Director Charlie Kaufman’s stream-of-consciousness movie takes another level of obscurity.
From his early work "Becoming John Malkovich", Kaufman has been tirelessly exploring the space of consciousness on the screen. And this year’s new film "I Want to End All of This" highlights this stream of consciousness expression technique. Although it has a hazy beauty, the narrative is incoherent and chaotic. In addition, the male and female protagonists in the film are confused by the scriptures, which may make it difficult to understand. Few people only looked at a hammer.
So let's stroke it.
In fact, the original narrative logic of the film adaptation was originally very clear. The key to its understanding is that the heroes and heroines Jake and Lucy and the uncle who mopped the floor in high school are the same person, or different characters conceived based on the memories of the same person. The old man mopping the floor imagined himself as Jake and the female version of Lucy based on his memories.
There are many clues in the movie that the hero and heroine are the same person. One is that when Lucy was looking at the photos of Jake's house, he said to the photos of Jake when he was a child that it was himself, and the shots for the photos also showed two versions of boys and girls. Second, after Lucy showed the pictures of his paintings, he found that these paintings were in the basement of Jake's house, and he also marked with his own explanation of these paintings. Besides, Lucy said a poem for himself (bonedog) in the car. Jake said that this poem was written by himself, and this poem was indeed in a book called Rotten Perfect Mouth in Jake’s bedroom when he was young. found it.
Jake's mother said that Jake has always lacked friends and was surprised to find Lucy's girlfriend who understands him like this; and Jake said that his slippers are Lucy's slippers (My slippers are your slippers), also weakly implying that they are the same person.
The hero and heroine are the same person, which explains why Lucy often thinks about her in a daze, Jake seems to be able to sense what she is thinking. Their mutual evaluations were both appropriate and sad.
The mopping master interspersed in the movie did not clearly reveal his identity before the end. But we can also find that when Jake told his parents how he first met Lucy for the second time, he said that Lucy was a waiter who served him some kind of burger, which corresponds to the plot that Uncle Mopping had previously seen on TV, suggesting men and women. The Lord’s story is the uncle’s imagination. In addition, the uncle saw the rehearsal of musicals in school, and Jake liked the musicals, especially the oklahoma that the uncle watched at school.
At the end of the film, after Lucy and the uncle met, the implication of the uncle's identity became more obvious. Lucy couldn't describe Jake's appearance, but he and the uncle looked at each other moved, and hugged the uncle before leaving. Uncle returned to the truck. For a while, Lucy and Jake passed by the ice cream shop advertisement on the window, and for a while it was Jake’s childhood shadow, piggy with maggots in his belly, and piggy jumped out to bring the uncle and the audience to the end of the movie. One scene. In the last scene, Uncle/Jake went to receive the Nobel Prize for the musical version. Lucy and Jake's parents called him. Although some connections are not direct, but so many plots or images overlap, it means that the conscious memory of Uncle and Jake/Lucy are connected.
In summary, the movie created the two protagonists Lucy and Jake in memories and imagination after the uncle was old. Lucy struggled with Jake, which represented the timidity and a little inferiority in the uncle's self-recognition. Because the plot of the story is based on the imagination of memories, it is possible to see Jake's parents of three age groups, and the jumping of the characters in the scene can also explain it, and even the surreal and weird shots that pop up, such as filled with the same ice cream Ling's trash cans are all similar to the performance of dreams. As Lucy thought in the movie, the characters here are static, (in memory) time is dynamic, passing through the characters like a cold wind.
After the dreamlike memory and imagination, the last scene of the movie is the grandfather truck under the thick snow, implying that he did not get out of the car. The title I'm thinking of ending things literally means that I am thinking of ending something. At the beginning of the film, I thought it was ending the short-lived relationship between Lucy and Jake. I didn't even think about it at the end. What ended up was their sorrowful life.
View more about I'm Thinking of Ending Things reviews
