postcard, and bought me a red toy bus. I still have the postcard, but must have lost the bus when we moved house in 1999, a year after he died.
From that moment on, my relationship with the UK was fraught, because it reminded me of a profound loss when I was only nine years old. I settled in Germany in my late teens, which further alienated me from the shared diaspora experience of the rest of my family. After a conference in October 2021, however, I stayed on in the UK for a few days, determined to travel to Coulsdon and see what I would find there.
Victoria was the common reference on that special Thursday afternoon. In western Kenya, the lake named after the queen who married her first cousin dominates the landscape of my ancestors: it is “true north” for my people, the Luo. It acts as a general, quasi-spiritual point of orientation. It is the indelible home. And, in London, it was at the station named after that same monarch that I boarded the southern-bound train to my past. Time travel can be surprisingly banal: the 35-minute ride took me back 35 years.
When I arrived, I relished how familiar it all felt. Coulsdon was always marinated in nostalgia in Mum’s accounts; to my naive ear, it sounded like paradise (lost). Everything worked there, and the mail was delivered to your door! Mum still keeps her mail order catalogues from 1986 to prove it. I knew the address by heart, and, since dusk was imminent, I rushed towards it. I wanted to get a picture before darkness fell. The final rays of the sun blazed through long thin clouds when I finally spotted number 31.
I approached with the fitful confidence of a Black man facing his destiny in an unfamiliar residential neighbourhood at the onset of darkness. With each step, the coordinates thankfully fell into place. Barring some paint peeling off, and the dark velvety moss that covered the pavement and gathered between the red bricks of the facade, number 31 had aged with a charming, jagged grace. I stood in front of the door where my brother was pictured in 1985, posing on the blue BMX I later inherited. My breathing rapidly accelerated as my brain desperately re-enacted scenes that my body remembered from the family album. I was quite possibly on the brink of hallucination.
I was born three years after my family left this house and this country, yet it felt like home. I unsuccessfully muffled snorts and sobs with tissues and tried to unhear the wistful soundtrack playing in my head on the downhill walk back to the station. When I eventually blew my nose, the brisk evening air rushed into my previously clogged nostrils, and with it a fundamentally reaffirmed sense of familial belonging. On Brighton Road, I passed the Waitrose my mother loved to shop at, and the library, where my siblings spent their Saturdays back in the 1980s.
With my formerly frail claim to the family’s fabled anecdotes now substantiated, I mentally formulated a message that I would post to the family WhatsApp group later that evening. The last-born had been to Coulsdon, and was now an equal.
The Spaciousness of Thought
It came to me as I lay for hours sleeping and half-sleeping through the night.
Makes me remember Apollinaire' Alcools and in particular his poem Chantre
Et l’unique cordeau des trompettes marines
—the shortest poem in the French language
One of my thoughts, like a title, was "The Equivalence of Wives".
This is what I wrote in notebook:
Perpetual Lab has reached its ultimate function, in the form of "Diary" using the wide expanses of Blogger to to ink wide thoughts
It's a literary whiteboard, infinitely wipeable. Upstaging this notebook which becomes a jotter for shopping lists when nothing else is at hand
Of which more later as in my notebook. I'm taking a breather before removing the front door handles to take to the excellent locksmith B. Hatt.
Yes,I got them from Hatt's grandson for £50 and he gave me a lift back in his big van. Of course I could have walked.
Sweet lovemaking earlier after we'd drunk our tea and had enough of the crossword. Except for K, my wives have been in a sense random choices. Wrong expression. there was no succession of relationships that fizzled out or ended in "heartbreak". I'm not the heartbreak type.
Pondering the matter I decide that what I mean by equivalence is the way one might adjust to the sexual relationship,. If one partner wants sex and the other doesn't
Looking at it from a transactional point of view, the problem top be resolved is how you are going to put up with one another. As in my earlier post, we can leave out "Love" from the equation.
Putting it simplistically, the two of you have to find a way to share one another's lives. Let's see the scope:
- each of you have your own life, with responsibilities, prejudices, likes and dislikes daily routine, timetable and so on
- bad habits
- areas in which you are dependable and those at which you are hopeless
- skills ditto
Then there is the sexual relationship
It's the sole reason that the institution of marriage, as translated into every human culture on earth. It can of course be hijacked for the loopholes it enables: immigration, avoidance of tax.
People may get married for the comforts of shared living, where it's agreed not to have sex. I have a niece, Janet Unwin, an art teacher, who for years lived with a writer whose books were all about football. Both were celibate. Childhood abuse can generate lifelong repulsion. Especially, I'd guess, where it is repressed and never let go of through sessions with a therapist.
I believe my first wife J, Janet's older sister, may have suffered worse. She suffered greatly in her life and committed suicide at 47 years old. She was not short of friends who gave her loving support.
Tuesday 29 November 2022
Lust versus Libido
On the Jeremy Vine programme today there was discussion about couples who don't have sex. I recorded it in case there was anything of interest. There wasn't, I deleted the recording.
But at the end, to wind up the discussion, there was talk about unequal libido between the partners. I am adamant this is the wrong word, not just because it's a medical term but it assumes the libido is intrinsic to the person at a given time, whereas this is but one factor in the question can you get around to wanting to do it.
Far more important, in fact I would suggest the entire shebang, is lust. Do I get to feel it with this person, or in this situation (e.g. fantasizing, or assisted fantasizing by watching porn)?
I decided to look up on Google. Invariably, but especially on Christian sites, lust is condemned as some kind of vulpine urge for personal satisfaction. Setting those aside, here's a clip from Psychology Today:
"Non-lustful sexual desire includes a desire for one's own pleasure, but also a desire for the pleasure of the other. It also includes a desire for him or her as a person and not a mere body to be used for one's own purposes. Sex is not merely recreation, it is also a means of the unification of two people, in both body and spirit. In this way, sex can express and foster a meaningful unity and harmony between human beings. The desire for this type of human relationship is good and preferable to the self-centeredness of and ultimate dissatisfaction produced by mere lust."
I disagree strongly. At my age, it is lust that gets me hard enough to do the deed. I tell her so. When I'm ready, or often before, I lick and suck her sex parts and check she's juicy with finger and occasionally ask if she's ready. If not, my cock won't rise to the occasion. Then she may take it in her mouth and do whatever she wants. I used to try and tell her how to do this, but have long since ceased. It's not about formula but tender love.
And when I say love, I'm mindful of Khalil Gibran "On Marriage"
Then Almitra spoke again and said, And what of Marriage, master?
And he answered saying:
You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore.
You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days.
Ay, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.
But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.
Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of your be alone,
Even as the strings of the lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.
Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.
Here he mentions love only once.
He says other things about love too, but I ignore that stuff:
